Psalm 109:1-15
Matthew 5:43-45
           
You may be familiar with the comic strip from several years ago, Kudzu.  Doug Marlette, from Mississippi was the creator of the comic strip.  One of the characters was Rev. Will B. Dunn.  The character of Rev. Will B. Dunn was drawn from the ministry of Will Campbell.  Will Campbell is a maverick Baptist preacher who lives in Tennessee.  He said that as a child his two grandfathers had a great deal of influence on his life.  One taught him how to pray and the other taught him how to cuss.  Will said he wasn't sure which one had helped him the most. 
           
Reading the Bible raises the same issue.  I'm not sure whether the prayers or the curses are the most helpful.  I'm also unclear whether the prayers or the curses were the most helpful to the people at the time the prayers and curses were given.  Some of the biblical passages that are introduced as prayers are really curses and some that are identified as curses really are some of the deepest and most profound prayers.  Some express anger and hatred to God.  Such an approach seems to keep the anger from evolving into destructive behavior.
           
Listen to this prayer recorded in Psalm 109.

Choose some corrupt judge to try my enemy,
and let one of his own enemies accuse him. 
May he be tried and found guilty;
may even his prayer be considered a crime!
May his life soon be ended;
may another man take his job!
May his children become orphans,
and his wife a widow!
May his children be homeless beggars;
may they be driven from the ruins they live in!
May his creditors take away all his property,
and may strangers get everything he worked for.
May no one ever be kind to him
or care for the orphans he leaves behind.
May all his descendants die,
and may his name be forgotten in the next generation. 
May the Lord remember the evil of his                                                                                     
ancestors and never forgive his mother's sins.
May the Lord always remember their sins,
but may they themselves be completely                                                                         
forgotten!
                        (Psalm 109:6-15)
           
That’s some prayer, isn’t it? Did anyone ever teach you to pray like that?  Would any of us want someone praying for us if this were the prayer?  Have you ever offered a prayer like this one?  I'm sure you have but you didn't call it a prayer.  A prayer like this is a curse because it expresses the desire of destruction for the person being prayed for.  And yet it is a prayer because it is expressing one's deepest yearnings, feelings, and desires to God.  As the hymn writer has said, "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, unuttered or expressed." 
           
Underneath a prayer like this one is anger, anger at being mistreated, anger at injustice, anger that things went well for another and badly for you.  Underneath the anger may be the feeling by the person that he is cursed in life rather than blessed. 
           
Why do you pray? Why does anybody pray?  Primarily, people pray because they are convinced that God listens to them. (Paul Johnson, Psychology of Religion, p. 132) The converse is true.  People stop praying if they are convinced that God doesn’t listen to them.  People need assurance of an audience with God to continue communing with God.  David Elkind suggests that the opportunity to communicate with God about one’s needs and struggles may be more important than evidence that a person’s prayers have been answered. (“The Child’s Conception of Prayer,” in The Child’s Reality: Three Developmental Themes, p. 27-45)
           
Throughout life we make friends and enemies.  I suspect that most of us set out to make friends and few if any of us intentionally strive to make enemies.  However, we have both friends and enemies.  Because they are a part of our lives, we cannot commune with God about our lives without praying for friends and enemies. 
           
Jesus drew strong reactions.  Some were drawn to him; others were repelled by him.  Throughout his life Jesus was making friends and enemies. If there is any integrity in Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels, then, he prayed for his friends and his enemies.  How he interacted with people models what praying for friends and enemies involves.  Jesus instructs us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matt. 5:44).        
           
Focusing on the communication process with God and addressing the transaction that occurs are much more important than the motivations behind the transaction. (Donald Capps, “The Psychology of Petitionary Prayer,” Theology Today, 32, no. 2 (1982): 130) I wonder if this is part of why Jesus urged his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecuted them.  Nothing can turn enemies away from being enemies quicker than praying for them.  Nothing can keep enemies as enemies like refusing to pray for them.  

Prayer is such an intimate interaction that to pray for another person is to take that person’s needs, the person’s very life into your own life and to desire the very best for that person.  To do that, to pray for a person releases the person from being your enemy.  This does not mean that person may not continue to seek to do you harm or to work against you.  What happens is you are no longer at enmity with her.  To pray for a person or group of people is to care about them.  
           
Often we have understood prayer as an expression of our embattlement with God.  We want one thing and we perceive God wants another.  When we pray for our enemies and they remain at enmity with us, we may conclude that is God’s will and thus suggest that there is a conflict between God’s will and ours.  Theodore Newcomb’s ideas on co-orientation (“An Approach to the Study of Communication,” Psychological Review 60 (1953): 392-403) are helpful with regard to the significance of prayer being communication rather than a conflict of wills in which we are embattled with God.  Co-orientation is the ability to orient oneself to the subject of discussion and to another’s anticipated view of this subject simultaneously.  Co-orientation is not seeing eye to eye.  Rather, it is the ability to view a situation from the perspective of another.
           
