By the Rivers of Babylon

Memory, Exile, and the Making of Scripture

January 11, 2026

David R. Collins

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It feels like kind of a weird and awful week to start a multi year project about what the Bible is and isn’t.

Which might actually mean it’s the perfect week, because if there’s one thing the Bible has never waited for, it’s a calm political moment, where everyone feels safe and optimistic. The Bible is a product of messy weeks, and years, and centuries. Periods when people were scared. Times when something happened that makes them say, “Well…this is bad.”

This week, Renee Nicole Good was murdered by ICE.

Renee mattered, to her wife and children and community. And now to the whole world.

I know there’s a lot of anger in the room. There should be. There’s also fear. And exhaustion. And that little nutty voice some of us hear that says, if we just organize hard enough, if we just shout loud enough, maybe we can stop this and make it all better.

And while I do believe in protest and resistance, It is also clear to me that our lives do not count the way they used to in this country. The state can kill us if it wants to. And I am not interested in seeing any of you become martyrs or in becoming one myself. I plan on being an adorable old man one day with an inexhaustible supply of butterscotch candies.

But still we are going to go downtown at noon today and join the protest against ICE at city hall and you are welcome to join us. No pressure at all.

You see, what I am interested in is faithful survival. The kind that keeps us and this community alive long enough to pass on something better.

And honestly, that’s part of why we’re starting this now. Because we don’t think this moment is going to be over next year. Or maybe even the year after that. And if that’s true, then we need more than slogans. We need wisdom.

We need to understand how we got here…and how the Bible has been used, misused, twisted, flattened, and sometimes rescued, in moments like this before.

Because a profound misunderstanding of the Bible helped create the mess we’re in right now. A shallow, weaponized reading. A reading that forgets where the text came from, who wrote it, and why. And if we want to imagine a different future for our grandchildren…if we want a church that is actually faithful to Jesus and not just useful to the regime or useful against it…then we have to slow down and relearn what this book is.

So over the next few years, we’re going to slow down. We’re going to take this book seriously enough to ask where it came from, what it was trying to do, and how it’s meant to shape people who are not in charge of the world.

We’re going to learn how to spot bad Bible readings…including our own. And we’re going to practice sharing the truth about Jesus and the vehicle of Scripture in which he comes to us, in a way that a hurting world might actually recognize as good news.

Now let’s say a quick word of prayer so we can focus in on what we’re here to do today. Because it might not change the world, but it might change us.

Let’s pray.

God, here we are.


We didn’t choose this moment, but it’s the one we’re in.

You know how we’re feeling. Angry, grieving, tired

So give us steadiness now.
 Not false optimism.
 Not despair either.


Just the strength to be present, to slow down enough to pay attention.


And learn from those who walked this road before us.

As we begin this long work together,
 keep us grounded,

keep us honest,
and keep us alive to what really matters.

We’re not asking for all the answers today.


Just the wisdom for the next step…
and the courage to take it together.

Amen.

I’ve got something to show you! It’s a box.

Nothing special to look at. Just a box.

And the important thing about this box is not the box itself. It’s what’s inside.

Inside are ticket stubs.
 Photos that are a little blurry.

A piece of cloth that used to belong to something bigger. 
Maybe a lock of hair, which is little gross until you remember whose hair it was.

These aren’t things you keep because they’re useful. You keep them because they’re yours. Because throwing them away would feel like throwing away a part of yourself.

Someone else might not get it. Someone else might eventually toss the whole thing in the trash and wonder why you kept such nonsense. But not you. You never throw this box away. If there’s a fire, this is what you go back for.

Every piece inside is a fragment. On its own, it doesn’t explain much. But together, they tell a story. Your story. Where you’ve been. Who you’ve loved. What you refuse to forget.

Now, this isn’t actually my box.
 This is Megan’s.

My box was a box of old cords. You know the kind. Computer cords. Chargers for devices I don’t own anymore. Things I thought I might need someday. And then when we downsized …I threw it away. They took a notch out of my middle aged dad card when I did that. And that hurt. But it was time.

