Deliverance From Evil
Herb Montgomery | October 19, 2018
“What does it mean to be delivered from economic oppression and ecological oppression as well? The U.N. reported this last week that we have only twelve years left to address climate change, and if we don’t we face dire consequences.”
“And lead us not into the time of testing, but deliver us from evil.” (Matthew 6:13)
As we wrap up our look at what we call the Lord’s Prayer, I want to begin with a story of a dear West Virginian woman, her children, and her husband in context of deliverance from evil. There is a type of coal mining here in West Virginia called mountain top removal. It’s legal here and is happening in much of the southwestern region of the state. Many of our elected representatives are financially supported by coal mine owners who profit from how those representatives structure our laws. This is the story of a family involved in trying to change these laws. Listen to how the mother of this family tells her story:
“Coal miners work in the coal mines because they have no other choice, others because they enjoy that type of work. Most coal miners have college degrees in many things, yet Coal mining is the only thing we have to offer them.
My husband has a degree in electronics engineering and 1080 [credit hours] in industrial electronics, but his only choice was to become a Coal miner. He worked in the mines for two years, the toll it took on his body… that was heartbreaking. When he would come home from work he looked like death in the face. He worked twelve hours a day six days a week — the kids and I only saw him on Saturdays and half a day on Sundays. His skin was stained black, he coughed constantly as if he had the flu.
I was 8 months pregnant with our son the day the UBB mine disaster happened. I had laid down to take a nap. When I got up my cell phone had 10 missed calls and 20 text messages on it. The calls and messages were from my two oldest daughters and my sister, asking if my husband was working. I called my 15-yr-old first and asked what was wrong. She was in a total panic and crying wanting to know if her step-dad was ok, that a mine just blew up and 12 (at the time) miners were trapped. The news didn’t report which mine or [its] location until later. When I informed her he was ok and was getting ready for work, she responded ‘NO, do not let him go back to work mommy, Please!’ I got her to calm down then called my 19-yr-old and got the same response. ‘Mommy, please don’t let him go.’ It broke my heart in two knowing he had to go to work to pay bills and take care of our babies. But what hurt the most was the fear and heartbreak that my children were feeling.
Anyway, I turned on CNN and started to watch the heartbreaking events unfold. I knew that come 9:00 pm my miner would be walking out the door to go to work. But somehow this night was different than all the other nights I told him goodbye. I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I had never felt before in my life. The mining pay was great, it gave us tons of nice things and plenty of money to provide for our family. But at that moment, I didn’t care if we had a dime in the bank and had to live in a tent. I was sending the love of my life, my best friend and my children’s father out the door not knowing if he would ever be back. He was killing his body and he was risking his life to provide us with worldly things, things that could be replaced. After he left, I sat and watched CNN until daylight waiting on his morning call letting me know he was coming home. Thank God in heaven I received that call.
As the evening went on I continued to watch the events at UBB unfold. As I watched the [miners’] families standing, praying and waiting on the news of their miner, it broke my heart. I will never forget the look on one young man’s face when a reporter [asked] him how he was feeling (stupid question). His response was ‘it feels like I’m getting punched over and over in the stomach.’ I knew at that moment, I didn’t want my son or daughters to ever experience that feeling… Two days later, he decided to leave the mines.
It has been 8 months now since he quit, we are all doing fine. We may not have as much money as before, but we do have the most important thing to our family and that’s DADDY!
I just wish our elected officials would see that West Virginia’s most valuable resource is our Miners themselves and not the Coal. But I’m afraid that they will continue to fight for the Coal Barons’ wallets and the campaign funding, as long as they ‘Keep Them in the Coal’ our politicians will be fine. Please keep our West Virginia Coal Miners in your thoughts and prayers. Never forget the ones we have lost in Sago, UBB and other places.” (Source)
Jesus envisioned a world where people were valued over profit, property and power. That’s where this week’s portion of the Lord’s Prayer comes in.
This is a prayer for liberation. This week’s portion of the prayer begins with “Lead us, not into the time of testing.”
A time of testing was a familiar concept in the Jewish tradition.
“Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.” (Deuteronomy 8:2, cf. Exodus 16:4, Ecclesiastes 3:18, Isaiah 48:10, and Zechariah 13:9)
In the Psalms we read:
“Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness, where your ancestors tested me; they tried me, though they had seen what I did.” (Psalms 95:8-9, emphasis added., cf. Psalms 106:14)
It seems from these passages that in the Jewish tradition both humans and God could be tested. Yet, regardless of who was testing whom, people in Jesus’ day understood the idea of a time of testing. First century Zealots (see Faith Like a Mustard Seed) also used this phrase.
Josephus tells us how how the zealots used this idea of a test for one’s faith. He writes of incidents during the mid-1st Century, when revolutionary prophets/zealots would lead large groups of people into a desert outside Jerusalem on the premise that, if they took the first step, if they submitted to testing, God would see their faith and respond by bringing them liberation from Roman oppression.
Felix, the Roman procurator, regarded these gatherings as the first stage of revolt, and so sent cavalry and heavy infantry to cut the mob into pieces (see Josephus, The Jewish War, p. 147). The most infamous of the revolutionary prophets who promised the people reward if they would first step out in faith (the test) was a militaristic messiah referred to as “the Egyptian” (Acts 21:38).
