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The Lord's Prayer
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
It's really important to realize that prayer is not your work. Prayer is not gathering. It's not asking. Prayer is not where you make your case before God and do a good job or a bad job. Prayer is simply learning to rest in the goodness of the divine.
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. Time.
Speaker 1:But welcome today. My name is Jeremy, and I'm one of the people who hang out around here at commons. And we're really glad you're here because we are about to finish off a short three week series that we call the problem with prayer. And the premise of this series has been that prayer actually can be a problem for a lot of us. Either it doesn't make sense, or it doesn't work, or we're not sure how to wrap our heads around something like a conversation with the divine.
Speaker 1:And maybe there are a thousand different things that you struggle with when you think of prayer, and that is okay. Some things were always going to be just beyond our reach. And prayer is at some level, a giving of ourselves 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. But in my experience, when we name that struggle and when we own that complexity, when we talk openly about where we are overwhelmed when it comes to prayer, then prayer really can be opened up for us in new ways.
Speaker 1:And so what we've been doing in this series is taking Jesus' teachings on prayer and the model for prayer that he gives us in the Lord's Prayer and just sort of working our way through it together. And through it, what I mean is that in two weeks so far, we have covered two words of the Lord's Prayer, so we have some significant ground to cover today to get through the rest of it. And because that, we are going to dispense with the normal full recap that we would normally do, and I will trust that you can jump online, either our YouTube channel or our podcast to catch up. If you missed anything, you can always head to commons.church, and right at the top, there's a button that says watch online. That will take you to a new page that we've recently redesigned that'll make it easier for you to find the latest sermon from each of our parishes here in Kensington or over in Inglewood.
Speaker 1:So check that out. But last week, briefly, we talked about hour and father, and how these words ground God in the experience of chosen family. Not masculinity, but welcome in family. And then we looked at how our sense of our needs to be continually expanded until it comes to include everyone in our hour, everyone in God's embrace. Today, we wanna work through the rest of this prayer.
Speaker 1:But as we have also talked about in this series, we wanna begin by grounding ourselves in the liturgy of the church and the prayers that have been gifted to us. However, before we pray the Lord's prayer today together, let me say that I know that this week and this new cycle has been difficult for a lot of people here in this room. Maybe it has brought back stories or memories that you have worked hard to heal from and move past, and I hear that. But as we pray today, and as we ask God to deliver us from evil, might we trust together that God is delivering us from everything that leads to dehumanization and destruction. From violence in every form, from pride in politics that shame victims and promote abusers.
Speaker 1:May God deliver us from all of it. And so stand with me as we pray today. 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.
Speaker 1: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. You may be seated. Now, as I said today, we have covered the first two words last week.
Speaker 1:Today, I promise we will move to the rest, but that means we're going to need to dive right in. No stories, no jokes, no funny tales about my son. However, if you have ever found yourself feeling a little self conscious about your prayers, and wondering what is okay to pray and how to pray it, I have collected over the years some of my favorite prayers that remind me that prayer need not be all that stuffy. I keep them in a folder for whenever I need them. And so on the front end of a heavy sermon today, here are a few of my favorites.
Speaker 1:Little Elliot prays, dear God, I think about you sometimes even when I'm not praying. And that is probably far more profound than Elliot realizes, so that's a good place to start. Here's another. It's a good one for those of us in Calgary. Dear God, I keep waiting for spring, but it never come yet.
Speaker 1:Don't forget, Mark. Now, hang on to that one. You're gonna need it at some point. Just put it in your back pocket. Here's Mickey D.
Speaker 1:That sounds like a fake name, but we're gonna go with it anyway here. Dear God, if you watch in church on Sunday, I will show you my new shoes. That's cute. Here we go. One last one.
Speaker 1:Dear God, I bet it's very hard for you to love everybody in the whole world. There are only four people in my family, and I can never do it. And everyone said together, amen. Now, today, we are gonna work through a series of questions. Sometimes we call them petitions that Jesus gives us as a framework for prayer in this prayer.
