A Fourth Church Sermon by John A. Cairns

July 25, 2004 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Phrase Two

John A. Cairns
Dean, Academy for Faith and Life

Psalm 85
Colossians 2:6–15
Luke 11:1–10

It is in the nature of true prayer to remind us of what we may not pray for.
We may not ask God for anything that separates us from our neighbor;
we cannot ask for “our daily bread” in such a way
as to deny that daily bread to our neighbor. . . .
No prayer for private advantage can possibly be directed to the one
we call “our Father.” God’s kingdom cannot come to us apart from
our neighbor and still remain God’s kingdom.

Theodore W. Jennings Jr.
Life as Worship: Prayer and Praise in Jesus’ Name

Sometimes just a couple of words can get you started. If you had a high school English teacher who thought memorization was a good thing, all it takes is “to be or not to be” and your mind is off and running through the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” I’m not sure whether it was good for me or not, but I must have had a lot of those teachers because I certainly had to memorize a lot of material during my school years. Some of it I can still remember!

I also know that not all memorization works the same way. When the item under consideration was a Shakespearean soliloquy or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, you were expected to understand the meaning of the text, to carefully articulate the less-than-familiar words. But other memory assignments required only the repetition of the material with no particular concern for pronunciation or meaning. All that was required was for you to make your way through whatever it was without prompting.

I can remember memorizing a list of forty prepositions for what I’m sure was a good reason, but we learned to say them so quickly that you’d have to listen carefully to discern the particular words. Learning the books of the Bible produced a similar result.

There are a lot of items that fall into this latter category. Many are learned as part of what we might regard as our cultural heritage—those things it is just assumed everybody knows: The Pledge of Allegiance, the first verse of “The Star Spangled Banner,” half a dozen Christmas carols, and eight or ten great lines of movie dialogue. When you become part of a church community, the list increases to include—among other things—the passage we just read as our scripture lesson: the Lord’s Prayer. For many of us, that learning began in early childhood, when the words didn’t make much sense and thus were morphed into the phrases that have become a standard source of humor over the years: “Our father who aren’t in heaven, Harold be thy name!”

All this is fun to reminisce about, and there is, I’m sure, some of it that was part of your experience or the experience of someone in your family, some story of a misunderstood phrase or mispronounced word. But at another level, there is a legitimate concern here. By committing something to memory, we may have moved it to a place where we no longer think about it, no longer have any real awareness of what we are saying or of what it means. Once again, the Lord’s Prayer is an example. For all the thought we give it, God’s name could be Harold! Actually many of us memorized the Lord’s Prayer using the singer’s pronunciation “hallow-ed” rather than the spoken word “hallowed,” and it’s never registered that we’ve been mispronouncing a slightly-less-than-familiar word all our lives.

But I want to move us beyond the Lord’s Prayer’s first phrase today, so that we can look at the second. The words here may be more common and ordinary, but their meaning is no less hidden from us by our mindless repetition. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

I wonder how many times you and I have uttered those words—weekly, perhaps daily, through much of our lives. Year after year, we make our way through this prayer as if we were a race car. We’re a little slow at the start, but by the time we get to “hallow-ed” we’ve picked up speed, and from there, it’s pedal to the metal zipping right through to “Amen.”

Perhaps we think of this recitation as a mantra, as an enveloping set of sounds that provides a good spiritual feeling. That may be what it has become, but I cannot believe that is what was intended when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray.

What Jesus offered in response to that request was a summary of his purpose and mission and the mission of all those who would seek to follow him. It’s all right there in that second phrase: “Father God, we plead for the coming of your kingdom.” This is what we are working toward. This is what we want to see happen. It is a radical request, although I doubt many of us think about its radical dimension as the words flow easily from our lips.

Perhaps that is because when we have actually stopped to think about this phrase, we have assumed it was one of those end-of-the-world things, that it related to what theologians call eschatology—the last days, the final chapter. Certainly there is some of that eschatology imbedded in this phrase. The early church lived in the expectation of Jesus’ quick return. Much of the New Testament writing seems to assume that Jesus will return in the lifetime of those first-century Christians, and so their prayer suggested that when that happened, when Jesus did return, then the kingdom of God would be established.

We, too, have an eschatological hope. We expect that at some time Christ will return, but we have learned two things over the years. First, that return will not be quick. And second, that its timing is known only to God. (I say that knowing that there are some in the Christian community who are busily working out the details of how and when and where the end of the world will arrive).

So we are people who are living in what can be properly called the in-between times—between Christ’s coming and his coming again. Now it might be possible to think that such in-between time places no particular demands upon us, sets no agenda for us. It might be possible to decide that if we behave ourselves, keep our heads up and our hands clean, then all will be well. That really could be a fair assumption, if it were not for this prayer that we hardly notice but continue to offer up each week. But there it is—the radical request that pushes aside the possibility of a smooth and easy life; there it is, the second phrase of this prayer in where we ask for God’s kingdom to come.

