The Park Road Pulpit

Have you ever walked a railroad line? Tried to balance on that thin track? Or, have you held hands with another, leaning in, walking together down parallel lines of steel? David Wilcox sings of such an experience with a woman he loved:

The fear of falling is a universal experience. I’ve read that it comes to us, deeply imbedded. Tracing back millions of years to some genetic ancestor who lived amidst the limbs and leaves, where cover and foliage meant life. There, high above the ground, was safety. But “the fall”[2] meant vulnerability, exposure, certain death.

Babies know this fear instinctually. And adults the world-over experience that start in the night, awaking -- mid-fall -- somewhere just above ground. (They say that if you ever do reach rock bottom in one of those stomach-wrenching, nighttime terrors, you will not wake to tell of it!) You know what I mean, don’t you? It is a terrifying experience. I’m no fan of the ocean, which might explain why my recurring nightmare usually comes atop some monstrous salt-water wave. It’s a curl that radical surfer dudes would die for! But in my terror, this rising tide swells high above sand and sea and then abruptly falls from under me, and I am suddenly in thin air, and accelerating toward the ground at 32 feet per second, per second.[3]

I awake with a shudder. Heart racing. Stomach descending, ever so slowly this time. And with a subconscious prayer on trembling lips: “Thank God that didn’t just happen!” It’s a prayer, For Fear of Falling

So, too, was the prayer on Jesus’ lips… And let us not fall into temptation.[4]

According to Jeremias, whose work has been essential to our study for this summer, Jesus’ own wording of the prayer ended with this dissatisfying phrase; the rest was added by later editors.[5] And almost as soon as Jesus uttered these strange, difficult words, the Church began disagreeing over what they meant. A face-value reading of the text, which has provided the theme for countless sermons, might more appropriately be translated, “lead us away from temptation” -- in other words, “Oh, don’t let me be ‘tempted and tried, Lord.’”[6]

My mother instructed me, frequently, that the best way to keep from doing the wrong thing was not to put myself in a place that I might be tempted to do so. It was good advice, which continues, when I follow it, to serve me well. I commend it to you. If you have trouble with alcohol, find a better place to enjoy your friends than at a local bar. Or, difficult as it may be, find a new set of friends. If you have trouble with materialism, consumption, overindulging the credit card, spend the afternoon with a good book, not parading the mall. And throw away all those shop-at-home magazines before you open them. If you can name your sin, you are wise enough to begin avoiding it. “Lead us away from temptation” is a wise prayer, which we ought to pray, daily, but this is not the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples.

For as important as morality is, Christianity is not a code of moralism (“don’t drink, don’t smoke, and don’t go with girls who do!”). No, following Jesus will always be more complex than this, often pushing us into the gray which lies beyond the “black and white” boundaries of simple moralistic judgments. Following Jesus is more difficult than this. And, as the prayer reveals, it is more troubling, too.[7]

Jeremias suggests that the better rendering of Jesus’ phrase here is, “let us not succomb to temptation.”[8] Temptation, you see, is inevitable, unavoidable. For the Christian, we might even say that it is necessary. Not that we have to prove our mettle before God. Not that we have to pass some divinely ordained tests in order to merit God’s grace. Nothing could be farther from the gospel truth. The text from James says this in no uncertain terms, for God cannot be tempted by evil and God tempts no one (James 1.13). Though it is a frequent response to pain, no one should so doubt God’s constancy, God’s slow anger, God’s steadfast love,[9] that in the midst of the trials that life will throw our way, they should cry out, “What have I done to deserve this!?” No one should ask such a question. God does not tempt us with evil.

But testing will come. Temptation, great and small, will be ours. Such is the fertile ground of freedom. This is true, I believe, because, as I have said to you before, “creation is broken.”[10] There are trials that will come to us from beyond us. Temptations to fail that will be thrust upon us due to earthquake and heartbreak. Temptation is all-too-real in this all-too-real world which is our home.