Josephus describes the event as follows:
“Arriving in the country, this man, a fraud who posed as a seer, collected about 30,000 dupes, led them round from the desert to the Mount of Olives and from there was ready to force an entry into Jerusalem, overwhelm the Roman garrison, and seize supreme power with his fellow-raiders as bodyguard.” (Josephus, The Jewish War, p. 147)
Josephus believed the future of the Jewish people depended on the elites collaborating with Rome rather than rebelling against Rome. Most scholars think he exaggerated the numbers of people involved: “30,000 dupes” as compared with the book of Acts’ “4,000 assassins.” But the fact that he mentions the event at all is important. In a parallel account, Josephus includes the “sign” that this rebel had claimed would be shown to the people if they passed the test of going out to assemble. It was supposed to be a sign like Joshua’s at the Battle of Jericho: at his command, the walls of Jerusalem would fall down so that his followers could enter and seize the city. However, before he could make his signal, the Roman cavalry and infantry slew and captured hundreds and put the rest to flight, including the militaristic messiah himself. (Josephus, Antiquities, pp. 170-172). Liberation prophets like the Egyptian framed the people’s act of taking an initiative despite hopeless odds as a test of faith that their God would honor with liberation from Rome.
Jesus grew up in Galilee in the wake of a similar destruction that Rome had wrought on revolutionaries in Sepphoris. I believe this played a role in Jesus seeking a different path toward liberation than violence, one that incorporated the best odds of survival and would not just be about the liberation of Jerusalem, Galilee or Judea, but also be about an end to socio-political structures of domination for humanity as a whole.
Gustavo Gutiérrez writes about this at length:
“This universality and totality touch the very heart of political behavior, giving it its true dimension and depth. Misery and social injustice reveal ‘a sinful situation,’ a disintegration of fellowship and communion; by freeing us from sin, Jesus attacks the roots of an unjust order. For Jesus, the liberation of the Jewish people was only one aspect of a universal, permanent revolution. Far from showing no interest in this liberation, Jesus rather placed it on a deeper level, with far-reaching consequences. The Zealots were not mistaken in feeling that Jesus was simultaneously near and far away. Neither were the leaders of the Jewish people mistaken in thinking that their position was imperiled by the preaching of Jesus, nor the oppressive political authorities when they sentenced him to die as a traitor. They were mistaken (and their followers have continued to be mistaken) only in thinking that it was all accidental and transitory, in thinking that with the death of Jesus the matter was closed, in supposing that no one would remember it. The deep human impact and the social transformation that the Gospel entails is permanent and essential because it transcends the narrow limits of specific historical situations and goes to the very root of human existence: relationship with God in solidarity with other persons. The Gospel does not get its political dimension from one or another particular option, but from the very nucleus of its message. If this message is subversive, it is because it takes on Israel’s hope: the Kingdom as ‘the end of domination of person over person; it is a Kingdom of contradiction to the established powers and on behalf of humankind.’ And the Gospel gives Israel’s hope its deepest meaning; indeed it calls for a ‘new creation.’ The life and preaching of Jesus postulate the unceasing search for a new kind of humanity in a qualitatively different society. Although the Kingdom must not be confused with the establishment of a just society, this does not mean that it is indifferent to this society. Nor does it mean that this just society constitutes a “necessary condition” for the arrival of the Kingdom nor that they are closely linked, nor that they converge. More profoundly, the announcement of the Kingdom reveals to society itself the aspiration for a just society and leads it to discover unsuspected dimensions and unexplored paths. The Kingdom is realized in a society of fellowship and justice; and, in turn, this realization opens up the promise and hope of complete communion of all persons with God. The political is grafted into the eternal. This does not detract from the Gospel news; rather it enriches the political sphere. Moreover, the life and death of Jesus are no less evangelical because of their political connotations. His testimony and his message acquire this political dimension precisely because of the radicalness of their salvific character: to preach the universal love of the Father is inevitably to go against all injustice, privilege, oppression, or narrow nationalism.” (Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: 15th Anniversary Edition, pp. 134-135, emphasis added.)
Jesus promoted a path toward liberation that parted ways with the methods of the Zealots and the elite Sadducees who wanted to cooperate with Rome hoping for greater representation in a system of exploitation. Jesus presented a restructuring of the norms we use to interact with one another, and at the heart of these new norms was a preferential option for the vulnerable, exploited, and marginalized.
“What does it mean for Jesus’ followers today to follow that path? What does it mean for coal mining families here in West Virginia to be delivered from the evil of corporate oppression where the owners continue to gain more and more while the majority of the people struggle without being able to make ends meet? What does it mean to be delivered from economic oppression and ecological oppression as well? The U.N. reported this last week that we have only twelve years left to address climate change, and if we don’t we face dire consequences. A prayer for deliverance from evil also has its application for the evil of bigotry that many in the LGBTQ face. We might expect to be delivered from the evils of racism, sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, and more.”
Jesus, whose teachings we follow, stood in the Jewish tradition that traced its roots all the way back to the liberation story of Moses’s alignment with toiling masses of slaves. So what is our work, today?
What injustice or evil are you staring at this week?
What does it mean to work toward deliverance from evil in your context?
What does it meant to work in solidarity with other communities affected most deeply by these evils as they also work toward their deliverance?
