The Pain of Separation

Psalm 137

Our daughter Caitlin and her husband John left yesterday morning. They flew back to Philadelphia in the US and will leave in August for Banda Aceh in Indonesia to work on economic development and public health issues for this area devastated by the tsunami this past December. It may be a year or two years before we see them again.

We have been in Morocco for 5½ years and separated from our daughters and now their husbands for all that time. We abandoned our daughters to come to Morocco. There are certain holidays in the US when families traditionally get together and we have missed those holidays with our daughters. We have missed out on the opportunity to meet together and go camping on a weekend in the fall. We have missed out on the opportunity to meet for a weekend just because we decided it was time we did something together.

If we want to see our daughters and sons-in-law, we have to book a ticket that costs anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 dirhams. Then we have to find a place to stay since we do not have a home other than here in Rabat. We have to rent a car. It is complicated and we cannot justify that expense for a weekend so it turns into a couple week trip. It is difficult for me to be away from the church for that amount of time so we are reduced to making that trip once or perhaps twice a year.

Now our problem has become accentuated. With one daughter and husband in Boston in the US in North America and the second daughter and husband in Banda Aceh in Indonesia in Asia, our immediate family is now stretched across three continents and we cannot easily meet together. To see our daughters and their husbands and perhaps one day our grandchildren, we will have to fly to Asia or North America and each will require at least two or maybe three weeks away from Rabat in North Africa.

It is difficult to be separated from our family.

Friday night when Annie and I had our last meal with Caitlin and John, at the time we were eating desert and playing cards, Ann’s grandfather died in Littleton, Massachusetts. He was 99 years old, a wonderful, hard-working, gentle man. There will be a memorial service for him this weekend and Annie is feeling torn. I too would love to go and be with the family. If we lived in the US, we would be there. Living in Rabat, it is realistically a question only of perhaps Annie going. She would love to go and be there but it is expensive to do so.

A year or so ago my father slipped coming down the stairs and fell which put him in the hospital. I wanted to be with him but could not go to see him.

There is pain in being separated from our families.

I know what I am saying might be considered whining by some. I complain about not seeing my father and daughters more than once a year. But we have a man in the church who goes back to his home country to see his wife and son just once per year and if there is an emergency, is unable to go back to help but must wait until the scheduled time for his return arrives. There are students from sub-Saharan Africa who have not seen their families for five or seven years or more.

One Sunday a man from Nigeria came to me and asked me to pray with him because he had received news his mother had died. He had not been home for several years and was unable to go to her funeral and unable to be with his family.

There is pain in being separated from our families.

We miss not only our families and friends, we miss the culture of our country. We miss the food of our country. I love asking people what they want to have as their first meal when they return to their home. The food of Morocco is wonderful but it is not the same as what we grew up eating and we miss that.

We miss the language of our country. It is difficult always trying to speak in your second, third, fourth or more language, and to go home where you do not have such an accent and you understand what is said is refreshing.

We miss the sports of our country. We miss the music of our country.

It is painful to be separated from your country, culture, family and friends.

This is the context of Psalm 137.

587 years before the birth of Jesus, the Babylonian empire conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. To understand the impact of this remember that the Temple was where God lived on earth.

During the exodus when Israel wandered through the desert for forty years, they marched with the tabernacle leading the way. In the tabernacle was the ark of the covenant and it was here that God lived. When David brought the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem, there was a tremendous celebration because now God lived in the heart of Israel. When Solomon built the Temple, then God lived in the grandest home in Jerusalem. The Temple was the heart of Israel and so when the Babylonians captured Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple, they destroyed also the faith of Israel. How could God allow his people to be defeated?

This was a bitter defeat. The Babylonians had developed a strategy of deporting their captives to Babylon and so they did this with the Jews of Jerusalem. They took the elite, the educated, the military and sent them to Babylon.

This was not a peaceful conquest. In II Kings 25:7 we read of the fate of King Zedekiah and his family:
They killed the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes. Then they put out his eyes, bound him with bronze shackles and took him to Babylon.

In Lamentations 5:11-15 an indication of the nature of this conquest is revealed:
Women have been ravished in Zion,
and virgins in the towns of Judah.
12 Princes have been hung up by their hands;
elders are shown no respect.
13 Young men toil at the millstones;
boys stagger under loads of wood.
14 The elders are gone from the city gate;
the young men have stopped their music.
15 Joy is gone from our hearts;
our dancing has turned to mourning.

The captives now sitting along the banks of the canals of Babylon remembered the humiliation of defeat, the destruction of the Temple which had been their pride and joy, the brutality of the conquest, the rape of their women, the change from being masters to being slaves. They remembered the long journey to a strange land, so different from their home.

