THE LORD'S PRAYER
"Father,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give its each day our daily bread
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial. " (Luke 11: 2-4)
Because we do not know how to pray as we ought, Jesus gives us
a model prayer. Luke's version is shorter than the others and
probably closer to the original. The ancient Church regarded the
Lord's Prayer as a peculiar treasure, to be entrusted only to the
baptised, who were to pray it three times a day. In worship it
belonged just before tile communion of the bread and wine.
With slight variations, Luke's Greek version may be the closest
to the original in Jesus’ mother tongue of Aramaic. It is
also the shortest, shorn of liturgical flourishes.
It was Jesus' custom to pray to God as Abba, Father, as
to an intimate, and beloved elder member of the family. In
English "Father," the best we can offer, still feels remote and
austere, lacking the necessary degree of warmth and intimacy, in
comparison with Abba. My own children reserved the word
"Father" for all approach in jocular formality, as in Father, I
have a bone to pick with you."
Abba, came from a baby's babblings - abbubbabbubb.
Proud fathers in the ancient world naturally took it as directed
to themselves. Meanwhile mothers were sure that the baby's ummammamma
was for them; and the Aramaic word for
mother, with parallels all over the world, was Imma.
Jesus wants us to pray with the intimacy that goes back to the
cradle. Babies instinctively place complete trust in their
parents (or whoever occupies that role). Such trust, necessary
for survival, has been hard-wired into them from the beginning.
Over their childhood years only trauma and/or continued
disappointment can remove it. If their earthly fathers turn out
to have feet of clay, will God also seem to have let them down? A
woman, abused by her father as a child, told me she could never
pray the Lord's Prayer.
Our present generation has another problem. We rattle off the
Prayer without slowing down to savour it. We automatically rattle
off prayers in public to our "loving heavenly Father," without
stopping to think. Thus, as we may have been told often enough,
our very unconsidered prayers reinforce patriarchy, male
domination, and the subjugation of women. If God is a He, then
men, naturally, are more God-like than women. 'The logic of'
course, is false since God is vastly more than our human
categories of he and she. We are in danger of making a graven image of
a word.
Tiny babies, with trust in their eyes, teach us how to pray. I
was watching my daughter's little one as she lay on the floor.
Miriam's eyes followed her mother adoringly, her ears continually
alert for the sound of her mother's voice. "Well," you might say,
"this is cupboard love, like that of a dog, tuned to the sight,
sound and fragrance of food." Certainly, for a mother is the
source of the baby's nourishment, comfort and consolation. In
time the adoration will transmute into something else, but as I
watch little Miriam, I understand more and more how like a mother
God must be.
And I see more clearly why Catholics turn to motherly Mary as a
help in prayer, and how Christians of all sorts find help by
calling on God as Sophia, the ancient word for wisdom, and
specifically, the wisdom of God.
Let us continue to pray to God as "Father," as rightly we should
since Jesus taught us to do so, but let us do it wisely and
devotionally, having in mind not some stern, all powerful
disciplinarian, nor some unpredictable tyrant. Let us think of
that proud Dad who cuddles his baby, and who will in time become
the waiting, loving, powerless father of the prodigal son.
Hallowed be your name. By praying aright, we seek to hallow
God's name. More than that, we pray that the whole creation might
revere everything that God's holy name represents. Though God is
indeed the source of all goodness, how easily we take God for
granted.
We dishonour God's holy name when we take, without gratitude,
God's good gifts of daily bread, and God's greater gifts -- "the
starry sky above ... and the moral law within" (Kant).
We also blaspheme the name of God when we use it to justify acts
contrary to that moral law. Apartheid, as you know, was justified
as the will of God. The Hitler death camps were justified in
terms of the divinely ordained superiority of the Aryan race.
September 11 and the Bali bombings were clear cases of God's name
taken in vain.
It is easy, of course, to see these errors when others make
them, We must be alert ourselves to the dangers of using
religious language not for the glory of God, but for the sake of
personal, corporate or national power and domination. If we find
the way of the pious hypocrite distasteful, we have to be careful
lest we go the same way ourselves.