You get the idea though, right?

Do you have a box like this? Show of hands?
 You have a box of fragments that you will never throw away and that are all jumbled together and only you can make sense of them and tell the story that they represent?

Hopefully it’s just a box and not your whole house.

Well, before the books of the Bible were books of the Bible, this is what they were.

Stories and memories that were passed down from generation to generation long before they were written down.

Before the Bible was a book on a shelf, it was something much closer to this box, and that’s easy to forget because we’re used to thinking of the Bible in shallow ways…as a single book, written all at once, dropped out of the sky fully formed, or as a rulebook that tells you what to do, or a reference manual you flip open for answers, or even a sacred object you respect but don’t really engage. But that’s not what it is.

The word Bible actually means “library,” and that doesn’t just describe the named books that are in it, but how those individual books were put together. That each fragment is sacred and special, even though they don’t always make sense in the story itself.

You can feel that when you read it, because sometimes you’ll be moving along and then you get hit with something that makes you stop and say, Wait…what? Like that strange little story in Exodus where God suddenly decides to kill Moses, (Exodus 4:24-26) and the only thing that stops it is his wife circumcising their son and touching Moses with the blood.

It’s really weird. It’s bad story-telling. It raises way more questions than it answers. But clearly, someone at some point thought, We cannot throw this story away. It’s in the box for a reason, even if we kind of forgot what that reason was. So instead of smoothing it out or fixing it, they tucked it into the story where it kind of fits and trusted that it would be okay.

That’s what people do with shoeboxes like this. You don’t discard the strange pieces. You keep everything.

So that’s the first point today. And it’s the first of many images we’re going to use in this long project. The box helps us see that before parts of the Bible were ever copied together into scrolls, they were memory. They were culture. They were fragments and songs and stories passed on because they were woven into daily life. Our spiritual ancestors didn’t keep these things because they were “religious” in the abstract. They kept them because this was the stuff that made up who they were. It was just the air they breathed. You don’t usually stop and narrate the air you breathe. You live in it.

It’s only when all of that is taken away that it has to be gathered, named, and held together on purpose. It’s only after a significant loss that memory becomes something you have to protect. That’s when it starts becoming a story.

So let’s set the box down for now, and talk about something we know from history, from archaeology, from other ancient cultures, and from the Bible itself.

The Exile

In 587 BCE, the city of Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonian Empire. The temple was destroyed. The institutions that had held their world together were dismantled. Many of the people were taken from their land and forced to live in exile, under someone else’s rule.

Can you imagine if you lost everything that once made your nation special?

If someone who had no qualifications to be your ruler, suddenly was?

If the center of worship for you and your people was desecrated?

That’s what happened to Israel.

And that is where most scholars start when they talk about how the Hebrew Bible came to be. The evidence points to the conclusion that these books weren’t written in comfort or certainty, but as a response to an incredible loss, as a way of trying to make sense of how it all happened, and to look for assurance that God was still with them, no matter what.

The most important event for Israel,

that we forget to remember,

and helps us understand Bible stories

that seem to have nothing to do with it....is: the Exile

So even though we are going to start this project of ours at the beginning of the Bible, the project of theirs of putting it all together starts in the middle of it. Does that make sense?

Like their beginning wasn’t really “In the beginning”. It was more likely that it began by the waters of Babylon.

Have you read Psalm 137? Those of you who remember the 60’s might remember the song of it.

Psalm 137

1 By the rivers of Babylon—
  there we sat down, and there we wept
    when we remembered Zion.

Of all the verses in the Bible, I think this one captures the moment best of when their whole project really began.

This was their first move after their world ended. They sat down and wept when they remembered Zion.

Zion is their pet name for home. Not just a place on a map, but everything that went with it…belonging, identity, meaning. And they lost it all.

2 On the willows there
    we hung up our harps.

Those harps were instruments of worship. And they’re not broken. No one smashed them. They hang them up themselves.