I’ll close this week with a statement by Dorothy Day that encourages me when I feel like our small efforts are insignificant, and I feel like a world structured in a way that answers Jesus’ prayer in Matthew is so far, far away:
“One of the greatest evils of the day is the sense of futility. Young people say, ‘What can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort?’ They cannot see that we can only lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform these actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.” (Catholic Worker, September 1957)
This week choose something to do, no matter how large or small, that aligns with Jesus’ prayer in Matthew:
“And lead us not into the time of testing, but deliver us from evil.” (Matthew 6.13)
HeartGroup Application
Sharing our stories is how we heal the world. Hearing one another’s stories empowers us to let go of our fear of one another and enter into compassion. Listening to the diverse experiences of one another’s lives leads us to replace insecurity with a much broader understanding of each other and our larger world.
1. This week I want you to take some time in your HeartGroup and let those who wish to share tell their story to the group.
2. We here at Renewed Heart Ministries also want to hear your story. We are asking our followers to share their stories with us. How has this ministry impacted your life for the better? How have you been blessed by Renewed Heart Ministries? How has journeying alongside RHM inspired you or made a difference for you? We want to hear your story! And if you give us permission, we may feature your story in one of our upcoming newsletter issues so your story can help others, too! (But only if you give us permission.) Send your story of how you have been positively impacted by the ministry of Renewed Heart Ministries by emailing info@renewedheartministries.com.
3. Consider making story-telling a part of HeartGroup experience on some type of ongoing basis, either monthly, quarterly, or even weekly.
We believe every person’s story matters and every person’s voice has value. The Jesus of the gospels spent the majority of his time teaching by telling stories. Author Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees) states, “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”
I’m looking forward to hearing from you, with much gratitude and excited anticipation.
Also, don’t forget about our Share Table Fundraiser for the month of October. Find out how you can participate and get your own Share Table Pottery Bowl as representation of Jesus’ shared table philosophy of doing life together. If someone wanted to actually use it, they by all means could. Each time you eat from your bowl or use it as a serving dish, you can be reminded of Jesus’ shared table, mutual aid, and philosophy of resource sharing as a means of restructuring our communities and healing the hurts in our world. You can also place it on your coffee table or desk at work as a conversation starter. When asked about it you can share with them about the Shared Table philosophy, and even direct them to Renewed Heart Ministries to find out more. That way you can partner with us in even more ways to spread the message of love, compassion, justice, sharing and taking care of one another.
Find out more here: A Shared Table: A Fundraiser for RHM
Thanks for checking in with us with week. Keep living in love, resistance, survival, liberation, reparation and transformation.
Another world is possible.
I love each of you dearly,
I’ll see you next week.
God the Father, Exclusive Othering, and a Distributive Justice for All
Herb Montgomery | September 21, 2018
“And if Amos were alive this week, he might have said, ‘I hate, I despise your endless religious statements that make you feel pious, protecting your phobias about those whose experiences in life are so different than your own. Away with your worthless statement and drafted expressions of bigotry. Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!’”
“This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’” (Matthew 6:9-13)
This week, we begin a series of articles on Jesus’ revolutionary prayer in Matthew’s gospel, the prayer we label today as “the Lord’s prayer.” This prayer frames an outline we can use to consider the themes in Jesus’ teachings in Matthew’s gospel. There’s much in it that I believe speaks to our work today of survival, resistance, liberation, reparation, and transformation.
The outline of this prayer is:
Our Father in Heaven:
Be hallowed Your Name
Be come Your Kingdom
Be done Your Will
As in Heaven, so on Earth:
Daily Bread
Debt Cancellation
Deliverance from temptation to evil
Those are the themes that we’ll be looking at. Now, let’s dive right in.
Our Father in Heaven
Historically, the exclusive image of God as “Father” has borne bad fruit for those who are neither male nor fathers. Some in the dominant social position have weaponized it against those whose differences are “Othered” and then dominated, exploited, and destroyed them. One example aptly laid out by Grace Ji-Sun Kim is how these images of God have been used against Asian American women. In her book Embracing the Other: The Transformative Spirit of Love, she writes:
“As a poor Jewish peasant teacher from Nazareth, Jesus was marginalized and stood in solidarity with the marginalized throughout the Roman Empire. Jesus’ incarnate life, kingdom teaching, and crucifixion on a Roman cross unveil God as a lover of justice, peace, and liberation.
While Jesus was a revolutionary, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, Jesus becomes reimagined as a supporter of empire. Classical theism in the West often emphasizes God as an Almighty Father. This patriarchal concept of God has often been wielded in destructive ways throughout the history of Western Christianity. Through European colonization, too often guided by a patriarchal image of God, indigenous cultures have been dominated and destroyed, Africans have been enslaved, Asians exploited, women have been abused, and the poor have been economically exploited. The male God image mediated through the Almighty Father has often had negative conscious and unconscious effects on women, especially women of color. God the Almighty Father has often been a theological tool used by white men of European descent to subjugate woman and people of color.” (p. 116)
This title for God, “Almighty Father,” has proven extremely vulnerable to being coopted by sexism, racism, colonialism, imperialism, and binary heterosexism for the abuse of those who, though not male and not fathers, are nonetheless bearers of the image of the Divine. For many, the phrase “Our Father” in such a transformative prayer as this is not an appropriate place to begin but a trigger of pain and suffering.
