Smashing Babies

Lectio:

Psalm 137

*****³ when those who had taken us captive
asked us to sing them a song;
our tormentors demanded joy from us —
“Sing us one of the songs from Tziyon!”

⁴ How can we sing a song about Adonai
here on foreign soil? ****

⁷ Remember, Adonai, against the people of Edom
the day of Yerushalayim’s fall,
how they cried, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
Raze it to the ground!”

⁸ Daughter of Bavel, you will be destroyed!
A blessing on anyone who pays you back
for the way you treated us!
⁹ A blessing on anyone who seizes your babies
and smashes them against a rock!

Micah 7:11-20

¹³ The earth will be desolate for those living in it,
as a result of their deeds.

¹⁸ Who is a God like you,
pardoning the sin and overlooking the crimes
of the remnant of his heritage?
He does not retain his anger forever,
because he delights in grace.
¹⁹ He will again have compassion on us,
he will subdue our iniquities.

You will throw all their sins
into the depths of the sea.

1 Peter 4:7-19

¹¹ if someone speaks, let him speak God’s words; if someone serves, let him do so out of strength that God supplies; so that in everything God may be glorified through Yeshua the Messiah — to him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen.

Meditatio:

Grief and sorrow, hatred and revenge. Who makes a song about smashing babies? I tried to imagine what I would have to feel in order to ask for God’s blessing on someone who killed babies to settle a score for me. I couldn’t do it.

**

I went from nodding my head at the image of the desolate earth, ravaged on account of what we had done to it, to feeling my chest ease at the words that I originally heard as “You will throw all our sins into the sea.”

**

Of course I heard in my mind’s ear the phrase “God whisperer,” since that is my understanding of how to speak in God’s voice, with God’s words. I also remembered those times when I heard someone speaking to me in God’s voice.

Oratorio:

This psalm is tough. Why is there a verse in the Bible about smashing babies on rocks? Why is such terrible hatred spoken as a prayer? How could anyone think that the God of Love would ever grant such a petition? At first I was going to write that last sentence as “…hear such a petition?” but suddenly it came to me that God hears all of our prayers and pleas. And that is exactly why there is such a verse in the Bible. It’s there to prove the case. I don’t believe that the psalmist would ever have actually killed toddlers. No, the psalmist just had such a profound trust in God that he could voice the most horrifying of impulses, speak the most poisonous of imaginings, and declare the most virulent of desires, in the utter certainty that no prayer should ever be censored. God already knows our inmost hearts, and when we speak the unspeakable in trust, God will comfort us. Such prayers are not to be taken literally, as some of my atheist friends seem to think. They are as literal as any Puritan in their insistence that because humans are fallible and inconsistent, cruel and hateful, that when the human authors of the Bible open their most vulnerable hearts to God and contradict themselves or pray for some kind of atrocity, then that means that God also must be fallible, inconsistent, cruel, and hateful. Some kind of logical fallacy there, I think. Anyway, this insight shook me a bit. I know a lot of people who try to censor their own thoughts and feelings, because somehow they think that they will be judged and punished on account of them. The psalmist says a resounding, “NO!” to that, and instead gives full rein to his feelings of outrage, grief, homesickness, bitterness and yes, hatred. He pours them right out of his heart, and into the great ocean of God’s grace, and lets them dissolve there. President Trump just came to Salt Lake City to reduce the size of two national monuments. There is this phrase: “wrings my heart.”  Now I know what that phrase means.  I could feel my heart being twisted just like a washrag being wrung out. I witnessed the very deeds that are making “the world desolate for those living in it.” We can’t afford to stop there, at all, though. Desolation doesn’t equal despair. Iniquity does not always win. In the verse, I was struck by the word, “subdue.” Compassion subdues our iniquities, and our sins sink down and are swallowed up in the endless depths of God’s delight in grace. So I will practice compassion. For Trump in his sulky, strident, smug swaggering. For the ranchers and rich oil speculators who have made profit their God, and who refuse to look up from the chains they are forging link by link to shackle their hearts. For the politicians who make duplicity and hypocrisy into an art form. I will not admire them. I will not defend them. I will not justify them. Instead, I will hold them in good-will. Instead, I will wish this: “May all things be happy and at their ease!” Including them! I will not “despise any being in any state!”

Contemplatio:

I’m not sure that I can hear God’s voice,

But I will always listen for it.

I’m not sure that I can speak God’s words,

But I will watch for them to come gracefully

Swimming up from the shimmering depths.