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The Lord's Prayer
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
There's a time to know the scales so that you can play with them. Are we lamenting? Are we celebrating? Are we thankful? Are we confused?
Speaker 1:How can we express that as freely as possible with the language we've been handed? And then there is a time to rely on our muscle memory. And to say the words that have been gifted to us. And to speak with someone else's voice when we struggle. To acknowledge our lostness by learning to pray out of someone else's grounding.
Speaker 1: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. Welcome to what is in many ways the real start of our fifth year together as a church.
Speaker 1:Last week was our fall launch and our birthday party, and it was amazing to have just over a thousand people here to join us here in Kensington and Inglewood across our services, and literally hundreds of people who helped to make this church happen. But as we head into the new church season, if you are looking for ways to connect, you can head to commons.church, click on next steps anytime, and that will take you to a ton of ways to get involved, including refugee resettlement. Because our newest family, the Alabars, have just arrived in Calgary this week, and we will be in need of a lot of different help from people as we get them settled here in the city. So pray for them. If you can, help, and we will have more information to share over the next couple weeks as they get their feet under them in the city.
Speaker 1:Now, one of the other ways that you can get involved is financially. And you may have noticed that we don't take up an offering at Commons. That's because we never want your generosity to be an uncomfortable experience. We believe in generosity here, but we don't believe in measuring or comparing or competing when it comes to giving. That said, we do exist because of the donations of the community.
Speaker 1:We don't receive government funding for anything that we do, and we're very grateful for the ways that you continue to support Commons. But one of the ways that you can do that is to sign up for automatic giving. And when you do that, you are never locked in. We understand that circumstances shift all the time, and you can change your donation anytime online yourself. But what this does is it really helps us to understand the support level in the community and to budget effectively, and then to make sure that we are stewarding the community's resources well.
Speaker 1:And so if you're in a position this fall where you could consider that, you can do so using the donate button at commons.church. Just select the frequency that you wanna give, whether it's monthly or weekly or somewhere in between. And once again, we really do wanna thank you for all the ways that you are so thoughtful about your support of this church and your generosity to this community. Now today, we jump into the first series in our new journal project. And if you're new to Commons and you're unfamiliar with our journal, you can pick one up free from the connection center before you leave.
Speaker 1:Or if you're in a pew right now, there is one in front of you and that is yours. And that journal will give you information about us, what we do, how we think, how we imagine community, but also an outline for the teaching for the next twelve months. And so if you flip to page 41, you'll see our new series, the problem with prayer. And if you turn the page, you'll find space to take notes there and every Sunday this year as we talk about today, the problem with prayer. Again, that might sound strange.
Speaker 1:Right? You know, especially in a church. What's the problem with prayer? But if we're being honest with ourselves, I think that most of us have run into some moment somewhere at some point where prayer seemed problematic. Either it just didn't make sense, or it didn't work, or it didn't function to connect you in the way that you had hoped for.
Speaker 1:And I think that unless we're unwilling to acknowledge that, and own that and talk about that together, then prayer really does become a problem for us. Because let's be honest here, prayer is speaking to the divine. And if that doesn't blow up at least some of the categories that you normally live within, then I'm not sure you're taking it all that seriously. And after all, what is prayer supposed to be exactly? Is it an expression of worship?
Speaker 1:Is it crossing your fingers and hoping for the best? Is it snapping your fingers and telling God to get to work? Is it possibly all of the above and maybe something more mixed together? I actually read a prayer written by Tina Fey a couple years ago. And if there's a person who doesn't get quoted enough in church, it's probably Tina Fey.
Speaker 1:But in her book, Bossy Pants, she wrote a prayer for her new baby daughter. I've edited it here slightly for church. But she prays, first Lord, no tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie the Pooh holding a college logo stain her tender haunches. And when the crystal meth is offered, may she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half and stick with beer.
Speaker 1:Guide her. Protect her. When crossing the street, when stepping onto boats, when swimming in the ocean, when swimming in pools, when walking near pools, when standing on subway platforms, when stepping off of boats, when using mall restrooms, and getting on and off escalators, when driving on country roads while arguing, when leaning on large windows, or while walking in large parks, protect her while riding on Ferris wheels, roller coasters, log flumes, and anything anywhere ever set up at a midway. And please protect her while standing on any kind of balcony ever anywhere at any age. Lead her away from acting, but not all the way to finance.
