Scripture: Psalm 71 and Psalm 23
I remember that when Ronald Reagan began talking about the evil empire, and more recently when George Bush spoke of the axis of evil, I was disturbed. I was upset that they would be thinking in those terms and using that language. And I was reminded of that disturbance as I began thinking this week about the sermon for this morning, which is the last in the series I have been doing based on verses from the Lord’s Prayer. This week the phrase is, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
I’m going to mostly skip over the temptation part this morning. There are definitely some issues there, things that are worth thinking about, but I’ll grapple with those some other time. For whatever reason, my attention fell more on that last phrase, “deliver us from evil”. Then, as I began to sit with that phrase and explore it, I started to realize that I wasn’t really sure what it means. I didn’t have a clear idea of what Jesus might have meant by it, and I wasn’t sure what I would mean by praying, “deliver us from evil”. It’s one of those things which again in the Lord’s Prayer you say so often without thinking about it, that when you do think about it, you realize your thoughts aren’t all that clear. And that can be a good thing, getting less clear, just as being very clear about something can be a bad thing, especially when it depends on not thinking very much. Anyway, it was as my thoughts about being delivered from evil were becoming more clouded that I remembered those phrases about the evil empire and the axis of evil.
They are a little bit too clear, aren’t they, though I know that’s part of what was appealing about them: the willingness to identify and locate evil so unequivocally and unreservedly is both attractive and disturbing. But for me it was more than the overconfident clarity. It was also the idea, the assumption that evil was out there, somewhere else, not here, that it belongs to other people, not to us, that we are threatened by evil from the outside and not from the inside. That is a view of life, a view of the world, that I find disturbing—at least unhelpful, maybe in some situations dangerous. The idea that evil is all (or mostly) out there and has to do not at all (or very little) with me, the idea that evil resides primarily with the other guy and only incidentally, if at all, with me, and further that my person or my way of life, which may not be perfect but is essentially good, is under attack from people who may not be 100% but are essentially evil—that view of the world and way of thinking is not conducive to healthy personalities, healthy relationships, or healthy foreign policies.
That’s the way my mind was running as I was thinking about this very large question of evil and being delivered from evil…when I realized that it’s not just the other guys who have this “other guy” view of the world. Sometimes it’s me. What I realized is that for many years, in fact until not too long ago, I had been praying the Lord’s Prayer with just this view of the world as my assumption. When I said “deliver us from evil”, to the extent that I was conscious of what I was saying at all I think I was asking God to deliver us from the evil that is out there, that is all around us, and there is plenty of it. When I was praying “deliver us from evil” I was essentially meaning the same thing Psalm 71 says: “In you, O Lord, I take refuge…In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me; incline your ear and save me. Be to me a rock of refuge, a strong fortress, to save me, for you are my rock and my fortress. Rescue me, my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the unjust and cruel.” When I was praying “deliver us from evil”, I was meaning “make us safe; protect us; be like a fortress, to shield us from the onslaught of evil”. When I was praying “deliver us from evil”, I was praying to be delivered from cancer and hurricanes, from terrorists and assaults on the street and assaults in the home, from thievery and greed and lying. I was praying to God to protect me from all those evil things and from anyone who would do us harm. Deliver us from evil. Save us from the evil that could at any time attack us. In all of that, I was envisioning the evil as apart from me, outside me, different from me.
Until recently, more recently than I would like to admit. Then I realized that there is another way to understand this, another way to say the prayer “deliver us from evil”. It could mean deliver us from the evil that is ours, not someone else’s. It could mean not to deliver us from evil being done to us but from being evil ourselves. It could mean not to deliver us from the evil of being hurt but from the evil of hurting. It gives a whole new twist to the petition deliver us from evil. Now, instead of praying to be whisked away from evil and danger like Superman or Spiderman might do, we are praying that we may not, wittingly or unwittingly, intentionally or unintentionally be agents of harm. Now instead of praying for God to make us safe, we are praying for purer, more loving hearts. It’s a whole different ballgame to pray “deliver us from evil” in that spirit.