This isn’t defiance yet. They just can’t pretend. They don’t have it in them to sing.

3 For there our captors
    asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

Well maybe it was a little bit of defiance, of non-compliance. The people who destroyed their home now want to be entertained by them. Empire does things like that. Power doesn’t really need a consistent reason to hunger for more. It just takes and takes, and attracts those to it who also just want to take and take. So the writer answers the request with an honest answer.

4 How could we sing the Lord’s song
    in a foreign land?

5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
    let my right hand wither!

6 Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
    if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
 above my highest joy.

Look at how the writer refuses to move on, refuses to make their life just about them and their own joy. They say, “I refuse to make my own comfort, my own survival, my own happiness the center of the story.” And maybe I need to hear that too. Maybe we all do.

Because while forgetting would be easier, and would help them adapt faster, and probably make life in Babylon more manageable.

Forgetting would cost too much.

So they choose memory, even though it hurts. They choose loyalty to a place and an idea they may never see again.

Remembering is an act of resistance.

Holding on to who you were, when the world is trying to tell you who you are now, is defiance.

And then…if we’re honest…the Psalm goes somewhere we’d rather it didn’t.

7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
    the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
    Down to its foundations!”

8 O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
    Happy shall they be who pay you back
    what you have done to us!

9 Happy shall they be who take your little ones
    and dash them against the rock!

That’s about as honest as it gets.

This is not poetry we frame and hang on the wall. If you see this cross stitched on a pillow at gramma’s house, you should either run or realize that gramma has been hilarious longer that you’ve been alive.

But really, that’s what rage sounds like when it has nowhere to go. And the Bible does not correct it. It does not interrupt it.
It does not say, “Now, now, let’s calm down.”

It lets it stand.

When violence goes unanswered, it doesn’t disappear. It turns inward. It goes sideways. It says, if this happened to us, let it happen to them, too.

That thirst for vengeance is where they start. And I have the same thoughts, if I’m honest with myself.


But it is not where the Bible ends up.

Because they had their box of fragments to look through. They had their people’s ancient mythic stories about snakes in gardens whispering that each person can decide for themselves where the line is between good and evil, and about brother killing brother and bringing the greater curse down on his own head.

They had commandments to dwell on and ponder, commandments that begin by saying God alone is God, that leads to a command not to kill. Because putting God first means refusing to take God’s place, and the moment we decide we get to choose whose life matters and whose doesn’t, we’ve already broken both commandments at once.

They couldn’t just follow their emotions, or the crowd, or just react to the violence against them. They had to…they chose to…respond based on the fragments in the box. They responded through their shared experience and their community’s story going back as far as anyone could remember.

And they chose to take their time of loss and use it not only for the good of their little tribe, but for all the tribes to come. Because the arranging they did, or all the little fragments into a finished cohesive narrative let that story leave the fireside and spread over the face of the earth.

The books they wrote, by the grace of God, took what had lived in memory and by committing it to the written word, they didn’t just preserve their hope, they set it free. Writing these Scriptures allowed the hope born in exile to travel beyond one small community and into new lands, and in new languages, so that it could be heard by people who had never sat by the rivers of Babylon.

And over time, that written hope took on a life of its own, forming expectations that God would act again…expectations that were shaped and reshaped across generations, until Jesus appeared among another occupied people, stepping into that long, shared hope in ways that surprised them and forced them to see God’s faithfulness differently.

All because they took the time they never wanted to have in the first place, that time in exile, to slow down, to tell the truth, and to do the work of remembering together.

They refused to let loss be wasted.

And that’s why we’re starting this project now. Not because we think we’re the first people to face a moment like this, but because we’re not. We’re taking our time not to escape the present, but to understand it. To gather what’s been handed to us, to notice what’s been distorted, and to learn again how Scripture was meant to function…not as a weapon, not as a shortcut, but as a companion for people trying to stay faithful when the world they knew has changed.

Next week, we’ll start where they did. At the beginning.