Today and for the next 3 Sundays I will
be preaching about the Lord’s Prayer. But today I want to look at four lessons
we learn from the Lord’s Prayer: First,
prayer is a skill we need to learn.
Secondly, all Christian prayer is corporate. Thirdly, the Lord’s prayer teaches us that
God relates to us as a parent to children.
And fourthly, we can never go so far from God that he will be unable to
hear our prayer.
“Pray then this
way…” implies that we do not know how to pray.
How could that be? Isn’t prayer a
universal human impulse? Why did the
disciples go to Jesus and say, “Lord, teach us to pray”? They were Jews, and at the time of Jesus’
birth, the Jewish faith was over a thousand years old. For over a thousand
years the Jewish people had raised their hearts and hands to heaven and called
upon the Almighty. Even if they had been Greeks or Romans, they would have
known how to pray. All of the world’s
religions have teachings and traditions about prayer. Doesn’t prayer rise spontaneously from a
feeling of gratitude? I think that all
of us have a natural desire to offer thanks for the good things that come to us
unsought and unasked for – the startling red of a maple in autumn or the
stranger who opens a door for us when our arms are loaded with groceries. Prayer
seems not only natural but inevitable when disaster strikes – when a newborn’s
fever grows higher and higher and nothing seems to bring it down, what parent
in the world does not turn to prayer?
When the crops fail, or the river overflows its banks, or there hasn’t
been a drop of rain in months, is there anyone who does not at least yearn to
believe that there is a God who will hear and answer our prayers? And especially at death, don’t we naturally
pray for peace for those who have departed this life?
Prayer appears
to be a natural human response to both the good and the bad situations that
inevitably accompany human life. And
yet, whether we read Matthew or Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus
seemed to think he needed to teach his disciples to pray.
Why do we need
to know how to pray? The Lord’s Prayer
itself is the answer. It is at once both
simple enough for a child to learn and understand and also a deep vein of
spiritual treasure from which the greatest of saints can mine inexhaustible
riches. To be sure, prayer is a natural
and universal human impulse and God hears all prayers. However, while our natural impulses are all
God’s good gifts, they need to be shaped and trained. It is natural for a child to want to speak,
but without hearing her parents talk to her, she will not advance beyond the
oooohs and ahhs of infancy. Hunger is a
natural impulse, but a child needs to be introduced slowly and gradually to
healthy and nutritious food. And so it
is with prayer. The spiritual life
requires as much training as sports or music. The Lord’s Prayer is a set
of exercises from which both the beginner and the advanced student can benefit.
The first word
is the first lesson: “Our…” By nature
our prayers are selfish and individualistic.
We seek to get our own needs met.
But the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that we are not isolated individuals
but parts of a greater whole. As with
the Nicene creed, so with the Lord’s Prayer, this is a text for the
baptized. In the early church, those who
were to be baptized at the Easter vigil were dismissed from the service after
the sermon. They did not have an opportunity to say the creed or the Lord’s
prayer. But after they had been baptized, they said the creed and the Lord’s
prayer together with the congregation for the first time: “WE believe…” “OUR
Father…” Baptism makes us no longer an “I” but a “we” .
Perhaps the
greatest and most destructive mistake of the modern West is individualism. In contrast to human experience from the
beginning of time, the women and men of the modern West believe themselves to
be captains of their fate and masters of their destiny. But in John Donne’s words, “No man is an
island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the
main....” This is even more true for
Christians. Baptism makes us members of
the body of Christ and participants in a fellowship that extends throughout
time and space. There is no such thing
as a solitary Christian. You have never prayed alone. Every time you pray, you
are a part of the great chorus of prayer that goes up throughout time and
space. As we say in the Eucharistic prayer, “With angels and archangels and
with the whole company of heaven…”. And
this is the first thing the Lord’s Prayer teaches us. “Our Father…”
The second
lesson is about the nature of God.
Without a guide, it would be natural to think of God as remote, removed,
indifferent, or perhaps even hostile.
This seems to have been the belief of the Hellenistic religions. It was assumed as a matter of course that the
gods were vindictive and vengeful and so sacrifices were offered to acquire
their good will or to avert their anger.