Speaker 1:And my hope is that by the end of the day, you might be more inclined to use the Lord's Prayer as a model in your life, but then also that you might leave today with some tools and some language that you can use to begin to play with prayer for yourself. So Jesus prays, our father in heaven, hallowed be your name. We talked about the our father part last week, but there are a couple interesting things here. First, our father in heaven is actually our father in the heavens. And this is intriguing because in the next line Jesus says, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, singular.
Speaker 1:So what's going on here? Well, the heavens are a lot more fluid in Greek. The word is or in the plural. And you have to remember that in Hebrew thought, like Jesus, heaven was not some distant place in the clouds where we're all waiting to go. Heaven was more like a way of talking about what could be, or maybe what should be in the world.
Speaker 1:So heaven was where God was, but heaven was also wherever God was. You see, Ouranos was heaven in Greek, but it was also the skies. This is why we tend to think of heaven above, but it also included everything from the stars in the night, to the clouds above, to the air that you breathe. In fact later, in the same sermon in verse 26, Jesus is gonna turn his attention to worry and anxiety, and he's gonna say, look at the birds of the air. They do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them.
Speaker 1:Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any of you by worrying add even a single hour to your life? Well, when he talks about the birds of the air and your heavenly father, he is using the same word in the same sentence to talk about both. So heaven is large. It's the metaphorical concept of God's reigning and ruling.
Speaker 1:It's the stars in the sky and the clouds above you. It's the world reunited with the divine. It's the air that birds glide through, and it's the breath that fills your lungs right now. And I wonder if perhaps the reason Jesus uses the plural here is to say that even now, God is present in every expression of the heavens. So God is there in heaven ahead of us in everything that we hope for, but that God is also here in the air that we breathe right now.
Speaker 1:Our father who art in the heavens. The heavens above you, the heavens ahead of you, the heavens that fill your lungs, and the heavens that surround you in every single moment of your life. You see, I don't think this is just a literary quirk. I think that Jesus is trying to root our imagination of the divine at the intersection of heaven and earth. As if maybe these barriers that we hold in our minds are not as indicative of reality as we intend to imagine.
Speaker 1:That maybe God moves a lot more freely than we have allowed for. And so if you have ever imagined God is up and away and distant from you out there somewhere, then perhaps as you pray, you might remember that the heavens are as close as the air that you breathe literally. And that God is present in all of it. And so, even as we begin to pray, we ground ourselves in God as chosen family. And family as expansive as our hour can become.
Speaker 1:And then the very first thing that we remind ourselves of when we pray is that the heavens are closer than we realize. For me, this is about prayer as the reminder to live as if God was the center of my imagination for everything. That God is in the heavens, and the heavens are all around me right now. Now, from there Jesus prays, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And preemptively, I think we actually covered a lot of this last week.
Speaker 1:But the idea that prayer is often less about God deciding what will happen to us, and instead us deciding who we will become as we exit prayer and we head back into real life. Because prayer is at its heart about believing that the earth is salvageable. That the earth is redeemable and that somehow you and I have a part to play in the story of repair. However, I find it helpful here to translate this section almost as literally as possible to hear what Jesus is getting at. And it's gonna sound stiff when I do it this way, but I think it might be helpful.
Speaker 1:So here's what he's saying at its most raw. Come kingdom of you, be born desire of you, as in heaven now also on earth. Now, for me, it's actually incredibly helpful. Because I find it very easy at times to pray, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and to imagine this is some kind of a cosmic conquest. Like God is gonna give us freedom whether we want it or not.
Speaker 1:Pound us into paradise if you will. But to pray, come your kingdom, be born your desire as in heaven now also in me. Well, this changes how I experience this prayer. Because to notice this little Greek word, and to know that it's not just God's will that's being done, it's God's will that's being born, or created or formed within the world and within me. That's a very different experience of prayer.