But for those also dedicated to contemplating and following the teachings of Jesus, this first portion of this prayer presents no small challenge. After all, Jesus was Jewish, and Jewish tradition encourages practicing care with picturing God in one’s mind’s eye. In the Torah we read,
Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3:13-14)
This cryptic description of the Divine within the Hebrew sacred scriptures provides for a universality in bearing the image of the Divine. “I am who I am” is left cryptically defined. The question could be asked, “Who are you?” We must practice caution against answering the question definitely, for any word that comes next will undoubtedly limit the Divine.
There is a rich diversity within the human race. And to believe that all of humanity, every member of the human family, all of our human siblings, are made in the image of God speaks to the rich complexity of God, too (See Genesis 1:26). Our concept of the Divine must become more expansive and inclusive. It is okay to speak of God as male and as female. It’s okay to speak of God as nonbinary and ungendered, too! God is not just White, but also Black, Asian, and more. God has traditionally been defined within the imagery of heteropatriarchy. We must be careful to allow every person to see themselves reflected in an expansive image of the Divine because “in the image of God has God made humankind.” (Genesis 9:6). And to the degree we exclude anyone from God’s image today, history shows we will exterminate them tomorrow.
There are many ways to respond to this in prayer. Some of those who understand and practice this way of addressing the Divine in prayer use “Mother-Father God” or “Paternal God.” I’ve prayed, “Dearest Heart at the Center of the Universe.” I’ve also heard “Source of Light and Love,” “God of all nations,” “God of all peoples,” “Faithful One,” “Source of Wisdom,” or “Source of Goodness, Grace, Mercy and Justice.” On June 22, 2017, Rev. Kevin Kitrell Ross, addressed his prayer in the U.S. House of Representatives to the “Loving Presence,” and concluded with “In the name of a love supreme we pray.”
The Jewish tradition seems to encourage not limiting God with our images of Divinity:
“You saw no form of any kind the day the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire. Therefore watch yourselves very carefully, so that you do not become corrupt and make for yourselves an idol, an image of any shape, whether formed like a man or a woman, or like any animal on earth or any bird that flies in the air, or like any creature that moves along the ground or any fish in the waters below.” (Deuteronomy 4:15-18)
I will admit that the authors’ intent in this passage was most likely to discourage people from using creation as any kind of referent at all, but I would also argue that this passage, therefore, leaves our image of the Divine as cryptic which also allows for an expansive and inclusive imaging that embraces the rich diversity of everyone. Jesus’ Jewish tradition would have given him sufficient grounds to have addressed his prayer in much more inclusive ways.
So why does this prayer in Matthew begin with “Father”?
We cannot ignore the reality that, like many of the cultures around it, Jesus’ culture was deeply patriarchal. Householders were almost exclusively men. Householders were “fathers.” In rare exceptions, widowed women might become householders.
But there are some hints of another worldview in the rest of the prayer. It is a deeply economic prayer. Of all the things Jesus could teach his followers to pray for, he teaches them here to pray for enough bread for today, for all indebtedness to be forgiven in Jubilee fashion, and for liberation from evil as a violation from Israel’s covenant with YHWH. I believe, given the other content of this prayer, that deliverance from temptation to evil could have been a direct reference to the way the rich were exploiting the poor in violation of the economic teachings of the Torah.
“However, there need be no poor people among you, for in the land the LORD your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the LORD your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today.” (Deuteronomy 15:4-5)
But back to our quest for understanding this prayer’s address, “Our Father.” Given that this prayer is grounded in economic realities, and in the Jewish patriarchal family the father was the householder, the one responsible for ensuring no one in the family had too much while others didn’t have enough, John Dominic Crossan offers this fitting and possible explanation:
“[The prayer’s] vision derives from the common experience of a well-run home, household, or family farm. If you walked into one, how would you judge the householder? Are the fields well tended? Are the animals properly provisioned? Are the buildings adequately maintained? Are the children and dependents well fed, clothed, and sheltered? Are the sick given special care? Are responsibilities and returns apportioned fairly? Do all have enough? Especially that: Do all have enough? Or, to the contrary, do some have far too little while others have far too much?
“It is that vision of the well-run household, of the home fairly, equitably, and justly administered, that the biblical tradition applies to God. God is the Householder of the world house, and all those preceding questions must be repeated on a global and cosmic scale. Do all God’s children have enough? If not—and the biblical answer is “not”—how must things change here below so that all God’s people have a fair, equitable, and just proportion of God’s world? The Lord’s Prayer proclaims that necessary change as both revolutionary manifesto and hymn of hope. Do not, by the way, let anyone tell you that is Liberalism, Socialism, or Communism. It is—if you need an -ism—Godism, Householdism or, best of all, Enoughism. We sometimes name that biblical vision of God’s World-Household as Egalitarianism but, actually, Enoughism would be a more accurate description.” (John Dominic Crossan, The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer, p. 3).
Given the cultural context as well as the content fo the rest of the prayer, it could be synonymous to pray, “Our Householder in Heaven.” And Jesus’ point is that the will of the World Householder is that everyone have enough. Within a Jewish worldview, the responsibility for carrying out that will has been delegated to humans. We have to ask ourselves what kind of world have we made with this responsibility. Jesus is calling for a community of people (the Kingdom) to come into being where the distributively just will of the World Householder is actually carried out. This is a prayer, within the contradiction of a patriarchal culture, that calls for an economic, distributive justice. How this prayer begins may still remain deeply problematic for many. But the prayer still offers us much. There is much to reclaim and to renew our hearts as we continue to work today toward a world that is safe, distributively just, and compassionate for everyone.
