Sunday, March 17, there was an eight-hour prayer meeting in Washington D.C. called “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise and Thanksgiving.” I didn’t attend. The airline ticket from Baton Rouge to D.C. was too costly. I wouldn’t last through an eight-hour prayer service. I’m not a Christian nationalist, a Seven Mountains Dominionist or part of the Independent Network of Charismatic groups. Listening to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson do his imitation of David Barton would make me barf.
The word “rededicate” and I have history. Every year during the Spring and Summer revivals, an evangelist came to Antioch Baptist Church preaching salvation. On slow nights when no one was interested in “getting saved,” he would switch in the middle of the invitation hymn and beg people to come forward for rededication. I knew he counted a rededication as “being saved.” To make the preacher feel better, I would “walk the aisle” and rededicate. I think I counted for 50 souls saved over the years. “Rededicate” seems suspicious to me.
I wanted to go because I believe America should rededicate its national life to values this gathering has rejected. And I really believe it is a good thing to pray for our nation. In Evening Prayer, Rite 2 of the Book of Common Prayer, I love the collect:
V. Lord, keep this nation under your care;
R. And guide us in the way of justice and truth.
V. Let your way be known upon earth;
R. Your saving health among all nations.
V. Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten;
R. Nor the hope of the poor be taken away.
V. Create in us clean hearts, O God;
R. And sustain us with your Holy Spirit.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of the people attending the service. I am convinced they are very serious Christians – very serious about controlling our nation with their pernicious brand of Christian faith. The problem: The Christianity represented in this service is not shaped by the gospel. It is not Christian.
For example, it took a certain amount of gall to include the word “Jubilee” in the title of the prayer meeting. These Christian nationalists have no desire for a “jubilee.” The Old Testament has an explicit description of Jubilee. every fifty years you must give back to the people the land and property that is inalienably theirs that they have lost in the rough and tumble of the economy. You must give it back, even if you own it legally and it is properly yours. You must give it back, because in the end it is theirs and not yours, inalienably.
Walter Brueggemann says, “When the signal is given, everybody returns property, everybody cancels debts, everybody breaks off the mad scramble of accumulation and acquisition.”
Jubilee is a concrete, material, human act. It is the enactment of the social gospel. This is not what the gathering will be praying to happen. These religious types have no interest in Jubilee. Whatever else happens at the prayer meeting, there will not be a Jubilee miracle.
I believe Jesus and Mark Twain would make the best response to this gathering of hypocrites pretending to pray in the name of God.
Jesus would attend the prayer meeting and say, “They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.” (Mark 12: 38 – 40). And there’s this: “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Luke 6:5 – 8).
And Mark Twain’s Letters from Earth seem an appropriate response to the praying spectacle.
Twain remarks, “Many men pray, not many of them like to do it. A few pray long, the others make a short cut.” No doubt this gathering will be filled with long, boring prayers as the speakers drone on and on till Judgment Day.
This turns out to be an idolatrous gathering. The false prophets have gathered but they will lack the power to bring fire from heaven. They are more prophets of Baal than prophets of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
In the spirit of Elijah, God’s prophet, I have mocked the “prophets and apostles” gathered in D.C. The prophets of Baal called on the name of Baal from morning until noon, crying, “O Baal, answer us!” But there was no voice and no answer. They limped about the altar that they had made. At noon Elijah mocked them, saying, “Cry aloud! Surely he is a god; either he is meditating, or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” Then they cried aloud, and, as was their custom, they cut themselves with swords and lances until the blood gushed out over them. As midday passed, they raved on until the time of the offering of the oblation, but there was no voice, no answer, and no response.”
The prayer gathering embarrasses in its carnivalesque rhetoric, its bonkers theology and its demagogic jouissance. It showcases a kind of pleasure in spectacle succeeding in merging entertainment with politics, skepticism with fantasy and violence with authoritarian tendencies.
Going, feeling as I feel, would have been dishonest.