Speaker 1:Because no longer am I really asking God to do anything. I'm asking myself to align with what God is already doing all around me right now. And, this is really one of the great paradoxes of prayer. I mean, who exactly are we talking to when we pray? And I know I said last week that prayer is not for God, it's for me, and that's undoubtedly true.
Speaker 1:But sometimes I actually think prayer is to me. And not that I pray to myself, even someone with my ego, that's a bit too much, but I do recognize that prayer is sometimes, maybe often actually about speaking to myself. That God is my audience, but often my words are somehow actually intended for my own ears. Look, when I pray, come your kingdom, be born your desire, as in heaven now in me, Who are those words intended for if not myself? Because prayer is often sacred self talk.
Speaker 1:And I know that when I say that, for some of you it might feel like I'm diminishing prayer or dismissing it, but believe me, I'm not. Because we know just how important self talk is for us as human beings. We create narratives in our minds. We construct our reality as we describe our world for ourselves. And prayer has always been for thousands of years where we are invited to describe the best version of ourselves in front of the one who fashioned ourselves.
Speaker 1:And trust me here, if there's anyone who is ever going to believe the best about you, it's the one who put everything good in you to begin with. See prayer is where we come to believe that we are the person that God believes we are. And so when you pray, part of prayer is asking how the best version of you can help to close the gap between heaven and earth this day in this moment. Because prayer is what takes the big story of the universe and makes it your story in some new way. But Jesus isn't done here.
Speaker 1:Not even close. And so even as he invites us to engage in this sacred self talk, Jesus calls us to trust in something beyond ourselves as well. He says, give us today our daily bread. And this is actually kind of an interesting line here because there's a somewhat curious repetition going on. Give us today our daily bread.
Speaker 1:And Jesus is notoriously pithy. Right? Like, likes to say things in short memorable ways. And in my experience, there's very little that Jesus says that is careless. So the needless repetition here is at least a little noticeable.
Speaker 1:But what makes it complicated is that the word here that's translated daily is the Greek word, and we don't know exactly what that means. It just doesn't show up anywhere in that construction but here. However, it's a compound word made up from epi and ousia, and so we have an idea of what it means. And depending on how you put it together, you're either gonna come up with what's necessary for today or what's needed for tomorrow. And so even though give us today our daily bread is pretty firmly entrenched in our religious vocabulary, most scholars tend today toward translating this phrase, give us today bread for tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Now, that's significant because this is a callback to a story from Exodus. In Exodus 16, the people of God are stuck wandering around in this wilderness, and they think they're gonna starve. And God sends this miraculous bread for them to eat. And it's called manna. And in Hebrew, manna actually translates to something like, what should we call this stuff?
Speaker 1:And that's just awesome that that stuck. But the whole thing with this miracle manna bread is that it would appear for them in the morning, and the Israelites could gather it and use it and bake it and eat it all day. But if they tried to gather up more than they needed and stockpile it, it would rot overnight and it would be gross and inedible by the morning. And the whole story was about learning to trust God for what they needed, not to trust in their ability to store and hoard and stockpile for the future. And that's obviously what Jesus is getting at here.
Speaker 1:Prayer is about learning to be continually dependent on God. Prayer is not about turning to God when you have a problem. Prayer is at its best a continual awareness of dependence and need. It's knowing that need is your natural normal state. It's always been, and that's really hard.
Speaker 1:Because for most of us, everything that we have been taught to believe about ourselves, everything we have ever been trained to work toward in our lives has been about independence and self sufficiency and rugged individualism and boot strapped competency. And here Jesus says, not even close. It's God who causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. And you may have worked hard and you may have earned what you have, but everything you have is ultimately gift. And prayer is where we remember that.
