We are five psalms into the psalter and we have seen some of the currents that move the prayers of the people of God along.  Flowing underneath the surface are the preeminence of God, his rule and reign, rest as worship and rebellion, the temptation to subvert God’s authority by assuming his throne, and then there is the difficult matter of enemies.  For Christians, Jesus instructed us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us.  But the psalter is laden with vitriol and curses (known as imprecations) all heaped upon the heads of our enemies.  Here in Psalm 5, David prays:  Make them bear their guilt, O God; let them fall by their own counsels; because of their many transgressions cast them out, for they have rebelled against you.

In 1 Timothy 2:4, Paul writes that the Lord wants all to be saved and to come to a knowledge of him.  David, on the other hand, seems ready to condemn all of his enemies to the grave.  The psalms then raise the question: how are we to pray these sorts of prayers and be faithful to Jesus?  The answers, as seems fittings, are as complicated as the question.  I want to focus on two angles to this difficult discussion.  First, this is a psalm of David, famous in the Old Testament for being “the one after God’s own heart.”  A quick survey of David’s life will yield many disturbing results that you would not encourage anyone to emulate.  David is a violent man who builds his reputation around his ability to kill.  David commits adultery which leads him into a tangled conspiracy resulting in David doing what he does best, killing.  So how can this at best morally ambiguous and at worst morally reprehensible man be seen as “the one after God’s own heart?”  Perhaps its his feelings towards enemies that gives us a hint.  David holds nothing back from God.  He does not hold in reserve his most exuberant praise as he dances like a fool before the ark of God in front of all Israel.  Conversely, David does not try to keep the dark corners of his heart from the light of God.  He brings it all out into the open of God’s all-seeing light.  He bears his soul completely before God in compete trust and vulnerability.  Is it not at least possible that this is the characteristic that the Spirit is beckoning us to pattern our own prayers after?  Perhaps this is what it means to be a woman or a man after God’s own heart?

Second, the psalmist writes in v. 9:   For there is no truth in their mouths; their hearts are destruction; their throats are open graves; they flatter with their tongues.  The second angle that I want to address pertaining to enemies is around the person of Jesus.  Jesus is the one who Christians are to see as our pattern in the world:  his words, his love, his beauty.  So who are the enemies of Jesus?  Perhaps this will give us insight into our own prayers regarding our enemies.  Well certainly, during his incarnate life recorded in the gospels there are many schemers: scribes, Pharisees, Herod, Pilate all trying to be rid of Jesus.  But when the temple guard comes to apprehend Jesus and Peter draws his sword to engage the apparent enemies of Jesus, Jesus stills his hand saying, “Peter, those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”  He even heals the ear of Malchus, one of the soldiers who assists in arresting Jesus.  Paul will say it this way in Ephesians 6v12:  For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.   Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection reveals our enemies.  Our enemies are not people, not even those who inflict violence upon us.  Our enemies are the sin and death to which those people are enslaved.  Thus, we pray.  We pray that our true enemies, sin and death, would meet their final end as Jesus triumphs over them and we pray that the people in our lives who may be acting as enemies would be liberated from the grip of their captors.

For meditation:   But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house (v.7)

I am languishing; O LORD, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror. My soul also is struck with terror, while you, O LORD—how long?  (Ps. 6vv2-3).

The psalmist, presumably David, in Psalm 6 is not just having a bad day.  He is in the throes of death.  He goes on:  For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?    I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping.  My eyes waste away because of grief; they grow weak because of all my foes.  (vv. 5-7).  David is in a downward spiral, drowning in his tears every night, losing his vision either because his eyes are red, dry and all cried-out or they are calling it quits because they have just seen too much.  I have certainly felt this way recently.  On every side, we are constantly bombarded with unspeakable suffering in our world.  Whether we are enduring it ourselves or simply empathizing from afar, it’s a wonder our eyes don’t all just up and retire saying, “I’ve seen enough.”

But this psalm and thus the circumstances of the psalmist take an unexpected turn.  The psalmist has been crying out to the Lord, “How long?” (v. 3) and now he speaks with a confidence that seems to come from nowhere:  Depart from me, all you workers of evil, for the LORD has heard the sound of my weeping. The LORD has heard my supplication; the LORD accepts my prayer. All my enemies shall be ashamed and struck with terror; they shall turn back, and in a moment be put to shame.  (vv. 8-10).  Why the sudden bravado when as recently as v. 7 he was drowning in tears?  Simply, the psalmist knows that heaven hears him.  He is assuaged, strengthened, emboldened by this one simple expression of faith that God hears when he cries and is able to work mightily in his circumstances. We are not told if the psalmist receives this word from the Lord.  Presumably he does not and rather is operating from the confidence of his past dealings with God.  He knows that in previous trials, the Lord has heard him when he has cried out and has responded.  But most of all he knows that he does not serve a God who is far off but rather a loving, attentive Father—a God who hears.  Here this is the psalmist’s sole hope, that heaven hears him.  And it changes everything.

