The Empire Strikes Back: Segregation and the Lord's Prayer

There is something transformative and subversive about the Lord’s Prayer. Subversive in that it challenges our notions about the way the world is supposed to work, about our notions of how we are to live our lives in this world. To pray for God’s Kingdom to come, and then to ask to participate in bringing that Kingdom, is treason in the existing kingdom. To pledge allegiance to a King that is not the current king (or President, Prime Minister, or Dictator) will often get you killed. To seek to reorder the way things are structured will, at the very least, get you yelled at. (Just try to change something in the church!)

The Lord’s Prayer, with its petitions for God’s Kingdom to come and His will to be done, with its requests for equity, faithfulness, justice, love, and hope, with its urging for debts and transgressions to be forgiven massively challenges the systems and structures that guide our society. As we’ve realized, these petitions and requests aren’t just for God to do something, but they are for God to use us in helping God. As Christians, we are called to be God’s hands and feet in our culture and world so that debts and sins might be forgiven, that there might be equity, faithfulness, justice, love, and hope. This call that Christ makes upon our lives is a dangerous one. It amounts to treason against the powers and principalities, the systems and structures that have so unfairly ordered our world.

On October 1st 1962, James Meredith became the first African-American student to enroll at the historically segregated University of Mississippi. Meredith, who by all accounts was a good student, had previously attempted to enroll but was blocked solely based on the color of his skin. At the time, of course, this was nothing strange. In fact, in parts of the South, segregation was the law of the land. The long legal battle that preceded Meredith’s admittance to the Ole Miss was just the beginning.

Tensions were high as Meredith was set to make his appearance at the University. The Federal Government sent 500 US Marshals, as well as soldiers from various different military units to ensure Meredith’s safety. Despite this protection, students and anti-desegregationists gathered and rioted over the issue. The violence that ensued resulted in close to 200 wounded and two deaths.

No one can doubt the injustice and sin that was perpetrated on persons of African decent throughout our nation’s history. Slavery, racism, and segregation are a great sin from which we are still trying to be free. But there were some who saw this great evil and dared to expose it, dared to speak out against it. Those people, like James Meredith, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others bore the full brunt of the systems, powers, and people who benefited from the sin of racism. They dared to be agents of God’s coming Kingdom. And some paid with their lives.

This week’s phrase, “Save us from the time of trial, but deliver us from evil…” must be prayed if we are seriously engaged, like James Meredith and Martin Luther King, Jr., in unmasking sin and death so that God’s Kingdom may break in just a little bit more. The sin, the death, the principalities and powers at work at our world will not go quietly into the night. They will not give up without a fight.

This phrase, far from being just about our own personal struggles and temptations, is about the strength and help we will need if we are to truly to be engaged as Kingdom people. Jesus fought all that was wrong with this world and was met with the greatest of resistance.

Our call, as Christians, is not just to have our own individual lives changed and transformed. It isn’t even just about proclaiming the good news of personal transformation and salvation. Too often we limit Christianity to this, encouraging people that if they just trust Christ, their lives will be better. There is something in this part of the Lord’s Prayer that completely reverses that notion. If we are to be Christian, if we are to be followers of Jesus Christ, then we are to live like him, we are to engage the powers that be, and we are to engage the sin and brokenness that so dominates our world so that it might be unmasked and destroyed. It is this engagement that gets us in trouble.

Lies and sin don’t like to be exposed. They don’t like to be fought against. They don’t like to be changed. They fight back. To pray for God’s Kingdom to come is treason. So we must pray, “Save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil.” We must pray it because it is what Christ prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane shortly before his death. We must pray it because it is only with God’s help that we can remain faithful to the call to participate in God’s coming Kingdom in the face of the resistance of the principalities and powers of this world.