March 17, 2024
• Rev. Mindie Moore
Together We Pray Week 5: And Lead Us Not Into Temptation but Deliver Us From Evil
James 1:13-15, Matthew 4:1, Hebrews 4: 15-16
(SLIDE) “And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”
This is a very complex part of the prayer. Some of you, your theological red flags are going up. Like...what are we about to talk about?! Some of you have a whole long line of baggage relating to the ideas of sin, temptation, evil, all of that. So I just want to say upfront, that I understand that this part of the Lord’s Prayer can be a challenge. And I am about 100% certain that someone here today is going to hear something in this message that either makes you uncomfortable, challenges you, or makes you say HMMMM.
So let’s make space for that right up front. Because at least here at St. Luke’s, I don’t see us talking about things like sin and evil very often. In fact, I probably have a bit of a bias AGAINST talking about these things because I’ve seen some of the culture that can create and the way it can be misused in church circles. At a previous church I worked at, the pastor would often say, “The Devil is a liar!” when anything went slightly amiss. A lightbulb burns out- “The devil is a liar!”; we run out of coffee- “The devil is a liar!” I mean, there were several moments that I would think...I don’t know that the devil is really part of what’s happening here!!
So I don’t know what your background is on this. I don’t know where you’re coming from or what this brings up in you, but here’s what I do know—Jesus included this in the Lord’s Prayer and it wasn’t an accident. There’s a REASON he brought it up and there’s a reason we are still praying it.
And for the second week in a row, it begins with that small but mighty word: AND. If you were with us last week, we talked about the fact that this word creates a connection and adds meaning to what comes next. So the sequence here is you’ve got daily bread, God providing our needs, connected to this idea of Forgiveness and now we link up to temptation.
And it creates this amazing tension for us when we think about it like this:
Jesus wants to forgive us AND keep us as far away from evil and temptation as possible.
So it paints this really awesome picture of who God is. It tells us that (SLIDE) God is loving, providing, forgiving, protecting, and guiding.
And so that all sounds great and full of hope and I love it. You know that there’s a “but” coming, don’t you? But WHAT do we do about the big question at the heart of this line of the prayer, when we say, “Lead us not into temptation”?
(SLIDE) DOES God lead us into temptation??
Well, if you listen to the Scripture out of James that we heard today...I guess no? James seems pretty clear on this one. He
says, (SLIDE) God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; 14 but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed.
And I’d love to tell you that this just shuts the door on this question, but here’s the problem. Did you notice what the Matthew Scripture said? (SLIDE) Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested by the devil.
WHAT!
Can I just tell you as a side note that it is my favorite thing in the world when we get in this awkward moment of beautiful Biblical contradiction like this? Because I grew up in a tradition that said, “here are the answers, everything is cut and dry, just know these things and you’ll be ok.” So we just kind of sped by these types of situations and we lost so much by doing that. When we get in a spot where there are all these questions and it doesn’t make a ton of clear cut sense, that’s when we get to wrestle with the text and the context and what the Spirit might be doing in our world right now and the wisdom God has for us as we do this wrestling.
So if the contradiction is making you a little uncomfortable...I just want you to know it’s ok. It’s safe. You can ask the question you’re holding, you can disagree with what you see, you can make space for some mystery to live in your relationship with God.
For me, as I look at these two passages and put them in light of what Jesus says in the Lord’s Prayer and the fact that Jesus wants us to pray about this certain thing, here’s where I land—no matter what cause and effect kind of relationship we think God has with temptation or evil, the bottom line is that it was important to Jesus that (SLIDE) God knows we will have moments of being tested.
Moments of trial, moments of testing, moments of temptation—those are things that simply make up our lives. We’re ALL going to be tempted, to have a desire to do something that might take us out of alignment with where God wants us to be. We’re all going to be tested and wonder if we’re going to make it through a particular season or challenge. It’s part of life, and it something Jesus experienced too.
It’s why Hebrews says that we’ve got this great high priest, which is referring to Jesus, but we’ve got this great high priest, and guess what—he's been exactly where we’ve been. He’s been led into the wilderness to experience these intense temptations. To be worn down, to be hungry, to want something that he doesn’t have. Hebrews is not painting some kind of fantasy picture of who Jesus is. He’s been there and he gets it and he has experienced the goodness that can come from walking through trial and temptation and sticking close to God in spite of all of that.
And honestly, it would be easy to take this line of the prayer and internalize it to mean, “God don’t ever let anything bad or
tempting happen to me!” But I don’t think it’s a prayer of avoidance. I think the spirit of this part of the prayer is God- take these moments of temptation, take these times of trial, take those times when I encounter or even cause evil...take those things and make something better out of them. Make me stronger in my faith, make me stronger in my resolve. Use something about this thing to make me more like you.
The Greek word here for temptation is peirasmos- and it also means to test or to challenge. And I’m sure that we can all tell of a time when we’ve been tested, we’ve been challenged, and our faith has come out stronger on the other side of whatever that was. Sometimes we can look at our lives and say that we wouldn’t be where we are today without that experience, or that our faith wouldn’t be nearly what it is if we hadn’t gone through some kind of difficult season.
So we KNOW that God can use these things.
But I also want to be really clear—we don’t have to CREATE these times of testing and tempting and challenge to grow in our faith. That’s NOT where this line of The Lord’s Prayer is trying to take us! I am NOT saying sprint yourself towards something tempting, evil, that thing that trips you up and creates a lot of regret, whatever you want to call it, just so you can hopefully grow in your faith. That is not the point! It’s absolutely amazing that we HAVE a God who rescues and redeems things, but (SLIDE) We don't need to create something that we're going need to be rescued from.
