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Dr. George A. Purnell
November 15, 2009
“What Are We Looking For, What Are We Offering?”
Luke 11:1-4
We are presently in a series of sermons entitled Taking Church to Work. These sermons are intended to cause us to see that what we do in worship really does matter; that it can be the source of our encouragement and inspiration to live in ways that are counter cultural in the world, as did Jesus.
Worship in its truest sense is transformative. In this encounter with the Holy, our sights are lifted and our burdens are lightened; our love is broadened and our joy deepened; our fears are faced and our faith strengthened; and we become different.
But most of us do not think of worship in such grandiose ways, at least not regularly. We come to worship for multiple reasons, and these reasons differ from week to week. And what we are expecting from worship…and what we are willing to offer of ourselves in worship... influence what we take from worship into the world…
One thing about worship, whether traditional worship or more contemporary worship, is this it’s predictable in that it takes on its own form. I have looked over Open Door bulletins over time, and the service essentially follows this format: singing, passing of the peace, greeting and announcements, call to reflection, reading, sermon, music, prayers of the day, call to offering, offertory, closing words and singing.
Classical worship follows it own format too: greeting, call to worship, the opening hymn, the opening prayer, the statement of faith, the passing of the peace, prayer concerns and community notices, the morning prayer, the call to giving, the offertory, the reading, the sermon, the closing hymn, and the benediction.
The Lord’s Prayer is said in both services, with a slight variation. At The Open Door the prayer is offered to “Our God,” while in the sanctuary it is offered to “Our Father.”
Whether we offer this prayer to Our Father or Our God, we offer it automatically each week, joining in when the person offering the Morning Prayer gives us cue by saying, ‘Our Father’ or ‘Our God’...
Since this prayer is so much a ritual of the service, I wonder if it would make any difference if we simply stopped saying it in worship.
For that matter, does worship itself matter? Or do we “go to church” because it’s what we do on Sunday morning? We have routines on other days. We eat out on Friday night, at the end of the work week. We go to the grocery store on Saturday mornings, because we can’t easily go during the work week. We go to the movie on Saturday night.
Worship becomes one of our routines. It’s okay to admit it. Some weeks we look forward to coming to church, and other weeks we come wondering why we make the effort. We certainly don’t come with high expectations every week. We don’t come ready to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God. We don’t always even come looking for God. Sometimes we come looking for each other. But we come.
But back to the Lord’s Prayer. Luke tells us that Jesus’ disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And Jesus, Luke writes, “said to them, when you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.”
(The prayer Jesus taught is also found in the longer form with which we are more familiar in Matthew (6:9-15).
Right away a question surfaces in the minds of some. Why is God a father? We know people who have not had a good relationship with an earthly father. Some have been sexually or emotionally abused by their fathers. Others have long wanted to know that their father loved them, but their fathers have been and remain aloof.
Some people have had loving fathers but believe that assigning God a human trait such as gender reduces the God beyond understanding to a God who is our size. So, they too ask: why is God a father? Or a mother?
We could spend weeks discussing the essential nature of God’s being, of course. But though an important conversation to have, it is beyond the scope of today’s message.
I use the term Father when I pray the Lord’s Prayer. I do so knowing that there are people who will be critical of me using the male pronoun for God, saying that in so doing I am perpetrating the notion of God held by a patriarchal culture.
(The Bible contains feminine metaphors for God, and the characteristics we assign God – giving birth to creation, nurture, mercy, compassion, et al. – are more feminine attributes in our culture than male ones. So, it is easy for me to think of God as female.)
I say Father, because Jesus prayed to his Father, whose name he hallowed. The name Jesus called God in Aramaic was “Abba,” which was the term small children used for their human fathers; more accurately translated in English as “daddy.” To address God in this way reflected the intimacy of Jesus’ relationship to God. Moreover, the petition that God’s name be hallowed is a request that God be honored as Holy.
(I say Father, too, because I was reminded by professors in seminary that no one has given me editorial license to edit the Bible. There is always the strong temptation to make the Bible say what we wish it said and want it to say.)
