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The Lord's Prayer
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Here in prayer with chosen family, the irony of knowing that God already knows means that none of the work that I normally do to protect myself holds any meaning here. Welcome to the Commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 1:If you and I haven't had a chance to meet yet, my name is Jeremy, and I'm part of the team here. And we're really glad that you're able to join us this weekend. We don't take it for granted that you spend part of your weekend with us, so thank you for doing that. Now if you are here for the first time or new, you are joining us in the middle of a short three week series on prayer, And we have called this series the problem with prayer. And the reason for that is that if we want to be honest about prayer, it really can be difficult for a lot of us.
Speaker 1:And I know we're in church and we're supposed to pray, and we've already prayed, and we're going to pray again. But let's be honest, because at the same time, sometimes when we go back home, and when we go back to real life, and when we settle back into real rhythms, prayer can be at least a little confusing. After all, is prayer worship? Is prayer about crossing our fingers and hoping for the best? Is prayer about snapping our fingers and telling God to get to work on her behalf?
Speaker 1:It's for all of that or none of that or more than that, and sometimes, I think it's this feeling of we're not supposed to talk about our confusion that sometimes makes it all that much harder to wrap our heads around. And so if you are here and you have ever struggled with prayer, how to do it, how to feel it, how to make sense of it in your life, then I want you to know that you are not alone. We all do. I do. You do.
Speaker 1:The person sitting beside you does, even if they don't want to admit that right now. Because prayer is, at its heart, a giving of oneself over to the mystery of the universe. That God is and God cares and God invites our small story to be shared with the infinite. And that was always going to be at least a little overwhelming for us. It's also why there really are no rules when it comes to prayer.
Speaker 1:One of the quotes that we played before the sermon comes from Edith Stein, and she said, my longing for truth was my single prayer. Meister Eckhart, one of my favorite thirteenth century Christian mystics once wrote that if the only prayer you ever pray in your entire life is thank you, then that will have been enough. So prayer really is where the rules don't matter and the points are made up, and yet there are still these tools and these patterns and this wisdom that is handed down to us that helps to shape us as we go. And that's what this series is about in large part. However, please remember this at the outset that at the end of the day, any honest expression of wonder pointed toward the divine, This counts as sacred prayer.
Speaker 1:Now, last week, we started this series really just with a brief introduction, and we talked about two ways to think about prayer, and then we talked about the context from which Jesus speaks to us about prayer. And the analogy that I used last week was learning to play guitar. You might not know this about me, but I do play guitar. Not very well, but I do have the hair for it, so there's that. However, when you are starting out, one of the first things that you do is you learn your scales.
Speaker 1:And you're learning which notes to include and which notes to leave out when you play. Somewhat ironically, actually being limited to certain notes helps you be more creative with them. In Christianity, this is what we call liturgy. When we are given prayers like the Lord's prayer as a guide and a model, and it can feel restricting at first to repeat them. As if our opportunity for self expression has somehow been limited.
Speaker 1:But what really happens is that once we learn the scale and we see what Jesus is doing and we internalize those patterns, what we find is this infinite space where our hopes and fears and frustrations and joy are welcomed into the presence of God. So first, we're learning the scales so that we can learn to play at prayer. Second, we are learning to imitate the masters. So when you're learning to play guitar, you want to learn to play like your idols. And for most of us as teenagers, what that meant was long hours standing in front of a mirror, holding a guitar, practicing how to look like a rock star more than anything else.
Speaker 1:At least that's my experience anyway. But eventually, you also do practice from time to time. And over time, that repetition and that imitation, it builds your skill. But at the same time, there also comes a time when we fall back on that imitation. So you learn certain guitar parts because you love them and you know them inside out, like riding a bike, you never forget them, and this really is what a lot of prayer looks like in the Bible.
Speaker 1:It's creative, and it's free, and it's unique, and it's beautiful, but then a lot of the time, it really is just imitating someone else. Not even Jesus. In his most vulnerable moment on the cross falls back on the words of someone else to express what's happening inside of him. And this is beautiful. To know that we don't always need to know what to say.