Speaker 1:Something that she can make her own hours at, but still feel intellectually engaged and get out sometimes and have her not wear high heels. May she play the drums to the fiery rhythm of her own heart with the sinewy strength of her own arms so that she need not lie with drummers. Grant her a rough patch from 12 to 17. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for far too long. For childhood is short, a tiger flower blooming magenta for one day, an adult is long and dry.
Speaker 1:Oh lord, break the internet. That she be spared the misspelled invective of her peers. And when she inevitably turns on me, give me the strength lord to yank her directly into the car in front of her friends for I will not have that. And if she should choose to be a mother one day, be my eyes lord. That I may see her lying on the floor at 04:50AM all at once exhausted, bored, and in love with that little creature.
Speaker 1:And when she thinks, my mother did this for me once. And the delayed gratitude washes over her as it does each generation, and she makes a mental note to call me and she forgets. I will know because I peeped it with your God eyes. Amen. Now that is a good prayer.
Speaker 1:Now least of which just because it's very funny, but also because there is a very real tenderness at heart and expression of something true in her words. Right? This overwhelming lostness that we all feel as parents. And so even as we attempt to speak about prayer today, and even as we discover in Jesus' words and teaching a model and an invitation to pray as he does in this series, my hope is that we might also keep something from miss Faye in the back of our minds as we go. That prayer is often less about hitting the correct notes or even using appropriate language.
Speaker 1:It is instead at its core about an expression of honest wonder directed toward the divine. So, let's pray and then we'll talk about prayer. Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden. Gracious God, who knows us fully, who sees our truth, and who invites us forward without hesitation. Loving God, who listens intently and speaks softly, who welcomes us to speak in your presence.
Speaker 1:May we pray true words. Words of lament and grief and celebration and joy this day. May we share our story with you. Unburdened by expectation or presumption. May we speak our truth and in return hear your love spoken back.
Speaker 1:Grant us pure hearts that we may speak with you and humble hearts that we might hear you, hearts of love that we might be changed by you. And in the end, grant us grateful hearts to know the beauty of this conversation with you. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay.
Speaker 1:We're gonna start this series in the gospel of Matthew. Because if we're gonna talk about prayer, then at least for me it makes sense to start where Jesus teaches us about prayer. But before we get there, I do want to acknowledge this. That prayer really is a problem for a lot of us. And I know that I joked about this earlier, but the truth is prayer is a very delicate proposition.
Speaker 1:To even attempt to speak to something beyond ourselves carries a sense of vulnerability within it. I don't know if you've ever felt this way, but I have found myself praying and then all of a sudden been overcome by this sense of crippling self consciousness. Like, exactly do you think you're talking to? Do you really believe that the universe is listening? Do you honestly believe that God wants to hear what it is you have to say?
Speaker 1:And I do. And I deeply believe that. But the act of praying, the act of actually speaking words that carry my convictions about the goodness of God, this can all feel very naked. Sometimes, especially when I'm the only person listening. Or maybe this, maybe you have prayed.
Speaker 1:And you have thrown yourself into prayer and trusted yourself to the goodness of God and things didn't work out. He still left. And she still died and the business still fell apart. And you were left holding prayers that didn't seem to be as precious to God as they were to you. Maybe the thing is you've not known where to start.
Speaker 1:And do you have to have the right language to do this? Are you supposed to close your eyes? Should you kneel? Do you have to have your heart in the right place before you begin? Like, what's the protocol here?
Speaker 1:And you've wanted to express something deep inside of you, and you've wanted to speak your truth, and you've wanted some type of profound connection to something beyond you. But in the absence of clarity, you opted for silence. And I wanna be honest here as we begin that I don't have a completely satisfying answer for any of that in this series. I hear it, and I know it, and I feel it, and we'll talk about it together in this series because sometimes it's as simple as giving voice to what often goes unsaid that at least begins to open new avenues of understanding for us. But please understand, I can't make prayer easy for you.
