Our Father: Deliverance from Evil through the Prayer of Christ Rev. Msgr. Charles Pope Tuesdays, July 21 and 28 @ 7:30 p.m. St. Ambrose Church Hall Part Two Deliverance from Evil I. What is deliverance? a. Deliverance is what happened to you when you were baptized and received the gift of faith; when you were delivered from one kingdom into another Kingdom. b. Deliverance subsequent to baptism is when the Church (through her ministers or members) helps a person to take fuller possession of the freedom they have already been given in Christ. c. Deliverance is moving from a place of darkness and lies (about us, and life, and God) to place of light and truth, seeing ourselves, our live and the world as God sees. d. Images from Scripture: i. Exodus 1. Israel delivered out of bondage and brought to the Promised Land 2. They celebrate this every year at Passover. 3. Their identity as slaves was overshadowed by their identity as God s chosen people. 4. And Jesus has become the fulfillment of this deliverance. ii. God has delivered us from the dominion of darkness, and has brought us into the kingdom of his dear Son (Col 1:13) 1. You have been delivered from darkness to light. This has happened. On going deliverance is when the Church helps us to lay hold of this in an ever-deepening way. 2. Deliverance is movement out of darkness into light. iii. St. Paul recounted how the Lord commissioned him by saying: I am sending you, to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by faith in Me.' (Acts 26:17-18) 1. Again, out of darkness to light 2. Out of one kingdom into God s Kingdom. iv. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil s work (1John 3:8) 1. Jesus came to break the hold of the enemy 2. To bring true freedom to us. v. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. (Jn 8:36) 1. Deliverance is Freedom
2. True Freedom. e. Deliverance is not simply to be equated with exorcism. i. Exorcism is a liturgical rite of the Church that confronts, challenges and torments a demon. It is only for those who are possessed. ii. Exorcism (major or minor) confronts demons, deliverance ministers to the person and largely ignores demons. iii. Deliverance is more than freedom from evil spirits. It s being transferred from one kingdom, one reality, to another; from darkness to light. iv. Deliverance is no more about Satan than the Exodus was about Pharaoh v. Deliverance isn t the mere removal of negative things, it is the addition of positive, amazing new things, new realities, new freedom, new power.
II. From What Are We Delivered? a. SIN - Forgive us our Trespasses. i. The Greek word in question is ὀφειλήματα (opheilēmata) which most literally refers to having debts. 1. But debts are not understood as financial here. Rather we have incurred a debt of sin. St Jerome who translated the most widely used Latin translation (the Vulgate) used the Latin word debitoribus which most naturally came into English as debts. 2. Later, because of the tendency of debt to refer more exclusively to financial matters the term trespasses became a more common translation in English. 3. However, trespasses has its problems too since it tends in current English to mean that I am illegally on someone else s property. 4. Currently there are those who want to simply say, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. But this loses some of what the original Greek, and likely the Lord, conveyed. For what is said here is not merely that we sinned (in some abstract sense) but that we have incurred and enormous debt, and that we have strayed into places we have no business being. Indeed our debt is huge. The Lord in summoning us to forgive one another as we have been forgiven speaks of a man who owed ten thousand talents (an almost unimaginable amount). But that man is us. 5. So sin is not an abstraction, it is a very heavy debt of sin we cannot pay on our own. This is what the Greek word opheilēmata (debts) is conveying. ii. Our first and most necessary deliverance is from sin. iii. You Shall Name him Jesus for he will save his people from their sins. (Matt 1:21) iv. Jesus looked at a paralyzed man and told him his sins were forgiven. (Lk 5:23) v. Unless you come to believe that I AM you will die in your sins (Jn 8:24)
b. TEMPTATION - Lead us not into Temptation i. Temptation is the work of the devil to drag you to hell. ii. More academically, temptation is an attraction, either from outside oneself or from within, to act contrary to right reason and the commandments of God. Jesus himself during his life on earth was tempted, put to the test, to manifest both the opposition between himself and the devil and the triumph of his saving work over Satan (cf Catechism # 538). iii. God is not a source of temptation despite what many conclude from the phrase in the Lord s Prayer, lead us not into temptation (Matt 6: 6:13; Lk 11:4). This phrase is a petition asking God not to permit us to be subject to a test or temptation beyond our capacity to endure, and asking Him to give us grace to withstand what does. That God himself is not a source of temptation is attested to elsewhere in Scripture: 1. When tempted, no one should say, God is tempting me. For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death (James 1:13-14). For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world (1 John 2:16). iv. For more on temptation see auxiliary materials I have supplied. c. THE EVIL ONE - But deliver us from (the) evil (one) i. πονηροῦ (ponerou) evil, the evil one. ii. ponērós - an adjective which is also used substantively, derived from pónos, meaning pain, laborious trouble, or toil more properly, what is pain-ridden, emphasizing the inevitable agonies and misery that always go with evil. iii. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen. Gal 1:3-5 iv. The chief manner in which Jesus Christ does this is through word and sacrament along with prayer and holy fellowship (Acts 2:35)