The God who Jesus pictured for his listeners was a God who causes the sun and rain to fall on all indiscriminately. So if someone is going without, we have to look for the obstruction. It’s being “sent” to all, so who and what are preventing what we need for thriving from reaching all? As is often been stated, there is enough each day for every person’s need, but not for every person’s greed. In teaching this, Jesus was accessing his Jewish tradition:
“The poor and the oppressor have this in common: The LORD gives sight to the eyes of both.” (Proverbs 29:13)
“Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.” (Proverbs 30:8)
This distributive justice spoken of by Jesus also has its roots in the way the Hebrew prophets spoke truth to power.
“I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:21-24)
Crossan again notes, “the primary meaning of ‘justice’ is not retributive, but distributive. To be just means to distribute everything fairly. The primary meaning of ‘justice’ is equitable distribution” (dIbid., p. 2). This was the great Hebrew hope of a distributive justice whose fruit would be peace.
“Of the greatness of his government and peace
there will be no end.
He will reign on David’s throne
and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
with justice [distributive] and righteousness.” (Isaiah 9:7)
“The fruit of that righteousness [distributive] will be peace;
its effect will be quietness and confidence forever.” (Isaiah 32:17)
Amos names the error of prioritizing religious ritual over concern for justice, especially justice for the vulnerable. Two weeks ago now, the same group of evangelicals that produced The Nashville Statement last year put out another ugly statement entitled The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel. I’m not going to link to it. It reveals the drafters’ and signers’ gross ignorance of both the gospel and social justice. How many times do we see Christians practicing extreme care for their religiosity, while either being totally ignorant of or even opposing people’s cry for justice? Gustavo Gutiérrez reminds us, “The kingdom and social injustice are incompatible” (A Theology of Liberation, 15th Anniversary Edition, p. 97). And if Amos were alive this week, he might have said, “I hate, I despise your endless religious statements that make you feel pious, protecting your phobias about those whose experiences in life are so different than your own. Away with your worthless statement and drafted expressions of bigotry. Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!”
Jesus begins his prayer in a way that would have been heard and understood by his original audience. He paints a picture of the human family where everyone has enough to not only survive, but also thrive.
I believe prayer, meditation, contemplation, and practices like these shape those who practice them. Over the next few weeks as we continue to contemplate this famous prayer, my hope is that it will shape us, too, into people who work to transform our world into a safe, compassionate home for all, regardless of race, gender, religion, culture, ethnicity, education, economic status, sexuality, gender identity and expression, ability, or whatever —a safe home for all, where everyone has enough.
“This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’” (Matthew 6:9-13)
HeartGroup Application
There is a lot happening this week.
Women all over the country are, again, hearing through our various news feeds and in private conversations family and friends the rhetoric of “boys will be boys,” “he was young,” “that was high school,” and more. Even before a hearing, the use of this rape culture rhetoric continues to perpetuate prioritizing violators over survivors. There is never an “okay” age for rape. Teenage boys should not get a pass. To say they are not mature enough to understand consent is disturbing. As a father having discussions this week with both my son and my daughters, I’m deeply concerned about the messages being communicated to them right now. And as human being, I witness how these kinds of statements deeply impact the women in my life. I’m deeply concerned for what this continues to say to women, and survivors, and men.
- Take a moment this week in your HeartGroup to go around the room and affirm each of the women in your midst. Tell them that you value them. Be voices in their lives this week saying, “This is not okay.”
- If any would like to share, make time for the women in your HeartGroup to share how this week has impacted each of them. Listen to them. Let me repeat that. Men, listen to them.
- Lastly, put your feet in motion. What are some of the ways your group can engage the work of making our world a safer place for women? Create a list. Then pick something from the list and put it into practice the following week.
Thank you for checking in with us, this week. Wherever you are today, keep living in love, survival, resistance, liberation, reparation and transformation. Till the only world that remains is a world where only love, justice and compassion reigns.
Another world is possible.
And remember, this is the time of year when Renewed Heart Ministries needs your support. If you have been blessed by our work, please consider making a one time contribution or becoming one of our monthly supporters. Go to renewedheartministries.com and click “donate.” Any amount helps. And thank you in advance for your support.
I love each of you dearly.
I’ll see you next week.
The Certainty of the Answer to Prayer
(Universal or Particular?)
by Herb Montgomery
“I tell you, ask and it will be given to you, search and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who searches finds, and to the one who knocks will it be opened. What person of you, whose son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or again when he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? So if you, though evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, by how much more will the Father from heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Q 11:9-13)
Companion Texts:
Matthew 7:7-11: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; those who seek find; and to those who knock, the door will be opened. Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”
Luke 11:9-13: “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; those who seek find; and to those who knock, the door will be opened. Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Gospel of Thomas 92: Jesus says, “Seek and you will find.”
Gospel of Thomas 94: Jesus says: “The one who seeks will find. The one who knocks, to that one will it be opened.”