For meditation:
-What is causing you anguish, grief, anxiety, or anger?  What would it look like to bring that before the Lord and to trust that he hears you?
-When has God acted in your life in an unforeseen way?
-Notice how the psalms give voice to genuine pain in our lives.  They enable us both to name our suffering and to frame it within the hope that we have in God.

Verse for meditation:   The LORD has heard my supplication; the LORD accepts my prayer.

In Luke ch. 11, we are welcomed into the scene that truly encapsulates the way that we are formed to be more like Jesus.  Jesus’ disciples are with Jesus as he is praying.  Listening to Christ pray is like listening to Bach play the piano or watching Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel.  The disciples pray along by listening and then they beg of Jesus:  Lord teach us to pray (v. 2).

1.  Prayer Is An Innate Skill.  Large swaths of the evangelical church in America have done their congregants a great disservice in failing to foster this paradigm-shifitng request— “Lord teach us to pray”— in their congregants.  For many Christians in America, it is simply assumed by churches that you will automatically know how to pray.   The disciples sitting near Jesus as he prayed to his Father were no novices in prayer.  They were first century Jews who prayed the psalms throughout their daily lives and recited psalms and corporate prayers in the synagogue.  But something about Jesus’ prayer was still so foreign and novel to them that they knew the prayers they had learned and the prayers of Jesus were of a different character.  Their response asking for help is truly the first prayer:  we want to pray, Lord teach us how to pray.  Prayer is the language of the Kingdom of God.  It is not foreign in grammar or vocabulary but in content.

2.  I have to come up with the words to pray.  The disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray.  He responds with his most famous prayer, the Lord’s prayer, and these words have been life-giving in prayer for the Church ever since.  But the reality is, Matthew 7 and Luke 11 are not the only places that the Spirit of God is teaching us how to pray.  The psalms immerse us in a school of prayer.  The psalms also run the entire range of the human condition from rapturous praise to hopeless abandonment and everywhere in between.  Consider the end of the lament longing for home in Psalm 137:  “O daughter Babylon, you devastator!  Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!  Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! (vv.8-9).”  Are the psalms condoning violence against innocent children?  How could something like this be in the Bible about a God of love?  But those questions miss the point.  This psalm is not promoting violence in God or in humanity but transparency between the divine and women and men.  The psalms give us words for even our most base and heinous impulses because the psalms are shaping us towards a life that is fully alive to God.

3.  If I have to work at prayer it becomes a “work.”  The reason most people struggle so consistently with prayer is because they fail to embrace the struggle.   Jesus’ response to the disciples’ request, “Lord teach us to pray,” is a prayer for daily bread, for daily forgiveness, for daily strength to overcome the evil one.  There is not a prayer that will suffice for all of time.  We must see each day afresh in the grace and provision of God.  Think of your most valuable relationships.  It is likely that there was an ease, an instant connection that felt a lot like grace, that paved the way for the relationship at the beginning.  But that relationship has only strengthened and deepened to the extent that you both have invested in the relationship.  There is not less grace present in the relationship because you have worked at it over the years.  If anything, you have found more grace because of the work.  Prayer is like this because the grounds for all our work in prayer is the grace of Jesus.  Remember where we started in Luke ch. 11?  The disciples long to pray in response to hearing Jesus pray.  All of our work in prayer is a response to our listening in on the love shared between Father, Spirit, and Son.  We ask, “Lord teach us to pray,” in order to be immersed in the eternal love of the Trinity.

This site is dedicated to the tension of life- the dissonance between already and not yet, between eternal bliss and daily monotony, between the dignifying words of God and the dehumanizing slogans of life, between the suspiciously sacred and the supposedly secular.   Emily Dickinson, recluse prophetess-poet, was a master at weaving life and possibility out of this tension.  In her poem no. 5, the last stanza declares:

In a serener Bright,
In a more golden light
I see
Each little doubt and fear,
Each little discord here
Removed.

The Scriptures, the holy words recorded in Old and New Testament will be our prism as we allow them to refract the revelation of Father, Spirit, and Son into every corner of our world.  The Scriptures tell stories—stories about life, family, beauty, and loss.  These stories all coalesce into a single story of God revealing himself in the ordinary lives of women and men.  In this space, I will endeavor to follow a similar arc.  I want to invite you to see where all these disparate “parts” of our lives find congruence, living, moving, and having their being in Christ Jesus.   But mostly I pray that the one who spoke the creation into being will spark life in the very core of who you are, inviting you to find yourself addressed and embraced as a daughter, a son of God.