daring to pray a daring prayer

For those who regularly visit this site, my love for the Book of Psalms is by now well known. Also well know is one of the reasons for my appreciation: faithful boldness in prayer. The Psalmists’ faith in God is such that they know His appreciation for honesty in prayer and so fearlessly offer it, even when their thoughts and feelings might challenge traditional views of what God will and will not accept by way of challenging complaint and questioning. Today’s blog post is a prayer.
 
 
Oh Lord, I will be as bold as Israel’s beloved Psalmist. I will speak of my wonderment. I will confess my doubt. I will give voice to my frustration and complaint. 
 
Where, I ask, are you? Are you really there? Do you really care?
 
How long will you remain silent, absent, neglectful, inert?
 
Why silent, absent, neglectful, and inert about and toward the devil named Putin?
 
Why silent, absent, neglectful, and inert toward and about religious leaders who give this devil a pass—is it because his views toward gays is perfectly aligned with theirs?—while they engage in inanities that waste the spiritual energy of adherents, divert attention from Jesus’ most cherished aims, and trivialize the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
 
Is it wrong to ask that you act today as it is reported you have acted in the past?
 
I remember, Lord, the words with which Sennacherib’s envoy, Rabshakeh, blasphemously reproached you to your face. “Hear ye the words of the great king, the king of Assyria,” spat Rabshakeh at the walls of your holy place. 
 
“Let not Hezekiah deceive you… neither let Hezekiah make you trust in the LORD, saying, ‘The LORD will surely deliver us: this city shall not be delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria’ … Beware lest Hezekiah persuade you, saying, ‘The LORD will deliver us.’  Hath any of the gods of the nations delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arphad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? And have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? Who are they among all the gods of these lands, that have delivered their land out of my hand, that the LORD should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?”[1]
 
I remember, still, what you said and how you responded when Hezekiah laid all this blasphemy before your face. I remember how you said to the mighty king of Assyria,
 
“Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed?    
   and against whom hast thou exalted thy voice,  
      and lifted up thine eyes on high?   
even against the Holy One of Israel…”[2]
 
I remember how you warned the oppressor, and promised the oppressed
 
“He shall not come into this city,   
   nor shoot an arrow there,  
nor come before it with shields,   
   nor cast a bank against it. 
By the way that he came,   
   by the same shall he return,  
and shall not come into this city,   
   saith the LORD.”[3]
 
I remember, too, how you then acted.
 
“Then the angel of the LORD went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt at Nineveh. And* as he was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, that Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons smote him with the sword.”[4]
 
Did this, O Lord, really happen? Is scripture to be trusted? Is it to be used as precedent, as an example to be followed? Did you really heed Hezekiah, a good, but flaw man such as I, as so many of us? Did you deliver Jerusalem, flawed city that it was, from the spoiler’s lust?
 
So, look down now, Lord, at what is happening on the planet called earth. A spoiler has entered the sovereign nation of Ukraine. The besieged nation is not a perfect nation. But it is no better or worse than ancient Judah was, surely. Its inhabitants have no less claim upon you for life and peace than that ancient nation that Isaiah, Jeremiah and many others castigated so mercilessly for its unfaithfulness to you. And I, with many others who pray to you, are we so different from Hezekiah. And surely, the spoiler’s head, Putin, is but a reincarnation of and is driven by the same vile lusts as that infamous Sennacherib.
 
Why, then, oh Lord, do you turn a blind eye to Putin’s present blasphemy and reproaches to your honor? For surely, the man’s violent outburst is a blasphemy and reproach against you and all that you stand for. Why do you sit idle while the puny man does Satan’s bidding? Wreaks havoc on the world? Lays waste to cities? Chases millions into the life of powerless refugee status? Causes psychological damage to children that may very well spill over to several generations? Takes the life of thousands upon thousands of innocents?
 
You, it is claimed, sent a sword-wielding angel to threaten death upon one, Joseph, who hesitated to take a second wife in polygamy. Why do you withhold your warning sword now? Why do you not visit and threaten Putin, whose sin is viler than Joseph’s by the order of many magnitudes? This would be a mercy to Putin and to the whole world. Can I, can we not ask this of you? If not, why not? What’s changed? What’s different?
 
Can I, can we not ask this of you? If Putin will not yield to your merciful warning that he stop and desist from his demonic works, then may you do as you did to Sennacherib and his army. Stretch forth your mighty arm and turn his army backward. Send them back to their homeland, defeated, without the shedding of the defenders’ blood. And, if necessary, may you send forth upon Putin an assassin, as you did against Sennacherib and as you did when you sent the left-handed Benjamite, Ehud, to pierce with his two-edged dagger the corpulent Moabite king as he sat upon his royal toilet.[5]
 
I ask that you try mercy first. Then, the bloodless defeat and failure of an army. Only then, death to Putin.
 
Can I really ask God to kill? Do I want to? How do I feel about a God who kills? I am, I confess, torn. But, what else is there to it? It is good and righteous and proper that Putin’s evil be stopped.
 
Now, Lord, forgive me, but I am troubled by another evil. We have leaders, it seems to me, religious leaders who, claiming to know you best and to be your mouthpiece, trivialize the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They give a pass to an obvious aggressor, murderer, war criminal, and faithful, apocalyptic-scale disciple of Lucifer by offering generic, half-hearted, milk toast statements of regret in regard to Putin and his international lawbreaking aggression against another nation. This weak-kneed and inadequate response is, in itself, troubling enough. But, at the same time that Satan unleashes his bought and paid for armies and navies and air forces upon a weaker nation, these same leaders travel the world over to claim that your greatest concern revolves around a matter as trivial as the name of the church and how its name is to be typeset. Putin may not be named as a danger to righteousness, but by God, those who won’t abide by their stylistic preferences sure as hell are!
 
Then again, they use their globetrotting ways as an opportunity to unambiguously and consistently and emphatically chide those who speak too often and/or too intimately of/to a wholly speculative, non-scriptural divine matriarch. But, on those occasions when this unknown matriarch is referred to, these leaders once more demand that their stylistic preferences be maintained and capital letters avoided in vocal intonation and typesetting.
 
How, oh Lord, are we to take such leadership or its claims of insight seriously? Forgive me, O Lord, but Jesus’ famous criticism of the religious leaders of his day comes unbidden to my mind: they “strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.”[6]
 
Lord, should not Putin be stopped? Will you let him offend and defile his nation and the nations of this world as America’s previous president did? You know how I prayed to you about him. I won’t return to that complaint. Will you not demand of all, especially religious leaders, that they take a stand and proclaim boldly and unequivocally against the evil that is Putin? Will you not put an end to the blasphemy and reproach that Putin’s violence casts at you? Will you not put an end to the trivialization of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Will you not put an end to the misery and suffering and death of the Ukrainian people?
 
Please act, Lord. I refuse to be comforted until you do. A gospel that does not comfort the vulnerable, the oppressed, the suffering, the powerless, the dying can bring comfort to no one.
 
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

[1] Isaiah 36.13-15, 18-20
[2] Isaiah 36.23
[3] Isaiah 36.33-34
[4] Isaiah 36.36-38
[5] See, Judges 3.15-26
[6] Matthew 23.24