LD 52, Ephesians 6:10-20 "After Amen" Scott Hoezee

In a scene from an old TV show a Catholic priest offers a prayer among a group of people, many of whom were not very religious and so were unaccustomed to prayer. But the priest offered a good prayer and concluded with "Amen." There was a moment of awkward silence, finally broken when someone asked, "Is that it?" to which another person replied, "Of course! Nothing comes after Amen!"

After Amen. Does anything come after the "Amen" of the Lord's Prayer (or for that matter of any prayer)? For weeks now we've been considering the content of Jesus' famous prayer. We've been thinking about what we say, what we pour into, our prayers. But there comes a point in even the most prayerful of lives when, for the moment at least, you are finished praying. There comes a point when you say "Amen," open your eyes, unclasp your hands, get up off your knees and go back to work, get back to tending the kids or trimming the rose bushes.

So what happens as a result of your having prayed? What comes after "Amen"? In a way the conclusion to the Lord's Prayer itself, as well as our text from Ephesians 6, address this question rather nicely. So this morning let's think about how prayer is supposed to shape and mold our lives after we say "Amen."

The most basic answer to the question of what comes after Amen is obvious and so I will state it right up front. What comes after Amen is a kingdom life of service but also of spiritual warfare. What comes after Amen is our becoming well-outfitted and well-equipped people who stand tall for God in a world of evil. If prayer is a quiet center to the Christian life, the life for which prayer prepares us is anything but quiet: it involves a pitched battle against spiritual forces the reality of which we may not think about very much but which clearly occupied a prominent place in the mind of the apostle Paul.

But in some ways this is a natural thing to see emerging from the Lord's Prayer. We said in an earlier sermon in this series that this prayer is supposed to bring us out into the wide expanse of God's way of seeing the universe. Prayer, we said, is not some exercise whereby we "center down" and narrow our focus to our own little immediate needs. Instead when we pray for God's kingdom and will to come to this earth, what we are bringing into focus for ourselves is God's grand program of restoration. What the Lord's Prayer scrolls up for us on our mental screens is a vision that could not be larger or more all-encompassing.

But when we step back and try to capture something of the "big picture" of the cosmos, one of the things we catch glimpses of are the dark forces, what Paul calls "the powers and principalities" of evil which are active in this fallen creation. On our own, we mostly miss seeing that these are very real entities. It's hard to grab hold of a shadow, difficult to see beings that have no light. But they're out there, Paul says.

Jesus says the same in the Lord's Prayer when he includes the petition "Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil." You cannot pray the prayer Jesus taught us without acknowledging that there is raw evil in the universe. You cannot embrace this prayer and still also think that the devil is mostly just a metaphor, just a symbol. You cannot take Jesus' words onto your lips and still also believe that really people are basically good and that life in general is at its core pretty decent such that if we all just hunker down and do our level, human best, why a better day will arrive. You cannot pray "Deliver us from evil" and still believe that any political order, any government, or any politician will, by themselves, eliminate what is most fundamentally wrong with this world. The Lord's Prayer is not about optimism but realism. The Lord's Prayer is not about trying harder as humans but about believing that God alone can deliver us.

Jesus wants us to acknowledge the reality of evil and you cannot pray his prayer without doing so. But you do not do this with fear and trembling. You acknowledge evil but you do so in the Name of the One who is already the Victor over evil! You pray "Deliver us from evil" with the memory of Gethsemane flickering in the back of your mind.

You remember the night Jesus was led into temptation. You remember the dark night when Jesus, the Son of God, was not delivered from evil but handed over. Jesus was handed over to evil, abandoned by God, abandoned to the derelict cry of "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!" We pray the Lord's Prayer in the Name of the One who faced all of that precisely so that we never would. But we also pray it in the living presence of Jesus because love is stronger than death, grace is stronger than evil, God is stronger than the devil.

So you have both in the Lord's Prayer: a bold and unabashed acknowledgment of evil's reality and yet a bold and unabashed confidence that Jesus has overcome it. We shudder at what we see in the powers and principalities of this world yet we stand firm, outfitted in God's gospel armor, knowing that because Jesus alone is the Victor, we will not be abandoned to evil but delivered from it.

