A few months ago I banned someone from our parish centre. That is, I went in as they were sitting by the front window, and I told them that they would have to leave and not come back. They stood up and began to protest: they hadn’t done anything. Did I call myself a Christian? I was no Christian.
You will, quite reasonably, want to hear why I did what I did, and what the person I banned had actually been doing in the parish centre and elsewhere, and what later transpired in the Cambridge magistrate’s court. Sorry. I can’t talk about that. Anyway, it’s less interesting to me than the reaction of a few of the people who heard about it. “Jesus wouldn’t have banned them,” they said.
In a clerical life, in life generally, you meet all kinds of people. The Venn diagram would have in it saints who are also sinners, wonderful people who make poor life choices and people who seem to have very few if any redeeming qualities apart from the fact that your religion insists that they have been redeemed by the love of God. Then there’s the matter of the bad things that people do. You learn about those just by living among them: the bullying, stalking, domestic violence and so forth; man being a wolf to man.
How do these things figure in my prayers? When I pray the psalms, as I do every day, these things and the daily news crowd my thoughts. If I pray psalm 139, “Lord you have searched me out and known me”, I come to “O that you would slay the wicked, O God”. If I pray Psalm 137, the one that begins “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept”, I come to “happy the one who repays you for all you have done to us; who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock”. I once had a great deal of trouble teaching a course on the psalms because the saintliest lady in Kidderminster was so shocked to find this kind of thing in Holy Scripture that she wouldn’t continue. “We are Christians. We can’t pray that.” If only I could have introduced her to the very old lady here whose prayer was, “Kill me. But kill Putin first.”
Putin and Trump have their religious allies: Patriarch Kirill and televangelist Paula White, to name two of the more prominent. I take it as given that there are lots of people praying for their health and strength and victory. How then, what then, do I pray? Not for their health, strength and victory, that’s for sure. How do I lead the congregation and offer up my prayer in a way that acknowledges evil-doing but, somehow, teaches love? The Church of England offers guidance on its website. Here’s the official prayer for Ukraine:
God of peace and justice, we pray for the people of Ukraine today.
We pray for peace and the laying down of weapons.
We pray for all those who fear for tomorrow, that your Spirit of comfort would draw near to them.
We pray for those with power over war or peace, for wisdom, discernment and compassion to guide their decisions.
Above all, we pray for all your precious children, at risk and in fear, that you would hold and protect them.
We pray in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Amen.
I tell myself in vain that it’s a good prayer and that I should pray for peace in my heart and try to curb my bellicose disposition. But really: “the laying down of weapons”? That’s mealy-mouthed. And then I idly wonder what the prayers for Gaza would look like, or for Darfur, or for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Or for the United States, come to that. I check. We don’t have an official collect for the current situation in the US. Yet.
Early in the morning, praying in an empty chancel, I can address Christ in the east window a little less diplomatically. I can turn to psalm 58, the one that begins “Do you indeed speak justly, you mighty? Do you rule the peoples with equity?” And I can pray as Miles my curate prayed—for an end to tyranny throughout the world, for the schemes of the oligarchs to be utterly confounded and for the billionaires to be sent empty away. Miles always had a firm grip on the Magnificat; he also knew the middle verse of “God Save the King”. I’m not praying for anyone to die a slow, agonising death, or even a quick and painless one. But let the luxury of the plutocrats turn to dust in their mouths. Scatter their armies, drain their batteries and turn their hearts. Amen.
