I grew up with the myth, universally absorbed but rarely argued for except by extremists with bad manners, that whites were superior. Exceptions were acknowledged, but only as exceptions that did not change the rule. Racism was one of the unspoken beliefs of my childhood culture before the Civil Rights movement rose up to challenge the great lie with the potent rhetoric of our founding documents, as in The Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Ours was not the hard and bigoted version of the myth that fueled groups like the Klan, who embarrassed us all, but the kinder and more genteel version, more condescending than outright vicious. The N-word was not used in our home, and if one of us children slipped, we were reprimanded and reminded that many of my father’s patients who received his care and paid the bills were black, though in those days we used the word Negroes, often spoken with a peculiar lilt as if we were unsure just quite how to pronounce it. Less educated and refined relatives were tolerated in their opinions but not approved of. After they left family reunions at a rural church we were gently assured, “Son, they just don’t know any better; the changes with King-and-all scares them; they’re really good people, and they will always be family.” I understood the boundaries between personal ethics and bad manners.
Since my dad was a doctor and mother a nurse, certain of their own prejudices of an earlier, more robust vintage- the 1930's and 40's, had been modified by the practice of professional compassion. They were permitted to be better in one sphere of life than in others. A little leaven, I am told, effects the whole lump. When cut, we bleed the same color blood, and when a baby is born of whatever color, there is rejoicing. Penicillin cures one as well as the other. When you listen and touch and care for all sorts of people because it is your high calling and a daily duty, it does something to you, something good.
But it was still the segregated world of two waiting rooms, and with a clear division between professional responsibilities and social life, but once in an examining room the care was the same. I saw my parents struggle with the dichotomy, and we have all grown because of changes in the culture and the deepening of our faith in Christ. Myths, by their very nature, die hard and most often have to be killed more than once. The really wicked ones, take anti-Semitism for example, have a life of their own and recycle themselves through each generation in different forms. We may be less primitive than our forebears, but we are not necessarily more morally advanced. We are surely different but not necessarily better in any absolute sense. The Christian doctrine of original sin humbles one generation after the next. We look back on slavery and the treatment of the Indians and say, “How could they?” Our children three or four generations down the corridors of time will do the same with us, though on different issues, perhaps abortion, the use of fossil fuels, and a crippling national debt. “How could they?” We see the sins of earlier generations better than our own. The biblical command to honor our fathers and mothers, and their mothers and fathers before them, is not a call to uncritical approval of the holes in their faith and the gaps in their ethics. It is a call to sift the good from the bad, the noble from the shameful, to honor through them the God who gave us life and access to this faith and its grand vision of the kingdom of God. We do not honor them by carrying on their prejudices but by letting them go.
On top of all that, we were Christians, though we most often thought of ourselves as good Methodists, and so there was always a stinging in our conscience concerning the gap between the faith we celebrated on Sundays and the myths we lived by, mostly unconsciously, the rest of the week. It had to do with what sociologists call the pressure of social location and what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, as when two contradictory ideas live uneasily in the same head, and when head and heart cannot seem to get together. It was a gap of guilty anxiety; you just knew something was wrong, something too big and fearsome to face alone, so large that if you dared speak against the myth or even voice doubts, people labeled you and distanced themselves. We were born in a prison of our ancestor’s making, and what we inherited as a legacy we maintained and serviced out of deference and the privileges it afforded till one day we heard a new and larger world was coming. It did not hurt that there were rumors out of Washington that the prison was to be dismantled and destroyed. So we packed our mental bags and moved out into a strange, new world where all were equals, at least mostly, at least on paper and at water fountains and in public accommodations. But we still thought we were better. Some still do.
The myth, and I do not hesitate to call it what it was, which is sinful and devilish, did not die all of a sudden. It was an invisible spider’s web, and once entangled it took great effort to get untangled. But it did wither steadily in my case, under the influence of desegregation in the sixth grade, of new friends forged on sports teams and in informal conversation, of an education in the liberal arts, of a late adolescent crisis conversion, of serious theological study, of exposure to world missions, and in the practice of ministry. The residues are still there, and when the myth raises its ugly head I run to Jesus for help. cannot deny my raisin’; I can get over it and move beyond it with God’s help.