With regard to prayer, we are able to express our needs and problems to God and, at the same time, anticipate how God will respond.  Our anticipation will be influenced by our view of God and our self-esteem.  Our anticipation ought also to be informed by how God has responded to others, including Jesus and other biblical people, as well as the church fathers and well-known devotionalists like John Woolman, Evelyn Underhill, and Michael Quoist.

Our anticipation also can be informed by asking ourselves whether the response expected from God portrays God like a loving friend or an angry beast.  The closer the anticipated response is to a loving friend, the more nearly correct we are in our co-orientation.  When communicating with God in this manner, we may urge God to respond in a specific way and at the same time doubt that God will respond in the way we have requested.  Psalm 109 is an excellent example.
           
 In a sense, our thoughts may be prayers.  We think thoughts we cannot control, and they interfere with the best intentions.  Thinking is unceasing.  We struggle with how to convert our unceasing thinking into unceasing praying.  Unceasing prayer neither means thinking about God every moment nor babbling constantly to God.  To pray unceasingly is to realize that all of our thoughts occur in the presence of God.  We need to turn all our thoughts into conversations with God, conversations that may or may not be verbal.  Then the significant question is not, What do I think? But rather, To whom do I offer my thoughts?

This seems to be the understanding of people in the Hebrew Scriptures.  They talked to God as if their suffering did not matter to God.  When relief from their suffering was delayed, they accused God of a lack of compassion.  When their enemies were suffering, they rejoiced, saying that God was punishing them for mistreating the Israelites.  They tried to bargain with God, using different approaches to get the responses they wanted.  They played up to God’s name and reputation.  
           
Evident in the prayers of people in the Hebrew Scriptures is the free-flow-for-all, especially regarding their enemies.  There is evidence of this free flow in the prayers of Jesus and his courageous approach to God, as he spoke imperatively and freely, letting his fears and feelings be known.  We resist letting our prayers flow directly from ourselves without censoring them.  We think there is potential peril in the free flow of prayer that releases emotions within us of which we may be unaware. 
           
We think we have to get the theology straight in order to commune with God.  As we explore ourselves through prayer, we need to realize that it is God who is calling to consciousness the infinite possibilities within us.  We are not seeking God; rather, God seeks us and our search is a response to the Creator who has been brooding and moving over us since the day of our creation.
           
Jesus encouraged people to pray for their friends.  Often praying for our friends informs us more clearly about who they are, what it is about them that attracts us to them, and ways that they contribute to our lives.  Praying for friends has increased the value of friendship for me, has helped me discover friends I did not know I had, and nudged me to grow toward who I want to be.  Awareness of friends also has caused me to examine the kind of friend I am and want to be.  Praying for friends has challenged me to grow in some areas I had not anticipated.  Some of those areas have been troubling and difficult before they were calming and encouraging.  This supports my thesis that praying can be disturbing if not dangerous.   
           
The antithesis of friends is enemies.  Having enemies is not easy to admit. Learning we have enemies shatters our innocence and idealism that we can relate well with anyone and everyone.  We should know better.  Even Jesus couldn’t do that!
           
Just as friendship requires contributions from two people, it also takes two to have differences that become enmity between them.  We contribute to our enemies being our enemies.  To be able to pray for our enemies is a major growth step because it is an admission of having enemies and knowing who they are.  It also is a step toward ending the enmity.
           
There is a sense in which our enemies represent our shadow sides.  To begin to know our enemies is to learn some things about our darker sides.  Because our enemies represent something of our shadow sides, we need to keep in mind that we probably represent some of their shadow sides.  The animosity an enemy has for us probably is not all because of us but includes both who or what we represent and of whom we remind that person.
           
A model for praying is Jesus.  We can examine his prayers and seek to pray like he did. Praying like Jesus involves praying for ourselves but quickly expands to praying for friends and enemies.  The key is the discovery that praying like Jesus involves the psychology of communication rather than the psychology of will.  To live a life of prayer means to be open-eyed to myself and see my neediness, brokenness, and godlessness and to see others and the world as they are. 
           
A life formed by prayer is one formed by the sober truth.  Pretense is no longer necessary because it is no longer worth the trouble.  All this makes praying disturbing because it exposes our best selves and our worst selves to God and to ourselves.  It is when praying is disturbing that we are both the most vulnerable and the most likely to grow and change for the better.  What I have discovered in praying for friends and enemies is that there is nothing human that is alien to me.  My friends and my enemies are my brothers and sisters.  If I address my godlessness to God, I cannot be thankful that I am not like others.  I can only plead, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  The result is solidarity formed with my friends and enemies.  In praying for them, I identify with their joys, pain, brokenness, and godlessness.  Praying can be disturbing, but it can lead to growth and healing for ourselves.  It can lead to growth and healing in our relationships with friends and enemies. Praying can be disturbing but I highly recommend it.