Daily Lesson for July 8, 2014

Today's Daily Lesson are the hard and bitter words from Psalm 137 verses 7 through 9:

7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites

the day of Jerusalem,

how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare,

down to its foundations!”

8 O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,

blessed shall he be who repays you

with what you have done to us!

9 Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones

and dashes them against the rock!

The headline in yesterday's New York Times read "Hamas Vows to Avenge Militants’ Deaths in Israeli Strikes". And such it is that we see the thirst for vengeance fueling one act of barbarity upon another in a revolving spiral of violence in the Middle East. Three Israeli schoolboys kidnapped and executed, followed by a Palestinian teenager apparently burned alive in retaliation, followed by the pledge of yet more violence to come. 

It is the children who die. And the world yearns for this senseless infanticide of its own sons and daughters to end; God yearns likewise.

I know that I write here without the experience of having been victimized first hand by terror nor by a response to terror. So my words come from a place of humility necessitated by distance. But they do come, because as Donne said "no man is an island" and "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind."

Humankind continues to be diminished so long as we demand that our thirst for vengeance must be slaked. So long as we demand eye for an eye and tooth for tooth then the prospect for true and lasting peace will never come in the Middle East nor anywhere else. One side must have the courage to say, "Our desire for vengeance will go unmet. We will not mete out justice; instead we will choose to mete out mercy."

Today's Lesson speaks of the will for revenge. "Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!" the psalm says. It is rare that I disagree with the psalmist; but today I do. Today I disagree, even emphatically. No one is blessed by the killing of these Israeli and Palestinian children. No one has ever been blessed by the killing of a child. They are cursed for. The region is cursed. The whole world is cursed. So long as we continue to think the killing of our children is justifiable then we are cursed.

The world awaits a leader or leaders who will find the strength to resist the will toward vengeance and end the curse with mercy.

Maranatha. Lord come.