“Praying for Donald Trump”

To pray for Donald Trump is a serious concern for the Christian believer!  How can we legitimately pray for a President in whom we do not believe and do not support any of his political agenda?  I have wrestled with this question for the past two years, as a Christian minister and physician.  On the one hand, we are instructed by the Holy Scriptures to pray for emperors and kings, that we might live in peace, much as the Christian churches in the time of Paul. The early Christian churches were instructed to pray for the Roman emperors, some of whom were actively persecuting and seeking to destroy the church (I Timothy 2:1-8).  To destroy the church is not possible, as the church is the work of God.  But it is possible and indeed has occurred that some in the early church were martyred for the faith and some of these were brought to their death by some of these same Roman emperors.  Until the time that Emperor Constantine had the vision of the cross in the sky, “in whose name he would conquer his enemies”, in Roman society Christianity as a religion was not yet recognized by the state.

In our day, the historical context of praying for “our emperor” is different.  It is presumed that this individual may himself be a Christian, although in the context of President Trump even Pope Francis had reason to question some of his actions regarding refugees who are seeking asylum in the United States.  If a person finds it possible to presume that President Trump is a Christian, one might then, as a Christian pray that he begins to practice the faith of Christ, who turned away no one, who welcomed sinners to dine with him and went out of his way to minister to them, saying to those who opposed him: “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance… It is not the well, but the sick who need a physician” (Matthew 9:10-13). In the context of Christ in his ministry on earth, how are the righteous distinguished from sinners?  Jesus himself declares in the Sermon on the Mount, “By their fruit, ye shall know them [his disciples]” (Matthew 7:15-20).  If we apply this same standard to any one of us or Donald Trump, then we have some reasonable way to measure our faith.  Since the scriptures declare, “there is none righteous, no not one [!]”(Romans 3:10), we are then led finally to salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, since not one of us can obtain righteousness and sufficient merit before our God for our salvation (Ephesians 2:8-10).

The context of Jesus’s statement in Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount gives us pause to consider the “fruit” of which Jesus speaks.  Apparently, this is about obvious behaviors easily discerned by the average person, who can easily recognize the difference between figs and bramble briers (see Matthew 7:15-20), as to our human actions.  This is how we recognize a person who is serving Christ or himself.  It is in this context of internal faith and its relationship to our outward behavior that I ask myself this question:  “How should I as a Christian minister pray for our President of the United States, Donald Trump?”  On the basis of his outward behavior, it is very hard to consider him a Christian.  On the basis of his inner life, we are not able to discern a person’s heart, so we are left with nothing except Donald Trump’s outer actions by which to judge his internal character.  Many of us in this regards find him woefully lacking!  He is the type of person who does not exhibit Christ like behavior.

So as I have attempted to pray for him simply on the basis of not knowing if he is a Christian or not and since I cannot say, I have asked God in Christ to be merciful on his soul and to save him from certain damnation.  There is no harm, as I see it, in asking God in Christ to be merciful on his soul and redeem him from his sins and grant him the possibility of redemption into eternal life!  As a Christian, I would pray this prayer for anyone, without any exclusion.  It has taken me two years to come to this, as in the past I only managed to pray for God to replace him as our President with someone more suitable for this important job.  I still pray in that respect for him, but I have come to realize if God does turn his heart from death to life, it is possible that some of his terrible behaviors might change and God might use him for meaningful changes in our nation and our national life.

I prayed this prayer for Donald Trump, President of the United States of America, this morning, authentically, for this first time.  I felt a real peace in my spirit afterward and realized that in order to pray this type of prayer, it means I am on the way to offering him forgiveness, which is the point I believe God may be asking from me.  The peace I now have is that I am not required to be his judge, but can legitimately pray for his salvation.  This does not mean I now condone what he is doing in any shape or fashion!  It simply means I am legitimately attempting to pray for his soul to be saved from death and given eternal life in Christ.  It is a terribly difficult prayer for me, as I would rather simply stand in judgment of the man.  But I am not Donald Trump’s ultimate judge, but rather God is!

