“Bashing Baby Brains”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, July 7, 2024
Reading: Psalm 137
Last week something happened that’s never happened to me before. Someone new told me they came to church because of the sermon title. They’d seen it on the sign out there, “Boo other nations,” for Canada Day. I don’t love titling sermons. Half the time I dream up a title way in advance and by the time that Sunday rolls around I forget why I chose it. But last week I did talk about the rude psalms that condemn other nations, as promised on the sign. If you’re here again this week, welcome back!
This week’s title is a good deal more sensationalist: bashing baby brains. And if you’re here this morning because you saw that title and liked it, maybe don’t tell me. My titles are sort of the equivalent of headlines in yellow journalism in the 19th century, or tabloids in our day. Prurience sells. But both last week and this, I haven’t doctored the Bible at all. I’m just telling you what it says.
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!
Infanticide is how you eliminate another people. The psalm offers it a benediction. “Blessed are those” makes us think of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” for example. The language in Psalm 137 is the same. “Blessed” shall they be who take your little ones and dash them. This isn’t one of those cases where the Hebrew original or some other manuscript can rescue the verse. It’s as awful as it sounds.
So, it’s perfect for this series on Rude Praise. In most of these sermons I’ve suggested the psalm offers some fibre to the diet of our prayers. Good for the whole system. Not here. I don’t want us praying these lines. I don’t want anyone praying these lines. A monastery I visit knew what to do with lines like these. Monks pray the psalms for a living. Seven times a day they’re in church chanting psalms. Lots of older monks know all 150 by heart. As they used to say in the ancient church, “they know the whole David.” People who love the psalms enough to give up money, sex, and power for them don’t say these lines. They just politely ignore them and move on to the next verse.
So why are they there? And what do we do with them?
The rest of psalm 137 is gorgeous. It’s inspired centuries of composers including our anthem this morning. Some of the rude psalms in this series, Elaine has no music for. This one she could keep us here till next Sunday and not repeat. It has shown up in reggae versions, Sinead O’Connor covered it, Matisyahu has a rap track on it. You can see why.
1 By the rivers of Babylon--
there we sat down, and there we wept
when we remembered Zion...
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.
It's a rare psalm we can geo-locate—in what we call Iraq—and date—after 586 BC. The southern tribes of Judah were conquered that year, the people carried off in exile, the temple burnt, their babies murdered. Without the promised land, the temple for worship, the people secure, what is the singer supposed to sing about? Israel has songs for Jerusalem but not Babylon. She has songs for the River Jordan but not for the rivers Tigris or Euphrates. So, the harp is hung up. No more songs.
One way the Nazis dehumanized Jews was to make them sing and dance. “Sing for us one of the songs of Zion!” No need to think of a response. There was one right here in the psalm: “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”
Scholars call these lament psalms. They dump out sorrow before God. That’s what I want in our prayers: more tears, more sighing, more longing for the redemption of Jerusalem. But scholars also call these two final verses “imprecatory.” Scholars need something to do. Just means cursing. You and I follow Jesus. And he commands us not to curse, even enemies. That’s why the monks won’t sing these imprecatory verses. Not because the verses are not nice. But because Jesus tells us not to curse.
Now, curses can have their uses. I joked the other week about Jesus commanding us not to curse that it’s easy enough for him to say—he didn’t have to drive around Toronto. More seriously now, I was in the Netherlands last month, and its Reformed churches have a tradition of singing psalms, including 137th. They were occupied for four brutal years by the Nazis. Friends of mine remember family murdered. So, the church in the Netherlands would pray these psalms of imprecation. Happy shall they be who do the same to you! Wait, are you resisting the Reich? Oh no, we’re just praying these psalms from the Bible. The Dutch under occupation learned what the African American church long knew. You can code switch and your enslavers won’t know. Yeah, these spirituals about Pharaoh and Moses, they’re just Bible songs. About a God who frees slaves and hates tyranny.
A few weeks back, we had an important event in our church about antisemitism. We had some 900 people register, so many we had to cut it off for fire code reasons. When do you ever have to turn people away from church because it’s full? I told the organizers I can’t fill the building on Sunday to talk about Jesus, if you guys can on a Monday night at the same time as game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals, maybe we should just give y’all the keys. You think I’m joking. I met half a dozen holocaust survivors that night. Two women who’d been hidden in monasteries as little girls. One man hidden on a farm as a boy. A fourth woman hidden in a Catholic Church. Several have tattoos on their arms from the camps they survived. Our pews feel holier for their having sat on them. Makes you wonder: would we have the courage to risk hiding those in danger? There was a war on. Not enough food for your own family. And the gestapo searching houses every day. Toni Morrison, the great novelist and essayist and poet, wrote of her fear as an African American woman that if the trains came for black people, most of her American neighbours would do nothing. Or join in loading them. Lots of Nazis saw themselves as doing God’s work.
