Sept. 21, 2003 (Jimmie Johnson)

Matthew 6:9-13

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.

I have never thought of Adam and Eve as the first man and woman. The idea that Genesis is a literal piece of history when it tells of the Garden of Eden and the man and the woman, the snake, and the piece of tempting fruit has never struck me as something a Bible believer believes literally.

To me, the story of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the snake, and the tree’s appealing fruit is all my story. It is all your story. It is literally the story of our lives together. It is not a literal story that happened way back in the beginning of time but the story of our lives this very morning. We are all Adam and Eve. We wake up every morning knowing that the way we are is not the way we would truly like to be on our best day. We simply know that often the best within us is at the mercy of the worst.

Jesus says pray: “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

Long before there were people like me standing in pulpits, long before there were churches even, long before there was anything like organized religions, human beings knew, somehow they knew, life was not as it was meant. They knew human beings were meant to be together but they weren’t. They knew as well that somehow they were connected to the divine but that the connection had suffered a severance. All that God had intended to be joined together had been torn apart.

You can find paintings of this knowledge of good and evil on the walls of prehistoric caves. You can hear magnificent symbol stories about these primal human experiences that are so old they pre-date written language. Long before anyone even thought up what we call the Christian doctrine of original sin, a story was told that one day human beings decided to take initiative into their own hands and decide what was best for them, not trusting God to give them the best. So they did the opposite of what God commanded and ate the fruit, and at the close of day found themselves standing on the curb outside the garden with their battered suitcases lying beside them on the ground (Taylor, Speaking of Sin, p.44). Life was never the same. All it took was one stupid, willful decision, and there was no going back. Life was forever out of whack. Innocence vanished and life became very hard.

Almost everyone remembers his or her own loss of innocence. Maybe it was the time you saw your dad’s pocket change lying on the table, and you slipped a couple of coins into your pocket, only to find as you turned that your dad was standing in the doorway, and you knew he had seen you. Perhaps he didn’t say anything, but you knew he knew. Or, there was the time when your mom walked into your room and you were playing doctor with your friends (Taylor, Speaking of Sin, p.45). Our innocence was lost. And at the close of that day, we lay in our bed aware that we were feeling strangely alone. A strange distance had come between us and all whom we love and who love us.

Lost innocence brings us the awareness of degrees of separation between us and even those closest to us. A perfect bond becomes broken, and while the embarrassment and sometimes even the memory of the moment pass, things are never the same. We, like Adam and Eve, find ourselves standing on the outside, and we can’t go back to who we were before. And life feels shabbier.

When Jesus tells us to pray that God “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” I believe Jesus is instructing us to ask for help: help from God to be aware of what we are facing, help from God to know that we have come to the moment when we have to decide. You wake up one day, and you simply know this is the day. You are sick and tired of being sick and tired. Or, you know this is the day on which your whole future rides, not your financial success or the attainment of some career goal but your whole future. I am talking about a choice you know you must make. I am talking about the day when you just know that if you go the wrong way, you will never again be the person deep down in your soul you have always hoped you would become.

Sometimes it is amazing that it is those people closest to us who prevent us from taking the road less traveled, the road of spiritual growth. “Sweetheart, I know you want to quit your job and spend more time with the children, but we can’t live in this house without two incomes. Why don’t you give it another six months and see how you feel in September?” (Taylor, Speaking of Sin, p.61) Or, “No, I don’t think you drink too much. I think you know how to have a good time and not be self-righteous, that’s all. You are one of us. You don’t look down your nose at others. If you want to cut back, go right ahead. But quit? What would we do on the weekends if you quit? Who would our friends be? No, I don’t think you have a problem.”

A woman looking at her life said, “It is over. My life is over.” The temptation of those who love her is to say “No, your life is not over. Everything will be fine. Come on, you will be your old self in no time.” But there comes a point sometimes when your life is over. At least, the only life you have known, and the temptation would be to choose to believe it is not over.

Reynolds Price, a writer, in the mid 1980s was diagnosed with a rare form of spinal cancer and lost the use of his legs. His crisis was not only physical but spiritual as well. His whole way of living was changed. What surprised him most, he said, was the resistance of his friends. “When we undergo, huge traumas in middle life,” he said, “everybody is in league with us to deny that the old life is ended. Everybody is trying to patch us up and get us back to who we were, when in fact what we need to be told is: ‘Yes, you are dead. Who are you going to be tomorrow?’” (Taylor, Speaking of Sin, p.61)

I believe the moment in our lives that we recognize the full distance between where we are, and where God created us to be—to feel that distance, to name it, to decide not to live quietly with it any longer—that is the moment when we can acknowledge we have died and begin to decide who we will be tomorrow. It is this moment of deciding, of choosing that we face the test, the trial, or the temptation. I believe this is what Jesus is teaching us to pray for: the wisdom to know when we are there, at that moment when only the right decision can save us. It is that moment when we must decide to live the rest of our lives either as a dead person walking or choose to trust God that there is the new life being offered if we can let go of the old life and let it be over.

Such a moment calls for facing the fact that painful changes will be required. Remember Jesus once said it is the narrow road and the hard road that leads to life (Matthew 7:14). Because of this requirement of painful changes, most of us prefer to keep on feeling guilty and sorry rather than change. We would rather say, “I’m sorry, I am so sorry, I feel really, really awful about what I have done,” than actually change and start doing things differently.

Our chronic guilt is often the price we are willing to pay in order to avoid change. We believe that if we feel bad enough about what we are doing, then we may continue doing it.
Plus, the guilt is so exhausting that it drives us right back into the arms of our sins which seductively offer us at least a temporary reliable comfort (Taylor, Speaking of Sin, p.66).
“All sins are attempts to fill voids,” wrote French philosopher Simone Weil. Because of the God-shaped hole inside of us, we try stuffing it full of all sorts of things or behaviors, but it refuses to be filled. It rejects all substitutes. It insists on remaining free. It is the holy of holies inside of us which only God can fill (Taylor, Speaking of Sin, p. 67.)

Therefore, in a strange way our sin is not the evil enemy we make it out to be, at least not when we recognize it and name it for what it is: sin. For when we see how we have turned away from God, then and only then do we have what we need to begin turning back. In such a moment, by God’s grace, our temptation is our only hope, the fire alarm that wakes us up to the possibility
of change (Taylor, Speaking of Sin, p.67).

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” It will never again be the same. Now whom do you wish to be tomorrow? That is your choice. Choose well!

 

 


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