Whether you doggedly make New Year’s resolutions every year or whether you doggedly refuse to, scientists have recently discovered there’s a good reason it’s so hard to keep them: because willpower is an extremely weak and limited resource.
Not too long ago, an experiment proved without a doubt just how vulnerable our willpower is...and offered one reason why we are so susceptible to the temptations all around us. A group of people were brought into a room one at a time. Each person was given a number and told that they had to memorize it. They were to leave the room, walk down a long hallway to another room, and once there, report their number. Some of the subjects got two-digit numbers, which for most people are pretty easy to commit to memory. But others got seven-digit numbers, and seven is the maximum number of pieces of information that the typical human brain can retain for a period of time.
What the subjects didn’t know was that on their way down the hall to the other room (while most of them were furiously reciting their numbers over and over in their heads), they would be offered a snack by a nice woman standing behind a table. “Thank you so much for participating in our study,” she’d say. “We’d like to offer you something to eat as a way to say thanks. You can have a piece of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit.”
Hmmm...delicious, artery clogging, fattening piece of chocolate cake or fresh, healthy bowl of fruit salad -- what do you think they chose? Well, it all depended on how busy their brain was trying to remember the number they had been given. The people trying to remember seven digit numbers were twice as likely to choose cake. Why? Because their brains were working so hard to retain those numbers that they simply didn’t have the ability to prioritize rational thought -- fruit salad is much better for me than chocolate cake -- over emotional impulses -- chocolate cake tastes so much better than fruit salad. All it took was five extra numbers for people to give in to temptation. (1)
Now does it make sense why it’s so hard to stick to those New Year’s resolutions? It takes a lot of energy and attention to exercise willpower and when our minds are preoccupied with all the demands and worries of daily life--work, family, our health or the health of our loved ones--we just aren’t capable of resisting the temptations we encounter at every turn. And, by the way, advertisers are counting on this. In fact, the scientist who designed the fruit and cake experiment? He is a professor of marketing at Stanford. Advertisers and marketing professionals rely on the fact that when it comes to temptation, we humans are a pretty weak species.
Of all the things Jesus could have chosen to bring the Lord’s Prayer to a conclusion, he chose this: “Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil.” Some time later, we would add a majestic benediction to wrap it up neatly, but for Jesus, the last word of this prayer was “evil.” If we look to Eugene Peterson’s version for some comfort, he fails us too. His translation: “Keep us safe from ourselves and the devil.”
For most pastors, the middle of the night phone calls don’t happen often. So when my colleague Mark’s cell phone rang one night at 4a.m., he answered it. On the other end of the phone, crying and distraught, was Jack.
Jack was a 65 year-old, faithful member of Mark’s church. He enjoyed a good theological debate and often played the devil’s advocate in church discussions, but he had a heart of gold, and was always the first to volunteer for a mission project or to help someone in need. But that night he was in trouble.
Fifteen minutes after the phone call, Mark and Jack met at the church. After sitting down on the sofa in Mark’s office, Jack jumped right in. “In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray every week, ‘God, lead us not into temptation.’ Does that mean God might lead me into temptation? Or that God wants to lead me into temptation? Why would I have to pray that, week after week, unless there was a real chance that God wants to tempt me?”
As Mark put it, “in that moment, whatever this prayer meant for Jack, the weight of his whole life, and his life with God was at stake.” Jack said one last thing: “this has my soul in pain,” and then he leaned back and stared at the ceiling. (2)
If we really hear and receive this portion of the prayer Jesus gave us, how can we not be disturbed? First there is this implication, the one that so unnerved Jack, that God might actually want us to be tempted and that God might cause us to be tempted...and then, before we’ve even had a moment to deal with that, Jesus brings us face to face with the devil: “...deliver us from the evil one.”
As much as we sophisticated 21st-century types might prefer to avoid the whole idea of an evil force or an evil being in our world, if we look around, the fact is, it’s there. Today, at our luncheon after church we’ll hear about evil in the form of slavery that still persists, both in this country and around the world. The reporter Nicholas Kristof writes about a woman who lived through the horrors of slavery. Her names is Jeanne and she grew up in the Congo. When she was fourteen her parents disappeared in that country’s brutal civil war. Most likely, they were massacred, but their bodies never showed up, so Jeanne moved in with an uncle. Just months later, members of the extremist Hutu militia invaded her home and tortured Jeanne’s uncle while she watched. Then they kidnapped his wife, son, and Jeanne and took them to the forest, condemning them to lives of slavery. The boys and men worked as porters and the women were sex slaves.
Because of the brutal rapes, Jeanne first suffered internal injuries and then became pregnant with a fetus that she couldn’t deliver because of her immature pelvis. The fetus did not survive childbirth. Jeanne survived, but barely. She was left for dead by the side of the road.