In 1838 in the US, the Cherokee Indians of the Southeast were forcibly led on a 1600 kilometer march to Oklahoma in the center south of the US. Their march was brutal and 4000 Cherokees died of hunger, exposure and disease on the march. The 1600 kilometer journey was called the Trail of Tears because of the pain and suffering during the march and the humiliation of being forced to leave their home.

The Trail of Tears for the captives of Jerusalem was 1170 kilometers and now they sat in Babylon dreaming of their home.
Alongside Babylon’s rivers
we sat on the banks; we cried and cried,
remembering the good old days in Zion.
Alongside the quaking aspens
we stacked our unplayed harps;
That’s where our captors demanded songs,
sarcastic and mocking:
“Sing us a happy Zion song!”
Oh, how could we ever sing God’s song
in this wasteland?

Archeologists have discovered a relief in the palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh in which three prisoners of war are playing lyres as they are marched along by an armed soldier. As the conquerors, the Babylonians demanded to hear the music of Israel. I know I love to hear music of other countries, I don’t imagine I am much different than the Babylonians 2500 years ago. But how do you sing when you have lost your heart? How do you sing when the bitterness of defeat is in your throat?

So the writer of Psalm 137 began to express the bitterness of the captives sitting in Babylon, so far from their home.
If I ever forget you, Jerusalem,
let my fingers wither and fall off like leaves.
Let my tongue swell and turn black
if I fail to remember you,
If I fail, oh dear Jerusalem,
to honor you as my greatest.

In our modern age of internet, we can chat and see pictures of those with whom we speak. We can receive pictures downloaded from the internet. It is a bit easier to remember when we have the technology to refresh our memories. But in the days before internet and before cameras, all that was carried when you left your home was the picture in your head and when you have been away from your home the picture begins to fade.

So the psalm writer brings a curse on himself to force him to remember. I am reminded of those in the concentration camps of WWII who forced themselves to remember a reality different than the reality of the camps in which they were dying. The desperation to remember what had been so brutally ripped from the Jews now in Babylon is revealed in the power of the curse.
Let my tongue swell and turn black
if I fail to remember you,

And then the bitterness of remembering bursts into one of the texts in the Bible that embarrasses us.
God, remember those Edomites,
and remember the ruin of Jerusalem,
That day they yelled out,
“Wreck it, smash it to bits!”
And you, Babylonians—ravagers!
A reward to whoever gets back at you
for all you’ve done to us;
Yes, a reward to the one who grabs your babies
and smashes their heads on the rocks!

Yes, this too is the word of the Lord.

One of the lessons of the psalms is that when we are feeling pain, it is better to express it to God than to hold it bottled up inside. I do not believe God is pleased when someone wants to take the feet of a baby and smash its head against a rock. That is one of the horrors in this world. But if you are feeling that angry, it is best to express that anger to God in prayer and then let God bring healing to you for the intensity of the emotion that you are feeling.

What this cruel outburst reveals is that the psalm writer was in a lot of pain when writing this psalm. The Jewish captives were feeling this pain because of the cruel separation that had been enforced on them.

Rather than getting into a deeper discussion of this, I want to jump off from the psalm at this point and talk about the pain we feel from being separated from our family, our friends, our homeland.

Our situation is quite a bit different. We have not been captured and forced to march to Morocco. We do not have the memories of the writer of Psalm 137 that led to the curse at the end of that psalm. But we do carry with us the pain of separation.

Part of the pain I carry with me here in Morocco is that when my daughters were in college and just out of college, Annie and I were not there to help them, encourage them, support them. We talked by phone and emailed, but you cannot hug over the internet or phone. My daughters have done very well. They have married wonderful men who love them and who love Jesus. I am a very fortunate man, but I still hurt that we were not there at points when they needed us. If we sacrificed to come here, our daughters sacrificed as well when we came.

As we move forward there will still be moments when they will want us to be near them. If they have children, they will want us to see their children. We will want to see them and our grandchildren.

Part of the pain I carry is that I am separated from my father. My father and I became friends when I began working with him in business in 1986. We spent many lunches and business trips together in which he would tell his stories. My father is a natural story teller and after the business was sold, I spent a year working with him writing this book of his life. We would sit in front of the fireplace in winter or on the deck in the spring and he would relax and tell his stories into a tape recorder. I would prompt him on many of the stories I had heard him tell in the past. Then I transcribed what he said into the computer and edited the different tellings of stories to make them more complete. This book is the fruit of that time together and I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to do this with him.

I left 5½ years ago and when we talk, he still asks me with a longing in his voice if I intend to stay here in Morocco for a longer time. I see my father once a year when I go back each fall for a week and we meet with my brother-in-laws, nephews and son-in-laws. And every time I call my father and talk to him, he asks me if I am coming to the men’s week this year. He asks me this even if we were just together a month or two earlier.

In these last years of my father’s life, I am an absent son and that pains me.

This is my experience but it is not only my experience. This is the experience of all of us who live overseas, away from our families.

