Psalm Meditation 1245 ¶Fifth Sunday of Easter ¶April 28, 2024 ¶Psalm 129 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+129&version=NRSVUE (NRSVUE) ¶One of the best ways to deal with an enemy is to depersonalize and dehumanize them. If they aren’t even human, let alone individual persons, we can hate them and kill them without a second thought. We are ‘us’ and they are ‘other.’ We can also project any unpleasant behaviors of ours onto them, which makes them more grotesque and scary, thus more necessary to sweep out of our lives as completely and as soon as possible. And because they are so evil and inhuman, we are actually doing them a favor by taking them out of the world in which we live. ¶The psalmist is dealing with an adversary who sees the chosen people of God as people to be destroyed, wiped from the earth completely. Fortunately, the psalmist’s people are not without protection. They call on YHWH to turn their enemies away at the border, to put them to shame for not being able to accomplish the objective or conquering and annihilating the people of Zion. In addition to their shame, let them wither and die like grass, and be left where they have died, like a bad crop of grain. ¶We still dehumanize and depersonalize our enemies. We still project our own evil onto them to make them even more unacceptable to ‘nice’ people like us. However, God, YHWH, continues to call us to see each person as being of sacred worth. We can hope for and pray for their destruction in the most violent way we can imagine, as long as we recognize that God is not going to act on our fantasies and imaginings. Our God is a God of steadfast love and mercy for each and all of us, no matter who, no matter what. ¶April 22, 2024 ¶LCM