And, temptation is inevitable because, as believers like Saint Paul, and unbelievers like Richard Dawkins both know, there is something deep within us that draws us away from that which is truly good. There is a civil war within each of us. On one side is the force of selfishness. Paul calls the force sin.[11] Richard Dawkins calls it genetics.[12] And they are both right. We are programmed for selfishness. But we are also called to Godliness. On the other side of this great battle is the voice of God. The love of who beckons Christians and humanistic Darwinians to rise above.[13]

There are a few sources other than the Bible which give us pictures of Jesus’ life and record his words. In one of these sources, Jesus declares to his disciples, flatly: “No one can obtain the kingdom of heaven, who has not passed through temptation.”[14] Temptation is the fertile ground of faith. It is also the ground to which we have been called as witnesses to the light, for if we follow in the way of Jesus, reaching out to the poor, the needy, the despise, the outcasts, if we take seriously his call and its challenges to our time and talents, our priorities and possessions, we will likely find ourselves tested and tried, tempted to fall, more than if we choose to take the road of comfortable “Christian” comformity.[15]

Jeremias says that we can only know the gravity of this petition when we understand the word used here for temptation (peirasmos):

…it does not mean the little temptations or testings of everyday life, but the final great Testing which stands at the door and will extend over the whole earth -- the disclosure of the mystery of evil, the revelation of the Antichrist, the abomination of desolation… the final persecution and testing of God’s saints by pseudo-prophets and false saviours. What is in danger, is not moral integrity, but faith itself. The final trial at the end is -- apostasy! Who can escape?[16]

In Baptist life the debate has long-raged over a theology of salvation. When God saves us, is it, “Once Saved Always Saved,” or can we backslide, lose our salvation in apostasy -- should we ever have to pray For Fear of Falling? Standing defiantly on the side of freedom in this debate was the late Dale Moody who was denied his final year of teaching at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary because of his belief. Dr. Moody claimed that salvation must be understood dynamically. In alliterative humor, Dr. Moody often declared, “If faith fizzles at the finish, there was a fatal flaw from the first.”[17]

Salvation did not happen to me when I hugged my daddy’s neck at the end of the long aisle of First Baptist Church; it did not come to you in confirmation; you did not “seal the deal” in your baptism. Salvation is happening. To us all. Like truth, it is a becoming more than a having. This is why nearly all of the reference to the word in the New Testament are given in future or progressive tense: we are being saved! Thanks be to God.

But here is the reality of such a dynamic, changing, open, free faith -- we are free to fly. We are also free to fall.

Perhaps it’s easy for you to believe, today. But what if the wave of success, the tide of good health, the rising enlightenment of understanding gives way tomorrow? Will you believe, then?

Temptation, ultimately, is purely and simply a question of self-assertion in unbelief, which is the denial of God. Our unbelief is the ultimate reason for our own incredibility. And the despair in which God himself is experienced as one who is incredible and who sets the crown to our unbelief, is the uttermost depth of affliction.[18]

We must never be seduced by our own enthusiasm. I believe. And that belief is the heart of my life. The center of my world. But there is no, glib, “blessed assurance.”[19] Faith is faith. “The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of this not seen” (Hebrews 11.1). Jesus’ petition should be taken as the ultimate warning against a piety of self-confidence on the one hand, and a complacency of apathy or despair on the other. But Jesus’ prayer is also our greatest hope.

I don’t believe it is possible to teach someone to pray a prayer that is not your own. Oh, you might teach them to say a prayer. But Jesus’ prayer survives today not because his disciples memorized some words, but because they learned to pray with him, For Fear of Falling.[20] Our introduction to this series has suggested that the best indicator of a person’s theology might be to listen to that person pray. In praying “lead us not into temptation,” Jesus has given us invaluable insight into the nature of his own life, which was made alive by the dynamic reality of faith -- but as a “dynamic reality,” his faith did not remove his honesty, his doubt, his fear of falling.

Can you hear this?[21] When Jesus prayed, “lead us not into temptation,” he was praying for courage in the face of his own sure and coming tribulation. If we can hear Jesus pray his own prayer, we have to hear him asking, “Will I be found faithful?” And hoping, “Let me not disbelieve, when I need it the most!”

The proper name is basiphobia. The fear of falling. The word comes from the Greek words for fear (phobos) and foot (basis). The fear of falling, you see, is fundamentally just the fear of walking. For no matter where we tread, whether on solid ground or on a trestle of tall temptation – the balance is no harder... it’s just that we’ve got farther to fall!