By contrast, we hallow God's name:-
when we worship in truth, honouring the one we call the Son
of God,
when we maintain integrity in the face of pressure to abandon
integrity,
when we love our neighbours as ourselves,
and when we have failed in any of these, we turn to God for
forgiveness and strength.
Your
kingdom come. What did Jesus mean when he taught the
disciples to pray for the coming of God's kingdom? He meant God's
royal rule, and not a kingdom with a stretch of territory,
like the Roman Empire. Neither Christianity nor the Church was
itself the kingdom, to be extended by missionary zeal.
God's royal rule, both actually and potentially, already
extends throughout the creation us taught the disciples that
God's royal rule of was erupting all around them, "...the
blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are
cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good
news brought to them, " he said, and 'To you it has been
given to know, the secrets of the kingdom of God."
The nature of the kingdom is to be both present and future. It
is both "already here," and "not yet." Therefore we pray for eyes
to see what is already happening. I think of Graham
Clarke's bionic car as an example of the kingdom breaking in. His
parents used to worship with us in Bendigo, and so did Graham on
weekend visits.
The kingdom is already here in developments like the bionic car.
It is also "not yet"-not yet in its fullness. Therefore when the
powers of darkness seem to be winning, and evil appears to
triumph, that is the time for Christians to pray, Your
kingdom come. Imagine the early church under persecution from
Imperial Rome, and Christians praying against all outward
appearances, Your kingdom come.
And sustained them in their prayers was a vision of Christ
risen, risen in victory over the most evil forces of' darkness.
Christ the King would keep coming to them, lovingly, supportively
and encouragingly as he came in his own strange way in bread and
wine.
With the Eucharist as subtext, Give us each day our daily
bread, the prayer continues, or more accurately, our bread
for tomorrow. The disciples were to remember the children of
Israel gathering manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16). God in
divine providence gave them sufficient for each day, with a
double share on Sabbath eve to cover the next day as well. And
when they tried to gather more than they needed, it bred worms
and became foul (Exodus 16:20).
In the next chapter of Luke, Jesus will tell his disciples, and
us,
... not
to worry about your life, when you will eat, or.
about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food,
and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they
neither sow not. reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and
yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the
birds! ... It is the nations of the world that strive after all
these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead,
strive .for God's kingdom, and these things will he given to you
as well.
Our prayer
for daily bread keeps us alert to notice God's
gifts--to see the doughnut, not the hole. Our prayer can stave
off that deadening depression that makes us blind to the
goodness, truth and beauty that surround us on every side. There are
winter flowers, and they are very beautiful.
Then comes the petition Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves
forgive everyone indebted to us. Here resides spiritual and
mental health. It does us little good to maintain our rage, to
nurse resentments to ourselves in a little ball below the solar
plexus. Our own forgiveness - indeed, our own freedom-is linked
unequivocally with our forgiveness of others.
True, it may take a long time for anger to become transmuted
into acceptance. We fool ourselves when we think we can forgive
others lightly, or accept light forgiveness for ourselves.
Finally, we pray in Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer, And
do not bring us to the time of trial. The old translation had Lead
us not into temptation, which is powerful enough.
But specifically here Jesus is asking us to pray for safety at
those times when we come to the great ordeal, when we are
tempted to fall away from faith. The times of trial are many, and
Jesus faced his in the Garden of Gethsernane, when lie prayed for
courage to go the way of the cross.
The parables that follow in this chapter remind us of the need
to persist in prayer, Remember those early Christians, encouraged
to pray the Lord's Prayer three times a day- really pray it, not
rattle it off like a duty or a magic charm.
God rarely answers our prayers straight away. We must keep on
praying, perhaps until we have become transformed ourselves and
ready to receive the gift, or until our prayers change from
selfish concerns to great-hearted intercessions, or until the
time is ripe, according to God's timing and not our own.
___________________________________________________
A sermon presented
by the Rev Dr Stuart Murray at St Aidan's Uniting Church North Balwyn,
on 25th July, 2004.
IT MAY BE
REPRODUCED WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
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