This morning I want to finish my series on the Lord’s Prayer
by looking at the conclusion of the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. The
traditional translation is “Lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from
evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever.
Amen.” I will also be referring to the contemporary translation: “Save us from
the time of trial and deliver us from evil. For the kingdom, the power, and the
glory are yours, now and forever. Amen.”
The genius of the Lord’s Prayer is that it so perfectly
balances the heavenly and the earthly.
Praise and worship bracket the prayer, but at its heart it gives voice
to our most urgent needs: bread,
forgiveness, and refuge from evil.
“Give us today our daily bread” and “Forgive our sins” are
prayers we can pray as a matter of course.
But it can be a bit disconcerting when Jesus instructs us to pray “Save
us from the time of trial” or “Lead us not into temptation” How could the
Father to whom we pray “lead us into temptation” or bring us to “the time of
trial?” Is God a cosmic tempter? Is God’s good creation full of snares and
traps?
Think with me about the petition, “lead us not into temptation.”
In the 23rd Psalm we affirm that God “leads us beside still waters”
and in the Lord’s Prayer we pray that God would “lead us not into
temptation.” What sense can we make of
the seemingly incompatible ideas that the same God would lead us beside still
waters and might also lead us into temptation?
It may help to solve the difficulty if we realize that the
path beside the still waters and the way of temptation are often one and the
same. Think back to the story of Adam
and Eve. They lived in paradise. Eden contained everything necessary to
sustain human life, and God invited them to enjoy it rent-free. God only asked that they refrain from eating
the fruit of one of the trees. Was this
fruit evil in itself? Of course
not. It was the way that Adam and Eve
used this fruit that was evil, not the fruit itself.
The lesson we learn from Adam and Eve is that God has given
us no gift so good that it cannot be put to evil uses. The Book of Proverbs tells us that God gave
wine to gladden the human heart. Wine is
God’s good gift, but it is also the source of misery to those who misuse
it. Sexuality is God’s good gift but has
any other human appetite caused more anguish?
Almost daily we hear stories about the epidemic of obesity in America,
and yet God blesses the responsible use of food.
In other words, we are led into temptation every day. Every day we are put to the test and face
times of trial. The Lord’s Prayer
teaches us to ask for the strength to face these daily trials. But we usually
have the strength to turn down an additional martini, or an extra slice of
cheesecake.
Jesus’ own example shows us that we dare not rely on our own
strength and that all of us may face trials which will test the limits of our
endurance. “Father, let this cup pass from me,” Jesus prayed in the Garden of
Gethsemane. “Nevertheless, not my will
but yours be done.” We will all come eventually to our own Gethsemane. It may happen as a result of a visit to the
physician: “I’m sorry to tell you but…”
It may happen when a relationship fails:
“You’re a really nice person but…” It may happen when we are
euphemistically “downsized”. But the
trial will come. Jesus was nothing if
not a realist. When that moment comes
(and it will come for us as surely as it came for him), we are more likely to
be able to withstand it if we have frequently and fervently prayed, “Lead us
not into temptation” or “Save us from the time of trial.”
Note also that this petition, like all the others, is
phrased in the plural: “Save US from the
time of trial”. Just as we pray to OUR
Father, for OUR daily bread, and that God would forgive US, so we pray that God
would save US from the time of trial. In
this there is a note of hope. We never
face trials alone. Just as we never pray
alone, so we never face trials alone.
When trials come our way, we do not face them alone. As the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, we
are supported by a “great cloud of witnesses”.
This petition also reminds us that we are responsible to one
another. The trials that your neighbor
faces are also your trials.
“Lead us not into temptation” or “Save us from the trial”
leads directly to “and deliver us from evil.”
Bread and forgiveness don’t give us much trouble, but evil is another
matter. We tend to make two fundamental
mistakes with regard to evil. One is to
attribute too much power to it. The
other is to attribute too little.
There are some religious groups who regard evil as nothing
more than an error or a flawed way of thinking.
They say that there are no wrong turns, only wrong ways of
thinking. I beg to differ.
I don’t want to make the mistake of attributing too much
power to evil, but if the 20th century taught us anything it taught
us that evil is very real indeed. How
else can we explain the fact that the land of Beethoven, Goethe, and Einstein became
the land of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels? If evil is not real and powerful,
how can we explain the near-extermination of the Jews of Europe? If evil is not real how else can we explain
the triumph of totalitarianism across two-thirds of the earth in the Soviet
Union, its eastern European satellites, and the People’s Republic of
China? And closer to home, how can we
explain our own commitment to build an arsenal of catastrophic weapons that could
destroy all life on earth?
On the other hand, it would be a mistake to attribute too
much power to evil. The classic
statement of this mistake comes from that great theologian of my childhood - Flip
Wilson: “The devil made me do it!” Well, no… the devil can’t make us do
anything. Powerful as evil may be, it is
never all-powerful. Evil may have the
next to last word, but it never has the last word. The West defeated Hitler; the Soviet Union
collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions; and the stockpile of
terrible weapons that we built to defend ourselves from the Soviets is slowly
but surely diminishing.