Speaker 1:Now, I don't think for a second that this precludes turning to God when you have a specific need. In fact, I actually think it invites it. Because if I can come to know that today is gift, and that this meal is gift, and this moment is gift, then I can realize that everything is a dance of gift and reception whether I've asked for it or not. And if we can learn to pray for the mundane, then everything becomes available to us in prayer, and maybe that's the point. But at the same time, I don't know if you caught this here, but there's something really strange in what Jesus prays.
Speaker 1:Because if this is a callback to Exodus and we're meant to remember the story of manna, then it's kind of strange that Jesus would pray, give us today bread for tomorrow. Right? Mean, after all, the whole point of the story of the manna was not to store bread for tomorrow. Well, except for the Sabbath. You see, on the day before the Sabbath, the Israelites were instructed to gather two days worth of food.
Speaker 1:And they were to use that food while they rested and worshipped on the next day. And somehow on that day, once a week, the food would last an extra day and it was miracle food, so it could do that. But it makes me wonder if maybe the point that Jesus is intimating here, by talking about being given today our bread for tomorrow, is that prayer is somehow where we learn to rest. That prayer is gift, but prayer is also Sabbath. And that it's really important to realize that prayer is not your work.
Speaker 1:Prayer is not gathering, it's not asking, prayer is not where you make your case before God and do a good job or a bad job. Prayer is simply learning to rest in the goodness of the divine. And please hear me. I don't say that flippantly or lightly. I don't mean to say that everything will be okay because you prayed.
Speaker 1:What I mean is that God is good. And that sometimes the best that we can do is rest on that. Because prayer is about learning to trust in just enough. And for a lot of us who are really used to more than just enough, this might actually be the hardest thing that Jesus faces us with in this prayer. Now, we have two more lines and precious little time.
Speaker 1:So let's keep moving here. Jesus prays, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And this one is not uncommon for Jesus, this idea of linking forgiveness with forgiveness. In two verses later, immediately after the Lord's prayer, Jesus clarifies what he meant, saying in verse 14, for if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your father will not forgive yours.
Speaker 1:That's a heavy thought. To think that forgiveness is inextricably linked with forgiveness. Well, the key here gets kind of technical, but really doesn't do anything to take the sting out of what Jesus is saying. Jesus prays, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And that little word as is the word hos in Greek, and it sort of opens up room in the relationship between these two clauses.
Speaker 1:Now the question comes down to whether that relationship is meant to be temporal or interdependent. So in English, this is usually translated forgive us, present tense, as we have forgiven past tense others. And what happens is that sort of makes one a condition of the other, and that makes it a temporal relationship. God forgives us after we have forgiven others. What complicates this is that in the manuscripts, the second appearance of forgive is, well, it's just spelt wrong.
Speaker 1:And so in most of the manuscripts, it looks like it's in the present tense. It's closest to that. But some scholars think that because of how it's misspelled, it's indicative of the fact that it was meant to be in the aorist tense, which would be a past tense in English. And because hos can work either way, we really don't have a definitive answer here, at least not based on this one verse. But what happens is that you are now left with either, God forgive us after we have forgiven others, or God forgive us in the way that we are forgiving others, Or the way that we're learning to forgive.
Speaker 1:And as I said, neither of those is really going to remove the sting here, because either way, this is a hard teaching. But when we take into account everything that Jesus says and does demonstrates in his life, it seems clear to me at least that the second option is preferable here. Because forgiveness is never a transaction. It's not something you buy. It's not something you earn or you don't.
Speaker 1:It's something you live in. And the reason you can only be forgiven as much as you learn to forgive is not because God holds anything against you. You are always loved fully. It's because until you learn to let go of the past, you will keep holding on to the past. And this is why repentance and confession and forgiveness are so central in the Christian story.
Speaker 1:Because as long as you carry your hurt and your wound and your sin and your brokenness with you and you refuse to put it down and let it go, And you will never know the welcome and the embrace and the freedom that God desperately wants you to know. And so we pray not to change God's mind about us. God never changes. We pray to let go of everything that we've been holding onto that stops us from seeing ourselves as God knows us. You see, until you learn to forgive and let go of what's behind you, you will always carry what's behind you with you.
