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Sermon
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| THE RICHEST FIFTY-FOUR WORDS Some years ago I was at a wedding where the bride’s uncle was one of those old bores who think they’re the entertainment world’s great undiscovered treasures. His speech introducing the toast to bride and groom had embarrassed everyone (especially the bride). When the dancing began he set about making sure he was never forgotten – by offending people one after the other. I knew he would get to me sooner or later. “You sky pilots” he said, “are on a good racket, “only working Sundays.” I put on a smile and said, “Sure beats honest toil any day.” “You shouldn’t have got in here”, he said. “You’re not wearing a tie.” (I was wearing a clerical collar). I smiled again and said, “Hey, you know I must have put my shirt on back to front, and the darn thing’s hanging down my back.” With another glass in his hand now, he started up again. “I think life and religion ought to be more simple – but you lot make it complicated. I wanna see if you can answer three questions for me.” I said I would try, and this is what they were, as I recall. “First, does it matter what you believe? Second, what is a good person? And third, if I pray, is anyone there? An’ I don’t want a sermon. This glass is nearly empty.” I said, “How about fifty-four words? If you’re sober enough to remember tonight, go through Matthew 6:9-13, and I mean carefully – and you’ll find some pretty good answers to those questions.” I never did hear from him again, but I thought of him when I began writing the series. A great many people are exercised by his three questions. Does it matter what you believe?
I
In answer to that first question, I want to propose that the Lord’s Prayer is a model of conviction. It could be said to package what Jesus saw as the irreducible minimum of belief. That means it’s a very important resource for those who ask what the really vital matters of conviction are. For some this can be a great agony. I want to illustrate with a man nicknamed “Moses”. Moses had been educated in a Catholic school, but on leaving it he rejected what he saw as a doctrinaire and restrictive kind of religion. He wanted room to move. When work took him to town, Moses met a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers); for a time he went to their meeting house for the meditative, unstructured services they held – largely in silence. But he came to feel the Friends were a bit wishy-washy on doctrine, and duly he joined the Methodists, who seemed more sure of their beliefs. However, all this was during that unstable period of the 1960’s. When the minister resigned to sell insurance, Moses moved on too. He met some counter culture people and spent about a year trying to find the meaning of life in a Queensland commune. But some of those people seemed a bit mixed up, and Moses decided this time on the big move. He went to Northern India, found a guru and set himself to find out what he really should know. When Moses came back he looked around for some people to help him set up a new centre – a kind of Christian ‘ashram’. It lasted about six months, and most of his handful of devotees were very neurotic. When one decided she was madly in love with him, Moses figured it was time to shut down the ashram. He moved into a monastery, and for a while thought of being a monk. But there were too many reminders of the educational system he hated, so he went back home. This time he joined the Anglicans – just long enough to find they didn’t know it all either! A neighbour took him to a pentecostal church, but their attacks on Indian religion upset him, and he stayed only a month. From there it was the Brethren, who weren’t much more tolerant. He tried the Presbyterians, but was finding them too tolerant. “Moses” – forever in search of a promised land. In one sense he represents something in most of us: the part that asks “What are the really vital matters of conviction?” Of course, if you do get a final answer, leaving no room for questions, there is probably no room for faith either. But for the pilgrim like you and me, one can do a lot worse than contemplate the Lord’s Prayer as a model of conviction. First point, then, is that we can approach the Lord’s Prayer as a kind of ‘creed’. II