Speaker 1:And that in fact, sometimes it's better not to know what to say. It's better to allow someone else to speak for us in that moment. This is holy. Because that is an act of surrender. In fact, one of the most meaningful ways that I have made peace with prayer in my life is coming to realize that it's not actually always about me.
Speaker 1:And no doubt my wife would be happy to hear me say that, hoping that realization might carry over into other parts of my life as well. But when I simply receive the prayers of the people, and I stop trying to be so creative, stop trying to be eloquent, I stop trying to express myself, what I often find is this freedom to simply be in the presence of the one that I've been looking for. And so when I stop trying to make prayer happen, and I simply surrender myself to the prayers that I have received, oftentimes what I find is that it was my struggle that was getting in the way of noticing God near me. And so, even as we're learning to play, part of prayer is allowing the prayers of the people to speak for us. And as a community, we are collecting prayers all the time.
Speaker 1:They are posted every week to our website at commons.church/liturgy, and those prayers are there for you to use and internalize and pray in your life when you simply need to receive a prayer. But in this series, we are diving into a specific prayer, the Lord's Prayer. And so as we begin today, would you stand with me and pray this prayer together as a community? Pray with me. Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Speaker 1: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 trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.
Speaker 1:Come grab a seat. Okay. So today, we want to begin to actually look at this prayer, this Lord's prayer, and see what we can pull from it in order to better understand prayer in our own lives. But before we dive in, we have to go back to our final point from last week when we introduced this prayer. Because when Jesus talks about prayer and when Jesus wants to teach about prayer, he does so in the context of a conversation about righteousness.
Speaker 1:And righteousness in Greek and in Hebrew and in French and in Spanish and almost every other language other than English is actually the normal common word for justice. So we work for a more right world, or we work for a more just world. Same idea. Right? And in fact, in Greek, the word that's used in Matthew here is and the primary definition is this, the quality or practice of responsibility with a focus on fairness, justice, and equitableness.
Speaker 1:So those are the ideas that are floating around in Jesus' mind when he turns his attention to prayer. Responsibility, fairness, equitableness, justice, and specifically, he's talking about justice for the poor when he turns his prayer. Justice for the least among us, and that's not nothing. Because prayer is specifically a subset of our practice of righteousness, and righteousness is our participation with justice in the world, specifically justice for the least. Now, when I talk about justice, I'm not talking about following the rules and not speeding and paying your parking tickets, although all of those are good.
Speaker 1:My many parking tickets will attest to that. But what I'm talking about is this idea of working alongside God for a more just, a better world. In Jesus' words, a kingdom like God's. Because that's what prayer is predicated on for Jesus. That's what we have to keep in the back of our minds when we pray that prayer, this prayer specifically, is designed to help us become better participants in God's world.
Speaker 1:Not merely more religious ones. Now, if you open Matthew and you turn to chapter six, you're gonna find the Lord's prayer starting in verse nine, but it's not gonna look exactly like the prayer we just prayed a moment ago. The prayer ends in verse 13 with, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Period. And from there, Jesus goes on talking, but we, however, are used to normally praying for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever.
Speaker 1:Amen. And that benediction actually did show up in early manuscripts of Matthew from around the fifth century. We call these the majority texts or the Byzantine texts because they are the most common copies we have of the bible. And these are what the King James bible was translated from in the early sixteen hundreds, which is where that benediction in English comes from. So those lines are very old, at least 1,500 years.
Speaker 1:But they are not there in the earliest fragments of Matthew, which come from the city of Alexandria in about the second century. And this is actually really fascinating to think about. Because what it means is that likely what has happened is either a scribe came along and realized that this prayer had been given to the church and wanted it to be used in the church for worship, and so they wrote a nice little flourish that helped to bring it all together with a nice little bow. Or they realized that the prayer was already being used in worship, and people had already written this addendum to it, and so they decided to actually include that in the text for us. Now, as a bible nerd, this is fascinating for me because it shows just how organic the original collection and dissemination of the scriptures was in the early years of the church.
