Pray For Your Enemies: Donald Trump and the Coronavirus
President Trump has tested positive for coronavirus. It’s no secret that I view him as an enemy of the Church. I may have never named that fully, saying it so bluntly, allowing you to construct that reality for me. Yet it’s true. I view President Trump as an enemy of the Church. He has, in my view and estimation, levied more destruction and division upon the Church both inside and outside than any singular person in US History. This however, is not about that. This is about how to pray for President Trump.
I have prayed for President Trump, even written about my struggles with praying for him, and how I’ve been praying for him. It has been a journey of struggle to pray consistently and regularly for him. And here, in this moment of diagnosis, calls are ringing out for people, pastors, Christians, to rise up and pray for President Trump’s full and total healing, because: “Pray for your enemies.”
But I’m not sure we actually understand what this truly means.
Somewhere along the line we’ve developed this understanding that praying for another person should always follow a positive train of thought. We should pray for the wellbeing of others. We should be praying for their good. Even if we have to force out the words. Prayer, we’re told is always a positive experience. Yet that’s not what we actually find in Scripture.
King David, the author of much of the book of Psalms, a book in the Old Testament filled with musical lyrics and prayers, poems of adoration and celebration of God, mixed with tremendous moments of grief, anger, lament and repentance. A portion of Scripture in which we see deep into the heart of a man and his wrestling with his God. His openness, his authenticity and transparency with God has endured for millennium on display for all of humanity past and present to see.
In several episodes throughout the Psalms, David prays for his enemies. In one particular episode, he opens up with what feels like a sigh, a moment of resignation as he engages in praying for his enemies, those who have sought and worked for his destruction and death “… but I am a man of prayer” [1]
But here’s the thing, in this resignation to pray, in this submission to the act of prayer and to God, we’d expect this to be positive right? But this is actually what David writes, and prays for all to see:
May his days be few; [a prayer for his enemies death!]
and his wife a widow.
May his children be wandering beggars;
may they be driven from their ruined
homes.
May a creditor seize all he has;
may strangers plunder the fruits of his
labor.
May no one extend kindness to him
or take pity on his fatherless children.
May his descendants be cut off,
their names blotted out from the next generation.
May the iniquity of his fathers be
remembered before the Lord;
may the sin of his mother never be
blotted out.
May their sins always remain before the
Lord,
that he may blot out their name from
the earth.
For he never thought of doing a kindness,
but hounded to death the poor
and the needy and the brokenhearted.
For he loved to pronounce a curse—
may it come back on him.
He found no pleasure in blessing—
may it be far from him.
He wore cursing as his garment;
it entered into his body like water,
into his bones like oil.
May it be like a cloak wrapped about him,
like a belt tied forever around him.
May this be the Lord’s payment to my
accusers,
to those who speak evil of me. [2]
Are you uncomfortable yet?
This is an example of praying for your enemies that we are given in Scripture. A far cry from the prayers of positivity we are expected to offer in our current cultural climate and understanding of prayer. As I repeatedly read through this portion of David’s prayer, I was struck at how easily I was able to create correlations between David’s enemy and my enemy (in this instance President Trump.) [3]
As I read this prayer over and over and over, I found myself actually sliding into the realm of prayer. I was actually beginning to pray these words as a prayer for Donald Trump. Now stop clutching your pearls for a moment and see what happens.
I don’t know if you know this or not—and I’m just going to assume that you don’t or at best it hasn’t been accepted at the core of your being, in the depths of your soul—God is not a transactional God; God is relational. The reason why I don’t think we truly know this is that most of us, upon reading the prayer of David immediately thought, “I could never pray that!” Or “That’s just not right! How could David pray something like that? How could you [Aaron] pray something like that!?"
Because God is not a transactional God. God is not some giant genie in a bottle. God is not a karmic God where the curses we pray, the horrors we release that emanate from a deep pain and hurt or sense of justice, don’t get revisited upon us 10-fold. You see, God is a relational God. A God who doesn’t want us to hold back a portion of ourselves from him. Who would hide how we’re truly feeling and what we’re truly thinking about the state of affairs, the state of the country; the feelings and thoughts we hold about our enemies and our President. God is relational and wants us to bring our full selves into the picture.
But too often we see prayer as transactional. We feel as if we need to be on our best behavior, say the right words, use the right turns of phrase, tip-toeing around God with platitudes and thoughts, and feelings that don’t truly represent where we are at that particular moment. We feel as if our hearts need to be in the right place, the correct place, occupying some faux state of perfection as we approach Him in conversation and prayer. And so we pull back and try to hide away those “unseemly” parts of the self, tricking God into believing our construct of perfection.
But here’s the thing: I don’t want to hide (or think I can hide) this part of myself from God. I want to be known fully by God. I want authenticity and transparency with God, because if I can’t have that with God who can I have that with?! And I think praying for your enemies, praying for President Trump, can look like this too. It is bringing your full self, your true self, where you are at that very moment into the presence of God where something remarkable and beautiful happens.
You see, if we pray faithfully by bringing our full selves and our true selves into the presence of God, if we hold nothing back, “a bond and an intimacy will be growing under the surface: a deep growing bond with our God” [4]. And just as God is not transactional, neither is prayer.
It is prayer that is the foundation of our relationship with God. “Prayer is a conversation between God and the soul” [5], a dialogue between God and the very core of our being, the fullness of who we are and where we are at that very moment, a place where nothing is held back.
So yes, pray for your enemies. Bring the fullness of who you are to God, the fullness of your emotions and your thoughts and get it all out. Allow the bonds of intimacy to form and solidify as you wretch all over God the deep seated hurts and pains and anger that reside deep within your being. I can’t guarantee that those thoughts or feelings will change, but your relationship with God will.
As I continued to pray David’s words over the President, I sighed deeply, wrestling with what I felt and what I knew to be true—that Donald Trump too is made in the Image of God. As that truth settled upon my heart I tried to sincerely pray for his well-being, but the anger quickly returned. As I positioned my heart once again, I found myself unable to fall back into the words of David instead stumbling forward into a new posture of submission. I stepped forward, leaning into the words of Jesus and uttered, “Thy will be done.”
“Thy will be done.”
At the moment, that is good enough… and today, this is my prayer for President Trump.
[1] Psalm 109.4
[2] Psalm 109.8-21
[3] “May a creditor seize all he has;” “he never thought of doing a kindness, but hounded to death the poor and the needy and the brokenhearted;” “He loved to pronounce a curse;” “He wore cursing like a garment.” Etc, etc, etc….
[4] Ronald Rolheiser in Prayer: Our Deepest Longings
[5] Hans Urs Von Balthasar in Prayer