Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning. Would you pray with me, O God, our helper?
Show us your way and teach us your paths.
By your Holy Spirit, open our minds that we may be led in your truth and taught your will.
Then may we praise you by listening to your word and by obeying it through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: All right.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: Our passage this morning comes from the Book of Matthew, chapter 6, verses 7 through 15.
I invite you just to listen to this version.
When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.
Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need. Before you ask him, pray, then in this.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.
For if you all forgive human beings their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
But if you do not forgive human beings, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your trespasses.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: So I've felt some unusual trepidation about this sermon.
The Lord's Prayer is a kind of beating heart of our faith, and it's often the only bit of scripture that Christians recite ritually in this congregation. We recite it together every Sunday, most of us from memory, so it is dear to many of us, even if some of us don't give it much thought.
We may mumble it absentmindedly to conclude our prayers and concerns each week, but it remains quietly potent, a kind of Sabbath in our speech.
And when the suffocating tragedies of life have robbed us of all other words, we and many other Christians are seized by the immense gravity of the Lord's Prayer to speak its words when we have no others.
We say it softly beside a deathbed.
Christians intone it ominously when they sense the unexpected approach of their demise, as some of the passengers of the Titanic apparently did.
Apparently, people recite it together before baseball games in Texas.
Maybe that tells us something about what baseball means to Texans.
So I don't want to desecrate a holy heirloom of our faith by explaining it in a sermon any more than I want to mansplain a poem.
There's nothing like a Presbyterian sermon from a professor to suck the life out of a poem as soaring and as humble as the Lord's Prayer.
So with what I say, I only hope not to do any injustice to it or to you. If anything, to gently creak open our tired minds a little wider to its meek and resounding song, which already hums low in your hearts.
Part of the challenge for me is that the meaning of the Lord's Prayer operates differently than the way words usually mean what they do.
It's not unlike a lullaby such as Rock a Bye Baby.
How is it that such a horrifying disaster could be the subject of a lullaby, a baby cradle and all falling helplessly, appallingly, from the broken bough to a mild sing song melody?
Maybe it's the way that horror is clothed in such soft, undulating sound, in the same sort of way the Lord's Prayer, the words of it, mean something to us, that the words of the Lord's Prayer do not mean otherwise.
The words mean something to us viscerally, musically.
That's not riding on the semantics we might say.
The meaning of the words is riding on something deeper.
So with what I say about the words of the prayer, I want to draw from that deep well of visceral musical meaning and not profane it with pontification. Lord help me.
I do hope that our ritual recitation of the Lord's Prayer every Sunday, or saying it in moments of crisis, or even at weddings or before baseball games, does not act to domesticate it, to dull the edge of its words, to numb us to it.
That's a risk of making a ritual of saying it.
But as I have sat next to my four children in those pews right over there over the past 15 years, hearing them murmur the words of the Lord's Prayer next to me on Sundays, usually after they have been unmoved, to sing a single word of our worship songs, at least the males.
I have been glad that those words of the Lord are being planted in their hearts, silently growing there as trunks, as the trunks of their lives push up into our world, which feels like it pushes down on them so much harder than it did when I was their age.
So I have no problem, honestly, with the fact that Christians mumble the Lord's Prayer ritually without knowing what it means, because it means more than what Christians can know, certainly more than what Bible scholars should pretend to know.
The Lord's Prayer is a poetic word to grow into the way we grow into being friends or parents, the way we grow to be children by learning to care for our parents when they're dying, for example, in the exact center of what we call the Sermon on the Mount, which is Jesus manifesto of the kingdom that's coming to the earth from heaven.
He says to his disciples, with the crowds of the people listening in, Pray this way, pray this way.
The Lord's prayer is the heart of Jesus Kingdom Manifesto according to Matthew, so his prayer informs everything that he has come to do. His strange politics has prayer at its pulsing center.
Following Jesus, we live for a life on the earth that God must bring about through us and beyond us.
We cannot settle for a life that we can confidently imagine or engineer.
We must dream.
We must grow, sometimes quietly and calmly, sometimes loudly and desperately, both together and alone, toward a life that we cannot see clearly and do not know how to reach.
That's why we must pray.
