SunApr102011
LORD’S PRAYER SERIES
Scripture - MATTHEW 6:13
It’s the only petition in the prayer Jesus taught us that’s phrased negatively. All the rest are positive requests: Your kingdom come; your will be done; give us; forgive us. All the other requests are for God to be God, and for us to receive what we most need.
And then we get this single negatively phrased prayer: “do not bring us to the time of trial”; or, more familiarly, “lead us not into temptation” (Mt. 6:13). Usually when we phrase a request negatively like that, it’s because we expect the one we’re addressing to do what we’re saying not to do. “Don’t go into that cookie jar.” “Do not come home even one minute past 11:00.” “Don’t you dare miss the deadline on this project.” This is the way we put it when it seems likely that the person will do the wrong thing.
So this is what irks me about this part of the Lord’s Prayer. Do we say it that way because we expect that God is inclined to test us? Do we say, “Lead us not into temptation (or “do not bring us to the time of trial”) because we believe that’s what God is leaning toward doing? Is it our sense that, were it not for our heartfelt pleas, God would be testing us all day long?
This is certainly a common way of looking at God, as the one who tests us. People of faith often say something like, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” And what’s conveyed by that is that there is a test going on, but it’s one that we should be able to pass, because God will never test us beyond our limits. So if somebody gets cancer, for example, or is fighting for sobriety, or finds their business falling apart, the conclusion is that God made it happen, but it will never be so bad that they can’t handle it.
And perhaps that’s true: who of us can say with utter certainty what God is all about. I must say, though, that, from my vantage point, this seems like an odd way to characterize God, a perversion, really, of the God we know in Jesus Christ. What kind of God would make sport of testing us? What sort of Deity would think it appropriate to constantly see if we pass muster?
I simply can’t conceive of a God gazing at me first thing in the morning, rubbing holy hands together, and saying, “Now, how are we going to challenge Hamilton today? I know—what about a computer virus and a two-hour phone call to India! No, wait. Let’s up the ante a little bit—a house fire, or a little melanoma, or maybe a major car accident!”
Just saying it shows how absurd it is. But every day, in myriad ways, people are making do with just such a paltry understanding of God. They’re assuming that God is frequently testing us, just waiting to see whether we’ll crack or triumph.
Not only does it seem wildly inappropriate to think that it’s God who does the testing. It’s also clear that the testing itself is sometimes too much. Sometimes we do crack. Sometimes we are broken. If everyone did handle the testing well, maybe we could chalk it up to God’s sport. But when thousands of Japanese die in an earthquake and tsunami; when people are ravaged by an Alzheimer’s disease that simply devours them; when young people are driven to the end of their ropes by merciless teasing, then clearly the testing has been too much. Not everyone can handle it.
About twenty years ago, Calvin Trillin wrote a book about a college classmate of his (Remembering Denny). Denny Hansen was an incredibly gifted man, a swimming star at Yale, Phi Beta Kappa, president of the student body, a Rhodes Scholar with a dazzling smile, who, as a student, had been featured in a Life magazine profile, with photographs taken by the legendary Alfred Eisenstaedt. His classmates used to joke about which government posts they might have once he became U. S. president. As time went on, though, Denny became more and more sullen, less and less the larger-than-life man they had known, hardly recognizable any more. And finally, in his forties, having apparently wrestled for some years with whether he was gay, he took his own life.
It’s simply unimaginable to me that God would inflict this struggle on Denny, just to see if he could manage. That sounds far more like sadism than holy love. I do not believe God tests us with times of trial.
This is not at all to say, though, that we don’t get tested. We do get tested. We get tested all the time. It’s just that it’s not God who does the testing. So the question still stands before us: how do we understand that line in Jesus’ prayer? What do we mean when we implore God not to let us be tempted, or tested?
When we pray that prayer, what I think we’re saying is that we hope to be spared the trials that can torment us. We’re essentially saying something simple: we don’t like to be tested, and we want you, God, to do what you can to spare us.
When we pray that prayer, we know how susceptible we are to difficult and challenging forces. And we’re saying, “We can’t control those testings by ourselves.” We’re acknowledging how dependent we are on the One who has given us life and walks with us still. And we’re saying, “We need help.” To pray this part of the prayer is to say, “We’re tremendously vulnerable, and we need you to carry us through the tunnel.” To pray this prayer is to trust.
Because the fact is that we are assaulted by lots of forces that eat away at us and diminish our common life. It’s everyday things that do this to us. If you use the word “temptation” in this culture, you most often mean food or drink. The other day, as our Lenten study group began to reflect on precisely these words, one dear angel in the group shared a freshly baked batch of mouth-watering chocolate chip cookies. From around the room came the chorus, “Lead us not into temptation.” Our prayers, though, were not enough to stop this glutton from eating at least five! And, of course we joke about cookies as a temptation, when they are really one of God’s great delights. The problem, the testing, comes when we can’t stop eating them.
But temptation is really so much bigger a matter than that. In fact, the Greek word means both “temptation” and “trial, or test.” So let’s try a definition: temptation or testing is any habit or outside force that diminishes us and our community. Sometimes “test” is the right word. They’re things that happen to us. So arthritis is a test. So is depression. And earthquakes. And collapsing economies.
Sometimes, though, the tests are related more to our own actions and attitudes and choices. When we lie or shade the truth to benefit ourselves, it’s a temptation. Giving up hope is a temptation. So are gossip and cynicism. These are things that hurt us and our friends and neighbors.
