Film Friday In the film Blitz Rita sends her son George away from their home in London, to escape the bombing, but George is not happy about that. So much so that he jumps off the train at the first opportunity and spends the rest of this story trying to get home. Along the way he encounters criminals, bomb blasts, flooding and many other dangers in this extraordinary film set in the Blitz of 1940. And it’s a story which highlights the pain of displacement. Whilst hitching a ride on a freight train George encounters three brothers who have also fled their evacuation because they were going to be separated.
Many characters in the Bible find themselves uprooted and in a strange place. Joseph is sold into slavery, Ruth leaves her homeland with her mother-in-law, and the people of God are taken into exile in Babylon. Psalm 137 – once made into a disco classic by Bony M – is a song of displacement, trouble and heartache. ‘How can we sing our songs of praise in this strange land?’ the people cry as their guards torment them and tell them to worship their God. The people don’t even know where God is at that moment. But they turn those cries into a psalm, into a song for other displaced people. And that in turn becomes one of our worship songs in the Bible. So a song about not being able to worship is in itself a song of worship. In the psalm the people pray that they will not forget their God, wherever they end up. And they pray for justice. The people of the Bible experience all aspects of life, and they offer their story and worship to us, that we might find hope in their honest words and lived experience.
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