And it's why prayer is at the heart of the politics of Jesus.
It's not incidental that Jesus politics is powerful because of how it combines compassionate militancy with fierce non violence public confrontation and collective action with quiet trust in God to act in ways human beings do not control.
It's a politics that periodically flees the crowd in order to pray alone.
This prayerful politics is antithetical to the macho warmongering and violent stupidity that are animating yet more catastrophic warfare by Israel and the United States today. In Iran and elsewhere, Jesus prayer exposes that brutal military imperialism as idolatry which does not trust God to act, but can only pretend pathetically and falsely to be God's own hand to reduce the one true God to a petty nationalist, capitalist deity.
Our world is already full of the casualties and the carnage of that idolatry.
And in the coming days we will see a lot more of its horrors which will be systematically sanitized by the propaganda that governs our loud media environment.
Jesus calls upon us to live differently by praying differently.
When he says at the beginning of our passage, pray. Then in this way, he's contrasting his prayer with loud grandstanding prayer whose goal is to be seen by other people in order to manipulate them.
Prayer that aims to impress people with some supposed righteousness represented by those who pray, or maybe those that they pray for.
It's the prayer of hypocrites, and most of our social media feeds storm us with images of people praying in just this sort of way to and for the current icons of nationalist bellicose idolatry.
The only thing that sort of prayer achieves, its only reward, Jesus says, is the toxic attention that it attracts.
Jesus is also contrasting his prayer with long prayers full of empty, unctuous incantations that treat God as a fickle sovereign who can be manipulated by verbal performances that stroke his ego.
People who pray that way end up with governments who control their people that way, and a whole culture of power in which people rise or fall in their corporations, their families, their other organizations, depending on the hollow homage, public homage that they pay to their superiors. Don't pray that way, Jesus says.
Don't pray so as to manipulate people, as if you could manipulate God.
Pray with few words, plain words, words of trust, words that know God as Father rather than a fickle sovereign.
Words that know God knows your needs before you speak them to God. Pray when you are alone, when no one can see, because that's where you are so directly in the sight of God.
Pray there in secret, to the God who despises pageantry, the God who fills the earth with the ruins of once loud human powers that trafficked in spectacle in their day. If only we in our day might remember and learn from their fall.
If you are going to pray out loud in public, let it grow from this sort of plain prayer that you pray when you are alone.
Pray this way.
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.
Do not pray to a fickle sovereign, lest you fuel a heart and a society that are slaves to fickle sovereigns on the earth.
Pray to the God who is our Father.
The all powerful love that is the source of our life, the Spirit of our every breath, the light for our every step.
The One who is creating us and carrying us, caring for us in every moment.
The One who blesses us with sunshine even when we are evil. The One who makes life fertile with rain and food and friends even when we do not love as he loves.
The One who remembers us even when we forget Him.
The One who forgives us.
The One who is the fullness of all our deepest hopes as human beings.
The One who is the horizon and the life of all that lives and nurtures us as children, as his children.
Our Father who art in heaven.
What does it mean for the name of our Father to be hallowed?
It means for his reputation to be revered on the earth.
It means for the divine wellspring of our life to be known in our hearts and in our society. For His g gifts, for his goodness, for the abundance of his generosity, for the way that even his judgment turns out over generations to make us thrive.
For the beauty that he makes of our life even if we have disobeyed him.
And how much more if we love as he loves.
Our Father's Name is hallowed as the life of those who Invoke his name, who call upon his name is a life worthy of praise, a life full of blessing, a life of thick bonds of neighborly love. A life fed by justice, truthfulness and mercy. That is the signature of our Father on the earth.
And when people see life like that, when they taste it, when they hear of the God who has inspired and fed it, they know the God of that life as truly God.
The God of that life is the same God of the majestic mountains and the teeming sublime ocean, the God of the trees that are clapping their hands, and of the stars that are pouring forth speech.
And they know the God of that life as holy.
When you pray to our Father this way, that his name be hallowed, you become people who gravitate. Not to fickle sovereigns or national deities, who promise only empty and false prosperity for the price of human sacrifice, but people who gravitate to what is holy, to what is true, to what is beautiful, to what is good, to the incomprehensible God of love.
