Our Father
Matthew 6:7-13
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This morning we begin a little detour from the lectionary as we start our summer series. While I wasn’t here the last two summers, rumor has it that two years ago you made your way through the Apostles’ Creed and last summer through the Ten Commandments, which brings us now, this summer, to the Lord’s Prayer - the final stop on our three-summer tour of the ancient practice of Christian Catechism. Because the majority of Christian history happened before people had access to books and couldn’t just pick up a Bible to read for themselves, it made sense to develop an easy to memorize question and answer based way of learning. So as strange or intimidating as the word ‘catechism’ seems, it’s simply a guided way to learn Christian faith that grows out of the creed, the law, and the prayer.
As we begin our journey through the Lord’s Prayer, our passage this morning is
Matthew 6:7-13
7 “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
9 “Pray then in this way:
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
10 Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.[a]
12 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And do not bring us to the time of trial,[b]
but rescue us from the evil one.[c]
In 2003 I spent a summer working at camp where I was assigned the 7 and 8 year old girls. One evening when our cabin was all circled up for evening devotions, I asked for a volunteer to pray. After everyone in the group avoided eye contact with me, little Caroline mustered up all her courage and slowly raised her hand. We all bowed our heads and then sat in silence while Caroline tried to figure out what to say, until finally she says, “dear God….(more silence) that’s it. I’ve got nothin.” The next day we talked about how we pray and the different kinds of things we can say, and she started feeling more confident. That evening the same scene unfolded: I asked for a volunteer and her hand went up, almost as if against her will. Again, we all bow our heads and Caroline begins her prayer: “dear God….” And after a little silence I whisper to her to say something she’s thankful for, and she finishes her prayer by saying “thanks for carmel. Amen.”
It’s still my favorite prayer!
Like little Caroline, I think we’re all always going to be just beginners at prayer and so it’s a good thing that Jesus teaches us how to pray.
Jesus begins his teaching on prayer by warning us that prayer is not about big fancy words and endless repetition to make us sound smart and important. Prayer is about relationship, not eloquence. Prayer is the opportunity we have to simply enter God’s presence and be transformed. And here, right at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus teaches us how to pray by giving us this simple and powerful prayer, this prayer that is shared by Christians in every time and place, uniting God’s children across denominations, languages, continents, history, and yes, even political parties. Although we use different languages and translation, and some of us forgive debts and others trespasses, this same prayer unites all who follow Jesus Christ.
This week we begin with the first petition: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” It’s only ten words, but I think we could spend a whole month unpacking it.
Within these first ten words we could think about what it means to call God “Father” – how even though God does not have a gender, God does communicate with us in culturally appropriate ways that we understand. In this case, God as Father to Jesus in the first century meant God as creator, provider, protector.
We could also think about what it means for God to be in heaven, about how God’s glory goes out to all the earth and beyond the earth - to the universe, and all creation.
We could explore what it means to hallow or glorify God’s name, about how prayer begins in praise and recognition of God’s love and power. There is so much packed into those first 10, most familiar words!
But for the past couple weeks as I thought about this first petition, I couldn’t get myself much past the very first little word: our. ‘our father.’ It’s just a little plural pronoun, and we don’t usually pay much attention to it, but it’s a crucial starting point for everything that follows.
So much of what we do in our culture is individualistic. We pride ourselves on self-sufficiency and independence. Today one of the more common ways for people to describe their faith is to say that they are spiritual but not religious (which I think means they find God in the sunset but not in a church full of messy humans). For many, faith is ‘between me and God, and nobody else.’ There is a resistance to being tied to a group and a desire for spirituality to be only a personal matter.
While prayer is certainly personal, it is never private. Prayer happens in community, prayer brings us into community – we pray with and for and alongside each other. Even when we pray by ourselves, prayer invites us into the presence of God right alongside all the people of God. All the pronouns in the Lord’s Prayer are plural because prayer is rooted in our life together.
When you pray ‘our father,’ that ‘our’ includes everyone in the pews next to you and Christians all over the world. That ‘our’ includes those you agree with, those you disagree with, those you understand, those who quite frankly, drive you crazy. We are all part of the big messy family of God, all praying this same prayer as children speaking to their father even while we sometimes fight with our siblings.
When we begin the Lord’s Prayer, we enter into the reality described in Ephesians that ‘There is one body and one Spirit, …one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all.
It’s a beautiful vision. But really, how is this whole unity thing working out for us? I’m going to go out on a limb now and suggest that we still have some work to do.
Over the centuries we’ve learned that unity is far from easy. We’ve discovered that the way of division is the path with least resistance and so we find ourselves separated from each other, content within our own small groups of likeminded friends and neighbors.
Here’s another little thing about the first word of the Lord’s Prayer. ‘Our’ is a plural possessive pronoun, and I think more often than not, humans are better at the possessive part than we are at the plural part. Which means that it’s easy for us to pray ‘our father’ …as in, not your father. Our father as a possessive, carries with it a sense of privilege and entitlement, control and power - the sense that God is on your side, on your nation’s side, on your political party’s side. This toxic assumption has been the cause of so much destruction: from the crusades and inquisition, to slavery and the atrocities committed against the indigenous people in this country, history is full of examples of what happens when people twist their theology to hold on to power and privilege
This past spring one of our Sunday School classes studied the Belhar Confession, which is our denomination’s most recent addition to our book of Confessions. This confession was written by the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in South Africa in response to the oppressive and racist system of apartheid in that country that ended in 1994. The confession of Belhar seeks to be a witness to unity, reconciliation, and justice – condemning any theology that opens the door to division and oppression. It reminds us that the ‘our’ in ‘our father’ is a plural that includes every human being.
Belhar was written in response to Apartheid, but it has plenty to say to the church here today. Racism, inequality, increasing hostility and division in our political life, old systems of power and privilege that help some and hurt others -- friends, none of our hands are clean and we have plenty of work to do.
In one of its opening affirmations, the confession of Belhar states: “Unity is both a gift and an obligation for the church of Jesus Christ. That through the working of God’s Spirit it is a binding force, yet simultaneously a reality which must be earnestly pursued and sought: one which the people of God must continually be built up to attain”
Did you hear it? Unity is both a gift and an obligation. It’s not easy, but it is good.
And it begins in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
It begins in prayer, where we are transformed and brought into community.
It begins when our imaginations are stretched by that very first word in the Lord’s Prayer to include the whole people of God. ‘Our Father’ …Our Father of every created being, Our Father who created all in God’s image.
The kind of unity God wants for us begins when we begin to see others with the heart of God – to notice those who others don’t.
It begins when we look around and notice who is not at the table and start asking why.
Unity is not always easy or comfortable work, but we trust that by the power of God we can be transformed and made new.
There’s another thing I find interesting about praying ‘Our Father.’ This was certainly not a new way to address God, and Jesus’ disciples would have found it familiar. But what is new and incredible about it is that Jesus prays this prayer with us and as one of us. ‘Our Father’ includes all humanity and it also includes Jesus – the one who makes it possible and shows us the way.
Jesus, who did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.
Following the example of Jesus, we are called to regard others with the same mind, to enter into the reality of our neighbors – with humility and self-giving, with compassion, and careful attention.
When we pray those first little words of the Lord’s Prayer, saying ‘Our Father’ with Christ and with an imagination big enough for all God’s children, then the work of unity can truly begin. May it be so. Amen.