Christ United Presbyterian Church
July 28, 2013
Tenth
Sunday after Pentecost
Sermon:
“Well, You Asked”
‘When
you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
3 Give us each day our daily bread.
4 And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.’
Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
3 Give us each day our daily bread.
4 And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.’
Some
translators say that translating that first word as “when” misses the intensity
of the Greek work. It should be
translated “whenever;” that is, every
time you pray say this. Since
both translators and even the Gospel authors present us with different sets and
order of words for this prayer, clearly the words themselves are not meant to
be treated as a magical formula.
The
important thing is the intent that rests at the core of this prayer.
The
prayer starts with both intimacy and reverence.
We address God as “Father.”
Immediately we also attribute holiness to God’s name. Now this version of the Prayer, unlike the
Matthew version, doesn’t start with the collective “Our Father,” but as soon as
we move into the prayer we find the collective pronouns “us” and “we.” As a community we approach the most holy God
and pray for us, not for “me.”
After we
have addressed God our Father we jump right into the heart of the matter: “Your kingdom come.” We are both asking God to bring the fullness
of God’s kingdom into our lives and committing that we wish to live in that kingdom. Now.
What
does it look like to live now in God’s kingdom?
It involves the acknowledgement that God alone will meet our daily
needs. It doesn’t say let me fill my
silos with grain so that I may eat well tomorrow and the next day. It says let me live in Your kingdom because I
know that You will provide for me. I
know that You alone are the sole source of my bodily needs and spiritual
resources.
We pray
that God’s kingdom will arrive and we pledge to live in that kingdom. In that kingdom we shall be totally dependent
upon God’s love and power and forgiveness.
We really
can get that forgiveness line confused.
Let’s be clear, the reversal of the two phrases is meant to make it very
clear to us: Because we forgive everyone
indebted to us, we know that God will forgive our debts. It doesn’t say that God forgives us and therefore
we should forgive others. It says God
forgives us because we have already forgiven others.
You see
that’s the essence of the kingdom that we have prayed for already. The kingdom of God is a place in which we
acknowledge our total dependence on God’s word, a place where God meets our
needs through faith each day, a place where we have already forgiven all those
who are indebted to us.
The
disciples came to him and said, “Lord teach us to pray….” Is this what they were hoping for? Did they think that he would give them a
prayer to allow them to bend God’s power to their own will? Did they want to pray for victory over the
Romans? Did they want to pray for the crops so that everyone could fill their
silos and barns with enough food to last a good, long time? Did they want to pray for wealth? For magical powers?
If
that’s what they wanted, they must have been disappointed. Jesus gave them – and us – a prayer of
commitment in which we are promising God to more fully live our lives in the will
of God. We are acknowledging the intimate
nature of God’s love for us and asking God to take us through faith fully into
his care. We are committing in faith to
give up control of our lives so that God alone becomes the source of our lives. We are acknowledging our responsibility to
forgive now knowing that such is the first criteria, the first obligation of
living in God’s kingdom. A modern
business consultant might say that our willingness to forgive is the primary
“metric” for measuring our life in God’s kingdom.
“Lord
teach us to pray!” “Well, you
asked.” This is what it means to pray.
Back
when Satan was tempting Jesus in the wilderness, one of Satan’s dares to Jesus
had to do with hunger and turning stones into bread. What did Jesus say? According to the Gospel of Matthew Jesus
quoted a part of Deuteronomy 8:3. He
said: “… one does not
live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of
the Lord.” The full verse is
another one of the “so that” sentences that we tend to overlook: “He humbled you by letting you
hunger, then by feeding you with manna, … in order to make you understand that
one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth
of the Lord.”
In that context, “Give us each day our daily bread,” means that we are throwing
ourselves completely into a place in which we live by the nurture of God’s
will, God’s word. We are saying that we
are giving up idolatrous self-reliance and placing our trust in the
Lord.
The rest
of that 8th chapter of Deuteronomy has some advice for us. God has promised to deliver the children of
Israel into a land of great abundance; a land with freely flowing water; a land
filled with grains and meats; a land in which their wealth will grow. In other words they would enter a land of
prosperity and comfort. And God knew that it would take all the discipline that
they – that we – could find not to abandon God.
The last
four verses of Deuteronomy 8 contain a solemn promise: “Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and
the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.’ But remember
the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so
that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is
doing today. If you do forget
the Lord your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I
solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. Like the
nations that the Lord is destroying before you, so shall you perish,
because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God.”
That’s what happened to Sodom. Isaiah speaking for the Lord tells us: ““Hear
the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God,
you people of Gomorrah! … I will hide my
eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen…. cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek
justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. [Isaiah
1:15-17]” And in Ezekiel 16:49, the
prophet reminds us: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her
daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the
poor and needy.” Sodom had given up
dependence on the Lord. It had no sense
of justice, no sense of gratitude, no forgiveness for one another.
Those seemingly pretty little words that we rattle off in
some rote fashion like we might rattle off the multiplication tables is nothing
less than the affirmation that we want – with all that is in us – to become
God’s own people. When the disciples ask
to learn to pray Jesus teaches them the words that reassert their readiness –
our readiness – to abandon other gods and return to faithfully and fully trust
the Lord with our lives. He gives them
an oath of allegiance to God’s kingdom.
He says, “When you pray, say….”
The prayer only gives us one way to measure our active
participation in God’s kingdom. It isn’t
filled with dozens of do’s and don’t’s.
It doesn’t itemize our daily behavior.
If we love the Lord our God with all that we are and have, and if we
love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves, then there is only one metric,
one measurement that describes our lives in the kingdom of God: “we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.”
Let us
pray:
Take, O Lord,
and receive our entire liberty,
our memory, our understanding
and our whole will.
and receive our entire liberty,
our memory, our understanding
and our whole will.
All that we are
and all that we possess
You have given us:
We surrender it all to You
to be disposed of according
to Your will.
Give us only
Your love and Your grace;
with these we will be rich enough,
and will desire nothing more.
In Christ’s name we pray
Amen. (Adapted from the Prayer of Ignatius Loyola)
Amen. (Adapted from the Prayer of Ignatius Loyola)
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