Maybe what we should fear most, then, is not losing our faith in final tribulation, but losing our community. For another heart, another soul, another mind, another hand – will give us just what we need for any journey.[22] A community of faith will give us strength. A community of faith will give us balance. A community of faith will walk with us, through the valley of the shadow,[23] and pray with us, For Fear of Falling.

[1] David Wilcox, from his recording, “Home Again.”

[2] I am alluding here to what is commonly referred to as “the fall of man” – the “fall” of Adam and Eve from the perfection of the garden, into sin and its resulting banishment from the garden.

[3] The speed of the normal acceleration of an object, in earth’s gravity, is expressed as 32 feet/sec².

[4] Joachim Jeremias uses this translation in his book, The Prayers of Jesus. p.104.

[5] Jeremias gives the prayer in “what is presumably the oldest wording,” as “Dear Father / Hallowed be thy name. / Thy kingdom come. / Our bread for tomorrow / give us today. / And forgive us our debts / as we also herewith forgive our debtors. / And let us not succumb to temptation.” pp.94-95.

[6] There is an old gospel hymn, of which I can only sing this first line, “Tempted and tried, Lord…”

[7] Gerhard Ebeling, The Lord’s Prayer,: “If we do not trace [the word temptation] into the depths of the biblical witness, but stop at the platitudes of everyday use, then we succumb to a mixture of the moral and the religious in which both are out of focus. Religion becomes a special kind of morality, and morals become a preserve of religion. And together both are thus reduced to a particular way of living that cannot have any universal binding force. Religion then appears to be a private realm for those with religious inclinations, and that which is avowedly moral appears as the domain of rigorists” p.89.

[8] Jeremias, p.95.

[9] “The LORD, the LORD, A God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love…” Exodus 34.6. This phrase is repeated numbers of time in the Old Testament. See Nehemiah 9.17; Psalm 86.15, 103.8, 145.8, Joel 2.13, Jonah 4.2.

[10] See my sermon, “Covenant, Curse, and the Promise of Life.”

[11] See Romans 7.14-25.

[12] “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.” Dawkins, The Selfish Gene.

[13] No Darwinian would agree with me, of course, but it is my belief that the call to “rise above” (my words) the “selfish gene” (Dawkins’ words) comes only from God.

[14] Quoted by Jeremias, p.105.

[15] See my sermon, “Tempted Not To Be,” taken from the temptation of Jesus in Mark’s gospel.

[16] Jeremias, p.105.

[17] My fried, Dr. William E. Hull recalled this history for me. Dr. Moody was quoting W.T. Connor, formerly of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

[18] This full quotation from Ebeling, The Lord’s Prayer, is: “Ought we, then, to believe in the devil? Oh no! That would be self-contradictory. We ought in faith to trample the devil underfoot. For the devil is the offspring of unbelief. The more profoundly we grasp the truth of this, the clearer it becomes that the reality, the power, and the right behind what is experienced in all this, in temptation and affliction, is ultimately God himself – but God as he is experienced in unbelief. Temptation, ultimately…” pp. 94-95.

[19] The hymn, “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine,” is by Fanny J. Crosby, 1873.

[20] Implicit to my claim here is the fact that in praying, Jesus, as well as his disciples, did not fall – else we would not be proclaiming faith in Jesus’ name today!

[21] Many Christians would not be able to hear this point, for in many Christological constructions, Jesus does not exhibit such “fear” or “honesty,” much less any “doubt.” But I struggle with such a view of Christ – how else would his “incarnation,” his being “in every respect … tested (tempted) as we are…” (Hebrews 4.15), give meaning to our lives, if, due to his nature, he was for any practical purpose really removed from such emotions as are at the heart of our own humanity?

[22] See Deuteronomy 6.4 and Mark 12.29-30.

[23] The Old Testament reading for today was Psalm 23.

[24] The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy them. Deuteronomy 33.27, KJV. We are “free to fly and free to fall,” yet the wonderful tension remains, even within scripture – would God, who is “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,” ever let God’s “children” fall, forever? “So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost” (Matthew 18.14). The sermon ends in such tension, and with an eye toward the mercy of God, “and underneath are the everlasting arms.”