I have been told on good authority that none of that old stuff will make it through the gates of heaven; it all has to be stripped away, either now or in the great purifying that stands between us and the lights of glory. All effects of sin and evil and meanness and ignorance will be left behind, and if you cling to them, then you will be left behind with them. We will be fully delivered; Christ died and rose to make it sure. Wrong behaviors and wrong ideas all have to go. Only truth and love will be allowed in that beautiful kingdom, and the more of both we have in the here-and-now, the less pain there will be in the crossing. Paul himself said that all we have done will be tested by fire.1 Not the fires of hell which are for the damned, but the fires of purging that remove all the residues of sin, all the wrong opinions and habits of the heart that stand as blocks to the grace of God. Only what is of Christ in us do we carry into the next life; everything else has to go.2 Getting rid of the crud once and for all ought to be a big relief, like having an abscess drained or a big wart removed.
A second myth that died was that this was a man’s world and should stay that way because that’s what the Bible said. Feminism, and its offshoot of Christian feminism, took care of that one a few years after the Civil Rights movement laid waste to the other. Residues are still around, but the general moral consensus in America is now that racism and sexism cannot be defended. Perhaps the same will one day be said of the national shame of abortion and of uneven access to health care. Change is slow and then sudden after pressure builds to the breaking point. Thomas Jefferson saw and stated truths he himself could not fully practice as a slave owner and parent of slaves. Like us, he saw what he could not reach, and it was up to later generations to fulfill his noble words:
“We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men (and women!) are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The ground has always been level at the foot of the cross; to seek to make it so in our national life is what striving for justice and love in the public square are all about. Having your life shaped more by the gospel than by any of the myths of the culture is what spiritual maturity is about. It is a life-long sifting process to make us useful on earth and prepared for heaven, and it is intellectually and morally painful. This message was painful to write.
A third grand myth is now under re-examination in my life, and only in the last six months has it taken on the pressure and discomfort earlier afforded the others. My political naivete is dying. I no longer believe that America is a Christian nation. It pains me to admit it. I long ago knew that the historical evidence would not support the contention, but the idea was just too attractive not to believe. It is a myth, and a most powerful one at that, perhaps because it makes such a deep appeal to the hope that perhaps we in this country are indeed the last, best hope of this world which, when you examine it, is nothing more than human pride. My guess is that this is what every great Empire has believed about itself from Egypt to Babylon to Greece to Rome to Charlemagne and on to the more recent British and American Empires. When you are on top it is easy to believe God is with you and that it will not end. But there is only one kingdom that is eternal, and it has not yet arrived, and one day the noble Stars and Stripes will take their place in the hall of great nations that had their day and faded. China may be next atop the world heap, or perhaps a revived European Union. All nations, even those with the highest ideals, are under the judgment of the coming kingdom of God, which is where we Christians place our ultimate loyalty. We love our country, but it cannot and should not have first loyalty; that would be idolatry.
Yes, I gladly admit that there are lots of Christians in our country, and that we Christians have had the decisive influence on the religious practices of the nation. We are perhaps the moral spine of the national experiment. It is hard to run for public office without giving some deference to the church and its beliefs, and we are the better for it. Some of our founders were fully Orthodox in theology, others nominal, others deists. There was a time, however, when we were officially Christian by statute, but that was in the years when we were a still an across-the-Atlantic colony of Great Britain, which is to this day formally a Christian nation in which the head of state, Queen Elizabeth, is also head of the Church of England. Despite a lapse in practice, crown and cross are still one by law in our parent nation, and that is at least part of what our rebel founders wished to be done with.
