Good morning, dear friends. I’d like to offer some brief reflections on the psalm we just sang together here in the sanctuary. 

The hymns, laments, and joyous songs of victory collected in our Book of Psalms echo far and wide across time and space. As these songs travel, they convey new meanings and may echo with fresh resonances. These verses were first composed and collected in the long-ago days of Israel and Judah, partly as personal poetry, or as librettos for priestly chant during Temple ritual. But far from that time and place, down through the centuries and millennia, faithful voices still raise these verses heavenward—or softly inward—as worship, encouragement, celebration, or consolation. 

The heading in our Bibles names Psalm 126 as a Harvest of Joy—referring to its contents—and files it amongst the Songs of Ascent. These were hymns chanted by lay and priestly people as they climbed Mt. Zion, as they approached the Jerusalem Temple. The psalm in its origins is thus a song of celebration, as it is also a prayer of preparation for worship. 

As I read and reread the text of Psalm 126, I notice how it looks first backwards, and then pivots to the future, eliding any direct mention of the here and now. We might notice, when we give the text a closer look or hearing, that the tone of the poem doubles back, as it curves from a time of laughter and happiness toward a more clouded, a more tentative atmosphere of lack, distress, or apprehension. Will God provide for us this one more time?

In the opening stanza, we give voice to the gracious, even surprising gift of God’s restoration of Judah from exile in Babylon. It’s a backward glance.

When our God restored the fortunes of Zion,
    we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter
    and our tongue with shouts of joy.

We may all dream of things we want but might never see come to fruition. The return from exile must have seemed an unlikely, long-delayed miracle to those Judahites. How long, O our God, they lamented, how long must we wait for our deliverance? At last, as we know, divine help did in fact arrive.

But then, after the psalm’s nostalgic atmosphere of relief and laughter, we find ourselves switching perspectives. The second stanza angles back to speak from an experience of loss, of uncertainty, seeking aid from a place of hunger. Hunger for the divine gift of harvest in times of need and sorrow. Voice is given to seemingly tentative hopes, as the people yearn for a gift of living water for their desiccated hearts. 

Restore our fortunes, O our God,
     like the watercourses in the Negeb.
May those who sow in tears
    reap with shouts of joy.

These lines plead for help from heaven. Surely God would intervene again as was done for their ancestors long ago. Yet as with any of the psalms, this one too can sound a ringing echo for us here and now, in our own circumstances.

We too may feel caught, as it were, in a place of uncertainty, perplexity, of fear. Between remembered times of peace and plenty, considered in retrospect from the here and now, and the prayerful hope of a fruitful harvest, streaming over its banks like a river in spring, we trust we are not abandoned, we are not lost. 

In this time, experiencing both hope and apprehension, I am comforted in my distress by the notion of what might be called “curvy time.” Psalm 126 looks back and forth from a single fleeting moment of now, fraught with joy, fear, and hope. Is the scripture’s timeframe strictly literal, or might we too be swinging back and forth, looking to the past, now moving on with hope? 

Writing from her transgender perspective, biblical scholar Jaeda Calaway states that she enjoys “toying with time.” She likes “its curves, dilations, contractions, and bending.” Reading with her theoretical lens, Jaeda suggests that “Curvy time highlights the ways in which temporalities are not straight; their overlaps, their doubling, their switchbacks, their entanglements, their curves.” With this insight in mind, I can imagine us circling back, troubled as we are, and then forging ahead, curving away from this time of desolation, reaching for the promise of a coming harvest of joy.

One final comment. That second stanza of the psalm refuses to leave all the work to divine intervention. As Jo Anne Rohricht would surely say, we need to roll up our sleeves, get to work, and keep on working. As the poet promises,

Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.

Amen, let it be so.