Speaker 1:And I can't force it to make sense for you. I can't short circuit your process of encounter with the divine. But I can acknowledge that sometimes prayer is hard for all of us. And I can point to some of the patterns that Christ and the church invite us into. And I can extend some of the ways that I've made peace with prayer in my life.
Speaker 1:And incorporated it into my journey and hope that some of that resonates with you in your story as we go. Now, I said that we were gonna start in Matthew. And this is a section that we know as the Lord's prayer. It's a prayer that shows up in two spots in Matthew six and then again in Luke 11. And in Matthew, Jesus is giving a sermon in which he wants to teach about prayer.
Speaker 1:In Luke, it's actually Jesus' friends that come to him and they ask him to teach them how to pray. But in both spots, Jesus gives this same prayer or one very similar, one that we call the Lord's prayer or sometimes the our father. And he does that as an explicit instruction about what prayer is meant to be. Now, I don't think that means the our father is the only prayer that we should pray. You know, I already prayed a different prayer in this sermon, so I don't think that's Jesus' intent at all.
Speaker 1:Although, I do think Jesus intends for us to use his prayer regularly in community. We'll talk about that as well. But more than that, I think that Jesus is giving us a model or a picture of what prayer can be. You got framework almost, which in which we can then explore and create and learn to express ourselves more freely. And if all that sounds strange to you, this idea that a framework or a set of restrictions or maybe a certain subset of language could help you be more creative and more free, then let me give you an analogy.
Speaker 1:I play guitar. Rarely and poorly, but I do play guitar. And when I was learning to play guitar, there were guitarists that I looked up to. Mark Noffler from Dire Straits and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Slash who I still maintain has some of the most melodic guitar solos you were ever hear. I mean, you can honestly sing along to that guy's guitar.
Speaker 1:Also, the guy's name is Slash, so amazing. And then, of course, Mike McCready from Pearl Jam, the greatest band in the history of rock and roll. I'm obligated to mention that. But when you're learning guitar, there is two things that you're doing. First, you're learning your scales.
Speaker 1:And you've got all these different places you can put your fingers on a guitar. 126 in fact. The problem is most of them are not going to sound very good together. In fact, if you are listening to a lot of blues or rock and roll, most of what you are listening to is called the pentatonic scale. And it's called the pentatonic scale because it has, wait for it, five notes.
Speaker 1:That's it. And the truth is that is all you really need. Get out of here with your Aeolian modes. That's a joke for the 14 people who took music longer than they wanted to. But the truth is that 90% of rock and roll is four chords, five notes, and a leather jacket, or if you're into pearl jam, a plaid shirt.
Speaker 1:That's about all it takes. And somehow learning those five notes and understanding how to use those five notes and excluding all of the other notes, this actually unlocks all kinds of creative expression for us. Well, in Christianity, this is what we call liturgy. A subset of language and a set of patterns, a wisdom that's being handed down to us for us to play with. And we all have it.
Speaker 1:I talk with people sometimes who tell me that they don't like canned prayers. They don't want prayers that are written out. They want spontaneity. And they feel like for them, praying extemporaneously is more authentic and free, and that's great. But then I listen to them pray, and what do I hear?
Speaker 1:I hear the same five phrases repeated over and over again. Father God, we just come to worship you, Father God, and we love you, Father God, because you love us, Father God. And that's beautiful. Because it's liturgy. It's a scale and it's language that they have found to anchor themselves within.
Speaker 1:So please hear me. I will never disparage a repetitive prayer because I think repetitive prayers are beautiful. Because I see the liturgy that grounds it and binds it. So when you're learning to play guitar, you're learning to restrict yourself to certain notes so that you can play with them. And this is what the prayers of the people are for us.
Speaker 1:This is what the Lord's prayer does for us. It's not meant to stifle your creativity, it's meant to give you a playground to play on. Now, second thing you do when you learn to play guitar is you learn to imitate your idols. So one of the first, like, serious guitar solos that I learned was Mark Knopfler's Sultans of Swing. One of the greatest guitar solos ever, period.