How important it is for us to pray for the howling of God's name when so many Christians who invoke God's name in our day are causing God's name to be blasphemed, to be despised, to be desecrated.
Pray this way.
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Do not pray to go to heaven one day.
Do not pray to leave this broken and beautiful earth behind.
Do not pray to escape your broken and beautiful body that your Father has made so intricately with this earth over eons.
Pray that the kingdom of your Father of love will come from heaven to the earth. That that kingdom will come and keep coming.
Pray for the redemption of the earth and of your body.
Such stunning gifts that God has made and will not abandon.
Pray for the resurrection of your bodies which are made of others bodies.
Pray for the healing of this earth. Pray that your loving Father in heaven will rule in your heart and the hearts of others. That he will rule among your friends and in your family. That he will rule in your places and your land.
That his kingdom of generosity and undying love will fill your body, the community where you live and spill beyond. Who knows how far thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Pray this way.
Give us this day our daily bread.
Your Father in heaven knows you need food today.
Pray that he will give it.
Speak your need for him to provide it.
Do not take it for granted.
And do not worry about the bread you will need tomorrow or next week, or next month or next year, or the bread your children will need when you are dead, or the bread their children will need. To say nothing of the shelter that will be needed or the financial security you want, or the vacations or technology or other luxuries you could do without but find yourself coveting.
Pray today for today's bread.
Do not hoard, do not stockpile what you will need tomorrow or in 10 years or when you will retire, what your children or grandchildren will need.
Because that is only to steal from others the bread that they need today and that they will need tomorrow.
Content yourself with the bread you need and the bread that you need today.
Pray for that bread.
Trust God enough not to be a hoarder who spreads scarcity in this world by claiming goods for yourself at others expense more than enough for you and not enough for them.
I find it hard to pray this way, very hard to pray for today's bread.
I do not trust God to provide tomorrow's bread, the bread that my family and I will need in the future. To say nothing of the health care we will need, or the end of life care that Kim and I will need, or the shelter we will need, or the vacations we would like to take, or the ways we would like to support our children in their adulthood.
I do not want to pray for today's bread and trust God to provide for tomorrow.
Because I imagine that my well being and that of my loved ones depend on Fuller Seminary, which is not trustworthy as an employer.
I imagine that our well being depends on insurance companies and a health care industry which all of us sitting here know are for profit predators.
I imagine the well being of me and my family depends on an economic system that will sacrifice the basic needs of the many for the obscene wealth of a few.
One in which people, like most of us, live quite comfortably on the backs of so many who must pay the price of our wars and our plenty.
I do not trust God to provide for me and my loved ones tomorrow. Because we live in a society, our society, where we might shake our heads regrettably at the destitution we witness among our neighbors and others, but hardly lift a finger to alleviate it, fixated as we are on providing enough and more than enough for ourselves, for our families.
Let us not settle cynically for being people like that.
Let us pray against it.
Let us pray for a life that is not predatory, even if we cannot imagine how we will get there as we do each day. God may bring us there. Yet our Father give Us this day, our daily bread pray this way.
Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
We may feel these words as a request for relief from God, and it is that.
But it is a request for relief only as it is also a curse.
Do we really want our Father to forgive our debts as we are forgiving our debtors?
Have you ever thought about that?
Damn, that depends on how we are forgiving our debtors.
How are we forgiving our debtors?
Poor people who hold few debts over others may indeed utter this prayer as almost purely for relief from the manifold debts that their lives embody, so few of which they have acted themselves to incur.
But hardly any of us sitting here is poor.
And so for us it is a prayer that speaks into our present consciousness the material debts and other debts that we allow others to owe us.
Our Father in Heaven has been generous with us.
He has rented the earth to us, the watersheds that sustain us, the human and animal neighbors on whom our lives depend on the bonds of affection that make our lives worth living.
He has sometimes added difficulty to our life to move us to love where we have failed to love as he loves.
We are indebted to our Father in heaven, and we cannot repay all that God has given us, or all the harm that we have done and the consequences God has allowed it to produce.
Neither can our debtors repay all that we have given them, or the harm that they have done to us, or the consequences that God has allowed that harm to produce in our lives.
