And Dash Them Against the Rocks with Pastor Ryan Braley

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Faith gets brittle when we pretend. This week we lean into a braver way: arguing with Scripture as an act of honor and bringing our full selves to God without a filter. We open the Psalms not as tidy theology, but as a school of prayer where the human heart learns to speak truth—joy, sorrow, rage, and all.

Together we walk through Psalm 137, set in the ashes of exile. Judah hangs up its harps by Babylon’s rivers, too devastated to sing, and the psalm breaks open with a line that makes modern readers recoil. We don’t sanitize it; we face the history and the horror. What happens when the oppressed name their suffering with gut-level honesty? How does a violent verse function as a cry for justice, not a command for revenge? We place that tension next to Jesus’ refusal of retaliation and his cry, “Father, forgive them,” and ask what it means to hand judgment back to God in a world full of fresh wounds.

This conversation is both pastoral and practical. We challenge the myth that “good Christians” hide anger, and we explore why the imprecatory psalms are preserved: so the powerless can pray without pretending and so anger doesn’t become action. You’ll hear the backstory of Babylon’s atrocities, why ending a generation meant ending an empire, and how the early church’s vision of mercy reshaped the value of life. Then we turn to practice: write a personal psalm, name your grief and your complicity, and bring it to the cross. Let God receive the truth you’ve been carrying and do what only God can do.

If this conversation stirred something in you, share it with a friend who needs permission to pray honestly. And if our work helps you wrestle well, subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: what would your psalm say today?

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