Speaker 1:And so we let go so that we can be led into a better tomorrow. And Jesus prays, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. And again, I'll grant this is kind of an odd saying. I mean, would God be leading us into temptation in the first place? If God is always forgiving and desperately wants ourselves to know ourselves is forgiven, then why, God, are you trying to trip us up now at the end here?
Speaker 1:And again, this is a bit of a quirk of translation. Pope Francis made some news last year because he was quoted talking about the need to update the Lord's prayer, and people took that a little bit out of context, but what he was doing was praising the decision by the bishops in France to adjust the prayer in French. This is what he said. He said, the French have changed their text and their translation, and it now says, don't let me fall into temptation. Because it's always me who falls.
Speaker 1:Never God who pushes me. A father doesn't do that. A father is the one who helps you get up. The one who leads me away is evil. Well, the holy father is on very solid ground here.
Speaker 1:James one thirteen says, let no one say when they are tempted, I am tempted by God. For God cannot tempt with evil, God tempts no one. Each person is tempted when they are lured and enticed by their own desires. Okay. So that's pretty straightforward.
Speaker 1:Well, the tricky part here is tradition. The Lord's prayer, and specifically the Lord's prayer in the King James English is so deeply embedded in our liturgies, both religious and secular, that changing it is almost anathema at this point. And yet, we do know that this is probably not the best translation. And I'm actually gonna quote here from the catechism of the church. This is paragraph two eight four six, which says, this petition goes to the root of the preceding one.
Speaker 1:For our sin results from our consenting to temptation. We therefore ask our father not to lead us that way. It's difficult though to translate the Greek verb into a single English word because the Greek means both do not allow us to enter into temptation and do not let us give in to temptation. God cannot tempt us with evil. On the contrary, God always wants to set us free.
Speaker 1:And so we ask God not to stand by as we take the way that leads to sin. Point here is that prayer is where we are learning to say no, so that we can follow the way that God is actually leading us to hell. God is not leading you somewhere to trick you. God is not trying to trip you. God's not trying to test you.
Speaker 1:God is not trying to stretch you or catch you in a moment of weakness just to show you how terrible you are. And if that's the imagination of the divine that has been handed to you, then it did not come from God. Because God is ahead of you, and behind you, and above you, and around you. God is in and through every step you take, whether you notice it or not. God is never that voice that is calling you toward what hurts you.
Speaker 1:God is only the one that invites you into everything that will make you whole again. And so this is what Jesus prays when Jesus prays. Our father in the heavens, help me to live as if you are the source of all that is good in the universe. May your will be born in me, so that I might then close the gap between heaven and earth with my choices. Remind me of my daily dependence on you and help me to want for just enough.
Speaker 1:Teach me where I need to let go of old hurts, so that I can experience fully forgiveness for myself. And show me where I need to say no, So that I can truly follow the path that leads me back to life and to you for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen. And so as you pray this week, may you come to know the one at the center of everything. May goodness be born in you.
Speaker 1:May you trust well, may you know forgiveness, and may you hear the divine voice calling you in good directions this week. And in all of that, may God meet you in some new and holy way as you pray. Let's pray together. God, as we conclude this short conversation on prayer and the wisdom, the words that you have gifted to us, May they sink somewhere deep into our bones and soul. So that we might be able to use them when we don't have our own words.
Speaker 1:That we might pray them when we don't know what to pray. That we might surrender to the gift when there is nothing left to express of ourselves. And then God, might we also use this as a playground to play within. These ideas and this framework, these petitions you give us, might they be the source from which we create and we paint and we sing and we pray something unique and beautiful and created within ourselves. That we might express what is deep and hidden with us to the universe.
Speaker 1:And that from that prayer, we might then exit into the world with new courage and conviction to bring heaven a little closer to earth. Knowing that the heavens are all around us right now, and you are guiding us by your spirit into everything that is good for us. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.