A sermon preached by Dave Shull
Spirit of Peace United Church of Christ
Sammamish, Washington
The 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time: September 12, 2010
The first in a sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer – the Prayer of Jesus
(Scripture reading from Psalm 23)
Every week, we say the words, “Our Father, our Mother, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name …”. The Lord’s Prayer, or the Prayer of Jesus, connects all Christians around the world. Some of us say forgive us our debts; others ask forgiveness for trespasses or sins. Some say, For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever right after deliver us from evil; others wait for the priest to say something before adding that ending. Some Christians don’t say these words at all because they’re not in either Matthew’s or Luke’s version of the prayer of Jesus. But aside from those rather slight differences, praying the Prayer of Jesus in community is one of the things that connects Christians around the world.
We say the words every week. But when we say them, what are we praying? That’s what I’d like to explore in my sermons this fall. If this prayer unites all the followers of Jesus around the world, I think we’d do well to spend time with this prayer. So we can hear what it is saying. And not feel like we’re just saying the words. But know we’re aware of what the words mean. So we can pray them with integrity.
First, a brief word about prayer.
I don’t know about you, but I grew up seeing prayer like the list you make out for Santa Clause. God, I want this. God I need this. God if you really love me, you’ll give me this. I did the asking. God did the listening. And, if I was lucky, God delivered. That’s how church taught me to pray.
But that’s not what prayer is. We don’t pray “to tell God what we want, but to receive what we need. [Prayer] is not approaching God with our demands, but listening for God’s leading. It is not seeking our will, but learning to [hear and follow] God’s will …. Prayer isn’t about me [or you] – it’s about God”
(James Mulholland, Praying Like Jesus, Harper San Francisco, 2001, pp. 24-5).
In prayer, we listen much more than we talk. We listen because we expect God to respond. In prayer, we open ourselves to how God might be stirring in us. To lead us to become the answer to someone else’s prayer. Or even the answer to our own.
In Luke’s Gospel, the disciples say to Jesus, “Teach us how to pray” (Luke 11.1). Like the master teacher he was, Jesus doesn’t talk about prayer. He teaches his disciples about prayer by praying.
And the first two words he uses are most commonly translated, Our Father. We’ll look at the word Father in detail in a minute. Let’s start with the word that modifies it. Our. In English, it only has three letters. But taken together, those three letters form a word that’s risky and radical. A word that, if taken seriously by presidents could get them impeached. And get any of the rest of us in trouble. On this September 11 anniversary weekend, it is a word that challenges us to do what I’ve never been able to do.
What our means is that the God we’re speaking to is not yours or mine. The God we’re speaking to isn’t the private god of the group of people praying this prayer. When Jesus said, Our, he meant God is the God of all people. God is the God of everyone. Jesus was saying God loves everyone. Everyone is one of God’s children. Everyone is part of God’s family. Which is another way of saying each of us is related. Each of us is a sister or brother to everyone on this planet.
But we hear that all the time, right? We sing,
In Christ there is no east or west, in him no south or north,
but one great fellowship of love, throughout the whole wide earth.
So what’s new about all of us being sisters and brothers of each other? Why is it so risky to try to put this into practice that a president who did it would be impeached?
Because on September 11, a president who was trying to live into the spirit of the God Jesus called Our, would have had to say: “What these people did was evil. Unspeakably evil. We will respond to these attackers. But the way we respond will show the world we know that these people are still our sisters and brothers. We are still part of the same family. Even though those who have done this chose to murder some of their sisters and brothers. So how shall we respond? …”
A president who was trying to put flesh on the meaning of the word Our would never have told us it was okay to demonize these people. Or rejoice in their deaths. Or imagine violence as the only response to violence. And I believe a president who tried to this this would have been impeached. Because we don’t like our leaders to appear weak.
When we pray, Our Father, our Mother, we are saying everyone on this earth is part of God’s family. For us who are residents of this state, that means we know we are sisters and brothers of Cal Coburn Brown. Mr. Brown brutally attacked and killed our sister, Holly Washa, back in 1994. When she was just 21 years old. In our name, the State of Washington killed Mr. Brown one minute after midnight Friday morning. To protect us, or to make people believe justice has been done, or to try to bring healing to Holly’s family, or to satisfy our need for vengeance, our state injected poisons into Mr. Brown. What he did to Holly Washa was unspeakably evil. This woman was his sister in God’s family. Now we have done to our brother the same act we killed him for doing.