So we have both candor and confidence. But we don't want the confidence side of that to swallow up the candor. That is, just because Jesus has overcome the devil and the world does not mean that we now are unconcerned with our fight against the spiritual powers that oppose God's kingdom. There are real powers and principalities, right now today, from which we need to be delivered. At times, though, I think we miss that. We keep "evil" a vague, amorphous word even as we generally do not connect it very concretely to actual things you can see and touch and read about in our present world.

Maybe part of the reason we miss this in our tradition is because we have tended to focus on sin as mostly being a matter that incurs guilt and which, therefore, needs to be dealt with via the avenue of forgiveness. It was the entire matter of justification by grace alone that kicked off the Reformation in the first place. Ever since we have had a tendency to make sin and evil mostly a matter of personal guilt in need of gracious forgiveness. And, of course, that is a major part of what sin is all about. That's why we spent all of last week's sermon on the theme of forgiveness.

But that is not the whole truth where sin and evil are concerned. You see, in the Lord's Prayer when Jesus moves from "forgive us our sins" to "deliver us from evil," Jesus is not being repetitive. He's not saying the same thing two different ways but is instead enlarging our picture of what sin is. Yes, it is a matter of guilt and shame. It does put us in a position in which we flat out need the grace of God's forgiveness or else we would never be allowed to stand in God's holy presence.

But guilt and forgiveness are not the whole of what sin involves, which is why Jesus includes also the request for deliverance. Sin and evil are also real powers of slavery which hold our world in thrall. Sin and evil are forces that trap us, that make us get stuck in destructive patterns and in bad habits of thought which, if left unchecked, lead us away from God. This is a major theme in the Bible: the theme of exodus. We need to be led out, delivered from a real place.

Perhaps the difference between sin as guilt in need of forgiveness and sin as slavery in need of deliverance is like an alcoholic's quandary: yes, if a man gets drunk and in his stupor accidentally breaks your favorite vase, he needs to be forgiven for both that bout of drunkenness and for carelessly busting something precious. He needs to be forgiven but he also needs to be delivered from the larger thrall of alcohol which has him trapped. So also we need exodus--we need to be liberated from an unholy land which insidiously asks us to feel right at home in the far country of sin. There are real powers intent on making us adopt this world's patterns as though these, and not God's kingdom, are right and normal.

It's sort of like what can happen to people when they live for a long time in a part of the country with a strong accent. Since I am preparing to head to New Jersey, I recall when my uncle and aunt moved there at a time when their children were still fairly young. After about a year in Wyckoff, my cousins had developed a definitive East Coast accent. The far country of evil wants to do the same to us: it wants us to soak up the patterns of an anti-God world, dominated by the dark rulers and authorities, so that slowly but surely we start to speak with the accent of the world instead of the accent of God's Word.

We need to be delivered. When we pray "Deliver us from evil," we are not saying "Forgive us our sins" all over again. We're saying something related yet distinct--we're saying that we know we need to be changed, that we need to do battle, that we need to stand up for God. We need to know that there are real powers that want to keep us trapped and we need to fight against them with that full suit of armor Paul talks about in Ephesians 6.

So we pray "Deliver us from evil," but we dare not let "evil" remain vague. And so dear God, deliver us from evil. Deliver us from what? Deliver us from a world of war! Deliver us from what? Deliver us from a world of hunger! Deliver us from what? Deliver us from a world of inept and unjust governments, a world of terrorism and of bloated, self-important dictators! Deliver us from what? Deliver us from pride of race and nation, from racism and sexism, from genocide and civil wars!