And I wish I could say that once I realized there was this whole other way to pray “deliver us from evil” that from then on I did it with that understanding all the time. But I don’t. It’s easy to fall back into that other way of seeing the world, where we are surrounded by things, forces, people who are out to do us harm, and to pray to be delivered from those things. It’s easy to fall back into that pattern, because of course to a significant degree that way of seeing the world is a true way. There is cancer, and there are hurricanes, and there are terrorists and violent people we may encounter, and there are unprincipled business people, and there are unprincipled politicians, and they can all hurt us. And it is hard sometimes not to pray to be delivered from evil in that sense, and I am not sure Jesus meant for us not to pray to be delivered from evil in that sense. I do want to be delivered from terrorists and torturers and violent people of all kinds. I want to be delivered from sleazy salesmen and deceitful leaders. I want to be delivered from heart disease and hurricanes. And those are all real in the world I live in. I am reminded of the saying: Just because I am paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t out to get me. In a similar way, just because I don’t want to have a world view of being surrounded by evildoers does not mean I am not surrounded by evildoers, or at least that there are not plenty of evildoers out there. There are. The question is: how do we imagine them…and us.
There has to be a better way to live than fear, than protective walls, than seeing the world as an enemy, even if part of that view is true. So even though it may be perfectly legitimate to pray “deliver us from evil” in that way that I’ve been talking about that sees evil all around us, it is important, I believe, to find other ways to pray those words too. I’ve talked about one other way already. It involves recognizing that we are limited in our wisdom and compassion and need help avoiding harming ourselves or others. It involves recognizing that we are capable of evil, sometimes without intending it, sometimes without recognizing it or being aware of it, and that we need to pray to be delivered from the evil that might be within us, or that might take hold of us, or that might result from even the best intended of our actions. Lord, deliver us, deliver me from evil.
There may be other layers as well. There are days when I have a sense that there is just a pall of evil that lays heavy over all of us. Just as surely as there are time when my sense is one of indescribable beauty, there is that other reality where evil just weighs down on all of us together, all of us precious children of God caught somehow in cycles of violence from the personal to the international level, evil that all of us are involved in, that no one is immune from doing or receiving or feeling the effects of, evil that we might do as we try to deliver the world from evil, evil that we find ourselves caught up in through no intention of our own and no badness of our own but that we are caught up in anyway and that we contribute to when we refuse to recognize. There are those times when I just want to pray without assessing blame or feeling ashamed or being able to identify the nature of the evil too specifically, when I just want to pray, deliver us, deliver all of us dear God, your children, deliver us from the evil that has come upon us, that we have brought upon us, all of us in one way or another, deliver us from evil.
We live in a country that consumes half of the world’s resources and where the fact of our living here allows us to live more abundantly than most of the rest of the world could ever dream of. This inequality is evil. It is not an evil that any of us created. It is not an evil we are responsible for. It is not an evil any of us individually wished for. But it is evil, and it is an evil that belongs to the whole world and individually to every single one of us. And until that early part of the Lord’s Prayer has been fulfilled, until God’s reign has come on earth, we will continue to pray in that same spirit, “deliver us from evil”.
At several levels evil threatens us. It threatens us in the form of the harm that may come from those forces of evil at loose in the world. It threatens us in the form of evil that can come from within us or attaches itself to us, the evil that we are capable of intending and also the evil that we may do without intending. And it threatens us in the form of the evil we have somehow created and will not be able to rest until it is gone, a world where poverty and violence can so easily overwhelm us.
In the midst of all this it becomes important, crucial for us to also hear the voice of Psalm 23, an entirely different voice from Psalm 71, even though they are both Psalms. Just as there have been other words and images I have not been able to get out of my mind as I thought about the meaning of “deliver us from evil”, there have also been the words of Psalm 23 that keep echoing through my thoughts. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.” And if we can come to that blessed point where we are able to fear no evil, then maybe the meaning of this verse of the Lord’s Prayer will have indeed been fulfilled. For then though evil will not be gone, we will be delivered from being controlled by it. Lord, deliver us from the fear of evil. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. I will fear no evil. I will fear no evil. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 5, 2004