Reading: Matthew 6:7-13
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.
Pray
then in this way:
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done, on earth as it is in
heaven.
Give us this day our daily
bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we
also have forgiven our debtors.
And do
not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.”
“And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us
from the evil one.” Or as we know it
from the old King James, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from
evil.”
I wonder about the first half of this request. Everyone faces temptation, whether God leads
us to it or not. Every day, all through
the day we face choices between good-but-demanding and bad-but-well-practiced ways
of acting, between healthy and unhealthy ways of being. And they are times of trial and testing because
the choices we make and the ways we act make clear who we are – what kind of
person we have become, with what kind of character.
It can be something as simple as driving through Hamilton
and having to respond to drivers who cut you off, who weave in and out of heavy
traffic, who feel entitled to extend the privilege of advance left-turn lights and
make their turn in front of you well past the time when their light turns
yellow or disappears altogether. What
words do you utter? With what tone of
voice? What thoughts form in your
mind? What do you do with your hands,
with the fingers God gave you?
Or you’re standing in the check-out line at the grocery
store. You’re in a hurry and the customer
ahead of you is having a little extra chat with the cashier about something or
other, or she’s fumbling trying to count out change from her wallet, or he’s
having a hard time getting his PIN entered correctly on the debit machine. What’s the expression on your God-given face? What’s the posture of your body? What kind of community and fellow-feeling do
you quietly create with the person standing behind you, also waiting – either
more or less patiently and understandingly than you?
And sometimes it’s something major – a moral choice we
have to make that is singularly life-changing and life-defining.
A number of years ago I participated as a member of a
clearness circle for a colleague in ministry.
He was seeking a new church to work in, had an interview coming up in a
week or so, and didn’t know whether or not to inform the interview committee he’d
be meeting that was alcoholic but was in recovery and sober for a number of
years. He tried sorting out the pros and
cons of disclosing his addiction, all the risks and benefits either way, and he
realized he needed help in discerning a moral answer and a best way of
proceeding.
So five or six of us were invited to serve as a clearness
circle for him, which meant listening to his story – as much as he chose to
tell us, and then just simply and honestly asking questions. Questions without judgement, agenda, or
implied answers. Questions that we had
no sense of an answer to. Questions
meant only to help him look at his own story that he had told us, look more
deeply into his own heart beneath the layers of self-defense, pride, anxiety,
illusion and habit that we all build up, to discover for himself what the
Spirit of God that was uniquely alive within him was leading him to say and to
do.
A few years ago I entered a program at Five Oaks called
the Jubilee Program, a two-year program of exploration and training to become a
spiritual director. It was something I
had thought of doing for years because it appealed to me for all kinds of
reasons – not all of them, I realize now, healthy. But for all the good and bad reasons, I
enrolled.
And part way through the first year, the spiritual
exploration we were doing within the program helped make me so aware of some of
my personal dysfunctions and disorders that I withdrew from the program and
instead ended up taking a five-month disability leave to get help in starting
to work through what I had come to see more clearly about myself.
It makes me wonder why on earth I would ever pray “lead
me not to the time of trial?” If that’s
what a time of trial can mean, it seems a good thing. And maybe the more important and helpful part
of this line of the prayer is the second part that says, “but deliver us from
evil, or from the evil one.”
In Isaiah 43 God speaks a word of hope to the people of
Israel precisely in a difficult time of testing and fearsome trial in their
life:
[But] Now thus says the Lord,
he who created you, O troubled one,
he who formed you, O struggling ones.
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with
you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm
you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the Lord, your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Saviour.
You are precious in my sight,
and honoured, and I love you.
It’s assumed that in life there are deep waters to pass
through, fearsome rivers to cross, and even fire to be suffered. And the hope, the promise of new life lies
not in being saved from these times, but in being saved through them and by
them. Walking with God does not save us
from trials; it may even be that being God’s people actually increases our
awareness of life itself as a test.
The promise is that when we stay open to God and God’s
presence, we will not drown as we make our way through the deep water. As we journey for the other side, we will not
be swept away and lost. Even though all
we have might perish, our true self, the gold of who we really are, will not be
burned up, but only purified and made all the more true.
It might be this that led Japhia and I to pray what we
did when we went back to the ER Thursday morning after she was discharged from
St Joe’s Sunday, and back to the ER for a few hours again Tuesday. It was a discouraging time. A scary time too, because of how consistently
sick she was feeling over those days. A
time when it was tempting just to give up.
So we prayed – not for an end either of life nor of the
disorder. Either one of those prayers, I
think, would have been succumbing to the temptation of an easy, quick answer that
our culture of immediate gratification and our own fearful heart teaches us to
value and expect.
But we prayed for a new beginning – for a beginning of
whatever new way of being God might be wanting to bring out of where we are,
what we were feeling, and what complex of disorders and problems we were
beginning to face more directly and honestly than before. We prayed that the time in the hospital might
be as time in a womb – a time for gestation and new formation, a time of
faithful reflection and examination, a time from which Japhia and I could
emerge in a new way, and for a new way of being.
And what will come of it – the prayer and the hospital
time itself, we don’t know. It’s
open-ended. As yet to be revealed.
Like the end of the Lord’s Prayer itself.
We’re used to the happy ending that’s been added on to
the prayer – those final lines that say “for thine is the kingdom, the power
and the glory, forever and ever.
Amen.” But those lines and that
quick happy-ever-after ending, are not in the Bible.
As far as we can tell, those lines were added later by
one of the early Christian communities and they just kind of stuck and became
traditional – were even inserted into the Bible later on, maybe because they
meet a human longing for closure, and because they echo the beginning of the
prayer closely enough to seem okay as an ending to it as well.
But the Bible as it was first written ends the Lord’s
Prayer with just that final request, “Lord, in the time of trial when we are
tempted to choose a way that is not your way, deliver us from evil and rescue
us from the evil one.”
And all we can do then is live in the ambiguity of our
lives with that request in our minds and our mouths each day and each step of
the way. All we can do is remain
prayerfully open to wherever and however God is and may be calling us to follow. The best we can do is trust the promise that
God hears us, remembers us by name, loves us, and answers as God will when we
pray as Jesus taught us.
No comments:
Post a Comment