And there are others. We’re sometimes tempted to dismiss others without recognizing the full constellation of factors that make them who they are, and without seeing, perhaps, how much like them we are. Roberta Bondi, in a book she’s written about the Lord’s Prayer, talks about what a hard time she has with a man in her book group. He disrupts the class and interrupts people and controls the momentum. He drives her crazy. And then Bondi begins to realize that he is afflicted with a mental illness, that she is, in several ways, just like him, and that beneath all that bluster is a kindness and care she hadn’t really seen (A Place to Pray: Reflections on the Lord’s Prayer, pp. 122-6). “If we could read the secret history of our enemies,” said Longfellow in a passage I’ve quoted before and will again, “we should find in each [one’s] life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
The temptation is to think of ourselves as superior, and to miss the inevitable, and sometimes disturbing, ways we’re linked. So often, our temptations are to value our own desires and needs more highly than we do those with whom we share the town or the state or the world. Jennifer Herdt, a teacher at the divinity school I attended, observes that the language of the “common good” has almost disappeared from our public discourse. When, in any discussion of Ohio’s S.B. 5, or in this week’s impasse over the federal budget, do we ever hear any participant talk of the common good, the good we all share? What most distinguishes us as human beings, Herdt says, is our capacity to pursue a good larger than ourselves. “That’s a special thing about being human,” she says—“a capacity to pursue the good because it’s good and not just because it’s personally beneficial.
Human beings are capable of finding their happiness in contributing to the common good. I think people are dying to hear that” (http://www.yale.edu/divinity/notes/110404/herdt.shtml). Life is not just about whether I’m satisfied. That’s the temptation, in other words; that’s the test. No, from Jesus’ perspective, life is about whether teachers and fire fighters and unemployed people and sick people are able to thrive. It’s about a world in which everyone has what they need, a world, in other words, of justice.
It may be that the greatest temptation of all is to withdraw into our own little cocoons and stop thinking about or caring about those who have less, who struggle and hurt and break. I know my own personal prayer life can easily devolve into an almost endless focus on my own struggles and frustrations and needs. And when it does, I have failed the test. The real temptation is to think it’s all about me. It isn’t. It’s about us.
In his recent book, What’s the Least I Can Believe and Still Be a Christian, Martin Thielen tells a story about Will Campbell. Campbell, who wrote the influential Brother to a Dragonfly, served in the Second World War, and he was assigned to a medical unit on an island. “One evening, in the middle of the night, a sergeant woke Will up. They needed Will to help with an operation on a severely injured island boy. A crusty colonel from Atlanta performed the operation. Sadly the operation failed and the boy died.
“After the operation the colonel asked the sergeant, ‘What happened to the boy?’
“The sergeant told the colonel, ‘The child was a houseboy for a wealthy French planter. When the boy dropped an ashtray, the planter beat and kicked him without mercy.’
“The colonel, looking at the dead boy, said, ‘That’s a hell of a price to pay for a goddamn ashtray.’
“After they delivered the dead boy to his family, the sergeant, a devout Christian, asked Will if he would go to the chapel and pray with him. Seeing a little boy beaten to death for dropping an ashtray would motivate almost anyone to pray, so Will went with the sergeant. When they arrived at the chapel, the sergeant prayed and prayed. But amazingly, he never prayed for the dead boy, or the boy’s family, or for justice to be served to the man who murdered him. Instead, the sergeant only prayed for the colonel who had taken the Lord’s name in vain. Indeed, the sergeant seemed profoundly distressed about the colonel’s great sin.
“It flabbergasted Will that the sergeant cared more about the colonel’s cussing than he did about the tragic death of the houseboy or the gross injustice of the French planter.” That experience helped gel for Campbell the realization that faith is not just about private needs and wants—like cursing and sexual behavior. It’s also and fundamentally about “larger issues of public faith—like compassion and justice.” If we don’t see that, then, says Thielen, “we’ve missed the point of religious faith” (pp. 28-9). And, I would say we have fallen victim to a particularly heinous temptation.
Temptation is a demonic invitation to get lost in our own lives. When we pray to be freed of that testing, we are asking to be invested in the common good, invested in the wonders of our shared life. And we are trusting that God can make it happen. We are trusting that God can cut through the parochialism and narrowness of our daily desires and remind us that there is something much bigger and deeper, something steeped in a rich and holy love.
When this past Monday’s NCAA basketball championship was over, several of the losing Butler Bulldogs were mortified at their dismal performance—the worst shooting game in championship game history. Shawn Vanzant and Matt Howard, two of the team’s stalwart seniors, sobbed in the locker room, keenly aware of their own failure. So Ronald Nored, their teammate came to each of them in turn, got them out of their seat, and hugged them a long and forgiving hug. He could have blamed them for the team’s futility. He could have held their dismal performance against them. But he, and they, knew that something more important than winning a championship was to be treasured. And that was the beauty of their camaraderie, the transcendent spirit of the team. He told them he loved them. It was “collective care in the lowest and rawest of moments.” Nored put it best: “That’s what we’re here for . . . we’re here for each other. In the big picture, who really cares about basketball? It’s about the guys in this locker room. I wanted Shawn to know we don’t really care that his shot didn’t go in; we care about him” (http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/basketball/news?slug=dw-wetzel_final_four_butler_goes_down_its_way_040511).
The temptation is to be seduced by lesser things. It’s to care mostly about whether the shot goes in. It’s to give up on each other. The test is whether we can instead love and support each other in everything life brings us. It’s the greatest of all tests. And it’s the one God gives us the power to pass.