Speaker 1:Trust me. And I haven't listened to Dire Straits in years. I barely picked up a guitar in years. I probably couldn't even rehearse that song in my head right now if I wanted to, but I promise you, if I was holding a guitar in my hands right now, I could play that solo right now based on nothing but muscle memory. Don't hand me a guitar.
Speaker 1:And this is what prayers like the Lord's Prayer do for us. They give us a subset of language and ideas to play with. But then when we need it, they give us a pattern to repeat. And there is a long tradition of this kind of imitation in the people of God. Now, one of the really neat places we see this is in Jonah chapter two.
Speaker 1:And Jonah is this crazy story about a guy who tries to run away from God. And he gets thrown overboard during a storm and he starts to sink to the bottom of the ocean when all of a sudden he's saved by a whale who swallows him. I think this is a crazy story. We'll get to it someday. But in chapter two, Jonah is sinking into the depths of the ocean, and seaweed is wrapping itself around his legs, and he can't find the strength to swim up.
Speaker 1:And just as he runs out of breath, he unleashes this incredibly beautiful profound heart rending prayer to God. At first when you're reading Jonah you're like how does this guy write a prayer like that on the verge of drowning at the bottom of the ocean? Until you realize that really chapter two is just a list of quotations from the Psalms strung together into something new. That the prayer in Jonah two is actually 14 separate Psalms that have been strung together and what you realize is that he's not being eloquent. He's just remembering.
Speaker 1:That in his most desperate moment, it's not Jonah's words that come out. It's his people's words. There's Jesus on the cross who says, father why have you forsaken me? And it's heart wrenching. And it reaches into our own struggles and our doubts and we're drawn into that moment with Jesus and then what we realize is that Jesus is actually quoting Psalm 22.
Speaker 1:The son of God at his most anguished falls back on the prayers of someone else. And so when it comes to prayer, is it time to know the scales so that you can play with them? Are we lamenting? Are we celebrating? Are we thankful?
Speaker 1:Are we confused? How can we express that as freely as possible with the language we've been handed? And then there is a time to rely on our muscle memory. And to say the words that have been gifted to us. And to speak with someone else's voice when we struggle.
Speaker 1:To acknowledge our lostness by learning to pray out of someone else's grounding. Not knowing how to pray is holy. And there are some fantastic resources that are out there. Over hundreds of years, the church has collected these prayers for us. And if you didn't know this, then every week all of the prayers and the songs that are curated and crafted for us here at Commons are posted to our website at commons.church/liturgy.
Speaker 1:And so if there's ever a prayer that is read or spoken that resonates with you in some way, and you wanna capture that for your own personal use, then those are always available to you as a resource to incorporate into your story. Because both of these are really important. This ability to create and express and capture something deep and unique from within our soul. Partnered alongside this opportunity to lean on the prayers of the community to carry us when our words fail us. And throughout our journey, most of us have probably tended to lean one way or the other, and that's fine.
Speaker 1:But I also find that if we end up practicing one to the exclusion of the other, either always trying to be creative or always leaning on someone else's words, then we are really missing out on something of the depth that Jesus invites us to when it comes to prayer. And so hopefully, in this short three week series, we'll get a chance to explore both of those ideas, both ends of the spectrum, and how we can weave them into our stories. Now, we've talked a lot already today. And I do want to get to the Lord's prayer at some point. But to do that, we need to back up a bit in order to really understand the context from which Jesus gives us this prayer.
Speaker 1:Because understanding how Jesus gets to prayer and the conversation from which he moves to prayer, I think, actually really help us understand his heart in prayer. And so today, in the time we have left, we are gonna work our way from the start of Matthew six right up to the start of the Lord's prayer, and then we'll have two more weeks in this series to dive into this model and this prayer that Jesus gives us. So, this is Matthew six, starting in verse one. Jesus says, be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your father in heaven.
Speaker 1:Now, notice at the start of the chapter Jesus isn't actually talking about prayer. Prayer is where he's going to land, but he starts with righteousness and detention gathering. He continues, when you give to the needy do not announce it with trumpets as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets to be honored by others. Truly I tell you they have received their reward in full. Instead when you give to the needy do not let your left hand know what the right is doing so that your giving may be in secret, and then your father who sees what is done will reward you.