But we can expect God to forgive us the debts we have acquired with God and with others, only as we forgive others the debts that they have with us, whether that be debts of money, debts of property, debts of revenge, debts of sex, debts of professional favors, the debt of your lover, who must show you they know how much they have hurt you.
The debt of your child, who must show you how much they have grieved you.
The debt of your friend, who must repay their betrayal of you.
The debt of our political enemies accepting the blame for the horrors that have befallen our country.
When you pray, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, you summon the names of your debtors and you pray that you will act today to forgive their debt.
Do not hold it over their head.
Do not keep controlling them.
Do not enslave yourself to controlling them. Free them and find that that will free you as God forgives you, as you have forgiven them.
Pray this way.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.
Lead us not into which temptation?
Especially the temptation of holding what others owe us over their heads, to cling to control, to make them pay, to punish them.
This is captivity to the devil, to to the evil one, to the rule of evil in our life.
Pray for deliverance from that evil that our Father. Lead us not into that temptation, but away from it, toward generosity rather than bitterness, toward forgiveness rather than vengefulness, toward love. And away from the temptation of hatred, away from analogous temptation too.
Lead us, Father, not into any temptation to take for ourselves at the expense of others.
Deliver us from our insecurities, from the fears induced by our traumas, from defensiveness. Deliver us from the evil one form in us desires only for what we can enjoy by sharing with others rather than exploiting them.
Desires not for what is scarce and subject to decay, desires not for what is less for others, the more that it is for us, but desires for the abundance of your gifts.
Gifts that the more we have of them, the more of them there is for others.
The gifts of friendship, of joy, of peace, of kindness, of truthfulness, the gift of love.
These are not less the more that some have of them, the more that people have of them, the more of them there is.
That is who and what God is as our Father among us and in us and relishing these gifts. And is how our Father's name is hallowed, how his kingdom comes the commentary that comes at the conclusion of the prayer is haunting. It's a good thing we don't say it every Sunday. I'm not sure I could deal with it.
Jesus has told us how to pray, and now he explains why.
Why pray this way?
Why pray for our Father's name to be hallowed and his kingdom to come to the earth for our daily bread and forgiveness as we forgive others to be led not into temptation, the temptations of a predatory and vindictive life that is captive to the evil one, but for deliverance from that evil one.
Why pray that way? Because if we forgive human beings their trespasses, our Heavenly Father will also forgive us.
But if we do not forgive human beings, neither will our Heavenly Father forgive our trespasses.
These are not the terms of some bilateral legal contract with God where you and I have to meet the condition of forgiving others to earn God's forgiveness of us? That's not what Jesus means.
Our Father is way too present throughout the fabric of our life and intimate with us to be merely one side of a contract with us.
Jesus closing words describe what we might call the physics of forgiveness.
How God's forgiveness on the earth works.
God is the love of our life, the breath of our life, the light of our life.
The power of the bonds of affection and trust that unite us to one another and to other creatures, human and non human.
Our Father's forgiveness of us names a life whose everyday conditions are free of the punishing deaths that otherwise dog people from the past.
If we do not forgive others, then we're shaping the conditions of the life we share with others over time. To be fearful, to be plagued by scarcity, to be poisoned by mistrust and therefore by predatory bitterness and eventually violence.
But if we forgive human beings their trespasses, the harm that they have done, we are investing in a life whose conditions will be trust, abundance, transparency, truthfulness, caring for one another, sharing with others as children of the same heavenly Father.
Those are the conditions of life called our Father's forgiveness.
If we till the soil, the plants will grow and there will be bread.
If we do not till the soil, the plants will wither and we and others will be hungry.
If we forgive human beings their trespasses as God has already forgiven us and will continue to forgive us, then our human life with others will be full of the abundant conditions of divine forgiveness.
If we do not forgive human beings their trespasses in defiance of how God has already forgiven us, then our life with others will lack the food of God's forgiveness. And so unforgiveness will spread as the God of love adds difficulty to our life so as to move us to love as God loves.
To know God as our loving Father rather than a fickle sovereign.
To experience life itself as the love of that God rather than futile and restless straining to win the favor of a God that we cannot trust.
Don't pray that way.
Pray in the way of Jesus.
Amen.