When we pray, Our Father, our Mother, we are saying the Rev. Terry Jones is our brother. He’s the pastor who gets the people in the church he serves to wear t-shirts that say, Islam is of the devil. The pastor who wanted to burn copies of the Muslim holy book, the Qur’an. If the God we pray to is Our God, then the Rev. Jones is our brother. Those who pray this prayer cannot pretend he is from another planet. Or call him an “idiot”, as a Seattle Times editorial did this week (September 9, 2010, p. A17). Some of us may not believe he deserves to be treated with dignity as a child of God. But if we say Our when we pray the prayer of Jesus, that is what we are saying. All of us are in God’s family. Each one of us is God’s beloved child. If we believe some people aren’t part of God’s family, then we can’t really pray Our Father, Our Mother. Instead, we’d pray something like, “Our (not Terry Jones’) Father, our (not Cal Coburn Brown’s) Mother, …”
That’s one of the reasons this prayer is so hard. I’ve never been able not to look at someone who says and does hateful things as my sister or brother. I jump at the chance to judge people. Even though I say I’m a Christian. But the Our that begins the Prayer of Jesus means I need to keep praying for God to heal me. In Matthew’s Gospel, the prayer of Jesus comes very soon after Jesus says, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5.43). God is the God of all. Of each one. When we start this prayer with, Our, we say God is the God even of our enemies.
The disciples would have been equally shocked by the next word Jesus uses in his prayer. It’s unfortunate that almost every English translations of this prayer use the word Father. Jesus said Abba. Which means Daddy. Or Poppa. Or whatever intimate name you would use for an older adult you knew loves you more than life itself. What’s important here isn’t the gender of the intimate name Jesus uses. God has no gender … in spite of the deep passion with which so many Christians insist on preserving all the male pronouns for God. What’s important is that Jesus uses such an intimate name to talk about God. His Jewish sisters and brothers believed God’s name was so holy that no one could speak it. The Hebrew Scriptures say God’s face is so holy no one can look at it without dying right on the spot. When he “saw” God, Moses survived because when God passed by him, Moses peeked out of his hiding place among some rocks. And the story says all he saw was God’s “behind”. In Jesus’ day, no one called this God Daddy or Mommy.
But that’s the name Jesus uses when he tells the disciples how to pray. Use the most intimate name for a parent he could use. In a country where more than half of the children grow up without a father or father figure in their family, I doubt if Jesus would want us only to offer people “Father” as an image for adult intimacy.
It’s the kind of intimacy for God that has made the 23rd psalm one of the most beloved and healing passages in all of Scripture. I invite you to open your bulletins as we say it together.
Listen for a Word from God.
You are my shepherd, I shall not want.
You make me lie down in green pastures.
You lead me beside still waters. You restore my soul.
You lead me in paths of righteousness for your name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.
For you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil.
My cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life;
and I shall dwell in your house forever.
May God help us hear and live this word. Amen.
The 23rd Psalm sings about a God who loves us like the most loving parent we can imagine. But it still can’t speak God’s true name. This God is too awe-some for humans to name. What Jesus does when he calls God Abba is to name the true essence of this God. And bring this God close to us. And make this God intimate for us.
If you’re well into adulthood, think back on when you were growing up. If you’re still relatively young, think about your life right now or maybe when you were a bit younger. Thinking about this time in your life, who is you knew totally loves you? Who is an adult who, whenever they look at you, their eyes light up … and they treat you like you’re the most important person in the world? When Jesus calls God Abba, he’s saying God is like this person. Jesus is saying God loves him with that kind of love.
Think about this person. Remember the name you call this person. Maybe it’s their real name, or a nickname or an affectionate name. Now think about praying the prayer of Jesus. But instead of saying, Our Father or Our Mother, say the word Our, and then this person’s name. Say that to yourself for or five times.
How that person looked at you or looks at you, how that person loved you or loves you … multiply that a couple hundred times, and that’s how much God loves you. That’s the depth of love Jesus wants us to know God has for us. That’s how much God delights in us. How much God’s eyes light up when God looks upon us. And upon all God’s children.
Some of us have a hard time believing we can be that intimate with God. Or that God wants to be that intimate with us. But that’s what Abba means.
Those of us who spend a lot of time in our heads have an especially hard problem with this. We value being rational and reasonable. But feeling this close to God has nothing to do with reason or rationality. In fact, many reasonable people like us believe feeling like God loves us is the antithesis of these traits we value so highly. That’s how I spent the first half of my life as a pastor. Trying to be a Christian while worshiping the gods of reason and rationality. Then I came across some words that called me down a different path. In a book about Jesus, the biographer Donald Spoto writes:
I do not believe in someone – I do not stake my life and death on the meaning and effect of one’s love for me – simply because of what has been claimed and written about him by others, whether remote or recent. Nor do I embark on the journey of faith, which is fundamentally a relationship with a person and not a set of intellectual propositions, because someone else has advised that belief is a good thing to have, as if it were an academic degree, a possession or a skill like a second language. Rather, I trust, I commit myself, I live in ongoing hope in a relationship only because somehow another addresses me and discloses [them]sel[ves] to me. The present (not the past, however gratefully recalled) is the forum of my commitment. Now more than ever, at the end of the second millennium, very many people want to hear Jesus standing at the door and knocking; even more, they want to open and find a real person there.
(Donald Spoto, The Hidden Jesus, St. Martin’s Press, 1998, p. 163).
Amen.
0 comments:
Post a Comment