Deliver
Matthew 6:9-13
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When I was a child I thought evil lived in the attic of my house. My brother and I shared a bunk bed in the room where the attic could be accessed through a panel in the ceiling of our closet. And some nights I was so terrified that the evil that lived in our attic was going open that panel and get me that I would have trouble sleeping. To be honest I’d never been in our attic. It wasn’t that kind of house, more of a 70’s suburban home built by a developer, so the attic was nothing more than an insulated crawl space between the second-floor ceiling and the pitched shingled roof. I really hadn’t given the attic much thought until a friend of mine told me about a movie that he’d seen on cable. Cable back then wasn’t like cable today with a gazillion channels. It was the kind you got so you could watch movie channels, like HBO. And on one of those movie channels my friend had seen the 70’s horror classic, The Exorcist. What he told me, or at least what I took away from his re-telling of this story about a demonic possession was that it came from the attic. I don’t even know if that’s true. To this day I have never seen the movie because just hearing about it had me so traumatized by fear that I was convinced the evil that lived in our attic was going to get me. We used to get TV Guide at the grocery store. I know that dates me. My kids have no idea what TV Guide is. But those of you who remember it know that you’d get it every week and it would list the broadcast schedule for what would be playing on the TV stations in your local area. Sometimes there’d be a special box highlighting a movie to be shown on one of the networks with a picture and a synopsis. One day I looked in the TV Guide and saw that The Exorcist was going to be shown. I got a sick feeling in my stomach, and that night when the movie was going to be on I couldn’t get to sleep. I kept thinking that this evil thing was going to find its way into my house through the TV. It took me a long time, far longer than you might imagine, for me to shake those fears. When I finally did, I put as much distance between myself and the image of that kind of evil as I could. I was done believing in imaginary devils. But if evil doesn’t live in the attic, where does it live? Does it even exist?
In the fifth book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry finds himself at odds with the magical world. It’s a new experience for him. Up until then he’d been known in the wizarding world as, “the boy who lived,” having survived an attack as a baby from none other than the most feared dark wizard of all time, Lord Voldemort. But then he is transported to a graveyard where he witnesses the regeneration Voldemort. When he returns, he tries to tell people what he’s seen and what it might mean if Voldemort has come back. While his closest friends and teachers believe his story, no one else does. Or, rather, they don’t want to. Instead of the boy who lived, they start calling him the boy who lies. Fake news. The Ministry of Magic wages a campaign to discredit him. Why? Because they don’t want to believe it’s possible. And they don’t want to believe it because they don’t know what to do if it’s true.
There are plenty of Christian traditions that continue to practice exorcisms. None of them resemble anything like you see in the movies. That devil doesn’t really exist. At least not in that way. When I was nine and my fears of what might be in the attic were getting the better of me, my parents asked a pastor from our church to come talk to me. We sat down and he explained to me that sometimes we tell scary stories as a way of helping us deal with the scary things in our lives that we don’t know how to handle. Sometimes we talk about evil like that as a way of coming to terms with the evil we see in the world around us. I still don’t like talking about the devil. Mostly because I don’t like the way I hear other religious people talking about the devil. But what I have come to realize is that we cannot wish evil away. We cannot close our eyes and pretend that it doesn’t exist. We cannot explain it away as if it isn’t real. There is too much evidence to the contrary. Too much evidence of something malevolent that is at odds with what God intends for this creation, something that would make us slaves of our own destruction.
And so, at the conclusion of this model of prayer that Jesus gives to us, we are taught to say “Deliver us from evil,” because there is no doubt that evil exists. But there is also no doubt that when it comes to evil we are in desperate need for God to deliver us from it. It’s a good news/bad news sort of thing. We ourselves are no match for evil. That’s the bad news. But evil is no match for God. That’s the good news.
In fact, it’s the good news that lies at the heart of the story that claims us as followers of the resurrected Jesus. Much of Jesus’ ministry was spent combatting the evil around him. There are accounts of him casting out demons because that’s often what conditions like epilepsy and dissociative mental illness looked like back then. Or maybe he was simply casting out the messages that each of us carry around that speak all manner of evil about us and others, reminding us of our failures, highlighting our shortcomings, telling us in any number of ways that we are unlovable, unworthy, and unacceptable. But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He feeds multitudes, because widespread hunger when there is food enough for all is a form of evil. And he heals the sick, because disease too is a kind of evil. He challenges the entrenched religious and political powers of his day, because the corrupting effects of unchecked power that enriches itself at the expense of the vulnerable is clearly evil. And when the powers of this world come for him, he himself prays that God would deliver him from the evil that is closing in. Then he experiences the evil of one friend’s betrayal, and another friend’s denial, as he is deserted and forsaken by the rest of his friends. Lies are told. The crowd calls for his death. And he is subjected to the pain and humiliation of a Roman cross, one of the greatest manifestations of evil history has known. By sundown his lifeless body will be sealed in a tomb and evil will have had its way as it always seems to do. That’s the bad news. That’s what it feels like we’re up against every day in one form or another. Sure, it may not be as dramatic as the passion story. We don’t live in that world. But in our world we know a thing or two about the demons and voices that won’t seem to let us go. We know a thing or two about the destruction brought about by hunger, illness, and unchecked power. We also know the painful truth of our own betrayals, our own denials, our own desertions. We know that not only is evil real. We know, we see, we experience how often it has its way.
But the good news is that everything evil is capable of, all of its destructive power, corrupting influence, and insidious lies are no match for the creating, sustaining and liberating truth of God. That is the promise of resurrection; the deliverance God makes good on by raising Jesus from the dark of that tomb. When we pray, ‘deliver us from evil,’ we announce two things. First, we declare our refusal to concede the field to evil; not the evil we see in the world, nor the evil that is within us. Second, we invoke nothing less than the power of God to take those whom the world has left for dead and raise them to new life. It is an act of faith, as all prayers ultimately are, that God can be trusted to do what God has promised. And it is an act of resistance against all that would draw us down into the pit of our own destruction.
It is also an act of solidarity with every other person we encounter, because what we ask isn’t for me first, or me alone. It is a plea for God to intercede on behalf of all of us, all of humanity, the whole world that God so loves. Deliver us. It’s easy to point the finger at another person, or another party, or another religion, or another nation and declare that they are the evil ones. That’s usually how we try to deliver ourselves from evil. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel righteous. It makes us feel like we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys. It’s also how evil gets its way. Every time. But Jesus won’t let us get away with that. It’s only when we learn to pray, trust and resist the evil that not only afflicts us but that we ourselves participate in- deliver us from inequality, deliver us from racism, deliver us from nationalism, deliver us from unending war- it’s only when we learn to ask that God deliver the one we call enemy as well as the one we call friend from the evil that creates such categories in the first place, that we will ever be truly free.
There is no evil that lives in the attic, no monster lurking under our beds or in our closets. Sometimes it’s much closer than that. We can put down our phones, close our computers and turn of the TV, and it still gets in. For all that’s big, bad and scary in the world, the thing that we most need to be delivered from is the evil that continues to live in our own hearts. To be delivered from that is to know the true meaning of salvation, leaving behind everything in us that would hurt and destroy and walking toward the promise of what God makes whole and new.