What would that mean? What would that kingdom look like? Those are fair questions, and the answers are best drawn from Jesus’ teachings and from the patterns of his life and ministry. Over and over again, Jesus would launch into a time of instruction with a parable that began, “The kingdom of God is like . . .” With illustration after illustration and analogy after analogy, Jesus worked to try to make clear what could never be adequately depicted: that the kingdom of God is a community of justice, mercy, and hope. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, like a pearl of great price, like a gracious king, like bridesmaids waiting for the bridegroom. It is glimpsed when one welcomes little children; when a steward cares for the master’s vineyard; when talents are used wisely; when the least of these are ministered to; when one master is served, not two. The kingdom is marked by those who are salt and light, who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who are laborers in the vineyard and purveyors of justice, good Samaritans, good neighbors. The kingdom of God is a shared experience; the individual—the I–becomes we. It is the manifestation of the body of Christ, the family of God.

The images are familiar, but we have not considered the implications of taking them seriously, of putting them all together and then putting them into practice. We have not thought a lot about what it would mean if this kingdom we pray for on a regular basis actually began to emerge. This is not a personal kingdom, not the kingdom of Tom or Sally or George Bush or John Kerry or rainbows and doves. This is the kingdom of God. Have you heard the line “Be careful what you pray for—you may just get it!”? Well, it’s time to think about that.

God’s kingdom means more than “liberty and justice for all,” although that’s not a bad place to begin. Even in our own backyard, under the banner of democracy, where we have come to expect liberty and justice as entitlements, there are neighbors—real right-in-the-same-zip-code Chicago neighbors—who have been forced to accept half a loaf of liberty and less-than-just justice while others have it in full measure. That’s not even an approximation of the kingdom of God, but we hardly notice the way our daily reality clashes with our prayer.

By way of example, I have to wonder about people who cannot live close to where they work and who then are the first to fall victim to the cutbacks in the CTA schedule. Wouldn’t you suppose that in the kingdom of God, folks would be able to get home after working the swing shift? And wouldn’t you imagine that those who never have to worry about catching the Blue Line would be the ones responsible to find a way for their neighbors to get home from work at one in the morning? Wouldn’t that be how it would work in the kingdom of God?

The latest figures from Washington, D.C., indicate that the top 20 percent of the households in that city have thirty-one times the income of the 20 percent of the households at the bottom. My guess is that Chicago is not a whole lot different. Does that sound like the kingdom of God we are praying for?

Stock prices fell this week when a major corporation announced second quarter profits of almost $280 million. That came out to be about 12-1/2 cents a share, but the market was expecting 14 cents. So jobs will be cut to enable the company to increase its profit margin. Where is the kingdom of God in that?

We need to wake up to the fact that we are praying for a whole new order, a whole new structure, a whole new reality, a whole new way of life.

In the kingdom of God, “no child left behind” means just that. What we are praying for is not that motivated parents with motivated kids and a good understanding of how the system works can find a way for their children to prosper. We are talking about all of us working on the system until we can get it right for every child and not expecting that enough people will play the lottery so that we won’t have to pay higher taxes to educate other people’s children. In the kingdom of God, there are no other peoples’ children!

In the kingdom of God we are praying for every week, there is no one who can be labeled “them.” The neighbor concept is not limited to those who think like we do, talk like we do, express their affections like we do, spend their money in the responsible way we do. This prayer pushes us toward a radical neighbor-ness that we can barely imagine and for which we have almost no blueprint. How do we do this? How do we love as neighbor people who insult or irritate us, who reject our values and pursue very different goals? How can we find ways to talk together that will allow us to discover commonalities, find a basis for respect in spite of difference, build a relationship that allows us to agree to disagree and yet remain connected?

We need a different paradigm—or else we need a different prayer! Be careful what you pray for

. . .

To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I would be ready to welcome this kingdom if it were to make an appearance. I much prefer safe and predictable to risky and radical. But I do know this: at its heart, prayer changes not God, but us. By praying this prayer, you and I are opening ourselves to being changed, opening ourselves to a radical transformation. So we should not hold out hope that our prayer will cause God to reconsider and decide that what we have going at the moment is good enough. Nor should we expect that we will be invited to serve as design consultants for a fresh new “kingdom concept”!

If we continue to pray “thy kingdom come . . .” and perhaps occasionally do as we will do this morning—offer our prayer using new and different words so we are forced to think about what we are saying—if we do that over and over and over again, we will discover that what Jesus said is true: “Ask and it will be given you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you.” And in small but significant ways, the kingdom of God will come. And we will see it—and be glad.

Amen.