Speaker 1:But also it illustrates the painstaking work that is done by scholars today to try to recreate these texts for us as they were originally written thousands of years ago. But, either way, what's happened in practice is that our newer Bibles have generally omitted the benediction because they weren't originally part of Jesus' words, so you won't find that if you're reading from the NIV or say the ESV for example. But in worship, we still generally include it when we recite the prayer as part of the work of the church. And I actually find this an incredibly beautiful expression. It's almost a metaphor really for this partnership between heaven and earth that Jesus is absolutely unapologetically going to invite us into in this prayer.
Speaker 1:The words of Jesus and the work of the church melded together and recited in worship, and I love that. So let's dive into this. Because we got a lot of ground to cover in two weeks, and right from the start, Jesus is already taking us somewhere. Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Now, I don't know about you, but I have noticed that Jesus tends to start his prayers differently than I do.
Speaker 1:I mean, at some level, prayer is conversation. Right? So I am generally in the habit of addressing my audience. Perhaps something like God. Heavenly Father, Jesus, these are all ways I like to start a prayer.
Speaker 1:In fact, last week, I prayed in the sermon, and I began almighty God, gracious God, loving God. These are all attributes of the divine that I want to center myself in as I approach God. And I think that's pretty normal. But I think it's actually pretty healthy, that we might choose to remind ourselves of who we speak to in prayer. And sometimes, simply reminding yourself that God is good.
Speaker 1:That God is gracious and God is loving. That God is on your side even before you begin. This can transform your experience of the conversation that follows. And yet, I can't help but notice that Jesus centers himself in something very different as he begins to pray. Now, it's no less gracious and certainly no less loving, but it is significant, I think.
Speaker 1:And commentators have actually picked up on this for thousands of years. In fact, many traditions have taken to calling this prayer the our father for this very reason. When Jesus starts to pray, the attributes of God that Jesus wants to ground himself in are God's fatherness and God's ourness. Now, Greek is a funny language. And Greek, in the order of words, they function differently than English.
Speaker 1:In Greek, you can basically put your words together in whatever order you want to emphasize or diminish something in your sentence. But in Greek, this prayer begins, pater hemon, or literally, father of us. So father is actually the first word in this prayer, and some people get caught up on that father bit a bit. Either people who want to plant some kind of flag in a masculine identity for the divine, or sometimes those who want to push back against that a bit. Personally, I think both of those have a potential to miss Jesus' point here.
Speaker 1:The pronoun for God is God, and the divine simply transcends our simple binaries. But what Jesus is doing is not attempting to ground God in the masculine as much as grounding the divine in the experience of chosen family. No. Absolutely. This is a culturally bounded metaphor.
Speaker 1:It's a metaphor that was culturally appropriate to its context, but it's a metaphor that speaks something very true to us. That God is not distant. God is close and tender and loving as a parent should be. Now, I understand it's possible that your experience a parent or father or mother was not all that it should have been. And that those words do not convey the meaning that they were intended to for you.
Speaker 1:Part of the beauty of this image is the chosenness of the language. That we are invited to choose God as parent because God has chosen us as children. All of us. So this is not an autocratic God saying, call me dad from now on. This is an invitation to create new meaning within the concept of family, however it comes to you.
Speaker 1:By the way, the word pateir that's used here probably points us back to the Aramaic Abba, which means something like dad. But for the record Abba is more like dad than daddy. I know sometimes people will say that, and that's fine, but Abba is the familial loving word for father in Aramaic. It's not an infantilizing word. And so to talk about God as father or or Abba or dad, this isn't about taking away our agency in prayer.
Speaker 1:It's not the point. It's about allowing ourselves to sink into everything that family could be made holy. And so when I pray, what this reminds me of and what this centers me in is my complete safety in that moment. I have no one to impress here. No one to persuade.
Speaker 1:I have no one that needs to know just how smart or eloquent or convincing I can be when I speak. Because I am in that moment already actually fully and completely known and loved anyway. And I think this is actually what Jesus is getting at when he says, your father already knows what you need before you ask, so don't go on about it. Just get to it. See, for years, I had always thought, well, if God knows, then why ask?