No state church in America; free-will offerings only. Worship as you wish, or not at all: you can still be a part of our national experiment. We continue to argue about the dividing line between church and state, whether it ought to be a polite picket fence or a high wall of division, but we are not a Christian nation in any meaningful sense. Our nominal civic religion and public piety consisting of the National Motto and our Pledge of Allegiance and Civic Oaths has value as glue to hold us together around a cluster of ideals and mutual respect under a sacred canopy of vague monotheism, but this nation has never officially adopted the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation or made a statement on the authority of Scripture or the two natures of Jesus Christ. Our national Scriptures are functionally not the Bible but the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Living inside such a myth and working to recover a past that never was is an interesting place to live. We Southerners are addicted to nostalgia. Choosing to lose my naivete about this matter has been painful, and I am not quite sure where it leaves me politically, perhaps in a sort of nowhere land with few friends and fellow travelers. Like you I love our freedoms and relish our national prosperity. I will work to be a good and loyal citizen. I will salute the flag and tear up at appropriate patriotic times. I am indebted to those who served and died to make it possible. I will pay taxes and pray for those in authority as Scripture instructs. I will strive to build up the common social capital that comes from love of neighbor. But do I believe we are a Christian nation? No, I do not. A powerful nation? Surely. The greatest ever? That is a question for future historians. But a Christian nation? No. There is simply too much evidence to the contrary.3
Whatever benefits the church may bring to the culture of elevated moral awareness, prophetic critique, and caring community are secondary. The goal of the church is to bear witness to the kingdom of the Father as shown in the person of the Son and sustained in the power of the Holy Spirit. That is our proper agenda, and it ought not be taken captive to serve as the chaplain of a political program of the left or the right, though at times it may side with either on a particular issue. We are our own agenda, and we the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church work cross-culturally in whatever political system we find ourselves living under.4 We are light and salt; we illumine best and preserve most when we are intensely loyal to the Lord whatever our location, be they pleasant and protected as they are here in America or intense and pressurized as they are in China and behind the veil of Islam. We are praying and looking for the kingdom of God and will settle for no earthly imitations or approximations, noble as they may first appear. We are not naive about the world in which we live. Our insights into universal sin and radical evil make us distrustful of all great promises and grand schemes to heal the wounds of this world apart from God. At our best we are content with the provision of daily bread and the gift of forgiveness received from God and extended to others. At our worst we are indeed worse because we know better.
What this means is that the focus of my hope has shifted. There was a time not long ago when I believed that if we elected the right people to office, and if we passed more laws that reflected the Christian moral vision, and that if we could just get our hands on enough of the levers of power, that we could have, if not a genuine spiritual revival, then at least a mini-moral renaissance here in America. We could again be a good people and show the nations the way forward. How naive I was, how misguided, how uneducated about the seriousness of sin and evil and how it infects all we touch, even our noblest impulses.
My theory of history is now much chastened and more modest. We are moving towards an ultimate collision with the kingdom of God, but we are not progressing towards it. It is not onward and upward till God rewards us by topping off our labors with the gift of his kingdom. When has the world been more divided or in peril than today? Condalezza Rice has, in my estimation, the toughest job in the world. Well, on second thought, the Pope has the toughest job; hers is second!
Think about it. For every advance there is a retreat. For every technological breakthrough an unintended techno-disaster. For every peace agreement a new war. Islands of near perfection surrounded by seas of need and despair. Nature itself seems to rise up and conspire against our efforts to eliminate disease and even feed people. Daily bread is still an issue for many, much less the peace that comes from forgiveness with God and one another. I am aware as never before of the insidious nature of temptation and the fact that behind the pain of this world is an organizing personality, a great fallen angel that the Bible and the Lord Jesus calls The Evil One. The prayer our Lord left us begins with the tender address of Abba Father and ends with a sober warning about The Evil One who presently rules on earth. There is a continual cosmic clashing of the kingdoms, and while the outcome is not in doubt, the church lives forever behind enemy lines as the representative of a promised new government, the rule and kingdom of God, of which we have a personal preview in Jesus Christ and a continuing view in the work of the Holy Spirit keeping the church faithful and alive around the world. The modern notion of progress is not a biblical notion but an evolutionary one. Hope is a biblical notion, not hope in us, but hope in God. We are accountable for our actions, but it is God alone who is finally responsible for what happens to this world. “This is my Father’s world” is a hymn, not yet of fact.
At times and places of God’s choosing we see the kingdom makes great surges forward as revival comes upon the church. Repentance descends with a groan and thousands are swept under the benevolent lordship of Jesus Christ through the work of faithful witnesses, anointed preaching, and by sometimes by outright miracles of healing and deliverance. John Wesley in England and Francis Asbury in America witnessed such for more than a generation. The culture is changed as popular vices become less popular and as new concerns for children and marriage and public decency emerge. Manners change. For a while the faithful are tempted to believe that they stand at the very outskirts of the kingdom of God and that the arrival of Jesus must be near. But no revival lasts for long. Forces of resistance rise up within and around us, and the raging flames of divine love flicker down to a bank of coals and once-warned hearts. Our own United Methodist Church is no longer a movement but a monument to a long-gone revival. Churches that speak more about history and tradition than about current opportunities are proof of this argument. So back to church as usual. We pray and wait and hold on and seek to be faithful in the dry places. Many grow cold towards God; the world wins for a while. We are in such a time of waiting now.