You know the best example I have of this is the entire (SLIDE) Jurassic Park movie franchise. We’re watching a LOT of Jurassic Park in my house right now because Rhys is in a dino phase. According to him he knows more about dinos than anyone else in the whole world. But so the premise of Jurassic Park...literally embodies that whole last point. They create this thing that isn’t necessary, it isn’t good, and it turns on them and they need rescued from it.
And ok, I’m here for the redemptive arc of the first film...but there are SIX OF THESE MOVIES. Six! And—spoiler alert—in the 4th movie, where they create a whole new theme park, they do it on the same island, with the old park from the original hiding behind this random fence. And it’s like, “gasp! This didn’t go so well the first time, how shocking that these dinosaurs are turning on the humans again! We could not possibly have predicted this!” Six movies of this!
Now, I’ll be funny and judgy when it comes to a film franchise. But I won’t be funny and judgy when it comes to us and the very real patterns and challenges we get stuck in. Because each and every one of us has something or a whole collection of things that try to wrap us up and lead us to places we don’t really want to go. James paints this picture of being dragged away from where we want to be to where our temptations take us and it reminds us that sometimes we think we want something, we think we need something, we think that a certain thing or person or situation will make our lives better
and we forget or choose not to hold those things up in comparison to what God might be about. We get stuck in cycles that feel impossible to break and end up breaking our hearts and our relationships and even our world.
We let that inner voice whisper that we can’t and shouldn’t depend on God, that we can get whatever that thing is on our own, in our way and in our own time. I think that’s why the very first example we have of temptation in the Bible involves a snake and a snack and a subtle line of doubt that we really need to depend on God for anything.
And even though a lot of the time we talk about temptation and evil in these really personal one-on-one terms...this isn’t just about what happens with you and me. It’s about what happens with us, collectively. I know I don’t have to tell you that evil or sin are just as systemic as they are personal. Throughout history and even in our current moment of history we’re living in, we SEE these things at work. It makes me think of how Martin Luther King Jr, in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail quotes Neibuhr when he says, “Groups are more immoral than individuals.”
That’s a really sobering thought and I think part of our task when we ask God to lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil is to have that kind of conversation about what collective evil and collective goodness looks like. To be honest, to be brave, to repent when we need to and to tell the truth
about where we miss it. (SLIDE) Because if we can create harm, then we can take action to heal harm too.
There’s a group of us from the different St. Luke’s Campuses going on a Civil Rights Pilgrimage to Montgomery, AL in just a few weeks, and Montgomery is a great example of how people can both systemically support and systemically dismantle evil in this world. Montgomery was one of the most profitable centers of the slave trade in the United States. A whole economy was built on the buying and selling of human beings.
And for a long time, this was the thing that wasn’t really talked about. (SLIDE) In our pre-trip briefing, we learned that in the downtown area, there used to be this plaque that referenced “A City Built on Commerce”. Now that sounds lovely...but it doesn’t tell the truth. So different groups, including Bryan Stephenson’s Equal Justice Initiative have been slowly reclaiming these stories. Where “A City Built on Commerce” was, it now memorializes warehouses used in the slave trade. Where a warehouse was, there is now the Legacy Museum which traces a path from slavery to our current evil of mass incarceration. There are risks to this reclaiming. It’s not easy work without conflict and pain. But when we pray that God will lead us not into temptation, I think we’re also praying that God will lead us somewhere better. And we get to be active participants in the hope and healing that Jesus brings.
I love what NT Wright says in his book, “The Lord and His Prayer”:
It is our responsibility, as we pray this prayer, to hold God’s precious and precarious world before our gaze, to sum up its often inarticulate cries for help, for rescue, for deliverance. Deliver us from the horror of war! Deliver us from human folly and the appalling accidents it can produce! Let us not become a society of rich fortresses and cardboard cities! Let us not be engulfed by social violence or by self-righteous reaction! Save us from arrogance and pride and the awful things they make people do! Save us—from ourselves...and Deliver us from the Evil One.
And you can’t pray these prayers from a safe distance. You can only pray them when you are saying Yes to God’s Kindgom coming to birth within you... (NT Wright, The Lord and His Prayer)
We can get up close and personal with that kind of prayer and with the Kingdom of God because whether we’re talking about individual temptations or systemic evil, here’s the truth: Evil and God are not on level playing fields. Evil is subject to God’s authority. And I know—there's probably a whole other sermon we could preach on how these things relate, what do we do about the problem of evil, I might have just opened up a whole new can of worms for some of you. But despite all those complicated conversations...I think it boils down to the hope that God always has the final word. God’s story always ends in redemption. And when Jesus says we can pray, “God lead us, deliver us”...we can pray that trusting that God can and will.
We can approach God with the expectation that good in the face of evil is possible. That Hebrews passage tells us that not only can we approach God, but we can “approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”
God’s not afraid of the hard stuff that this world can bring. And even when we might feel overwhelmed by temptation or evil or just bad news...we need to know we’re not alone. God hasn’t left us here to just hopefully figure it out and good luck. God’s been there. God’s been with us in human form through Jesus. And God’s Spirit is right here, in this place and in our world, working to have the last, hopeful, healing word...no matter what tries to get in the way.
Let’s pray.