Speaker 1:Now, Jesus hasn't gotten to prayer yet. He's talking about something different, but there's something really important here. Because for Jesus, prayer comes out of a conversation about righteousness, and righteousness is about caring for those around you. So notice Jesus language here. When you give to the needy, do not announce it.
Speaker 1:When you give to the needy, don't let your left hand know what your right is doing. So when Jesus wants to talk about righteousness, and when Jesus wants to move a conversation to prayer, Jesus assumes that you are already engaged in some way in making the world more righteous. And you see, there's this weird quirk of the English language where righteousness and justice have been separated in our vocabularies. At their base, they still talk about the same thing. Right?
Speaker 1:A more right world, a more just world. But because we tend to use righteousness in religious settings and justice in social settings, we tend to separate them a little bit in our mind. And that really is just a quirk of the English language. In Greek they are the same word. In Hebrew they are the same word.
Speaker 1:If you were to read Matthew six in French or Spanish, you would be reading about justice. It's only in English that we separate them this way. And that's significant because in Jesus' mind, to begin a discussion of prayer, you begin with a discussion of making a more just world. Not a more religious world. And so if your experience of prayer has been this sort of dusty rote encounter with ritual, or maybe on the other side this ethereal flighty dalliance with the speculative, both of which can be beautiful in their own ways.
Speaker 1:But unmoored, both are missing this essential grounding in real life that Jesus starts with. At its core, prayer is what puts us in tune with God. It centers us in God, but because God is actively engaged in the healing of the world right now, prayer inevitably involves us in that healing. For Jesus, prayer is the logical necessary conclusion of a conversation that starts with justice. And I find that really helpful for me.
Speaker 1:To remember that I pray so that I can be connected with God. And I pray so that I can be aligned with God, but I pray so that I can be thrown out of my prayers and back into the real world pointed in a more just direction. Prayer is spiritual, but only because everything is spirit. So sometimes it's prayer that reminds me of the tenderness of God. And sometimes prayer enlivens me to someone else's pain.
Speaker 1:Sometimes prayer is simply what reinforces what I already know and believe about where the world is headed. But prayer is about my engagement with the world, not my retreat or my escape from it. Because of that, I find it really helpful to remind myself that when I pray, that prayer is designed to make me a better, more just person, not a more religious one. And those aren't always separate, but they can be. Which is why Jesus goes on to say, don't pray like the hypocrites who pray to elevate their status.
Speaker 1:If that's what you want, it might work. Some people might be really impressed, but it's not gonna be very satisfying in the end. He says don't pray like the pagans who think they can control God by praying the right way and using the right words as if technique was the key to prayer. Instead he says, this is how you should pray. And we are going to pray that prayer he gives us together in a moment as we close.
Speaker 1:But first, I want you to know that I know that prayer is full of all kinds of contradictions. God knows what we need, but we call out and we ask God anyway. And prayer comes from the heart, but sometimes the best prayers are ones from other people that we pray as if they were our own. A prayer is never about bending God to our will, and yet we imagine that the divine actually leans in to listen when we speak. And sometimes we will struggle to make sense of all of it.
Speaker 1:Sometimes that's what makes it all so beautiful. The prayer is about that moment when even if just for a second we give ourselves over to the mysteries of the universe. That God is and God cares and God invites our story to be shared with the infinite. And so I want to invite you to pray this week. In your confusion, in your wondering, in your wandering, in your desire to become a better version of who you are right now.
Speaker 1:I invite you to pray as an expression of your belief that your story is part of the story. And it's being transformed into something beautiful. That you might know that even when your ability to make sense of your prayers fails you. That this is when Jesus has offered you his faith to borrow in prayer. And so let's pray together.
Speaker 1: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 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.
Speaker 1:Amen. We'll end here as we always do with this. Love God. Love people. Tell the story.
Speaker 1:If you need someone to pray with you today, just make your way up to the front. Someone with a name tag will be there to meet with you and spend some time. And perhaps if you don't have plans after church today, your prayer can be inviting someone out and getting to know their story as well.