Welcome to Pastor Jack Buckley's weekly blog and podcast.
You have three ways to hear his weekly message:
- Read Pastor Jack's GODblog.
- Listen now to an audio of the scripture reading and Pastor Jack's sermon.
- Listen anytime. You choose the time and place. Download Pastor Jack's GODcast to your MP3 player.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Deliver Us From Evil
Genesis 3:1-7; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13
This Sunday my message focused on the line in the Lord's Prayer: "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." I find that couplet more than a little bit curious.
I mean, why would God ever lead us into temptation? That would be just downright nasty. It's hard to believe Jesus really wants us to ask God every day, "Please, don't set me up!" Instead, these two lines are another example of Hebraic parallelism, which says the same basic thing two different ways, back to back... As in, "Lead us far away from temptation; protect us from evil."
In my sermon I told how author Anne Lamott once asked me out of the blue, "Do you believe in the Devil?" Caught off guard, and wanting to seem very intelligent, I started to beat about the theological bush. She interrupted, saying, "I sure do. I've met him in person!"
If you'd like to know more about that conversation and its significance for my sermon -- or how I of all people ever got to talk with such a literary superstar -- then you'd better...
Listen to the GODcast!
_______________
Last week the San Francisco bay area was shaken by an earthquake that registered 5.6 on the Richter scale, our biggest one since the murderous Loma Prieta quake in October 1989. Unlike that one, this shaker did little damage and nobody died. I sat in a meeting while it happened, silently counting off the seconds while it vibrated underfoot, and we all sighed in relief when it ended without a violent lurch.
The following Sunday my message traced another kind of fault line, poking around in our human tendency to toy with temptation. My Anne Lamott story fit nicely into all that, and it went over just as effectively as I'd hoped. Every preacher loves when that kind of thing happens, not nearly as often as we would hope.
All well and good. Today I finally looked up a passage in Annie's first best-selling book, Operating Instructions (Pantheon Books, 1993), which I flagged years ago in study notes on this part of the Lord's Prayer.
It's her confession of just how easily enticement to evil worms its way into our hearts and minds and spiritual cores. It's set on the evening of that 1989 earthquake.
Listen to her story...
There was a huge earthquake in the Bay Area yesterday. I came in from the kitchen to check on Sam [her baby], who was sleeping and who has a cold, and suddenly the whole house was swaying and there was a low roar. Everything was shaking, and I actually thought at first that John and Julie, who live in the flat above us, were using an industrial floor waxer. Then I realized what was going on, and I looked over at where Sam lay asleep in his bassinet, right beneath the built-in bookcases, and I was immobilized. All of the big heavy books could have fallen down onto him and crushed him, and I couldn't move. Like a nightmare. It felt like it lasted about fifteen seconds, and when it was over I rushed to the bassinet and picked up the baby. He continued to sleep. Then Julie came running down to make sure we were okay, and we turned on the TV. At first there was no reception, but then finally there was a picture, and the first reports made it sound like San Francisco looked like Nagasaki, like the whole city was on fire. A section of the Bay Bridge was down, and there was total pandemonium and also immediate acts of heroism and bravery. Julie and I both voiced huge, concerned, compassionate thoughts about what was going on, feeling really awful and impotent. One small difference in our reaction was that Julie, near tears, sat staring at the set, wondering out loud if her husband was still alive, while I was rather horrified to discover that I was worried about how this would affect sales of the book. This made me feel just great about myself, as you can imagine. So did my other main concern, which was that if the World Series had to be postponed, it would completely ruin my life, and when I got up to make Julie a cup of tea, I limped to the kitchen feeling like a medieval dwarf with a lot of small broken teeth. Well... She does have a way with words.
A few lines later she caps off the story with a gentle reference to our all too common "self-centered, petty, envious, conniving mule-stupid side." You could call it sin: our deep indifference to avoiding temptation -- just this once, right here, right now.
No wonder, then, that Jesus tells us to pray, "Keep us safe from the Devil, of course; and from ourselves as well!"
posted by Jack Buckley at
5:22 PM
<< Home
|
|
 |
|
|