There is so much to say in regards to this week’s saying. The passage has been touted by sincere Christians wanting to encourage others to have assurance in relation to their prayers. I believe that interpretation takes this week’s saying out of its context.
Most Q scholars believe that this saying originally appeared right after the section we call the Lord’s prayer. This means that Jesus isn’t trying to bolster up our confidence in prayer or setting us up for disappointment when things don’t work out the way we hoped.
In the Lord’s prayer, Jesus has just called us to pray for debt cancellation, today’s bread, and freedom from testing and trials. So with this week’s saying, Jesus is trying to inspire hope in that prayer. He is pleading with his audience to lean into the risk of being the first to set in motion economic revolution and then trust that it will come back around.
Remember, as we’ve said this year, God’s reign in Q is about trusting enough that God will send people to take care of you when you are in need tomorrow that you choose to be the person God sends to take of someone else today. Jesus’s saying is not on prayer in general. It’s specially in the context of trusting that Jesus’ economic plan will really work so we can let go and share.
If we do trust that if we seek this new world of people taking care of people, we will find it. If we knock on that door, it will open. Asking for today’s bread, we won’t get stones. Asking for fish, we won’t get snakes. And if we know how to take care of our kids, how much more will we, too, as we reach out to each other, also be taken care of.
Jesus shared this saying in the context of our fear or anxiety about following Jesus in mutual aid, resource-sharing, wealth redistribution, and praying for our and others’ debts to be cancelled.
Gospel of Thomas
That this saying ever made it out of its original Judean context to the more Platonic context in the region around Edesse, where modern scholars believe that the Gospel of Thomas originated, suggests that this is a saying of the historical Jesus and not simply a saying attributed to him after his death. There are a few points of evidence for this.
Matthew’s versus Luke’s Version
Matthew, believed to have been written before Luke, preserves the concrete, economic language in this week’s saying, even though the author of Matthew separated it from the Lord’s prayer by a whole chapter’s* worth of instruction. Luke, on the other hand, keeps this saying in the context of the Lord’s prayer but changes the wording dramatically to petition not for bread, resources, or debt cancellation but for the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is a unique element in the books attributed to Luke. In both Luke and Acts, the Holy Spirit plays a much more substantial role than in Mark’s, Matthew’s or John’s gospels. Luke uses this saying about prayer to prepare us for what will later happen in Acts when the Holy Spirit is “given.” We’ve witnessed this kind of change before. In last week’s saying, too, Luke changed the earliest emphasis on debts being cancelled into personal grievances being forgiven. (See The Lord’s Prayer.)
As we said last week, both versions can be true. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They are different, however, and these differences should not be glossed over as we study the canonical gospels.
Why Context Matters
I feel very strongly when we remove this saying from its context and make it about generic prayer rather than prayer specifically for economic revolution, then our false expectations set us up for deep disappointments. We might pray for something important to us and place all our hopes in what seems to be a magical promise, only to watch what we pray for not materialize.
A friend of mine recently claimed this passage as he interviewed over for job after job. He “asked, sought, and knocked,” only to be told repeatedly he was not what each company was looking for. After this series of disappointments, he wrote:
“I don’t believe in prayer anymore. I’ve prayed for jobs, specific jobs, and most of the jobs I prayed for, I didn’t get; most of the jobs I ever got, came without praying. Is it easier to believe in a God that plays favoritism or that there’s no God at all? I think it’s much easier to be an atheist or an agnostic.”
His disappointment over his unanswered prayer was only worsened by the false expectations of prayer that he’d been taught. Understanding this saying as a proverb about all prayer was emotionally damaging in a disheartening situation.
So how should we understand this passage?
In light of Jesus’ “year of the Lord’ favor,” the year when all debts should be cancelled (Deuteronomy 15:1), imagine you are one in Jesus’ audience who both owes others money and is also owed money by others. You depend on being repaid to repay those you owe, and you have real anxiety about releasing those who owe you and the fear that those you owe will still hold you accountable is real. Jesus encourages you, “Ask, seek, knock. You won’t get a stone, and you won’t get snakes.”
Say you are one who barely has enough for yourself to survive from day to day. Jesus’ words on mutual aid and resource sharing activate your fear that you will go without if you share with others, and your self-preservation impulse is triggered. Jesus again encourages you, “Ask, seek, knock. You won’t get a stone, you won’t get snakes.”
Or imagine you are someone very wealthy in Jesus’ audience. You have taken savvy risks with your money. You have been careful and overcome bad turns of events. Things may not have always gone your way, but somehow, today, you have come out on top. Jesus asks even you to voluntarily redistribute your wealth to those with great needs around you. Jesus is asking you to let go of your fear of what may happen to you in the future and to prioritize taking care of people today over profit so that you can survive what may come tomorrow. The fear is real, and yet Jesus encourages you, “Ask, seek, knock, you won’t get a stone, you won’t get snakes.”
It is easier to interpret this saying as about all prayer rather than specifically about the prayer Jesus taught. But we must allow the context of this saying to confront us, to inspire us to take specific economic action, and not to give us false hope. When we minimize the economic meaning of this saying, we only set ourselves up for grief when our expectations aren’t met.
Remember, the reign of God is not God simply raining down what we pray for from some place above. God’s reign, for Jesus, is people taking care of people. People who take responsibility for people, balancing the needs of each individual with the needs of the community, the human community, and the global community, and this would today include the care of the earth itself. Trusting in our choices today, specifically our choices to be the ones who take care of each other, we will be setting in motion an awakening where tomorrow there will be those who will also take care of us.