Speaker 1:And if God understands, then why tell? If God is always there, then why bother speaking at all? I mean, why don't we just learn to rely on the omnipotence of the divine and then call that prayer and be done with it? My son turned five about a month ago, and we had a little mini party in the back yard, and a few friends came over, and though he needed absolutely no presents, people dutifully brought some over. And one was this little remote controlled car.
Speaker 1:It was fun, I'd eaten and enjoyed it, and I forgot about it. Until the next day, when I found it at the bottom of the kiddie pool that we keep in the backyard. And so I fish it out, and I bring it dripping wet to my son Eaton, and I ask, how did your toy get so wet? And Eaton responds, well, it just kind of got wet when I wasn't looking. Well, unsatisfied with that explanation, I pressed, I don't think that's true.
Speaker 1:I found it in your pool. Did you put it in the water? Oh, no. No. It just bounced into there.
Speaker 1:Well, that sounds unlikely. Are you saying you put it near the water and it accidentally fell in? And you see, I'm trying to help him out here, give him some plausible deniability, and yet he responds, no, no, no. It was just up and then over, and then I had no idea what was happening, and all of a sudden it was just in the pool. And I said, Eaton, Can you just tell me the truth?
Speaker 1:And there was this long pregnant pause. And then slowly, haltingly, painfully, hesitatingly, heard, I put it in the water. And I said, thank you. And Eton said, how did you know? Of course, what I've come to realize is that the asking and the telling and the speaking of prayer were never for God anyway.
Speaker 1:They were always for me. Because you see, nowhere else in my life do a guy get to ask for something without selling something. Very rarely in my life do I get to tell my story without at least wanting to position myself in some way. And nowhere else do I speak without some fear of miscommunication misunderstanding or misapprehension of meaning. But here in prayer with chosen family, the irony of knowing that God already knows means that none of the work that I normally do to protect myself holds any meaning here.
Speaker 1:And sure, I do still try to sell God on my ideas. And I do still try to position myself in the best light, and I still try to make sure that my words carry my intent with clarity. In those moments, brief and shining where I know God as father, and I see God as mother, and I experience God as pure parental love beyond limitation. I know that everything I hide behind doesn't matter anymore. And I know that if I don't have the words, then I can plagiarize someone else, and I don't need footnotes.
Speaker 1:And I know that if my ask is insane, I can just go for it anyway. I know that if I'm wrong, I'm loved. If I'm ashamed, I'm welcomed. If I'm confused, I'm comforted. If I'm lying, I will be listened to.
Speaker 1:If I'm honest, I'll be taken seriously. If I'm funny, God will laugh at me. And if I'm crying, God will never tell me to be a man. Because prayer is where I am nothing but who I am, and I am embraced like family anyway. And so when we begin, our father who art in heaven, the intent here is not to remind us of the masculinity of God.
Speaker 1:That's insane. It's instead to ground us in the overwhelming experience of expansive family because for Jesus, God is father of us. And this is a really big deal. And in prayer, I come to remember that God is not mine. God is not my father.
Speaker 1:God is not my savior, not my own personal Jesus who lives in my heart. God is fundamentally ours. And I know it might seem I'm making a big deal out of one word here, but I made a pretty big deal out of father, so like it just comes with the territory. Honestly though, without exaggeration, how we define ours here will shape everything about how we pray. Honestly, don't think I can overstate that.
Speaker 1:Is prayer an expression of some deep and unique special connection I have with my God, or is prayer like it is for Jesus? An expression of some fundamental human connection with the divine that everyone who breathes air shares. Because if it's the former, then I can go back my day the way I started. But if it is the latter, and if my prayer is fundamentally an expression of my solidarity in the human experience with everyone I cross paths with, Well, then I am brought squarely back to justice as the starting point for my prayer. See, Jesus grounds prayer in two essential ideas.
Speaker 1:First, that God is near to us and invested in what is good for us. But second, that God is near to all of us and invested in every one of us. In fact, would argue that when Jesus says, do not pray like the hypocrites who look for attention, but instead pray like this, he is explicitly calling us to include even the hypocrites we encounter in our hour. Now, I know you pray for the hypocrites, And I know you pray for your enemies because I pray all kinds of things for those I wish would do things differently. But things change for me.
