Devotion • August 1
Today's Scripture
Psalm 149
Praise the Lord! Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise in the assembly of the faithful.
Let Israel be glad in its Maker; let the children of Zion rejoice in their King.
Let them praise his name with dancing, making melody to him with tambourine and lyre.
For the Lord takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with victory.
Let the faithful exult in glory; let them sing for joy on their couches.
Let the high praises of God be in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands,
to execute vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples,
to bind their kings with fetters and their nobles with chains of iron,
to execute on them the judgment decreed. This is glory for all his faithful ones. Praise the Lord! (NRSV)
Reflection
The pews in the small church I served, fresh from seminary, in Grandview, Missouri, had two sets of hymnals: the blue denominational hymnal and the older Hymns for the Family of God. The church bought the older hymnals more recently. When the denominational hymnal was published in 1990 without the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” the leaders of the church were so offended that they supplemented it with a book published in 1976, mostly because that hymnal contained that hymn.
That always struck me as funny. The church cared so much about an idiom of militancy in worship that they spent hundreds of additional dollars purchasing an extraneous set of hymnals.
Grandview was a military town, though. It had been home to an Air Force base, and much of the town’s infrastructure (including this church) was dependent on, well, militancy. Though my parents had met in the Air Force, and though I’d grown up next door to the Buckley Air Field outside of Denver, I didn’t have any personal stake in our armed forces, nor, I should note, in Grandview itself; I lived in Kansas City and commuted to the church.
Psalm 149 is a song of raucous celebration that envisions a glorious military victory executed by God on behalf of God’s “lowly” people against the nations that have trodden them to dust. It’s more fantastical than realistic, yet its vivid terminology — two-edged swords, vengeance, fetters, and chains — is unsettling. Can military imagery have any place in faith in the year 2024?
Maybe?
James Mays asks “whether attempts to banish the stance and metaphors of militancy from the conduct and language of the faithful mistake the world in which faithfulness exists.” He suggests that, though the mode of militancy, for Christians, is transformed by Jesus’ death and resurrection, faithfulness is nevertheless “placed in conflict with the purposes of nations and their rulers.”
In other words, our faith commitments put us at odds with the powers that be, powers that dehumanize and degrade. Terms like “fight” and “battle,” on behalf of the poor and despoiled, are not unfitting to describe faith’s vocation in such a world. Yet we must remember that “the weapons of our warfare are not merely human, but they have divine power to destroy strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:4).
Prayer
God of infinite mercy, we trust in your good purposes of peace for all your children. We pray for those who at this time face danger in the defense of justice. Watch over those in peril; support those who are anxious for loved ones; gather into your eternal purpose those who will die. Remove from the hearts of all people the passions that keep alive the spirit of war, and in your goodness restore peace among us; for the sake of the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (Prayer in time of war, Book of Common Order of the Church of Scotland)
Reflection written by Rocky Supinger, Associate Pastor for Youth Ministry and Worship
Reflection © Fourth Presbyterian Church
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