End The Child Sacrifice

Humanity has a long gruesome history of human sacrifice. It sounds horrific and horrendous to  us now. I'm sure it sounded that way to some people in ancient times too but it happened.For almost as long as people have existed, they have  offered up their most precious possessions in order to please their gods and receive whatever blessings they conjured up- power, wealth, status, etc. 

This complete disregard for the sacred value of human life speaks to the desperate wickedness of the human heart. God has always detested such blatant disregard for the dignity of his creation. In the Bible, God said that the people of Judah, “built high places for Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molek, though I never commanded—nor did it enter my mind—that they should do such a detestable thing and so make Judah sin.” (Jeremiah 32:35)

Strangely, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, this idea of sacrificing the most precious and innocent of the community to face a cruel death in the hopes that life may be better for those who remain behind on earth. I’ve been thinking about the colonization of South American Indigenous lands and peoples. In A Short account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartholomew las Casas writes with brutally vivid detail about how babies were ripped from the breasts of their nursing mothers by conquistadors who threw them up in the air and caught them on the edges of bayonets, lightheartedly taunting as they massacred their way through the land leaving a trail of agony in their wake. 

Unfortunately there are countless examples of the brutality that innocent children bear at the hands of adults whose minds have been corrupted by wickedness, but one day several months ago, there was a story of this that for some reason, hit way too close to home. While listening to the audiobook of The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby, I heard something new, something that did more than just break my heart, it grieved my soul. “The same men who stood up on pulpits to preach on Sunday, hung Mrs.Mary by her legs for the crime of speaking out against her husbands lynching. They didn’t care that she was 8 months pregnant.” A this point my foot on the gas accelerated as I missed my first exit and my hands gripped the steering wheel in an iron hold of horror. Bound and determine to set readers free to acknowledge the inhuman terror of American history, Mr.Tisby went on, not spearing any details about how Mrs. Mary’s baby was cut out of her pregnant body and crushed before she was lynched, the world in front of me became a blurry haze of tears. An agonizing scream got caught up in the back of my throat and escaped my lips as a gargled cry. Although I  mourned Mrs. Mary and her baby  at that moment, my tears held the weight of the fact that this story sounded oddly familiar. Reminded me of a person I’d just heard about in my Old Testament class. This penetrated my heart so deeply because it rang of the familiar sorrow of those Israelite babies who they brutally sacrificed to dead Gods or watched helplessly as invading armies destroyed their homes and children . I remembered Psalms 137 where the Israelite writer cries out for vengeance against the Edomites who took their infants and dashed them against the rocks during the invasion and exile of Israel.

I hate that I can’t help seeing these patterns. I hate that I can no longer live in blissful ignorance of wickedness, not just in our world today, but that persists as a defining characteristic of humanity. I hate that I not only know of it intellectually but I feel it in my heart. This grief for the precious human lives that bear the image of God being violently snached from the land of the living is heart wrenching and yet it is unavoidable. It has always been here under the surface but now the veil has been lifted. Unable to bear what I see, I mourn the cruelty of this world. I hate how recently, the feelings of deep humbling empathy bypass the walls of physical and emotional distance that built up over time to protect my soul from despair. Yet I am grateful. I am somehow able to appreciate this emotion that I hate because every time my heart aches at the loss of another mother, brother, sister, child, I know that my humanity is alive and well. I know that the part of my identity which is an exact replica of the spirit of God is not gone. I am not walking around as an emotional zombie,  dead to the reality of suffering with hopes of self preservation. I feel everything and it hurts but I can only feel it because I am here. The God shaped part of my soul cries out with groanings that cannot be understood over the blood that has soaked this wretched earth. The imago dei within me recognizes I am inextricably linked to every other created being and although it is just a shadow of what their loved ones must be feeling I feel their pain.

I am angry. I am angry at a society that has only evolved to execute sophisticated forms of child sacrifice. I am outraged that we are okay with sacrificing the most vulnerable of us on the altar of pride with the hopes that the gods of money, power, and self-righteous nationalism will somehow reward us for our offering. I am terrified that our society is so committed to worshiping the very things that are destroying us that we will protect it at all costs. Even if we have to pay with the lives of our firstborn sons and daughters. I am angry that I am somehow a part of this system of Babylon so I must seek its wellbeing even though it is complicit in the murder of millions and the destruction of destinies. I am afraid that nowhere is safe, that although my anger compels me to fight for justice in this wicked society, it could take me out at any moment. At any moment I could become one of the masses whose blood cries out for justice.

At the same time I am grateful that my humanity is alive enough to do the work of justice that needs to be done. I am grateful to know that in my sorrow over the lives lost in senseless but unsurprising tragedies, I am imaging my heavenly father. I am grateful because although there is so much that I cannot do, “anything” does not make the list. While “everything” stands out in bold letters and attempts to mock me into complicit silence, “Something” pushes me forward. It urges me to allow myself to feel even when it hurts so that my actions are not motivated just by fast fading anger, but by a deeply rooted understanding of our shared humanity. “Something” allows me to humble myself enough to admit that I don’t know the right thing to do or say or pray to respond in the wake of this seemingly endless flood of horrific tragedies. “Something” allows me to call on my God whose agony over his breath of life being stolen from babies is infinitely greater than my own. It allows me to call on this God to heal the land and comfort the families of those lives lost and others, who like myself, are releasing a collective groan for the human sacrifices that we are forced to witness and feel powerless to stop…

Oh lord, I come humbly before your throne of Mercy and ask that you would heal this land from the cancer of injustice that flows through the heart of our nation. I pray for your comforting presence as you mourn with those who are mourning and grieve with those who are grieving. I pray that you would break the chains of self preservation that have kept us bound in callus, unfeeling observations of the evils in this world.I pray that you would tear down every false idol that attempts to exalt itself above your glory oh God. I pray that the joy that ensues in the wake of this dark night will be all the more glorious after we have suffered a while. I pray that those of us who feel called to do the work of justice will be refined by the fire of empathy and sorrow so that we are able to serve as agents of healing and love in this broken world. I pray for the freedom to hold on to hope for the restoration of humanity. And that those who can’t make sense of their unimaginable loss in this this moment would have to space to grieve and find rest in the knowledge that one day, he will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain anymore for old things will pass away and behold, God will make all things new.