One did not have a parent/child relationship with the gods; at best it
was more like master/slave. But the
Jewish faith taught that God freely bound himself in love to his people in a
covenant relationship that could not be destroyed. And Jesus opened the vision of God’s love
even more and taught that the relationship that Israel had with God was the
relationship that God desires to have with each of us. And this is expressed in the second word of
the prayer: “Father”.
Before I go any
further I have to acknowledge that “Father” is a problematic word. A few years ago a wit took a jab at our
preoccupation with inclusive language:
How shall we
sing the praise of Him
Who is no longer
He?
Where shall we
go to learn
The sex of
Deity?
“Father” is
problematic for many reasons. First, it
implies that God is male or at least masculine.
But feminists have taught us that masculine and feminine are cultural
constructs. They are categories we
impose on each other, but in no sense are they natural or universal. God is beyond our limited concept of what it
means to be masculine or feminine. The
great Catholic feminist Dorothy Day said that God’s love can be “harsh and
dangerous”, but God’s love is also soft and yielding. Love makes God vulnerable. Isn’t that one of
the main things we learn from crucifixion? Love took God the Son on a journey
from heavenly glory to ignominious death on a cross, from the right of the
Father to the right hand of a petty criminal.
Harsh and dangerous are categories many of us associate with
masculinity, but vulnerability is a quality often associated with the
feminine. In a sense, addressing God as
Father is a subtle way of undermining our assumptions about both the feminine
and the masculine, because we see in God qualities associated with both
genders. God is both yielding and
resistant, both fierce and tender. We
limit ourselves when we define masculine and feminine too narrowly, but God
defies our limits and expectations.
However, the
great problem of addressing God as Father is that it appears to bless a form of
patriarchy. I think the way to deal with
this is to acknowledge that it is true.
While I believe that the Lord’s Prayer is a universal prayer that
Christians always will and always should pray, it is also a product of a
different time, place, and culture. The Lord’s
Prayer came from a world that privileged the masculine and could not conceive
of God as other than Father. Jesus
shared many of the assumptions of that world, but in his acceptance of women as
his disciples, in his defiance of the conventions that kept women and men apart,
and in his choice of women to be the first witnesses of his resurrection he
helped lay the groundwork for the full empowerment of women, even though that
took centuries and is not yet fully complete.
I sincerely
believe that the day will come when someone will compose a prayer addressing God
as Mother, a prayer that will catch our imaginations and move our hearts. Such a prayer will not supplant the Lord’s
Prayer but it will balance it. But that
day has not come yet. However, when we
pray “your kingdom come” I believe we are praying for the day when women and
men will share equally in God’s work and when we will perceive that all along
God has been as much our Mother as our Father.
The last point I
want to make to day is about how we locate God.
The Lord’s Prayer addresses God in heaven. The third and fourth words of the Lord’s
Prayer give people almost as much trouble as Father. To many “in heaven” implies that God is far
away and not near, that God is out there instead of in here. Heaven is infinitely far away. How, we think, could a God who dwells in
heaven be concerned with whether or not we find a job or our spouse’s emotional
cruelty or the incessant phone calls from bill collectors? How, we wonder, could the high God of heaven
bend his ears to hear not only our voices but even the silent prayers of our
hearts? That is precisely the
point. By teaching us to pray to our
Father in heaven, Jesus is telling us that distance is not a factor with God. No matter where are and no matter where God
is, God hears us. As Paul writes in
Romans 8, “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus”, not
even the distance between heaven and earth.
However, there
is another message in the third and fourth words of the Lord’s Prayer. To pray to our Father in heaven is an acknowledgement
that our world is not yet as it should be and we are not yet as we should
be. We are not yet ready to welcome
God’s rule. Our world is still a place
of injustice and cruelty, of deceit and treachery. The Bible promises that God will one day come
to dwell among us, but also tells us that that day has not yet come.
The Christian
faith teaches us that God is both beyond us and within us, both transcendent
and immanent. The Lord’s Prayer
expresses the longing that God’s world and our world will one day be
identical. But in this present time we
must sadly acknowledge that that is not yet the case. While present with us by the power of the
Holy Spirit, God does not yet dwell fully in our world.
When we pray the
Lord’s Prayer we discover that we are not alone, but rather God’s beloved
daughters and sons who are invited into a relationship with Christians in all
times and all places and that that the deepest desires of our heart are heard
in heavenly places. “Pray then this
way…”