But someone found her and took her to a nearby hospital where a doctor who has devoted his life to healing the victim’s of Congo’s war operated on Jeanne nine times in the next three years to repair the fistulas, holes in her body that caused her to constantly leak wastes. Finally, the surgeries were deemed successful and she was sent back to her village to live with her grandmother. Three days after she returned home, the militia came to the village and she was raped again, opening her old injuries. She made her way back to the hospital and is once again undergoing multiple surgeries, but it is unclear whether she will ever fully recover. (3) Atrocities like that are happening around the world every day. There is no word to describe that but evil.
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“Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil”...“Keep us safe from ourselves and the devil.” The English word “devil” comes from the Greek root diaballein, which means to throw between, in other words, to split apart. And isn’t that what happens when we encounter whatever we want to call this force--it is something that splits us apart from God, that tears us away from being the people God calls us to be?
When I discovered that tidbit about the origin of the word devil, it brought to my mind the perplexing word “cleave.” I say perplexing because cleave is one of the only words I know of that describes two completely opposite ideas. One meaning of the word “cleave” is “to cling to, to stick closely with.” But another meaning is “to cut apart,” as in cleaving a piece of meat. So although it may be our sincere desire to cleave to God, to stick close to God, and though we may pray the Lord’s Prayer as an expression of that desire, in this prayer we also acknowledge that there is a force in this world--and perhaps even in ourselves--that attempts to cleave us from God, to separate us from our true identity as followers of Jesus.
As surely as there is a force of evil in this world, whether you think of it as the devil or as a less personal force, there is also temptation. Temptations, big and small, are a part of daily life, whether we believe that God wants to tempt us for our own good or that God is there to help keep our willpower strong. Even Jesus knew temptation.
But notice when Jesus’ temptation happened. It wasn’t a test he had to pass before he could become the Son of God. Jesus faced his temptations immediately after his baptism. Now we may have picked up the idea that once we are baptized into Christ, once we have claimed our true identity as children of God, we aren’t going to have to face temptation or battle any of the evil that resides in ourselves or in the world, but, as one preacher bluntly puts it, that idea is “hogwash.” (4) In fact, it may be only after we receive our true identity in baptism that we begin to understand the real power of temptation and evil. But once we have been baptized, once we have died to self and risen to new life in Christ Jesus, then we have what we need to cleave to God when we find ourselves in the wilderness, facing temptations that seem custom-made to cleave us from God. In those moments, we have the memory of our baptism. Because when we remember our baptism, we remember the truth of who we are and whose we are.
When her husband Drew, a Maine state trooper, died suddenly one day in the line of duty, Kate Braestrup received the news in the living room of the home in which she and Drew were raising four young children. Forty minutes after hearing that she was now a widow, Kate sat in shock with her close friend Monica. When the doorbell rang, Kate answered it and discovered her neighbor standing on her doorstep. This was a woman with whom Kate had exchanged barely a dozen words in the last decade. But there she stood, holding a pan of brownies still warm from the oven, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I just heard,” she said.
Kate writes: “That pan of brownies was, it later turned out, the leading edge of a tsunami of food that came to my children and me, a wave that did not recede for many months after Drew’s death. I didn’t know that my family and I would be fed three meals a day for weeks and weeks. I did not anticipate that neighborhood men would come to drywall the playroom, build bookshelves, mow the lawn, get the oil changed in my car. I did not know that my house would be cleaned and the laundry done, that I would have embraces and listening ears, that I would not be abandoned to do the labor of mourning alone. All I knew was that my neighbor was standing on the front stoop with her brownies and her tears: she was the Good News.” (5)
It might just be that every temptation we face, every evil we encounter is, at its root, something that urges us to turn away from God, away from our true identity, away from what our baptism promised us was true: that God loves us and forgives us and frees us to live abundantly. And so we pray the Lord’s Prayer. We pray the words Jesus taught us, even though some days they make more sense to us than others. And as we pray we cleave to God. And when, in spite of our efforts to cling to God and to our God-given identity, temptation overwhelms us; when we find ourselves face to face with evil, may we discover, right there on our doorstep, the Good News: that before our baptism, before we ever entered a church, before we even knew we could cleave to God, God had already cleaved to us, claiming us as fiercely as a mother claims her nursing child, cleaving to us so tightly that nothing, nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Jonah Lehrer, “Blame in on the Brain,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 26, 2009.
2. from the sermon “Playing It Safe,” by the Rev. Mark Ramsey, Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, October 11, 2009.
3. Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed “The World Capital of Killing,” in The New York Times, February 6, 2010.
4. from the sermon “To the Edge and Back,” by Derek Starr Redwine, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Akron, Ohio, October 11, 2009. Used with permission.
5. Braestrup, Kate, Here If You Need Me. Back Bay Books, 2008.
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