The temptations and trials that you and I face will probably
be those that come to every human being – failed relationships, financial
difficulties, disease, and death. But
when we pray the Lord’s Prayer we make common cause with Christians in every
place and every age. Their trials and
temptations become our trials and temptations and ours become theirs. When we pray “save us from the time of trial
and deliver us from evil” the powers of death and hell shudder and continue
their long and slow but certain retreat.
And when we pray, “For yours is the kingdom, the power and
the glory, forever and ever. Amen”, we
anticipate that day when evil shall be finally vanquished and God will reign
upon earth as in heaven.
The Lord’s Prayer appears to be circular. We begin and end by affirming that the
kingdom belongs to God. All appearances
to the contrary God is in charge. But then
we add two more words – power and glory.
These make the Lord’s Prayer not a line but a spiral. We have moved on. Yes, God is the Ruler, the One who orders all
things on earth and in heaven. But earth
is in rebellion against God’s rule.
Things are not as they should be, and we are not as we should be. So Jesus teaches us to pray and long with all
our hearts for that day when God’s Name will be hallowed, God’s kingdom will
come, and God’s will is perfectly done on earth as in heaven. The end of the Lord’s Prayer is a promise
that it shall be so. The Lord’s Prayer,
then, is eschatological. In other words,
it gives us a glimpse of what is to come. The Lord’s Prayer is a preview of
coming attractions. “You’ve read the
book; now see the movie.”
How do we understand power and glory in this world? Free associate with me. If I say “power”, what comes to mind? I immediately think of political power. I think of the White House and the capital
building. I think of the President’s fearful power to authorize the use of nuclear
weapons.
Now, glory. What
comes to mind? I immediately think of
athletes and movie stars. The largest
buildings in most medieval cities was the cathedral. Nothing rivaled them for
size or beauty. The largest buildings in modern cities are sports stadiums.
Tens of thousands assemble to worship at the altar of sports and lift up those
demigods… at least as long as they are winning!
Or think of movie stars.
We sit in enormous dark rooms waiting for them to appear and tell us stories. In the past people waited in enormous dark
rooms called churches and venerated images of Christ and the saints and heard
stories about them.
But the New Testament has a very different account of glory.
The Bible tells us that the glory of God was primarily manifest in the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus. The Bible says that if you would see God’s
glory you must look to the the torture and execution of an obscure Palestinian
peasant crucified by the Romans 2000 years ago.
And God’s glory continues to be on display in those who
follow in the footsteps of Jesus, those who embrace the poor and marginalized and in
doing so exposed the hollowness of what this world thinks of as power and
glory. And in many cases what happened
to Jesus happened to his followers, too.
To see the glory of God, consider the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the gallows in
Flossenburg Prison; or the brilliant philosopher Sister Edith Stein in
Auschwitz; Ugandan archbishop Janani Luwum, machine-gunned to death by Idi
Amin’s agents; Martin Luther King, Jr., shot at the Lorraine Motel in
Memphis.
But remember that the Lord’s Prayer is not a circle but a
spiral. It promises us a day when God’s
rule will be accompanied by power and glory.
At the end of the Lord’s Prayer we give back to God the kingdom, the
power, and the glory that we took for ourselves. We want to possess the kingdom, the power,
and the glory and use them to aggrandize ourselves. We want people to bow down to us and praise
us and do our bidding, but when we pray the words that Jesus taught us we learn
that these things do not belong to us but to God.
Finally, we conclude the Lord’s Prayer with a resounding
AMEN. The Lord’s Prayer is God’s word to
us. In the 8th chapter of
Romans, Paul says that we do not know how to pray as we should, so Jesus
teaches us this prayer. Prayer is our
principal way of participating in God’s work in the world.
But at the end of the Lord’s Prayer we are given our own
word – amen. Amen means “yes”, “That’s
right”, “so may it be”. When we say amen
to the Lord’s Prayer, we are agreeing with God that the world is not as it
should be. We are casting in our lot
with those in every time and place who have worked for God’s kingdom and have
often paid a terrible price.
Are you sure you want to say “amen” at the end of the Lord’s
Prayer? Think about what you are saying when you say “amen” to the prayer that
Jesus taught his disciples to pray.
Do not say “amen” lightly.
It is your assent to what the Lord’s Prayer says. It is your affirmation
that God is the rightful ruler of this world, that it is God who gives us each
mouthful of food, that we need to
forgive and be forgiven daily, that evil is real and we cannot resist it with
our own resources.
Amen is a powerful word.
It slips so easily out of our mouths but it is our way of affirming that
we stand with God and the marginalized against the powers and principalities of
this world. When we say amen to the
Collect for Purity -- “Almighty God unto whom all hearts are open, all desires
known and from whom no secrets are hid…” -- we giving God permission to look
into our hearts, to do an inventory of all the deceit and selfishness we’d rather
no one know about. When at the beginning
of the service we say amen to “Blessed be God’s kingdom, now and forever” we
are affirming that only God’s rule deserves the blessing and withholding the
divine blessing from all earthly realms.
When on Ash Wednesday we say amen to “You are dust and to dust you shall
return” we are affirming that we are mortal but God is immortal and that our
only hope in this life and in the life to come is in the mercy and grace of
God.
Amen is a powerful, life-changing, and world-changing word
and never more so than when we pray the pray that Jesus taught his disciples in
every age. For the kingdom, the power,
and the glory are yours, O Lord. So may
it be. Amen.