And so I thought of what Jesus said one day to his disciples. A rich young ruler came to ask:
“Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”

Jesus spoke with him and when the rich young ruler heard that he needed to sell all he had and give it to the poor:
he went away sad, because he had great wealth.

The disciples were astonished at this because the man had all the qualities of a godly, pious man and asked Jesus:
“Who then can be saved?”
If this man had been refused, what hope was there for any of them?

Peter spoke up:
“We have left everything to follow you! What then will there be for us?”

Jesus spoke of their place in his coming kingdom and then he said:
And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.

Like Peter, many of us have left everything to follow Jesus. What is the promise for us?

What the promise does not mean is a literal hundred times as much. I have five sisters, a mother and a father. Does this mean I will have 500 sisters? 100 mothers? 100 fathers? 200 daughters? Of course not.

In Mark 3 there is a scene when Jesus was teaching in a house and the crowd was so great no one could come in.
Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him.  32 A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.”
33 “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked.
34 Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!  35 Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

I believe there is a partial fulfillment of this promise in this statement of Jesus in Mark 3. When I came to Morocco I left my family but I gained a family (although they keep leaving me over time). When I came in January 2000, I lived my first six months with Ruth & Habib Iskander until Annie came and we rented our villa. They became in many ways my parents here in Morocco, although I tell them they were very young when they had me.

Over the last 5 ½ years, we have had many wonderful relationships. We have had sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. We have had wonderful grandchildren. And although our family in Morocco keeps leaving, each year God is faithful in bringing new people with whom we can relate, people we can love and who will love us.

When our daughter Caitlin and her husband John were here they heard us talking about a young woman Caitlin’s age and John asked the question if Caitlin was jealous of our attention to this woman. The truth is that no one will ever replace our daughters and their husbands in our lives. But there is a partial fulfillment of the promise of Jesus because we are blessed with relationships that help fill the gap left by our separation from our children and other family.

The complete fulfillment of the promise of Jesus is that when we are with him in his kingdom, we will receive the reward for our obedience to him that will overshadow every painful experience we had in this world in the course of our obedience.

In this world our focus is on what we can receive from this world. We see how much we can earn, how much we can possess. We check to see how many friends we have. We check to see if we are married and have children. These are important. It is good to have money with which to live. It is good to enjoy the pleasures of this world. It is good to have friendships. It is good to have a spouse and children. It is good to live near your family.

But when we come into our real home with Jesus, we will see our lives in this world from a different perspective and the pleasures and the pain we experienced in this live will not seem, from the perspective of heaven, to have been as good or bad as they were experienced.

Our obedience to Jesus and following him wherever he leads us is the wisest course for any of us.

Let me end this morning with three applications of this message.

First, note that the promise of Jesus that he will reward you when you leave home and family is conditional.
And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.

There is pain in being separated from family and friends but the promise of Jesus is for those who are separated for his sake. Why are you here in Morocco? Is your separation from family and friends a step of obedience? If you are here in Morocco in obedience to the call of God for your life, then you can hold on to the promise that you will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.

If your presence in Morocco is the consequence of an act of disobedience, you may feel the pain of separation, but I do not believe this promise of Jesus is something you can hold on to.

Secondly, if your presence in Morocco is the consequence of an act of obedience, are you building relationships that compensate in some measure for the relationships you left behind? Who are your sisters and brothers, your fathers and mothers?

It is painful to develop a friendship and then have that friend leave. This happens to those of us who stay here for more than a couple years over and over again. One choice is to keep an emotional distance so we will not be hurt and so we resist becoming a close friend with someone who is passing through. I prefer a second choice and that is to keep open to the friendships that God brings to us and even though it hurts when they leave, we are richer for having loved and been loved when they were with us.

This must be a major emphasis for us at RPF. As humans, we have a need for family and we must become family for each other. We cannot be a brother or sister to everyone in the congregation, but we can be a brother or sister to some in our fellowship.

As new people come to us this summer and fall, will we open ourselves to them and experience the family God is sending to us?

And finally, there will be pain because of being separated from your family and home. You cannot avoid that pain. You will need to grieve apart and separate from your family. You will need to deal with a sense of abandonment that you cannot care for a parent who is ill or be with a sibling who is experiencing a tragedy or be with a child who needs you. So when you are in pain, reach out to God who loves you and who has called you to be here in Morocco. He will take care of you and he will take care of those you left behind to come here.

When you are obedient, God will bless your act of obedience and you as well as your family will be blessed and loved.

We celebrate Holy communion this morning. If you are feeling the pain of separation this morning, come to receive the gift of life Jesus offers you. Come forward with those God has provided to be your brothers and sisters here in Rabat. Embrace the relationships God has given so you will feel loved and cared for. And when you stand and receive the bread and wine, feel the warm embrace God gives you as you are reminded of his death for you so you can have the hope of eternal life lived with him.