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TRUSTWORTHY
-IS GOD'S HAND TOO SMALL TO SAVE?(Isaiah 59)
By Rev. gary W. Charles
There's just so much you can do when squeezed into the middle seat of the last row of a plane for fifteen hours. Fortunately, on our recent trip to Australia, I had a good novel and I did my fair share of airline aerobics, but fifteen hours is still a long time in a plane. I don't particularly like to watch movies on airplanes. I have a hard time hearing on their Dime Store headsets and I hate to see a motion pictured reduced to the size of a postcard. But fifteen hours is fifteen hours, so before I was airborne too long, I had gone to the movies.
Qantas offered us seven movies and I chose to watch one that I had previously decided not to go see. The Pianist tells the story of Poland as it is descending into the abyss of the Third Reich. It traces one Jewish pianist through the war years, through initial scoffing at any suggestion of Jewish persecution into the awful and systematic pogrom against an entire country of Jews. In the movie, on regular occasions, a group of Jewish men would be marched back to the Ghetto after a hard day's labor only to be told to stop and then shot indiscriminately by machine gun. That does not begin to do justice to the horrors against humanity in World War II Poland as exposed so graphically in The Pianist.
Prior to 9/11, I heard many people dismiss such a movie by saying, "That was then, this is now. We've come a long way." Implicit in their remarks is the assumption that we've moved beyond such large scale evil and that we are thoroughly modern people. We have moved beyond the pre-modern thought of those who burned witches at the stake. Parents might dress their children as ghosts and goblins for Halloween, most people spend little time worrying about things that go bump in the night. Science has exposed what some thought to be demons as bacteria or mental disorder. Modernity has freed us from magical thought and taught us that the only form of evil alive is human ignorance. If we knew better, we'd do better.
I wish I could believe that were true, but it has little basis in Scripture or life. Despite all our advances in science and technology, I have not noticed an accompanying decline in evil. In fact, like the wheat and tares that Jesus described, it's as if good and evil are inextricably present in everything we do. We may split an atom and provide enough energy for all the world, but that same split atom can also become the source of the final destruction of the world that we know. If we think science and technology and modernity has freed us from the grip of sin and evil then we are engaging in more magical thinking that our distant ancestors.
Someone once asked [the renown 20th century Baptist preacher] Carlyle Marney, `Where is the Garden of Eden?'
Marney replied, `Two-fifteen Elm Street, Knoxville, Tennessee.'
`You're lying,' the person said, `It's supposed to be someplace in Asia.
`Well, you couldn't prove it by me,' Marney said. `For there, on Elm Street, when I was but a boy, I stole a quarter out of my Mama's purse and went down to the store and bought me some candy and I ate it and then was so ashamed that I came back and hid in the closet. It was there that she found me and asked, `Where are you? Why are you hiding? What have you done?'" (from Will Willimon's, Sighing for Eden, p. 24).
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" is the prayer for people who know that they live on the other side of the tracks, on the other side of Eden. "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" is the final petition of the prayer Jesus taught us or as Clarence Jordan puts in it in his colloquial Georgia dialect, "Deliver us from evil's sway." I like that phrase "evil's sway." It lacks the red suit and pitch fork of our comic version of Satan or the haunting and terrifying version of Satan in films like The Exorcist, but it captures what the Bible treats far more sensitively, the fact that evil often has a charismatic appeal and is wrapped frequently in the most appealing package.
Usually, I am an unqualified fan of the writing and preaching of Tom Long. He was our Rally Day speaker a few years back and has written a wonderful, short commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. In it, he says about this petition on temptation and evil,
The best way to understand the petition `do not bring us to the time of trial' is to envision the congregation heading out the front door of the church to do God's work in a storm-tossed world and whispering the prayer `Keep us safe out there, O God. Let the forces of evil tremble to see us coming, rather than the other way around, and bring us home at the end of this day even stronger in faith than when we go out.'" (Tom Long, Matthew, Westminster Bible Commentaries, p. 72).
That's a wonderful prayer that Tom has composed and it's one worth praying -- with one important change. When Tom writes: "Let the forces of evil tremble to see us coming" he implies a common misconception in the church that evil is somewhere "out there," not in the church, not in us. That is perhaps the greatest modern temptation, to dismiss evil altogether or to think of evil as something outside us. But if Scripture and human experience hold true evil lives inside the four walls of this sanctuary, inside this preacher, as well as "out there." It's "sway" from which you and I need deliverance is whatever convinces us to underestimate evil in and around us, to be seduced into thinking that evil can be explained away easily and rationally.
There is a Presbyterian attorney who lives in Reston, belongs to a church in California, and is using his considerable financial fortune to bring church lawsuits against pastors who violate our constitutional standards on marrying gay and lesbian persons. Some think he is a hero. Others think of him in less glowing terms. As a result of one of his lawsuits, a Presbyterian pastor in Cincinnati has been found guilty as charged and has not only been ousted from his church, but has lost the source of his livelihood. No matter what you think of the vigilance of the Reston attorney or the defiance of the Cincinnati pastor, this situation is a painful reminder that sin and evil don't exist just "out there," but live within the church and if our biblical story is right, live in the Reston attorney trying to "purify" the church and the Cincinnati pastor trying to "reshape" the church.
Why does sin and evil have such a stronghold on us, even those of us who have dedicated our lives to God's work in the world? That I cannot begin to explain adequately. Nor can I explain why someone can feel so hated or abused or downtrodden that she would blow herself up on a bus on the West Bank or use a plane as a missile to target the Pentagon.
I cannot finally explain why millions of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals were charred to ashes in Dachau, while leaders in the West and in Vatican City who knew about this, kept silent. I cannot finally explain how the world could close its eyes on the genocide in Cambodia and later in Rwanda. Some explain away such evil by appealing to a decline in morality or to a deficit in education. Jesus refused such naivete. He did not overestimate our ability to do good and he did not underestimate evil's power to wreak havoc in and around us. So, one day in the middle of nowhere, when asked to teach his disciples to pray, he taught them to pray for deliverance from "evil's sway."
Toward the close of the book of Isaiah, there is an earth shattering speech from God. The chapter begins with the bold claim, "See. The Lord's hand is not too short to save." What follows is a relentless condemnation of people who need saving from themselves. He describes a poisoned religious community, where the rich exploit the poor, where people abuse their position for economic gain. It is a community in which there is no peace, no justice, no hope. Isaiah writes: "Truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter." Walter Brueggemann writes, "Yahweh [God] had assumed that some in Israel would accept responsibility for justice, which is Israel's great raison d'etre. But no, none! Nobody cared; nobody bothered. Nobody took the trouble." (Isaiah, Westminster Bible Commentaries, p. 200).
Despite giving God every reason to give up on them, Isaiah goes on to write: "So [God's] his own arm brought [God] him victory." God refused to desert Israel to its own wretchedness, but intervened to save them from themselves. That same divine tenacity was confirmed once again when God reached down and shook the evil out of death and filled Jesus with risen life. Whenever you and I pray, And Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" we are announcing that God's hand is not too short to save, that God's arm pushes through the tangled mess of sin and evil that surround us and dwell with in us, that God reclaims us for eternity.
That means that as we take "evil's sway" seriously and God's deliverance earnestly, then God is delivering us from the temptation to just thank God and then go on our merry way. Whenever we pray, "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil," we are pledging ourselves to get off the church couch and to recognize that God expects us to deliver "daily bread" to those who are hungry, expects us to exercise forgiveness for those who have hurt us, and God expects us to also uses us to fight temptation and to battle evil.
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