A Fourth Church Sermon by Cynthia Campbell

July 29, 2007 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Pray Like This

Cynthia Campbell, Guest Preacher
President, McCormick Theological Seminary

Psalm 130
Isaiah 6:1–3
Luke 11:1–13

“Jesus said to them,
‘When you pray, say . . .’”

Luke 11:2 (NRSV)

O gracious and holy God, give us diligence to seek you,
wisdom to perceive you, and patience to wait for you.
Grant us, O God, a mind to meditate on you;
eyes to behold you; ears to listen for your word;
a heart to love you; and a life to proclaim you;
through the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–547)

It’s not often you see a congregation go into meltdown—or that it happens in a congregation as large and healthy as this one. But I was here and watched it happen. One Sunday, about ten years ago, we arrived in worship to find that something in the order of worship had changed. Not a little something (although in a service as highly structured as this, I suppose there are no “little somethings”). No, it was big. On this Sunday, with no particular warning that I recall, a new version of the Lord’s Prayer appeared! For those who don’t read ahead and for those who were praying as they were taught (head bowed, eyes closed), the words we heard from the associate pastor came as a rude shock, followed by much scurrying to find our place in the bulletin.

The text John Buchanan substituted was surely new to Fourth Church but is neither new nor unfamiliar in other parts of the church. It is a version produced by the Consultation on Common Texts and is designed to do three things: First, it puts the prayer in “modern” rather than Elizabethan English (no thee or thy). Second, the translation is more accurate (thus, “lead us not into temptation” is replaced by the more literal “save us from the time of trial”). Third, it gets Presbyterians and the rest of English-speaking Christianity on the same page (we pray neither about debts nor trespasses, but rather “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”).

It’s a really good version of the Lord’s Prayer; my husband, who teaches worship, prefers it. But it’s different, and different in this case was the problem. So after several weeks of bravely soldiering on with the new version and fielding lots of your phone calls, John changed the prayer back to the version we know and either have grown up with or have come to love.

The Lord’s Prayer, like the Twenty-third Psalm, is a staple of Christian piety. Many of you probably can’t recall learning it; it’s simply there in your heart, in your mouth. For others of you, this prayer or the version we use may be newer. For all of us, it is a constant in our worship together.

The version of the prayer that the church uses comes (mostly) from Matthew, where it is part of the Sermon on the Mount. Luke’s version is shorter and is placed into the narrative of Jesus’ ministry. Luke regularly shows Jesus at prayer. In this scene, his disciples ask him to teach them how to pray. It is a curious request, because these are devout people; they’ve been praying all their lives—singing heartfelt psalms such as “The Lord is my shepherd” and “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.” They know how to pray. And yet they sense that their teacher has a profound prayer life, and they want to know more.

Jesus responds with a prayer that is compact almost to the point of being terse. Here is New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson’s translation: “Whenever you pray, say, ‘Father, may your name be holy! May your kingdom come! Give us every day the bread we need! Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone who owes us! Do not lead us into testing!’” (The Gospel of Luke, p. 176).

Five direct petitions: two focused on God and three on us.

Almost everyone who writes about the Lord’s Prayer says that it is our primer or textbook for prayer, that it sums up all we need to know about praying. If that’s true, then there is a lot going on in these five (or, in Matthew’s version, six) petitions. But since it is the prayer we all know best and perhaps love most, it is worth spending a few moments reflecting on what this prayer says that praying is all about. What are we doing when we follow Jesus’ instruction to “pray this way?”

The first (and maybe most surprising) thing to say is that there is nothing in this prayer that is explicitly Christian. The prayer is not addressed to Jesus; it does not end “in Jesus’ name we pray.” In fact, Professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt Amy Jill Levine argues that all the elements in this most distinctly Christian prayer can be found in Jewish sources of the time (The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, pp. 41-51). The opening petitions are most obvious: praying that the petitioner (and all people) know that God (and God alone) is holy and praying that God’s mercy and justice reign supreme throughout the universe are staples of the psalms. The fact that the prayer is in the plural form (“give us this day . . . and forgive us our sins”) reflects the corporate context of Jewish faith and life. It is the community as a whole that comes before God and the community that is collectively God’s people.

Many have argued that addressing God as “Father” is what makes this prayer unique to Jesus, but in fact this form of address is well-attested in Jewish writing in the centuries leading up to Jesus’ lifetime. Jesus does indeed make this name for God his own and uses it in various stories (including in this reading) to illumine aspects of God’s care for humankind. But Jesus did not invent calling God “Abba, Father.”

It is the combination—the collective address to “Our Father” in the context of the life of Jesus—that makes us who pray this prayer look at ourselves and others with new eyes. Jesus’ suffering and death reveals the depths of God’s love for us both individually and as the whole human family. Thus, John Calvin writes, “The prayer of the Christian [believer] ought then to be conformed to this rule [that is, of the Lord’s Prayer] that it may . . . embrace all who are [our] brothers [and sisters] in Christ, not only those whom [we] see and recognize as such but all [people] who dwell on earth”(Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. by John T. McNeill, trans. by Ford Lewis Battles, 3.20.38). Praying “Our Father” sets us in relationship to all because all are indeed God’s beloved children.