Georgetown, this city where we live and which we love, has problems, deep historical problems with generational sin that only a mass awakening could deal with. Pastors will tell you: it is hard to make disciples here. Something is wrong. And if it encourages you, something is wrong everywhere else as well. Same in Cheraw and Camden and Aiken. Only it is our responsibility to discern what is blocking the kingdom of God here and to deal with it with the appropriate spiritual weapons, the chief of which is always repentance.
I interviewed a pastor on Thursday who told me his heart aches for God to visit our town. We are still, for all our protests to the contrary, a deeply divided people, black and white, hiding behind traditions and unwilling or perhaps unable to seek the blessing of the Lord together. The beauty of the land lies defiled by the legacy of hundreds of years of enslaved bondage and by an ugly public history with prostitution about which I still hear people brag and laugh. I would not own land where slaves had worked without rededicating the land to God, praying that the centuries of bondage be forgiven, and then making some attempt at healing as directed by God. The deep effects of sin do not go away when land changes hands. Just as the blood of Abel cried from the earth, so does the sweat of generations of captives. Next Sunday evening tens of thousands of Christians will gather at Williams-Brice Stadium to repent and pray for an open heavens over our state. Perhaps a spirit of secession will be replaced by a spirit of intercession. This is kingdom politics.
Drugs and family violence are epidemic. The gap between rich and poor grows wider. If you are a good-ole-boy with a pick up and a place to hunt and a cold twelve pack in the cooler and a little sweet thing on the side, why bother with God? And if you are a rich man with a big boat and the finest whiskey and all the time in the world, why bother with God when your whole life is a vacation? And if you have so lowered your expectations in life that you are happy with a welfare check and resigned to public housing, why bother with God? There is much gospel preaching but not much gospel action in this county so far as I can see. Every time a bit of spiritual fire breaks out, it is as if someone tosses a wet blanket over it. We know the name of that someone, and his Internal Majesty’s success is a sure sign that he has a legal right to do so because of generational sin and iniquity that have never been repented of. And every pastor knows it, even if they will not speak to it out of fear.
In the past week I have heard rumors of a plan to assign a prayer minister to every block in Georgetown and another of a pastor who plans to visit the four corners of our county and there erect prayer monuments to ask God to claim our county and make a visit. The best gift God has to give any church is a set of open spiritual eyes and a sense of spiritual emptiness that drives us to prayer. Merely human schemes cannot do what needs to be done. I am not an outside critic; after eight years I am an inside observer. I am thankful for what I do see of Christian kindness and missionary service, but it is not enough to fix what ails us.
TURNING TO THE TEXT
vv. 1, 5-6 The Call To Private Prayer.
At the center of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus pointed to three spiritual disciples that keep our hearts open to the grace of God. These as ways to break from complacency and respond to God in earnest. You cannot serve the poor, engage in radical self-denial, and open your heart in prayer without being changed. Almsgiving, meaning direct aid given to the poor, helps them survive and reminds those of us with resources to give that we are poor in spirit.5 Fasting, doing without food or some other good for the sake of seeking God, reveals all the things on which we are dependent and is a guaranteed path to humility.6 But the center of the three is prayer. The principle underlying all three disciplines is that since God our Father knows what we are doing, we don’t need to show off for anyone else. It’s not about looking pious; it’s about seeking God in secret and keeping your eyes open for how God answers. Think of it as a form of Hide-and-Seek and a dare from God. Hide away and seek God. Give in secret. Fast in secret. Pray in secret. Then watch what happens, first in your own heart and then through you to others. The best reward God gives is more of himself. To move deeper into the fellowship of the Holy Trinity is the best God has.7 We seek the kingdom through the practice of the disciplines, and with it comes all we need and more. Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be yours as well.”8
Friends, when Jesus speaks about prayer, we ought to listen; he was the expert’s expert. His life was a continuous dialog with the Father as mediated by the Spirit; they were never out of communication. And the first lesson Jesus offers is that God is real and near, that God listens, that God knows what you need before you ask, that God loves the sound of his children’s voices and wants to hear from you. Don’t make prayer a show; even if you pray in public, as Jesus often did, make sure you are speaking to God and not preaching to others. Get alone with God. Go into a closet if you have to, “shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” Not all Jews prayed the way Jesus criticized, but some did, enough for his caricature and cartoon to register. When I examine my prayers I am embarrassed to admit how hurried and thoughtless they often are. It stung my conscience to read the words of Wilbur Rees:
“I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please, not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don't want enough of him to make me love a black man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.”9
Jesus participated in the worship of his people in the synagogue and temple. He was not against formal, liturgical prayer. What we call the Lord’s Prayer is Jewish through and through; every word has parallels in written Jewish prayers of the day. Jesus knew them by heart, but prayer in common must be complimented by prayer in solitude where God probes the conscience apart from the social pressure of being with people. In silence, in secret, seeking to open the heart to God and learning to listen for his voice. And don’t think that you have to use lots of words; silence is OK. It’s not like a slot machine where you keep feeding in quarters hoping to hit the mother load. God is not like that. That’s how pagans pray, first to this god and then that goddess, using flowery language and hoping to get someone’s attention in the divine realm. No, you are speaking to your Father in heaven, and heaven is not long distance; it’s always a local call. So if prayer is not to impress others, and if it’s not like pulling the lever and hoping for three of a kind, how do you pray? What prayer fits both who God is and what we need? “Pray then like this....,” he said. Knowing perfectly well who we are and how easily we are distracted, Jesus did not leave prayer to something as ephemeral as feelings or whim. He gave a pattern of words to start with.
A man once asked his pastor, “Can you teach me to pray?”
“Of course,” the pastor answered, “Do you know the Lord’s Prayer?”
“Yes,” the man replied a bit disappointed, “I can say it in ten seconds flat.”
“Pray it slowly,” the pastor said, “very slowly.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s it,” said the preacher and went back to his reading.
The man nodded a bit bewildered and left. A week later he came back. The pastor asked, “How are you doing.”
“I’ve been stuck all week on the word Father.”
“Good,” said the pastor, “then you are beginning to learn to pray.”
vv.7-15 The Lord’s Prayer And A Forgiveness Footnote.
You may never have considered it such, but prayer is a profoundly political act and perhaps the ultimate protest against the way things are. Behind it are a whole array of philosophical and religious commitments. The visible world is not all there is; naturalism and physicalism are not sufficient explanations. Their error is not in what they affirm but in what they deny. There is another realm called heaven that is above and beyond and different and invisible except by divine revelation.10 It is another level of creation at least as diverse as this one, chock full of immense ranks of angels and the communion of all the saints across all of time; it is realm where God dwells and where the divine will is unchallenged. We confess our faith in this parallel reality in the first line of the Nicene Creed, “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, creator of all things visible (the earth) and invisible (the heavens).” In prayer we address another world using analogies from this one, and the best metaphor is parental, “Our Father.” Not my Father, though that is true, but our Father. The one who prays this prayer alone is still bound to the community of the church.
Now a close reading of Scripture and of Jewish and Christian teaching yields the insight that God is beyond the distinctions of gender because God is holy and other and not part of creation.11 To call God Father does not mean that God is male. Male gods in the ancient world all had girlfriend gods, and from their unions came creation, which is one of the basic distinctions between ancient and modern paganisms and biblical theism. Maternal images of love are also used of God in the Bible.12 God’s love is best understood as the best of both father love and mother love. Then why not call God Mother as some radicals wish to do in our day for political reasons to balance out power in the church? Because the Bible is very concerned about this idea called transcendence, that the holy God is not to be confused with creation.
We experience our fathers as more distant than our mothers. For nine months we are literally part of our mother’s body; what she brings forth is a part of and extension of herself. If it happens to her during gestation, then it happens to you. And if that becomes the analogy for the relationship of God to the world, if God our Mother brings us forth as an extension of herself, then guess what? You are a part of God, and therefore the religious quest is not to reach out for the God who is other than you are but to discover your own deity within. Pantheism, the world view that all creation is a part of God, is the result of this line of thought. Pantheism and paganism go together to erase the Creator/creation distinction. The Bible uses Father language, not because God is male, but to preserve the distinction between God and what God has made.13 Everything in creation is made good, but nothing is divine.