III. Three incursions of the Evil One a. Temptation i. This incursion we all feel till the day we die. In the Our Father we ask that sufficient grace be supplied to resists it, and that we strive to lay hold of what is offered. ii. Again, for more on temptation see axillary materials that I have supplied. b. Oppression (obsession) i. This term describes an elevated level of the influence of evil spirits upon the soul or body of a person. Such influences take many different forms 1. Elevated fears and anxieties 2. Severe and tormenting dreams or thoughts 3. Bouts of extreme and negative feelings such as guilt, anger, depression, grief or discouragement with no obvious and corresponding reason or cause. 4. Strange, fearful, troubling thoughts and experiences when trying to pray or engage in holy activity. 5. Physical attacks such as scratches, bruises, bite marks that appear, sometimes in the morning after sleep. 6. Psychosomatic experiences such as being raped or physically attacked by demons, or of seeing black and shadowy figures. Such attacks may or may not leave physical evidence but to the afflicted person they are very real experiences. 7. Sometimes there are sounds or physical manifestations of the presence of demons in a place. This is usually called an infestation. 8. Etc. ii. The person s will and body are not possessed or taken over, the attack remains distinct from the person and does not involve their will or loss of control over their body. iii. Most people experience some degree of oppression in their life. It may go away on its own, or require some form of deliverance ministry. iv. While the Church has no specific ritual for such deliverance, there are two basic forms deliverance ministry takes. 1. Confrontational a. In effect, prayers of minor exorcism where the demons are directly confronted and commanded to depart in the Name of Jesus Christ. Any priest can prayer these sorts of prayers. b. There is a book recently promulgated by a bishop of the Church that contains such prayers: Minor Exorcisms that Priests can say. c. Lay people can also utter certain commands that confront demons and order them to depart. However, it
is seldom advisable for lay people to do much of this sort of praying. It is seldom advisable to directly confront demons at all. Better to ignore them and focus on helping the person. 2. Non-confrontational a. A form of deliverance ministry that ignores the demons and focuses exclusively on the person. b. The person ministering to the oppressed person usually works in a team of two or three and obtains the necessary information from the oppressed person. c. In a prayerful way the entryway or foothold of the demons is identified and the oppressed person is led through a series of renunciations of lies, and negative thoughts, a series of repenting of habits of sin, and of forgiving those who have hurt. d. Having done so, in effect removing the strongholds and closing the doors, the oppressed persons themselves, with the help of the team, command evil spirits to depart in the power of Jesus. e. The blessing of the Father is then invoked. f. The process is repeated as necessary. g. Again, the main focus is the person, not the demons. The focus is healing more than casting out. c. Possession i. In Possession a door has opened to a fallen angel (i.e. a demon) to possess, that is a person will has been submerged such that they are no longer able to resist the devil's lies and tortures, even with the prayers and support of others. The demons gain access not only to the person's thinking and to significant parts of their will, but also to their body and can speak and move through it without the person be able to resist this. ii. All possession is rare, whether partial or full. 1. Partial possession involves sporadic incidents and an over malaise or sullenness. The person however, between episodes is largely himself, can pray, receive sacraments and so forth. During episodes of possession there is hostility and fear to sacred objects and persons, there is often some combination of the knowledge of languages, hidden knowledge, and/or unusual physical strength. Possession here is not complete. It means that the person is severely demonized and is on the way to complete possession. But they still have revulsion and torment toward the demonic and seek, in some sense (though in a decreasing sense) to be free. 2. In complete (or perfect) possession the individual has completely surrendered his will to the demons and desires nothing other than what is evil, indeed, revels in it. In such
cases a union has been achieved that is comprehensive and consistent. iii. Again, possession is rare and cannot be acquired simply like a disease or mosquito bite. Those possessed have somehow opened the door and in some manner permit the demons a foothold. Other explanations must be ruled out for the person's behavior and the exorcist should be slow to conclude possession. iv. Performing major exorcism on a person who is not possessed can cause great harm psychologically, spiritually, emotionally and even physically. v. Given its rarity and the intensity of exorcism, it should, like surgery, be considered only for cases that are clear, serious, and admit of no other cause or solution. IV. Recapitulation a. Deliverance is what happened to you when you were baptized and received the gift of faith; when you were delivered from one kingdom into another Kingdom. b. Deliverance subsequent to baptism is when the Church (through her ministers or members) helps a person to take fuller possession of the freedom they have already been given in Christ. c. Deliverance is moving from a place of darkness and lies (about us, and life, and God) to place of light and truth, seeing ourselves, our live and the world as God sees. d. This is the fundamental work of Jesus Christ through his Church.