Week after week, year after year, when church folks pray, “Deliver us from evil” in the Lord’s Prayer, what do we mean?
Post-9/11, post-Ferguson, post-Eric Garner’s death and recent jury decision, and in the midst of NFL diminishment of violence against women, it’s a damn good question. #LordsPrayerHack
And you’re adding to that list your own experiences of outrage for the issues important to you. Good.
Now. When we pray, “Deliver us from evil,” what do we think we’re doing?
Among the possibilities, I hope we open to:
- Noticing what evil looks like in the world.
- Recognizing that some hatred is systematized in social and hierarchical ways.
- Coming clean that by design some of us are privileged to benefit from these systems while others suffer.
- Understanding the ways most of us reading this directly allow, sustain and nurture these corrupt systems.
- Begging for the courage to face our addiction to power and to understand it.
- Developing an imagination for the experience of the other that grows empathy and naturally shapes lives of compassion.
- Committing to resist and/or destroy these unfair systems.
- Confessing our failure to do this.
- Praying for, watching for and making way for the holy upheaval of justice that will free us. All of us.
Psalm 58 is a fierce text we might lean into when we are angry and desperate for change. One loud musical interpretation:
Disarm the terrorists
Tear out the lion’s teeth
Uproot corruption even if it’s served us
Shut down the violence
Once again make us free
Against, away from systems that enslave us
Deliver us, deliver us
Bring on the holy upheaval and
Deliver us, deliver us from evil
We’ve been oblivious
We’ve fed the system beast
The bramble’s grown up to entangle all of us
Forgive our arrogance
The snake can’t hear or see
Deliver us where one of us needs justice.
There’s only one of us
Show us the holy way
Uproot corruption even if it’s served us
Renew our sense of life
Once again make us free
Against, away from systems that enslave us
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Thanks to Psalm scholar Clint McCann for a brilliant commentary on how Psalm 58 and other ancient laments poke our 21st-century world.
Pic: “Despair” by Catalina Gonzalez Carrasco
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