Second, I suggest it’s also a model of conduct. Remember the second question the bride’s uncle put to me: “What is a good person?” I want to tell you about Phillipa, who illustrates another aspect of what we call ‘the human quest’. I was a bit nonplussed when this Mini did a screaming U-turn and pulled up at the kerb outside my office. I was rather more so when Phillipa stepped out, looking like a young hopeful at the Cannes film festival – at least five to six years older than her 17½. A moment or two after sitting down, she asked if it was OK to smoke. She lit up a foreign make you don’t buy in supermarkets. So, why was Phillipa here? I had her Year 12 teacher’s diagnosis. Over the phone he had said, “I guess you could say Pip’s having an identity crisis. She doesn’t know which way’s up or who-the-hell she is, or anything. Read up on your Durkheim before you see her.” (I’ll tell you shortly who he was) I asked Phillipa what she felt like talking about. “Me, I guess.” She talked freely and the drift of the conversation was this. Intellectually, Phillipa was brilliant. She could handle class work standing on her head – which is exactly what she was doing one day when she should have been at her desk. Phillipa got her work done, but the class couldn’t concentrate at all. That was one of the days she came to school. More and more she was sleeping in until 11 o’clock, and getting to school for lunch. Phillipa was often out late at some of the night spots, and had been lucky not to get nailed for drinking under age; indeed for driving under the influence. There was no record of actual criminal behaviour, but what had brought the matter to a head was a speeding ticket – with complications. She had been pursued at about 100km in a 60km zone, and another vehicle that swerved to avoid her had ended up in someone’s garden. The police were not sympathetic, and Phillipa’s folks were flummoxed. They had wanted to see her as mature and responsible. So, what was the trouble? Rebellion against tyrannical parents? Wanting more free space? Not a bit of it. At 17½ Phillipa was being expected to behave as though she had the capacity of someone ten years older – needing no protection or direction or correction (‘PDC’) from anyone. Her folks thought they were doing the best for her. They had given her a living allowance at 15, and let her buy all her own things. They sent her overseas at the end of Year 11, bought her the Mini at 17, and effectively had given her the green light to run her own life. They had overlooked two things. First, although she was brilliant, and could look like a woman of the world, Phillipa hadn’t had time to acquire the maturity and wisdom needed. Second, she was growing up in a world with vastly more choices than her parents had at her age. Phillipa’s world was more ‘pluralist’ as we say. And without being able to name it, she was falling victim to what the sociologist Emile Durkheim called anomie. Anomie means ‘no norms’ – being deeply unsure about what is supposed to be normal or normative behaviour.
III
What I have said to this point may surprise you if you thought reflections on the Lord’s Prayer should be solely about prayer. I’ve said it is also a creed and a code of conduct – that is, when you ponder it carefully, word by word and phrase by phrase. But it is, of course, also a pattern for prayer or ‘a model of conversation’. I use that term advisedly, because it seems to me that conversation with God is the most adequate and satisfying definition of prayer you’re likely to find. It carries the notion of a two-way process, and allows for a lot of things to happen, as in any conversation. I think my idea of prayer as conversation with God goes back to my visiting in my first parish an old gent who lived on the outskirts of the city. I want to tell you about him and close with this story. His house was about as unpretentious as anything you would find; built partly from flattened kerosene tins (remember?), but spotless. He too was spotless, although he eked out a living by scrounging at the dump, and selling ods and ends of value that he found there. During World War I, when he was in the trenches, his wife had cleared out with someone else. He had never remarried, preferring life with a kelpie dog, a heap of books (mostly off the garbage) and a faith in God reminiscent of those old monks who lived out in the desert. The first time I visited, there were three chairs around the kitchen table, which was also his dining table and his dressing table. I was about to sit when he said, "Not that chair, if you don't mind. It's the holy one.” I thought he was making a joke about its condition. In fact, he’d said, "It’s for the holy one.” His practice, morning and evening, was to sit at the table with a slice of bread and his bottle of port, imagine Jesus was in the chair opposite, and say the ‘Our Father’ very slowly – thoughtfully dwelling on each phrase of it. The bread, the wine and the empty chair for the holy one who shows us to God, and the Lord’s Prayer – these were his aids to devotion, to his conversation with God. In the Lenten studies we will be considering very carefully what is in this prayer of the earliest followers, for it is a model of such conversation. I will be inviting you to revisit it at a depth that may be new for some of you – and to find in it the richest fifty-four words in scripture. ___________________________________________________
An address presented by the Rev Dr John Bodycomb at St Aidan's
Uniting Church North Balwyn, on 11th February, 2007 IT MAY BE REPRODUCED WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENT. |
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Page updated 14/02/07