You see what I’m saying? Quoting the Bible is not simple. You can’t just say ‘the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.’ Not every verse has equal weight or stature. And some verses, like this one, read by itself, is a moral horror. The Bible has been used to justify slavery, genocide, dispossession of native peoples, misogyny, nearly any moral outrage in church history there was chapter and verse to support it.
So, does this render the Bible useless, or morally suspect? I’m a preacher over a Bible in a church, you won’t be surprised I don’t think so. It’s not morally suspect, we are.
Here’s what the psalm teaches us. First, life was hard! You and I expect to live long and comfortable and pain-free lives. Not so in ancient Israel or most places today. The great preacher Charles Spurgeon said this to his congregation in Victorian London:
Let those who find fault with it who have never seen their temple burned, their city ruined, their wives ravished, and their children slain; they might not, perhaps, be quite so velvet-mouthed if they had suffered after this fashion.
Of course, almost any atrocity is preceded by claiming to be a victim. Even the Nazis felt the need to pretend they weren’t aggressors—yeah, the Poles started this, or it’s the Jews’ fault. When Jesus commands us not to seek revenge, to respond to evil with good, to turn the other cheek, he’s speaking to oppressed people, crushed by Roman occupation and desperate poverty.[i] The Jews in the Bible had been mistreated by the Babylonians, but of course that doesn’t give them license to mistreat others. You might notice there’s a side glance at the Edomites. These are Israel’s neighbours, frenemies: sometime friends, sometime enemies. It seems that the Israelites asked for help and didn’t get it. Instead, they got mockery, an anchor thrown to a drowning person. And you may remember the Edomites are descended from Esau, Jacob’s twin brother. This psalm is partly a family feud: at your worst moment, your sibling, your twin, says “got what you deserved, didn’t you? About time.”
Israel shows who we are as human beings. We keep record of wrongs, unlike God. We want revenge, not reconciliation. I don’t know about you, but my mind does keep a list of who I think has what coming to them. The great Frederick Buechner wrote this:
Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.
Or as they say in the recovery community, bitterness is drinking poison and hoping the other person dies.
So, Israel is in a rage. Who can blame them? But as a preacher friend of mine says, ‘not everything depicted in the Bible is commended.’[ii] This sort of curse is meant to horrify us. But there are times to pray with rage. This is a way to pray against cancer for example. Let those new little cells not grow or metastasize, let them be strangled in the crib. Folks who struggle with addiction—to substances or gambling or porn or shopping—tell me the desires start out small, but then they grow overwhelming. When they’re small, drown them in the tub. The great CS Lewis thinks of the whiny voice that seeks recognition, and fumes when others get it: “Knock the little babies’ brains out,” he says.
You see what I’m doing here? I’m taking these words seriously by applying them spiritually. This is no call to harm anyone’s human child. God doesn’t want that; we know full well from the rest of the Bible. Anyone with a conscience knows that. These Babylonian babies are metaphorical. They are the worst things in ourselves: Envy. Lust. Pride. Don’t let them grow up into adult vices.
In 1st Corinthians 10 the rock in the wilderness, from which our ancestors in Israel drink, is identified with Jesus Christ. He’s the rock to build our house. Our hymns speak often of Christ as our rock. So, what would it mean to dash enemy infants against him? Take every idea, every thought, just born, and hurl it straight to Jesus. In our language we also speak derogatorily of infants at times. “Don’t be a baby” is not something we say to actual babies. Take any thought and hurl it to Jesus as fast as possible. When you’re tempted to curse that other driver, dash them against Jesus instead.
I know there’s something deep in us Protestants that doesn’t trust non-literal readings of the Bible. Catholics do sacraments, we do scripture. But bear with me: we read creatively in other parts of our lives. Lovers do it as they reread letters over and over, looking for clues beneath the surface. Spies write texts that misdirect on purpose, with a decoder on the other end. Fiction authors also misdirect on purpose: it’s more fun. The Bible is at least as sophisticated as a love letter, a code, a novel. Psalm 137 speaks of Jerusalem. This verse is on the sign outside now: “If I forget you, oh Jerusalem, may my right hand wither.” But what is Jerusalem? It’s a city. You can go there. It has postal codes and a mayor and traffic. But poets always make Jerusalem bigger than even that great city. It’s a symbol for all of Israel. For all humanity. Sometimes called Zion in the psalms. It’s an image for the church: the whole people of God. It’s an image for righteousness: Jerusalem the holy city. It’s an image for heaven: the city of God come down out to us, adorned like a bride processing up that centre aisle. Don’t ask which reading is right or wrong. They can all be right. Now look, there are some simple texts you want more precise. Ikea instructions. Parking rules. Doctors’ prescriptions. Minimal creativity, please. But those aren’t the texts that set souls on fire.