Deliver us from the evil of the powers and principalities who day by day subtly work their destruction on this world even as they seek to keep us complacent about it. In his book Amazing Grace Jonathan Kozol focused our attention on the children who live in this country's poorest congressional district in New York City. In the shadow of Wall Street and uptown Manhattan these children, mostly black, live in neighborhoods every bit as segregated in education and health care as anything that was once true in the old South. And because they lack a voice, because they lack political clout, they are not able to fight when it's time to put up a new medical waste incinerator. Those of us with money and influence can keep such things out of our neighborhoods, the poor cannot. So those who cannot be cared for adequately medically as it is are put at still greater risk by having to live next to toxic materials. This is a pattern perpetuated throughout not only our own country but the whole world. And so we cry, "Deliver us from evil!" Deliver us from what? Deliver us from a world that makes children sick and then turns the other way.

Today the power of multinational conglomerates is scary. They have great influence over us. Although it is not conclusive, there are those who suggest that breast cancer may be caused in part by organochlorines, a main ingredient in pesticides. Breast cancer now kills 50,000 women a year and those numbers are rising. Each year in October the media devote a flurry of attention to this during "Breast Cancer Awareness Month."

Yet in all of the material devoted to that month's awareness, there is no suggestion that there may be chemical influences behind this form of cancer. A reporter recently wondered why and found an answer: "Breast Cancer Awareness Month" was started, and is still sponsored, by a $14 billion a year British corporation named Imperial Chemical Industries. For years they have given enough money as to warrant their being allowed to review and edit the pamphlets distributed each October, which may explain the lack of mention about pesticides seeing as Imperial Chemical Industries is among the world's largest produces of pesticides. We cry, "Deliver us from evil!" Deliver us from what? Deliver us from the powers and principalities that may bring suffering but which then cover this up!

As we recently left behind the 20^th century, we were treated to any number of retrospectives highlighting the glorious accomplishments of the past 100 years. But the century we leave behind us was remarkable for other reasons, too: more people died violent deaths, died of preventable diseases, and died of hunger between 1900-1999 than in any other period of history. 100 million died in the century's great famines, 150 million more died in wars and ethnic conflicts and civil wars borne of hatred, 100 million more died at the hands of oppressive governments bent on eliminating peasants or Jews or the educated, and thousands will die this day and millions in the course of this year not because there is not enough bread but because inept dictators cannot muster the organization needed to move the food from Point A to Point B to feed the hungry in Africa, China, Russia, North Korea.

In a world of death and injustice, hatred and war, hunger and disease we cry, "Deliver us from evil!" Deliver us from all that makes these grim facts this world's reality and from all the forces that would lull us into accepting that that's just the way it goes. Deliver us from any power that would make us accept this as normal, as to be expected. Deliver us from anything we do or say or think that contributes to racism, hatred, suspicion, and fear. O Lord our God, deliver us from evil and from the Evil One!

This is our prayer and our cry and it is one which, as Paul reminds us in verse 18, we need to pray not just for ourselves but for all the saints of God. We pray for all fellow Christians because wherever we are, we're all in the same fight and are all trying to stand up for the same kingdom of God. We all need the same renewal of heart and mind so that we can slowly but surely come to see the world through God's eyes, letting the victorious power of Jesus deliver us from the string of compromises the world wants to foist upon us.

And we pray this way and live this way because, as the traditional ending of the prayer reminds us, God's is the kingdom and the power and the glory not just now but forever. God our Father in heaven is the holy and hallowed Name above all names and one day every tongue will confess it. God's kingdom will come and God's will shall be done in every corner of the universe, on earth as it is in heaven. Daily bread will be supplied and supplied to all. Our sins will have been forgiven even as we will have forgiven those who sinned against us. We will not be led into temptation because the only thing that will fill our hearts and minds will be the beauty of God and of his New Creation. And all of this will be so because of Jesus who delivers us from evil already now and who will continue to deliver us until he has brought us out of the far country and back home--back to a place where God alone is all in all.

At a moderate pace, it takes less than thirty seconds to pray the words of the Lord's Prayer. But it takes at least a lifetime even to begin to fathom these words and it will take us into eternity to begin living them out. But you've got to start somewhere and so we begin, and finally we end, with our Father in heaven, through Jesus Christ the Lord of the prayer and in the power of the Holy Spirit. What comes after "Amen"? Only the same God whose kingdom and power and glory are forever and ever! And all God's people said, "Amen!"