Recently, in an announcement that she would become a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminar in New York City, Michelle Alexander states, “Without a moral or spiritual awakening, we will remain forever trapped in political games fueled by fear, greed and the hunger for power.”
It is by understanding this week’s saying in its original context that we might be able to recapture a Jesus who called for an awakening in his own society. Two thousand years ago, he hoped for liberation that included being freed from “fear, greed, and the hunger for power.”
So, in this context, let’s consider the courage we’re called to take hold of in these words:
I tell you, ask and it will be given to you, search and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who searches finds, and to the one who knocks will it be opened. What person of you, whose son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or again when he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? So if you, though evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, by how much more will the Father from heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Q 11:9-13)
HeartGroup Application
This week, as a group, go back to the Lord’s prayer from last week and look at all three sections:
a. Enough Bread for Today (Resource Sharing)
b. Cancelling/Forgiving all Debts
c. Choosing Life rather than Death
- Discuss what each of these look like to you personally and as a group when you apply them to your lives today.
- How can you help each other practice these three?
- Pick one of the ways you come up with to help each other this week, and do it.
Thank you for checking in with us this week.
However you choose to apply the values we are considering this week, do so in love, till the only world that remains is a world where only love reigns.
I love each of you dearly.
I’ll see you next week.
*Chapter and verse delineation did not exist in the original documents but were added between the 13th and 16th centuries.
The Lord’s Prayer
by Herb Montgomery
“When you pray, say‚ Father — may your name be kept holy! — let your reign come: Our day’s bread give us today; and cancel our debts for us, as we too have cancelled for those in debt to us; and do not put us to the test!” (Q 11:2-4)
Companion Texts:
Matthew 6:9-12: “This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”
Luke 11:2-4: “He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation. ’ ”
This week, we’re looking at a saying in Q that many now call “The Lord’s Prayer.” Last week, we looked at the problematic nature of gendering God and Jesus’ naming God as our Father. This week, we’ll consider the tangible, concrete, economic nature of the rest of this prayer.
Jesus’ “reign of God,” as we have learned this year, can be defined simply as people helping people, taking responsibility for one another, living in centered relationships and community with a focus on quality of life for those whose lives and value as human beings has been denied, survival, resistance, liberation, restoration, and transformation.
Daily Bread
This prayer purposefully focuses on today: not tomorrow, but today. Gandhi is believed to have said that every day the earth produces enough for every person’s need, but not for every person’s greed. Greed can be defined as the exploitation of others and the hoarding of more than one needs for today (from fear of what may come tomorrow) while ignoring the basic daily needs of those being exploited.
In this prayer, Jesus doesn’t ask for tomorrow’s needs to be assured. He asks for our needs be met today. As we let go of our fear of the future, relinquish the exploitation of others, and choose instead a community of mutual aid, resource sharing, and mutual responsibility and care, we enter a path of trust. We trust that someone will take care of us if something should befall us tomorrow; we trust enough to be the ones who take care of those trouble has befallen today.
This is a path of abandonment and embrace. We’re abandoning values such as individualism and independence, and embracing our reality as humans who are interdependent. So we choose to balance each individual’s needs and the community where all of those needs can be met.
We take care of each other today, and leave tomorrow to worry about itself. As long as we have each other, we can together face what may come tomorrow. We don’t put our trust or hope in accumulated wealth but rather in each other as we live out the faith that Jesus modeled and the love that God shows us (see Psalms 62:10 cf. 1 Timothy 6:17).
Cancel All Debts
Next, this saying refers to debt cancellation. Some Q scholars believe that the phrase “cancel all debts” was part of the earliest form of this prayer. It’s interesting how the versions of this saying progressed from Jesus’ and the Torah’s concerns about economic liberation to a more “spiritual” language for debt that left the economic plight of the poor unaddressed. That’s convenient!
Let me explain.
It’s believed that the earliest form of the Q source text said “cancel our debts for us as we have cancelled those in debt to us.” In the spirit of the Torah’s sabbatical year (jubilee), this represented a community that had literally cancelled the debts of those who owed them, and now prayed that, like dominoes, their creditors would cancel their debts as well. They were setting something in motion and praying for its end: all debts forgiven!
When Matthew’s gospel adds this saying to Mark’s narrative, it becomes “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” This still means essentially the same thing, but notice the word “forgive.” This change sets up the phrasing in Luke.
Luke’s gospel phrases this saying, “Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.” This final step enlarges the prayer and makes it relational rather than economic. Any sin is now included and the Torah/sabbatical year connection is lost. Now the prayer becomes a matter of forgiving wrongs other have committed in hopes that one’s own wrongs will also be forgiven.
All three versions of the prayer are valid. It’s also important to know their origins as well. We often focus on Jesus’s relational teachings today, and with good reason. Jesus’s economic teachings are challenging, and it can seem preferable to avert one’s gaze. Yet they are there in his teachings nonetheless, along with the teachings of the Torah:
“At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts.” (Deuteronomy 15:1)
Luke’s gospel also affirms the centrality of “all debts cancelled” in a unique way. Luke begins Jesus’ ministry with Jesus taking the scroll of Isaiah in a Sabbath synagogue service and reading:
“The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor.” (Isaiah 61:1; cf. Luke 4:18)
This “year of the Lord’s favor” is the sabbatical year Deuteronomy 15:1 refers to, a year when the people were to cancel all debts.
