Sarah Thebarge
In 1952, President Truman instituted a National Day of Prayer. It falls on the first Thursday in May — which was yesterday, May 3, 2018.
President Trump held an observance of the National Day of Prayer, with 200 people of faith in attendance. At the end of the ceremony, a pastor led the attendees in a 566-word prayer that was specifically written for the 2018 observance.
I read over the prayer this morning. Then I read it again. And again. And then I shook my head, because its words hold deep and damning examples of cognitive dissonance that continue to plague our country.
No, it’s deeper than that. What grieves me is not that it plagues our country, but that this dissonance plagues the hearts, souls, pews and pulpits of so many evangelicals who claim to follow the way of Christ.
The thing about prayer is that if it doesn’t change us, it doesn’t matter. When Jesus talks about how God decides at the end of time who knew him and who didn’t, God doesn’t use the words we said to him, the prayers we prayed to him, or the time we spent talking about God as metrics to divide the sheep from the goats. God uses the actions — what we did, not what we said — to show who really followed in the steps of Jesus.
In just a handful of examples from yesterday’s prayer, it’s evident that while evangelicals and the administration they support spend time talking about prayer — and even reciting a prayer together at the end of yesterday’s ceremony — there is a jarring discrepancy between the words they say and the deeds they perform (or dismiss and justify).
Prayer that consists of merely saying phrases and words that sound theologically correct, but fails to fundamentally change the way we live our lives, isn’t prayer at all. Jesus said as much when he talked about the Pharisees who spouted and spewed $5 vocab words, who in God’s eyes were just yelling air into the synagogues’ ceilings. Instead, it was the humble man who bowed himself down, the transformed Zaccheus who vowed to spend his fortune making past wrongs right, the Prodigal Son who admitted his wrongs to his father, who were closest to the heart of God.
Prayer is being the moon to Divine Love’s sun, soaking in, absorbing and reflecting Light that doesn’t come from us.
If we simply repeat theological words and phrases but don’t demonstrate radical Love in the way we live our lives, we’re like the moon without the sun: a cold, dark, dead piece of rock taking up space in the atmosphere.
If yesterday is any indication, evangelicals and the administration 80% of them voted for don’t understand what it means to truly pray — to absorb Light and reflect the difference Divine Love is supposed to make in our lives.
“We come to You in complete humility…” prays the man who either coerced his doctor into writing — or signing off on — a bizarre letter stating that the man who doesn’t exercise and eats a steady diet of fast food and is the oldest person to be inaugurated president is, “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Complete humility isn’t exactly what you hear in bombastic bragging about everything from his steaks to his foreign policy to his wealth to his websites. “The greatest God ever created,” he bragged about himself many times.
“Oh God, we are burdened for our nation today.” Being burdened for a nation is very different to being a burden on the nation — with drawn out legal battles, erratic tweets, public insults, an undisciplined staff and a security detail for his wife that cost the nation more than the annual budget for the National Endowment for the Arts.
“We turn away from our disrespect and lack of dignity toward each other…” prays the man who has called people fat pigs, dogs, fat asses and ugly and bragged about being able to sexually assault women without their consent.
“We pray for God’s power to unify families,” prays the man who is divorced three times, suggested he wanted to date his own daughter, and had affairs with porn stars while he was married.
The bottom line is that we don’t need a president or religious leaders who talk about prayer. We need people who pray. If there isn’t a radical change in the disparaging rhetoric, lack of transparency, attitude toward minorities, erratic behavior and bombastic bragging in the days and weeks to come, then 2018’s National Day of Prayer — and any talk about faith in the public arena in the future — is nothing more than blowing air at the ceiling of the White House and the houses of worship that support it.
If our hearts don’t glow with Love, we’re nothing more than a cold, dark rock, doing nothing to light up the world that God so loves.
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