Congregational prayer

As a rule--or so it seems to me--today at least, the "imprecatories" don't pray well. What's more, the Book of Psalms include a lot of them, twenty at least, some impossible to forget.

Psalm 5 is the first, although others are more venomous. "Listen to me, Lord," the psalmist says, using the command form, as if God is his Secretary of Defense. This morning prayer of his seems an assertion he believes God Almighty is obliged to answer. "The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity," he says. "Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing: the Lord will abhor the bloody and deceitful man." What he's doing is reminding the Creator of Heaven and Earth to do his job.

But that's not the fifth psalm's imprecatory-ness. Harken!--here's the embarrassingly Old Testament-ish stuff: "For there is no faithfulness in their mouth; their inward part is very wickedness; their throat is an open sepulchre; they flatter with their tongue. Destroy thou them, O God; let them fall by their own counsels; cast them out in the multitude of their transgressions; for they have rebelled against thee (vs. 9 and 10).

Their "throat is an open grave" is a foul metaphor to keep you up at night, don't you think?

And Psalm 5 isn't the most appalling of the imprecatory psalms. Psalm 137:9 champions the bloodiest horror imaginable: "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." (I should have started this thing with a parental warning.)

I've never known quite what to do with those verses. How do you translate such hot-tempered viciousness into our times? How on earth can people make music with those words?

Occasionally, congregational prayer leaves silences for each of us to fill with our own petitions or thanks or adoration. Yesterday, in the first round I did some confession, but when the silence opened for a second round, I asked the Lord to do something to stop the bloody horrors in the Ukraine. I don't remember how exactly I started, but I ended with sheer imprecation. "Take him out, Lord," I said, as if God Almighty was a sniper in camo, sprigs of a bush affixed to his helmet. 

"Take him out, Lord," I said, and I'll say it again this morning. "Take Putin out so the world can be done with him." In essence, I say it every time I see those children, the babies, on the run, going someplace they don't know where, or when I see bombed-out hospitals or nuclear plants under attack. "Take him out, Lord." The minute I said it, I realized I'd never asked anything quite like it before in church, unlike any other in my three score and ten. Yesterday, in church, I asked the Lord  God Almighty to kill a man, and soon.

The Psalms are the most human of the books of the Bible. As Calvin says, those 150 poems offer us ourselves in every shade and mood--loneliness, despair, comfort, edification, admonition, ecstacy, beloved spiritual fulfillment in quiet waters. It's all there. As we wander this vale of tears, no better guidebook exists than the psalms. We're in them ourselves. We're there too. Everything we'll ever feel is in those poems, holy writ and human writ. We're never alone.

But never before in my life did I feel the heft of the imprecatories as I did yesterday and do right now. Putin is a cosmic villain, an angel of death, who deserves what he has doled out to millions of others. He deserves death and hell.

Amen.