"And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen."

Sermon on Sunday, October 24, 2010

Ephesians 1:3-14
Matthew 6:7-13

God doesn’t belong to us. We belong to God. That’s the sermon today, really, and I could stop there. God doesn’t belong to us. We belong to God. That would be an amazingly short sermon, though, wouldn’t it? So I suppose I’ll elaborate for at least a few more minutes…

This morning we find ourselves at the end of our sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer. And today I’m going to tackle that big chunk at the end: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever, amen.”

Again and again during this series, it has occurred to me that a world of meaning lies behind each of these little phrases in this prayer that we say together so often. On more than a few occasions, I’ve been able to imagine preaching from the Lord’s Prayer indefinitely—long enough, perhaps, to make some of you wish it wasn’t in the Bible to begin with! But once again, my hope in preaching on the Lord’s Prayer is that we find ourselves praying through it with more intentionality than ever before—that each time we begin to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven…” we can resist the temptation to set our minds on auto-pilot—that we can summon deep connections and convictions within us, and that the words of the Lord’s Prayer become for us a continuous call to think and live more vividly in our faith.

Our section of the prayer today begins with the phrase, “Lead us not into temptation,” and I’ll confess to you that it’s the part of the prayer with which I have the most trouble. “Lead us not into temptation…” I tend to think that we do just fine leading ourselves into temptation, and so I’m not sure that God needs convincing in this department. But that’s an image of God that’s really out there, isn’t it? That notion of a God who’s got the whole world hanging on the puppet strings, and God’s up there, making it all happen. Stuff happens here on earth, and it looks random and unplanned, but really God’s got it all mapped out, and minute by minute, God’s up there pulling the strings, keeping it all going.

That’s an image of God we need to get rid of, by the way—a God who doesn’t love the world, but who operates the world.

Still, the truth is that in this world that is so loved by God, temptations exist. Sometimes daily. We’re tempted by simple things—a juicy piece of gossip or a convenient lie…

But we’re also tempted by more subtle and complicated forces. Greed, envy, lust, mistrust… temptations to be something less than who we are and temptations to think of ourselves as more than who we are… Temptations to believe the worst fears we have about the world… to believe, for example, that a mosque in our neighborhood somehow poses a threat and not an opportunity for greater understanding. Temptations to think of the world as “us and them”—Christian and non-Christian, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, black and white, rich and poor…

Susan Retik and Patti Quigley both lost their husbands in the attacks of 9/11. Susan was seven months pregnant and Patti eight months pregnant, when their husbands’ planes crashed that day.

In response to their loss, they created an organization called Beyond the 11th, and since its inception, they’ve helped more than 1,000 widows from Afghanistan start businesses, including one that makes soccer balls and one that raises chickens for selling eggs. Beyond the 11th also supports, among other projects, a literacy center for Afghan women. For the past nine years, their work has grown and flourished, but here’s an amazing statistic: all of it has cost less than keeping one American soldier in Afghanistan for just eight months. (1)

The temptation for Susan and Patti might have been to believe that the world was as evil and worthless as it felt the morning their husbands’ lives were taken. The temptation might have been to live with a pervasive sense of fear and mistrust for the Muslim world. The temptation might have been to give up on any possibility of change for a world broken with violence. But in the end, these women found themselves able to believe in and hope for a world that had been unkind to them.

Sometimes temptations are so real—so overwhelming, that it’s hard to imagine life without them. And so we pray, “Lord, deliver us! Deliver us from evil.” Deliver us from our shortsightedness. Deliver us from our mistrust of others. Deliver us from fear, from hopelessness. Deliver us from our mistaken impression that love and goodness are scarce in this world. Deliver us from evil.

And that’s actually where the Lord’s Prayer ends as it appears in Matthew’s gospel. That’s the last request: deliver us. Somewhere along the line, liturgists added the phrase, “for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.” In that version of the Lord’s Prayer that we used last week in worship, we prayed, “For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and forever.”

I’d like to end our Lord’s Prayer series by simply wondering about that last word with you—forever.

Fred Craddock, a celebrated thinker and preacher in our tradition, tells this story from his own childhood. He and his father were lying in the grass in their backyard on a warm summer night. He was just a young boy then, and they were lying there, chewing on tender stems of grass, and looking up at the evening sky.

His father said to him, “Son how far can you think?”

The boy said, “What?”

“How far can you think?” his dad asked.

“Well, I don’t know what you mean,” the boy replied.

“Just think as far as you can think up towards the stars.”

The boy looked up, concentrating, and said, “I’m thinking… I’m thinking… I’m thinking…”

“Think as far as you can think,” said his dad.

“Ok. I’m thinking as far as I can think,” the boy said.

And then his dad said, “Well, drive down a stake out there now. In your mind, drive down a stake… Have you driven down the stake? That’s how far you can think.”

The young boy said, “Yes, sir.”

And then his dad said, “Now what’s on the other side of your stake?”

And the boy said, “Well, there’s more sky.”

And his dad said, “Move your stake.”

Fred Craddock says that that summer night, he and his father kept moving his stake further and further out into the night sky. “It was a crazy thing to do,” Craddock admits, “but I can never thank [my father] enough for doing it.” (2)

How far can you think? In a way, that’s the question that the Lord’s Prayer could leave us with each time we pray it. “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever…” Forever. And in some churches, they pray, “and the glory forever and ever…” Either way, forever’s quite a ways, isn’t it?

The Lord’s Prayer ends with an acknowledgement that God’s presence goes on and on and on—that a true endlessness exists when it comes to God’s power and glory.

“How good is God?” we might ask, or “How big is God’s love?”

Think about your answer to that question—“How big is God’s love?”—and put a stake there, and then ask yourself, “What’s on the other side of that stake?”

We will never get to the bottom of God’s love. It is and always will be beyond our ability to name, describe, or contain. So we could end the Lord’s prayer like this, really: “… for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, beyond our limits, beyond our perceptions, beyond our ability to fully comprehend—kingdom, power, and glory infinitely beyond all the words we can summon… amen.”

That’s the “forever” at the end of the Lord’s Prayer—a reminder of God’s nature beyond all we can name or describe.

Had Paul written the Lord’s Prayer, he might have ended it a little differently. In his letter to the Ephesians, he writes, “With all wisdom and insight, God has made known to us the mystery of his will… as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.”

That’s what we acknowledge and celebrate with our “forever” at the end of the Lord’s Prayer—our faith that at the end of it all, in the final forever, in the fullness of time, God is gathering up all things in Christ! All things! Not just the church things, not just the faithful things, certainly not just the Presbyterian things, and not even just the good things, but all things.

In the Lord’s Prayer, we acknowledge week after week that the kingdom and the power and the glory are God’s forever—and that we belong to God too—that we are infinitely part of God’s forever. Put a little more simply, the Lord’s Prayer sets forth a reminder each time we pray it. God doesn’t belong to us. We belong to God. Forever. Amen.


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1 I first read about Beyond the 11th in the 10/5/10 issue of The Christian Century, but the Century picked it up here.

2 Fred Craddock, Craddock Stories, Chalice Press, 2001