The three petitions that follow concern us, our needs: give us bread, forgive our sins, do not test us. Not exactly the three wishes you might imagine asking of the genie who magically appears from the brass lamp. Not exactly what the prosperity gospel or success-oriented preachers would advise. Not even the list of things for which we pray most regularly when left to compose our own prayers. But perhaps this is just the school for prayer to which we need to go; perhaps just this is what we really need from God.

If we are to live, we must eat and drink. We the overfed who have way more options for food and drink than any culture in human history may find this a curious prayer. But the point is to remind us that God is concerned about the basics—about what it takes to keep us alive. Once again, Calvin: “Ultimately, this is the real test of our faith, that we look to God for everything, recognize [God] as the unique source of all benefits, and find the tokens of [God’s] fatherly goodness appearing in even the smallest matters” (Commentary on Matthew, vol. 1, p. 209). Yes, I may work and “earn” my living, but even my ability to do that and the fact that I live in a society where I can do so is a gift from a beneficent and loving God.

Once again, we notice that the prayer is plural and not singular. It is not just what I need. We pray “give us this day our daily bread.” I’m not the only one with needs. You need to eat and drink; you need clothing and shelter and care. And so does every other child of God. When we pray that we will have enough to live for each day, this prayer calls us to expand our sightlines and recognize that God’s beneficence represents a call on our lives to share what we have and to do what we can to assure the well-being of all.

If we are to live in community, we need to forgive and to be forgiven. Surely no more ignorant words were spoken than “love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Love means precisely the opposite: the willingness to admit where one is wrong and has wronged another and, at the same time, the willingness to forgive the wrongs others have done to us. This is the only way marriages and families survive; it is the only way human community can be sustained. But it is not easy to do, and genuine forgiveness is hard to come by.

Miroslav Volf, a theologian from Yale, writes more profoundly on this topic than anyone I know. In his recent book, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, he writes, “The generous release of a genuine debt is the heart of forgiveness” (p. 130). Forgiveness requires first of all the recognition of wrong—not denying it or sliding it under the rug or making light of it. As Desmond Tutu taught his country and the world, reconciliation requires first telling the truth about the wrong that was done. But then forgiveness is the generous gift of grace that restores both parties to relationship with one another. That is what God is up to in the world in Jesus Christ, and that is what Jesus teaches us to pray for—that God will forgive us and restore us, individually and as a community, to one another and to God.

But note this petition contains a promise of action: “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone who owes us.” Everyone. No exceptions? Seemingly not. The prayer that Jesus teaches us to pray includes a commitment to release others from the obligations they have to pay us back for what they did wrong. He himself is best example of this. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ first words from the cross are, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”

Finally, we pray “do not bring us to the time of trial.” This prayer foreshadows Jesus’ own trial and his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. The earliest Christians faced generations of persecution, and surely they would have made this connection between Jesus’ prayer and his own trial and their own suffering. The point of this petition is the recognition that our faith, our trust in God, will be tested throughout our lives. Things like disease or pain, the suffering or death of a dear one, loss of a job or financial disaster, dissolution of a marriage or major disappointment—these things will tempt us to despair, to give up, to live as though God were not by our side. The prayer is not that we be spared these things that life inevitably brings. Rather, Jesus’ prayer is that these not become trials for us, that we not be tempted to give up on God because (as Jesus himself is proof) God never gives up on us.

Luke follows the giving of this model of prayer with a couple of stories. They are meant to suggest the nature of the God to whom Jesus and we are praying. They are designed to help us know who this Abba, Father is. The first story would have had Jesus’ audience chuckling, but it is more difficult for us to get the point. Let me try to retell it in a modern setting. Fred and I live in a typical Chicago six-flat: a three-story building with six apartments opening from a common front door and entryway. Let’s imagine that late one night, the buzzer sounds (which we can hear really well because we are on the first floor and our bedroom is near the front of the apartment). It seems that unexpected out-of-town company has arrived for our neighbors across the hall. There’s a lot of helloing and carrying on; I’m awake and irritated and waiting for this to settle down.

The next thing I know there is a knock at our front door. “It’s Jennifer,” the voice calls out. “I’m really sorry, but my sister’s brother-in-law’s daughter and her boyfriend have just arrived. They haven’t eaten all day. We don’t have anything in the house. Do you have maybe a can of soup? Some crackers? Anything?” The modern response to this is, this is so not my problem! And one is seriously tempted to play possum and pretend like we’re not home.

Not so in the ancient world where hospitality was job one. Someone arrives at your home, it doesn’t matter what time it is, how poor or rich you are, visitors must be fed. And this indeed is not just your problem but a problem for the whole neighborhood, because not to extend hospitality would be to bring shame on everyone. So, in fact, it would have been inconceivable to Jesus’ audience that the man who was all tucked in for the night would not have gotten up and rounded up the groceries.

The fact that he grumbles so much is the joke and drives home the point. If we fulfill our basic obligations to help out our neighbors, how much more will God—the most generous of all givers—respond to our prayers! Then metaphor of the gracious and loving father reappears. Once again, the point is contrast: if we, broken and failed parents that we are, know how to give our children what they need, how much more will God be present to hear us and shower us with grace.

So pray this way: “Father, may your name be holy! May your kingdom come! Give us everyday the bread we need! Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone who owes us! Do not lead us into testing!” Amen.