That commandment brought hope to indentured farmers, who used to own the farms they now worked on, and the day laborers who worked with them earning day wages. And what fear, objection, and threat it must have brought to Herod’s economy in Galilee and the wealthy aristocracy centered in Jerusalem. The economic elite in Galilee and Jerusalem would no doubt have been anxious to rid their societies of this itinerant teacher stirring up the hopes of the poor. (See The Jesus Story.)
There is a contrast, too, between the way Herod and Jesus approached politics. Politics is the subject of power and resources (wealth). Herod sought to hoard and then wield power and resources as the means whereby his Jewish people would be liberated, with him at the helm as hero, and liberation flowing unilaterally from him to the people.
Jesus, on the other hand, taught that both power and resources should be shared. Rather than the unilateral hero deliverance that we have transformed Jesus’ salvation into, Jesus taught the shared power of community where debts are cancelled, resources are shared, wealth is redistributed, and mutual aid becomes the order of the day. Jesus wanted his followers to be the source of a liberation that not only benefitted the Jewish people but would spread to and change the Roman world as well.
It is a misunderstanding to say that a community informed by Jesus’ teachings today should be relegated to spiritual matters and matters of politics should be left to the state. Jesus had much to say that was political—about power and resources. The community of Jesus followers is just as political as the state; we simply choose to go about politics differently.
Not Being Put To the Test
Lastly this week I want to discuss the difference between choosing life with the risk of a cross as pushback from the death dealers, and thinking that a cross or suffering is in itself the goal. Choosing a cross doesn’t bring life. Choosing life brings life. And sometimes we have to choose life even when a cross is being threatened against us, but choose life and thus a cross we must.
There is a subtle difference between choosing life with the risk of a cross and choosing a cross for the cross’s sake. If we can avoid suffering without sacrificing justice or our hold on life, then that is the better choice. In Jesus’ time, the cross was state execution. When you’re dead, whatever your reasons, you’re dead. In following Jesus, we should choose life even if threatened with death from the death dealers, and we should also not go around looking to get killed. This is why, I believe, we are taught to pray:
“Do not put us to the test!”
Because Jesus followers seek to emulate Jesus, how we define “being like Jesus” is vital. Jesus chose the way of life even when being threatened with a cross; he did not choose a cross. In cases of domestic violence, many women are counseled to “be like Jesus,” though they have sacrificed their selves by remaining in environments that are destructive to their entire being. We must be careful not to glorify suffering in contexts like these, and careful as we reject redemptive violence not to teach redemptive suffering.
To be like Jesus means to choose life, even with all the risks, threats, and dangers that taking hold of life and not being willing to let go of it entails, all the while praying that we will not be brought to what the gospel writers call the time of testing.
We choose life regardless of risk, knowing there may be a cross as a result, and keeping our focus on the life found in Jesus, not the death found in Jesus. When Jesus calls a person to follow him, he does not call that person to die, he calls that person to live! It is the threats of the powers that be that overshadow our choice of life with the cross. It’s not an intrinsic connection, but an imposed one. We’ll cover this again and in much more detail when we get to Jesus’ sayings about taking up the cross.
Today, my intuition tells me we must allow ourselves to face the economic elements of the Lord’s prayer in its original form. In a dog-eat-dog world, what could be changed if we chose to strike a more radical balance between individualism and what is best for our community?
Debt cancellation is a large task. Some are doing this task well, but not all of us are creditors. I would assume that many more of us are on the “debtor” side of the coin, and so an easier entry point may be a simple choice to follow Jesus’ teachings on mutual aid and sharing.
Regardless of where we pick up Jesus’ economic teachings, we can make a choice to subvert our culture’s tendency to value property over people or even treat people as property, and instead place people before both profit and property. The power of this choice should not be underestimated. It is the very stuff that has the potential to change our world.
And so we too pray,
“Father — may your name be kept holy! — let your reign come: Our day’s bread give us today; and cancel our debts for us, as we too have cancelled for those in debt to us; and do not put us to the test!” (Q 11:2-4)
HeartGroup Application
Too often, the church has only embraced social change once outside forces have given it no other option. We have taught that the gospel story teaches values that can create change more intrinsically. But this has never been how it has taken place, not yet. Whether we are talking about slavery, equality for the sexes, economic change, or, today, justice for our LGBT siblings, the church has seemed to lag.
For discussion this week:
- Discuss examples of where, historically, change did not come for the church from internal causes, but from outside pressures.
- Discuss why you feel this is typical, and what your group may be able to do to change that order for you.
- Pick one of those things and implement it this coming week.
The Lord’s Prayer could produce radical socioeconomic change for those who have the courage not just to pray it, but also to step out and implement it in the world. Let’s not just pray it. Let’s put it into action.
Thanks again for checking in this week.
Wherever you are and whatever you may find yourself in the midst of, our hope is that your heart has been renewed and inspired to continue following the salvific teachings of Jesus in your life and community.
Keep living in love, daily choosing love above all else, till the only world that remains is a world where only love reigns.
I love each of you dearly.
I’ll see you next week.
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