What Doesn’t Kill Us...
Matthew 6:7-9a, 13Pentecost 14
August 30, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
I’ve never really stopped wrestling with this text. I learned it as, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” I struggled right from my Confirmation days: We ask not to lead us into temptation. Does that mean that God would? Why would God do that?
If it is God who leads us into temptation, isn’t God at least partially responsible for the results? When I leave my bird feeders out overnight and they are raided by our local posse of raccoons, they have acted as their nature dictates. I must reluctantly admit— as my sister the raccoon rehab-er argues— that I have only myself to blame. If you put a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a bowl of Brussels sprouts side-by-side on the kitchen counter, told the kids, “Eat all the Brussels sprouts you want, but don’t touch the cookies,” and left for the evening, would you be shocked, angry and disappointed when you returned to find a full bowl of sprouts and a plate with only a few cookie crumbs? Yet when God planted a garden and put a man and a woman in it and told them, “You can eat the fruit of this tree, but don’t you eat from this one,” God is surprised at the outcome.
I suppose it makes a difference that the word we learned as “temptation” translates a word perhaps better translated as “testing.” Testing is no one’s idea of fun, but tests are a part of our world. Tests are gate-keepers. Do you to drive a car? Take a written test and then a road test. Do you want to be a lawyer? Take the bar exam. Do you want to go to college? Take the ACT and the SAT and some AP tests.
I had hoped to be done with tests when I finished my comprehensive examinations for my doctorate. After all, it’s in the name, comprehensive, isn’t it? But now I find I have other tests to take: blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and every middle-aged man’s favorite: the PSA. We’re familiar with tests and testing.
The trouble is that sometimes testing looks an awful lot like temptation. When Jesus was led or driven into the desert by the Spirit to what we call the “temptation in the wilderness,” in Matthew, Mark and Luke this same word is used again.
Mark doesn’t tell us what was on the test that Jesus took, but Matthew and Luke do. “Turn these stones into bread.” It must have been enticing after forty days of fasting. Shortcuts to success like overthrowing the Roman Empire by becoming a cosmic emperor or dazzling the crowd into allegiance with special effects must have been more than test problems with right or wrong answers— they were, well, temptations.
So our prayer seems to be to be spared the path that Jesus walked. This seems odd, since we who pray this prayer are followers of Jesus who, by definition, walk his path.
That may not matter anyway, since this prayer goes largely unanswered, which may be the hardest test of all.
We are, in fact, tested or tempted all the time. We are constantly confronted with choices between the better but harder path and one that is easier but less just. We visit a city and walk around the derelict lives that have washed up on the sidewalks and doorways. We come and home and divide the “worthy” and “unworthy” poor. We avoid genuine conversations with people who disagree with us. We snub some kids because our friends snub them, too. We keep silence when someone makes a racist comment or tells a gay-bashing joke.
Or maybe you aren’t like me and you chose the better path in all these choices. But even so you must have lingered just a little over your choices. You must in short have been tempted.
So here we are, in the midst of testing or temptation or whatever you’d like to call it. That’s the very place we had prayed not to be let to.
We pray to be delivered from evil. Or maybe it’s the “evil one,” you-know-who, he-who-must-not-be-named. Does it make it easier to imagine that our testing isn’t God’s doing, but the work instead of the “evil one.” Does it matter that God doesn’t test us directly, but delegates or sub-contracts instead? I’ve never thought so, but perhaps you do and you can straighten me out later.
So, when we pray as Jesus taught us, we find that our prayer not to be led into temptation is frequently unanswered. Hmm.
Of course, that is no different that the other five requests in this prayer. Is God’s name hallowed? Are we living yet in God’s dream? Is God’s will being done? Do we have our daily bread? Are we free yet from the debt regime? Neither are we spared from testing.
So here is our prayer, the one that Jesus gave us, the one we pray as Jesus taught us, but it goes mostly unanswered. This confuses us. Why should we go on praying “as Jesus taught us” if it doesn’t work?
That is how we measure things, evaluate things: by how they work. If we have a computer that doesn’t boot or a car that doesn’t start, we get it fixed and, if we can’t get it fixed, we replace it with one that works. If we have a toy, a yo-yo, say, and we can’t get it to work, we set it aside pretty quickly. “It sounds great, but it doesn’t work,” is a good way to kill an idea.
And yet, we keep praying this prayer that (mostly) doesn’t work. To be sure, some of us have given it up. Some of us have said to ourselves, “Well, if it doesn’t work I’m going to stop praying it. I’ll find another prayer or a different God, or no God at all.” I can’t fault the logic of those who decide to quit praying in the midst of this prayer’s massive failure.
But the rest of us keep praying it. Maybe we keep praying hoping that this time will be different, that we’ll say, “Amen,” this morning and we’ll open our eyes and this world will have changed and no one will be hungry and no one will stagger under an inhuman burden of debt and God’s dream will be here and our own troubled dreams will have come to an end.
Or maybe we keep praying because we’re just too stubborn to quit. Two thousand years we’ve been praying. More, actually, a lot more, since this is a very Jewish prayer and Jesus really didn’t invent Jewish prayer. He only focused and distilled it into this essential prayer. More than two thousand years, then, that we’ve been praying. Why stop now? Why not outlast God? We can try, anyway!
Or maybe we’re missing something about prayer. In our technological age, when the worst thing you can say about something is, “It doesn’t work,” we may perhaps be excused for treating prayer as one more technology for getting what we want. Turn the key and the engine starts and your car is ready to take where you need to go. Say the prayer, perhaps in a certain posture, using a certain tone of voice, with the heart and mind focused in a certain way, and an answer should pop out, the answer we want, or at least the answer we should want. And what desires are any more worthy of being granted than those that Jesus himself has authorized?
But maybe we misunderstand what prayer is. Maybe it’s not a technology for getting what we want, even if we meet all the conditions.
No, maybe prayer is speech that is less like, “Please do the dishes,” than it is like “I love you.” Sometimes speech is not about making something happen, but about telling a truth that must be told. It’s not about dirty dishes— or clean dishes, for that matter. It’s about affirming that, in a world of dishes that need washing, bills that must be paid, and overgrown lawns, there is a foundational truth and the name of that truth is love. Carol and have been telling each other that for over four decades and we’re not going to stop. Does it “work”? What does that even mean, anyway? I have no idea. It’s just the truth and it’s a truth needs to be said.
Maybe praying as Jesus taught us is that kind of speech. It’s not the speech of submitting a request to some divine bureaucracy and waiting for the wheel to turn so we can get our application approved. Prayer is truth-telling. The truth of this prayer is that all is not well with our lives nor with the world in which we live. Some of us are hungry. All of us live in a world in which it is possible to eat well or to sleep well but not both. Some of us are crushed by hopeless debt. All of us live in a world of lenders and debtors where human relations are defined and quantified by principal and interest. Some of us are being tested past the breaking point, what engineers call “tested to destruction.” All of us face the choice at every moment of our lives between justice and convenience.
And none of this is as it should be. We know it; it’s the truth. And we direct this speech toward God because we want the world to be different and because God wants the world to be different. We long for justice and God longs for justice. We speak from the depth of our hearts to the depth of God’s heart. Whatever it is that prevents the changes we long for, these things are true and we and God must speak them to each other.
Will it work? What does that even mean, anyway? Does that even matter?
We say these things simply because they are true and because we need a changed world if we are going to be fully human and because our relationship with God is based on mutual truth-telling. That is the only rule that governs our relationship with God. We listen for God’s truth and we tell God our truth. And that, finally, is what it means to pray as Jesus taught us.
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