When I say, “the River Jordan,” you don’t first think of the actual waterway. You think of death, as the African American church taught us. Or of baptism. Or of the promised land. When Barack Obama was elected president, Jesse Jackson said: “today we crossed the river.”
Once when I was in literal Jerusalem I couldn’t sleep, found myself walking around the wall of the old city. I thought, okay, why not walk around the whole city? When else am I gonna do that? I turned and saw the street go sharply down. And get dark. Uh, not doing that. Then I laughed out loud. Of course. Zion is on a mountain. You go up to Zion. Literally and figuratively. I’m not walking down there—that’s where Gehenna is—hell, or where you get mugged. Can you feel the metaphor coming?
This is how language always works: on multiple levels. But on every level: God loves us, and all humanity, and wants full life for every creature. Read the individual bits in light of that great truth.
Some say that cursing out loud against Edomites and Babylonian children is a sort of therapy. These denunciations are vocalized, so that they’re not acted upon. Like how therapists will have you say stuff to them you wish you could say to the person who hurt you. I’m not so sure. Most real-world violence starts with words. Before Jews were targeted with bullets they were targeted with words. Before Hutus in Rwanda went after Tutsis with clubs they went after them with slurs. Anti-gay words bring anti-gay violence. I can see validity in leaching poison out of us, so we don’t spray it on others. But it’s not my preferred reading. See: when you allow multiple readings, it doesn’t mean anything goes. The community together decides, nah, that one doesn’t work. But how do we decide?
The best solution comes from St. Augustine, 4th-5th century African church father. Augustine said this: read every text in the Bible so that your interpretation builds the community’s love of God and neighbour. If you interpret it and your hearers don’t love their neighbour more, start over. You did it wrong. Because that’s what the Bible is for. To change us from selfish creatures into saints. If we read the Bible in a way that makes us say ‘there, see that? It shows you’re bad, and I’ve been right all along!’ No, you just turned that book into poison. But if we read it and repent of our own sins: good. We’re starting to make progress.
And where does St. Augustine get this rule? From one Jesus of Nazareth. A lawyer comes to him. Alert: Jesus dislikes lawyers almost as much as he dislikes religious leaders. Lawyer asks: what do I need for eternal life? Jesus gives us the golden rule: “love the Lord your God,” and “love your neighbour as yourself.” The first part is from Deuteronomy, the second from Leviticus, close to our Jewish elder siblings’ hearts as well. In Judaism, they sometimes speak of a silver rule, articulated by Rabbi Hillel, around the time of Jesus: ‘whatever is hateful to you: don’t do that to your neighbour.’ All the rest is just commentary. I wonder who’s going to grab for a diamond rule.
Rabbis Jesus and Hillel knew there are things worth raging against. We pray about most of them every week in here. Israel and Gaza. Ukraine and Russia. Uyghurs in camps in China. Homelessness and hunger here in wealthy Toronto. Our own self-destructiveness. Let’s maybe try a bold step farther and pray this verse out loud. I respect my monk friends deeply, but let’s try something different. And then notice what happens when we curse our enemies. Our curses fall on Jesus. They land like nails in his hands. Thorns on his brow. A cross on his back. Christ does leach all our poison out and then he drinks it. And gives us back life, blessings—we who curse. Do you see? All Christ does with our curses is transfigure them into blessings.
I’ll conclude with a story that shocked me like this psalm shocks all of us. A young friend of mine is one of the best United Church ministers we have. He wears his clerical collar around on transit—because he’s braver than I am. A few weeks ago, on the TTC someone came up to him and said, “you’re no priest” and spit in his face. No idea why. Maybe there’s place for such rage—maybe someone else in a clerical collar harmed the spitter. That doesn’t make it okay. My friend is gay, not too outwardly, but maybe that’s what drew the ire. That would make it worse. Whatever it is, it’s awful. But all I could think of was Jesus. Also spit upon. Despised. And he absorbed all that rejection and made from it acceptance for us who spit on him. Jesus says:
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.
Hey—no one said being a Christian would be easy. Just that it’s the way to life.
[i] It’s Miroslav Volf’s point in Exclusion and Embrace.
[ii] David Larmour from King Street Community Church in Oshawa