Deliver us from evil

When I get in a really foul mood, there are certain remedies I employ.
One is basic damage limitation: remove myself from human company.
Two: if it’s not possible to withdraw physically, switch off all emotions and vocal chords and stop communicating except very superficially – nods or smiles.
This is basic safety procedure, to ensure that nobody gets scalped by my bite-yer-head-off words.
Next is to identify if anything else is going on inside me as well as the anger: hunger, physical pain, tiredness, loneliness? – and remedy those. My best remedy for loneliness is to be alone with God for a while, preferably with the bible open, allowing his words to jump out and either comfort or challenge me, till my angry words dissolve in his wisdom.
And then the real words can come, the panic and the hurt and the prayer that comes from where the real problem lies, not from where the anger tries to defend me and hide me from facing the painful stuff.
So what happens if I – or anyone else – am not in a position to apply any of those remedies?
If you’re homeless, for example, you’ll have no privacy, no quiet place of your own to withdraw to and take comfort or work things out.
If you’re working thankless hours in a job surrounded by people who are bullying, obscene, or just plain loud, you can’t take time out to think your own thoughts and consider your problem, because that is the problem.
If you’re at home all day, and home is the flat below the guy playing aggressive music at bust-your-brains-out volume, you can’t think positive thoughts because you can’t hear yourself think.
If you’re blessed with a finely tuned mind but it’s fragile and prone to tune into thoughts and voices that don’t seem to be your own, you may not be able to switch off the angry thoughts and mocking voices, however hard you try to find distractions.
If you’re atheist and have disproved the existence of God in your mind then your mind will call a halt if you find yourself trying to call on him.
So what happens, when those foul-mood remedies don’t work or don’t apply?
We know what happens then. It’s what happens to me when I don’t pray or can’t pray, when angry people won’t let me take space for my own anger to dissolve, when painkillers don’t kill the pain, there’s no hot water for a cleansing shower, we’ve run out of tea and consoling chocolate biscuits, and phone-a-friend turns out to be listen-to-a-moan.
The hurt that piled up and caused the bad mood in the first place starts swelling, unsoothed, and turns into fear that no one cares, and anger gets summoned up to shut out that fear, and that anger joins up with previous angers that have buried previous hurts, and then it all gangs up and either bursts out or burrows inwards.
And then people get violent and end up in prison, or destroy friendships or end careers, or get sick and end up dragging themselves through life instead of enjoying it, or …. endless ways of ending up, none of them happy endings.
I was invited to head up a group for prayer ministry, to pray with people who needed healing or help with their relationship with God - only first I had to satisfy the committee that my theology was in line with theirs: specifically, that I didn’t believe that Christians were ever in need of deliverance from evil spirits.
The committee regarded that belief as inappropriate since Christians, they said, are saved by the blood of Jesus and therefore can’t be controlled by any other spirit except God’s.
I said I felt it was inappropriate to have any theories on healing or on who a Christian is, since it’s God’s business, not for us to tell him who he’s dealing with, what’s their problem or what the appropriate remedy is.
I’ve had some terrific theories on healing and deliverance and Christians in my time, and God has lovingly blown every one of them out of the water before I can get so attached to my own opinion that I stop asking for his.
I’ve known loving, faithful, dedicated, full-on Christians take on so many people’s problems and so little help for themselves that they end up spitting rage, writhing in anguish or choking on the name of Jesus. Do they need Jesus Christ to deliver them from evil spirits, today, again? Yes, those particular people have needed that. And they’ve needed patient, expert human help, loving friends and families, bubble bath and chocolate cake as well.
What I think now is that certainly Christians are people who follow Christ, but sometimes from a great distance by the most evasive route possible with many diversions into anger, pride, lust and all the rest of it. And sometimes with huge obstacles blocking their path that are truly not their own fault and which they just can’t get past. And sometimes without being able to remember who Jesus Christ is or why they wanted to follow him in the first place.
And sometimes with such pain, fear, loneliness and hurt that it all gets too much and terrible crimes are committed.
So does that mean we’re all Christians, whether or not we know it?
All equally drawn by the magnet that is the love of God, which happened to be expressed through Jesus Christ, dying to save every single human being and every good thing created by God?
All equally confused, stupid, angry, and tending to pervert the course of God’s justice? All similarly distant from being the person Jesus was and is and will continue to be, through death, through hell, through bad mood days and bad faith decades?
All equally sick, though we show it in different ways and know it in varying measures.
All needing Jesus to heal us, every day till the hour of our death.
All failing to be a real Christian, like him, for more than two and a half minutes at a time, and that’s on a good day, downhill with the wind behind us.
And all in need of deliverance from anger, violence and being controlled by all kinds of evil spirits?
Yes, please.
Deliver us from evil. Whether we're Christian, agnostic, atheist, other, or all of the above. All of us. All the time. Amen.