Speaker 1:They change in me when I learn to pray with the hypocrites. And beside my enemies, elbow to elbow with those who see God very differently than I do. In fact, I would say that Jesus calls me to include in my hour even those whose hour does not include me, and that's often really hard. You see, way back in the beginning in Genesis, there is this story about the archetypal first family. And there's a man named Adam made from the Adamah, and his name means dirt.
Speaker 1:And there's a woman called Eve whose name means living or alive. And the dirt and alive come together and they have children. And they have a son named Abel which means breath and another named Cain which means a choir. And one day, acquire who is very concerned about who gets the most praise kills his brother Breath out in a field. And Breath's blood cries out to God and go God goes to see Cain and asks, what has happened to your breath?
Speaker 1:And Cain says, don't know anything about Abel. Am I my brother's keeper? And in many ways, everything that follows as you read your bible is God saying, yes to that question. Of course, you are your brother's keeper. Of course, your neighbor is your responsibility.
Speaker 1:Of course, you are meant to live out of your essential connectedness to everyone else. That's where your breath comes from after all. And so God goes on to tell stories and make rules and God forgives and God mourns until finally Jesus comes along and says, listen, if you want to know God then this is how you should pray. As Ron Rohlheiser writes, our father, who always stands with the weak, the powerless and the poor, the abandoned, the sick, the aged, the young and unborn, those who, by victim of circumstance, bear the heat of the day and the weight of our violence, who are in heaven, where everything wrong will be reversed, Where the first will be last and the last will be first, where all will be well and every manner of being will be made whole. Hallowed be that name.
Speaker 1:Because that kind of prayer is how you get your breath back in the world. You see, to pray the our father is to pray in solidarity with all those who know God and those who don't. Trusting the story of Genesis and our dissolution into us and them, that all of it can be reversed in love. And look, it might be hard at times to believe that God is your father, but trust me, it is a much bigger thing to believe that God is our father. Because when you say our father, that means that you are by extension now claiming yourself as your brother's keeper.
Speaker 1:And that means your homeless brother's keeper, and your Muslim sister's keeper, and your co working siblings keeper, and your Christian neighbor's keeper, all of that at the same time in the exact same breath. Because prayer is when pointed properly an expression of intimacy directed up toward the divine only when it engenders an expression of intimacy extended out from us to those around us just like God. And so this is what we do when we pray. We remind ourselves of who we are when we pray. And we remind ourselves of who God is when we pray.
Speaker 1:And we align ourselves with that imagination as we pray. That we might be like God. That earth might be like heaven. Because here's the secret. Prayer is often not where God decides what will happen to you.
Speaker 1:Instead, prayer is where you decide who you will become as you pursue God out of your prayer and back into the world. So may you pray well this week. May you remember God is intimate and tender and know that space free from performance or compulsion or expectation. May you experience God as fully ours, completely present to you and to everyone near you. And through it all, may you choose to be like God.
Speaker 1:That you would become your brother's keeper. And your neighbor's support and your stranger's new best friend. That you might work to dispel the illusion that any of us are ever on our own. And might your narrow slice of the earth become more like heaven because you pray. Let's pray.
Speaker 1:God, help us to come to you. As a father, as a mother, as a parent in that place of chosen family where we are free from expectation. Free from performance. Where you already know and so the words don't matter as much as the speaking of them. Help us to know that we are fully loved and deeply embraced and always welcome in your presence.
Speaker 1:And then God as we pray, might we begin to align ourselves with you. To know that you are ours only because you are ours. For all of us. Those who know you and those who don't, those who worship with us and those who don't, those we understand and those we don't. And might we carry that conviction back into our workplaces and our conversations, our relationships.
Speaker 1:Might we extend your grace and peace into every word we speak, reminding people that you are ours and near to us as we go. Through our prayers might we bring a small slice of heaven to earth. And may grace and peace reign in our lives. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.