The God of the Bible is near and dear, but also holy and transcendent and not to be confused with anything in creation. Father language is theologically and philosophically important; it is the way Jesus himself spoke in prayer; it is the way he taught us to pray; with the Son it is the core metaphor of the Trinity; it is a bulwark against a return to paganism; and it is the baptismal formula of the ecumenical church across time. To play with it in order to change it, as the Presbyterians have recently voted to do, and as many United Methodists would like to do at the next General Conference, is in fact to create another religion and to move out of the central stream of Christian faith. It is the doorway to apostasy, which is the abandonment of the faith. Once the distinction between Creator and creation is lost, all sorts of other distinctions begin to be blurred, like the complimentary nature of male and female. It is no accident that the same General Assembly that approved incorporating mother language into the Trinity also made room for local option on the ordination of non-celibate homosexuals and heterosexuals. With the Episcopalians and Presbyterians we are witnessing the fracturing of Protestant intellectual and cultural leadership along clearly theological lines. And the issues are either faithfulness of cultural capitulation. Father is the self-naming God has chosen and revealed. It is not against women or their full participation in the life of the church, though it has sometimes been misused for that purpose; it is against the perennial human temptation to forget who the holy God is and to create God in our own image.
The primary purpose of the church and thus of it own politics is to continue pointing to God first. The first concern of the Lord’s Prayer is not our needs, pressing as they are, but God’s glory. That God’s name as Father be worshiped as holy, that God’s kingdom descend to set the earth right, and that God’s will be carried out in every sphere. What we are praying for is simply more of what we have already seen in Jesus, because he was the only who always honored his Father’s name; he was the one who showed us what the kingdom looked like, and he was the one who always did the Father’s will. These are not so much three petitions as three renditions of one petition, that God in fact be God, not just in heaven where everything is fine but down here on the earth where pain is everywhere and God’s agenda always contested. The primary political agenda of the church is to name God properly as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and to cry out from behind enemy lines for divine help. Come down, O God! Have mercy, O God! Send your Spirit and your power and your holy angels, O God! Help us from on high! A church that does not major in the work of praise and prayer is simply not doing its job! Our greatest gift to the world is not our good works but our constant prayer and worship.
Our first response is not to act but to pray. You and I live in a psychologically self-obsessed and narcissistic culture where everything is about us and our needs and our self-esteem and how we feel about things and what we want and how we think things should be done, and the church of Jesus Christ is a grand protest against such indulgence in the cult of the sovereign self. We are not the center of the universe; God is! God first: God’s holy name and fine reputation, God’s kingdom rule, God’s effective will. Worship as entertainment and worship as group counseling and therapy is a part of this trend. Jesus said our heavenly Father’s concerns must be first, and that only in first loving God do we begin to have the proper perspective to love the neighbor and the self.
If you wanted the beginnings of a Christian anthropology, a doctrine on what it means to be a human being, you must start with the fact that we are created to pray, to address this God, “Our Father, who art in heaven....” Prayer is the most human act of which we are capable. And when we have addressed God as God wishes to be addressed, good things begin to happen. We look back on our common human condition through a new set of lenses, and here is what we see. First, that we are frail creatures, all of us, dependent on topsoil and seed and soil and pollination and climate and rain and farmers and bakers and finally the end product bread to sustain us. Physical hunger for bread and social hunger for someone to eat it with are as basic and you can get. We are not self-sustaining or self-made. We are creatures who stand between a few miles of atmospheric oxygen above us and few inches of topsoil beneath our feet, both of which deserve thoughtful conservation. This a profoundly ecological first petition. And when you make the appeal for daily bread, you are asking for the blessing of God on the whole cycle of production and committing yourself to do what you can to eliminate hunger. And if ever you eat without first bowing your head, you simply do not understand your world and who sustains it. I like what Martin Luther wrote in answer to the question, What is meant by daily bread?
“Everything that belongs to the support and wants of the body, such as meat, drink, clothing, shoes, house, homestead, field, cattle, money, goods, a pious spouse, pious children, pious servants, pious and faithful magistrates good government, good weather, peace, health, discipline, honor, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.”14
The second thing to know about human beings is that we all come to life with the same spiritual disease of rebellion against God, the name for which is sin, which in this case
means that we owe debts to God and one another we cannot hope to set right. Clara Null had just finished a Sunday School lesson on on Christian behavior. "Now, Billy," she asked, "tell me what we must do before we can expect to be forgiven for our sins."