I read a statement in the early autumn of a condition called “Donald Trump frenzy.”  It is a state of mind in which people are so opposed to Trump and his Presidency that they are unable to think of anything else.  It places a person into a reactive state of mind, in which one can only think of ways to criticize the President.  I have looked back over my writing since his election and I realize I have fallen into the trap of a “Donald Trump frenzy.”  I can truly say, I cannot find anything likeable about this man.  He is the exact antithesis to everything I hold dear and believe in about the way our democracy works and the way we should treat persons not like ourselves.  In the melting pot of our society there simply is no room for blatant racism, whether it is couched in terms like “Make America Great Again!” or “All Those of You Not of the White Race, Go Home!”  Both are blatant racism!  America’s greatness is in our diversity of many races, creeds and colors of humanity.  The white race of any persuasion simply has less melanin in our skin cells than some others and this is no more than a function of how much sun exposure our recent ancestors had in their respective places of origin.  Surely, we are able to discern a more reasonable way to judge ourselves than this!

For Donald Trump, the question is about who has power and how to keep others from obtaining it.  Trump’s perverse way of viewing our democratic ideals is the result of his own distorted ideas about life. He apparently views everything in terms of economics, personal power and who is winning, instead of God’s way as represented in Jesus Christ, which is in terms of relationships, love, mercy, justice and compassion, a way of inclusion into the sharing of power.  This white man has power and wealth and he wishes to build a wall to protect his way of life, so that no one else besides rich white men he calls his friends and those women attached to them are able to obtain it.

And so, I pray for this man’s soul.  I pray for God to save him from his whiteness, from his wealth, his power, his ego and his over-weening narcissism.  I pray for God to make him to be more like Christ and to be filled with the Holy Spirit of Christ.  It is the same type of prayer I daily pray for myself!  Are his sins any worse than my own?  Only God can judge matters such as these.  But I can pray for my fellow man or woman to be saved from death and brought into new life in Christ!

I do believe when we are dealing with an individual or a collective group whose mischief and damaging human behavior is of such greatness that its stench is poisoning and polluting the whole planet there is a second legitimate prayer which is needed.  This prayer is to ask God to contain the damage to the human family so the effect of the evil is ameliorated and the pollution contained.  Just as some are building floating platforms to contain the plastic pollution in the ocean and in our rivers, so we also in the Holy Spirit of Christ can ask God to place a wall or a barrier around evil and contain it.  Righteousness blesses a people and a nation.  Evil brings sickness upon those whom it has infected and endangers others who are not yet ill by the spreading of its infection.  We still ponder to this day how good Germans could allow the holocaust of the Jewish people and others to occur.  Yet Hitler introduced a poison into the German’s cultural life which seduced them.  Not everyone was seduced by Hitler’s rhetoric and some resisted, some even unto death.  But when good people do not resist obvious evil, they become like the proverbial frog in the pot of cold water.  Because the water is only gradually heated over a prolonged time, the frog does not sense the danger and never jumps out of the pot!  He is finally fully cooked, when he could have jumped out at any time, but he does not!  In the past two years we have grown so accustomed to the bizarre and the obscene, we can no longer tell truth from lie, or evil from “the daily whims and tweets of a President.”  We grow tired of the drama and so retreat from it, back to watching our sports and our entertainment on Facebook, the Internet and the TV, instead of confronting what we know is terribly wrong!

But let us pray for the man!  There is yet a potential we can contain this evil before it pollutes us and destroys our democracy.  I believe that we can.  And I will pray and hope and believe until I have no breath left with which to pray.  And then I will rise up from the dead and pray again.  In the power of Jesus’ resurrection and filled with the breath and wind of the Holy Spirit of God the Father and God the Son I will say to this mountain of evil polluting our planet, “Be gone from the face of this earth, be swept away by the cleansing power of the wind of God blowing upon us and in the power of Jesus name and by the cleansing of Christ’s precious blood be thrown back into the sea to be no more!   Dust thou art and unto dust shall you return and your evil deeds, if you do not forsake from them!”

And so, this is my prayer for our President.  It is a prayer of much love and compassion, but in opposition to evil it is of the hardest stone.  It is a legitimate prayer and one which will be answered in God’s due season.  Thanks and glory be to our God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, known in Jesus Christ our only Lord and Redeemer, world without end, Amen and Amen.

Bill Wilson

December 30, 2018