Jesus did not pray to an ethereal notion of Creator. Jesus prayed to a Father, to one he experienced as familiar…as real…as one he could trust and upon whom he could call. The gospels show us Jesus spending much time alone with God in prayer. And after this time alone with his Father in prayer, Jesus would rejoin the disciples filled with a sense of peace and an energy that they envied.
They wanted to have the connection with God that Jesus clearly found in prayer. So, they say to Jesus today, “Lord, teach us to pray”…In asking Jesus to teach them to pray was to say that they wanted to be different after prayer than they were before being in prayer; as he was different after being with God in prayer.
After naming God and asking that God’s name be hallowed, Luke’s version of the prayer has Jesus say “Your kingdom come,” and Matthew has Jesus say what we say today, namely: “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Even though we easily recite these words week after week after week, these phrases embody revolutionary requests. If God’s kingdom comes, and God’s will is done, on earth as in heaven, then nothing will be the same. Isaiah used these words to describe this state:
“For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; …I will rejoice in Jerusalem and delight in my people; no more shall be the sound of weeping be heard, or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth…They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit…my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord, and their descendants as well…The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent – its food will be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.” (Isaiah 65:17-25)
All things that divide peoples of the earth would be gone. Impoverished children would not starve, while others live in opulence. Wars would be no more, as the desire to protect what one has when threatened would be gone. Greed would be gone, because no one would be left wanting. Hatred born of fear of others unlike self will be gone, because everyone will be seen as family. Distinctions won by power struggles would be gone…
Earthly values would be turned upside down. Earthly kingdoms and empires would be unknown. Nothing would be as we have always known. Although we ask for this, is this what we really want?
We could go on unpacking this prayer. We could talk about how asking God for our daily bread is to recognize our absolute dependence on God for the most basic of our needs. Or we could talk about how difficult it is for us to forgive those who have harmed us. We could talk about temptation, and how easy it is for us to justify our behavior when we give in to temptation. We could discuss what it means to say “thine is the kingdom, and the glory, and the power forever.” Is this something we say from memory – because it is in the Lord’s Prayer – but something we resist; because we don’t want our earthly basis of power and glory to be gone? Or is this something we long to see become reality?
This prayer is part of our weekly worship. We may say it one Sunday morning with a real sense that we want God to act as we pray…and the next week say it while we are daydreaming about the afternoon we have planned…and maybe we are mad at God the next week when we repeat the Lord’s Prayer, and we struggle to even get the words out.
Finally, I think we must ask – is this prayer simply something we say on Sunday mornings, or is it an integral part of our identity as followers of Jesus? Do we say it and move on to the next thing in the order of worship? Or as we speak these words, do we internalize them and take them with us out into the world?
I believe that the saying of these words causes us to live differently beyond church in ways we don’t notice. We remember this prayer during the week without saying it. It becomes part of who we are, just as other habitual, repetitive things we do and say become integral to our identity.
Almost every man or woman who speaks in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous introduces himself or herself by saying: “Hi, my name is George (or Andrea) and I am a grateful recovering alcoholic, sober today by the grace of God and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.” It is rote. If the person attends an average of 4 meetings a week over a 30 year period of sobriety, he or she would introduce themselves in this way 6,250 times. It becomes part of their identity. It does not need to be thought about. It is an essential part of their identity and their character.
And it affects the way they live in the world, as they practice the principles of the Alcoholics Anonymous in their daily affairs. Their lives are never the same after they admit their identity. They say again and again and again who they were then and who they are now, giving credit to God and their companions on the road to recovery.
So it is, I submit, with the Lord’s Prayer. We say it week after week after week, and it changes the way we live in the world. These changes may come slowly and subtly…so much so that we hardly notice… but we do live differently. We cannot be the same after we admit our identity as followers of Jesus. Some days we follow more closely and some days we wander far from the way, but if we claim our identity weekly, we will not forget.
We may come to worship looking for little more than a pick me up for the week. We may come and say that we are not going to offer God our lives, but we will offer God that part of us that we want to change. And before we know it, we come looking more closely for God and offering God more of our life, because we feel in worship the wonder of God’s love and the miracle of God’s grace. Amen.
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