Without hesitation, Billy replied, "First we gotta sin."15
No one has to teach us that; it comes hard-wired to all born outside Paradise, which is all of us. What we have to learn is how to name sin for what it is in God’s eyes, and to receive and extend mercy to one another. Not I apologize or I’m sorry, true as that might be; both are weak substitutes for the real thing which requires the biblical language of I sinned against God and you, and, Will you forgive me and work with me to heal the breach that is between us? If it is withheld, we have another problem, and if it is granted, then we have to work at building back the bridges we have burned. Nothing brings freedom like the forgiveness God gives that we are commanded to pass on. More Christians are spiritually stuck at this point than anywhere else, which is why verses 14 through 15 were added as a sobering footnote. With daily bread we live in plenty, and with forgiveness we live in peace. Peace and plenty; isn’t that the political dream of world and its diplomats and social engineers? But is it enough to deal with the depth of the human condition? No, it is not because there is one more petition that requires an intellectual conversion of sorts. We all know about temptation, with the magnetic lure to do what is wrong. Jesus reminds us that we are not to play with such but to ask God for protection lest we give in. You can never be caught in a place you don’t visit, and to see how close you can get without crossing the line or getting burned is sheer foolishness. There is one who has your temptation profile and is planning at this moment to lure you in and take you down. Study spiders and you will learn much about how the Tempter lures in his prey.
Because the Greek noun for evil can be read as a neuter, thus deliver us from evil as an abstract concept, or as a masculine, thus deliver us from the Evil One, there has been confusion about the last petition. The Orthodox use the later and the Western churches the former. Both are grammatically possible, but since Jesus had such a vivid understanding of the One whose territory he was invading, I opt for the translation The Evil One, primarily for the reason that it is so utterly offensive to modern sensibilities. Jesus believed in the devil; so did John Wesley; so does Pastor Phil, and for two reasons: the Bible tells me he is real, and secondly, because I have done business with him, first as a friend and now as an enemy.
It is not enough to work for bread and against hunger, and for peace and against strife unless you acknowledge that we are up against not just human cussedness but up against invisible spiritual wickedness of the most malignant type. God and the saints and the good angels are not the only inhabitants of the invisible realm. The prayer that begins with Our Father who art in heaven ends on a note of great moral and spiritual sobriety with a plea for protection from the Evil One. We need daily bread; we need to receive and extend continual forgiveness, and we need protection from evil, both within and without. Knowing our physical and relational and spiritual vulnerability, we cry to our Father to bring the kingdom and rescue us all. This is the large and global and cosmic politics of the kingdom of God. This is how Jesus would have us pray; it is the truth about God and the truth about us.
CONCLUSION
Thinking of ourselves as a Christian nation is a pleasant illusion under which all kinds of mischief can find a home. I wish it was true. So may God bless America, land that I love, but may God also protect the church and keep before us the politics of the kingdom of God.
1. I Corinthians 3:10-15.
2. For a possible Protestant reading of purgation at death, see Jerry Walls, “Purgatory for Everyone,” First Things 122, April 2002, 26-30.
3. Two books that have pushed me over the edge on this issue are Gregory Boyd, The Myth of a Christian Nation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005) and George Hunter III, Christian, Evangelical & Democrat (Nashville, TN: Abington, 2006).
4. The four classic marks of the church from the Nicene Creed.
5. Matthew 6:1-4.
6. Matthew 6:16-18.
7. For a development of this idea, see Stephen Seamands, Ministry In The Image Of God: The Trinitarian Shape Of Christian Service (Downer’s Grove, ILL: IVP, 2005).
8. Matthew 6:33
9. PreachingToday.com search under Mt. 6:5-15.
10. For a fresh treatment by a first class Christian intellectual historian, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Paradise Mislaid (Oxford University Press, 2006).
11. The U.M. Articles of Religion, Article I—Of Faith in the Holy Trinity: “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body or parts (italics added), of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the maker and preserver of all things, both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there are three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
12. Among them Is. 42:14, 49:15, 66:13, Lk. 13:34b.
13. For treatments of this position, see Elizabeth Achtemeier, “Exchanging God for ‘No Gods’: A Discussion of Female Language for God,” in Alvin Kimel, Jr., editor, Speaking the Christian God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992); Charles Talbert, Reading the Sermon on the Mount (Columbia, SC: University Press, 2004), 112-114; Barry Callen, Discerning the Divine (Louisville, KY: WJK, 2004), 50-57.
14. Quoted in Dale C. Allison, The Sermon On The Mount (New York: Herder & Herder, 1999), 125.
15. PreachingToday.com search under Mt. 6:5-15.