July 25, 2010 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

To Boldly Go

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 138
1 Thessalonians 5:12–19
Luke 11:1–13

“Father, hallowed be your name . . .”

Luke 11:2–4 (NRSV)

Most people who attempt to pray will say they are bad at it; almost no one claims to be good at praying. The disciples themselves were hardly confident in their communication with God and asked Jesus to teach them the art. Yet prayer lies at the heart of religious faith, and Jesus himself constantly emphasizes its importance.

Robert Van de Weyer

Our scripture texts today direct us to reflect on the theme of prayer. The psalmist tells of their trust in the steadfast love of God and God’s promise to answer prayer. Among the exhortations to the church in Thessalonica, perhaps the most complex or difficult is the exhortation to pray without ceasing. And in these familiar words in Luke’s Gospel, Luke tells the story of the gift of the Lord’s Prayer to the disciples.

John Buchanan has been in Minnesota this last week leading workshops for Lutheran ministers at St. Olaf College. He and I keep in touch a bit by phone. I spoke to him on Tuesday afternoon. He said, “What are you preaching on this Sunday?” And I said, “Well, the Lord’s Prayer in Luke.” He said, “Here’s my advice: Don’t tell the congregation that you’re going to change the wording of the Lord’s Prayer in the bulletin.” Now that may seem a peculiar word of advice, but I’m sure some of you, if you hark way back, will remember in March 1998 an episode in the history of this congregation when John Buchanan decided it was time that we went ecumenical and embraced the more modern version of the Lord’s Prayer. You all know that we say “debts and debtors,” and some churches use “trespasses and those that trespass against us.” The ecumenical version uses, among other word changes, the word sin: “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” In 1998 John felt it was time to bring the congregation along in the ecumenical version of the Lord’s Prayer.

Now as luck would have it, the day before he preached that sermon he got a phone call out of the blue from the Tribune’s religion reporter, who asked him about his view of this ecumenical version of the Lord’s Prayer as the Church of England had just included it in their official worship book. John replied to the reporter, “Well, funny you should ask, because we’re just going to change the Lord’s Prayer at Fourth Presbyterian Church.” The reporter found this very interesting and conducted an extensive interview with John, which then landed on the front page of the Sunday Tribune, March 8, 1998. The congregation woke up that morning, lifted up the newspaper, and saw that the Lord’s Prayer was going to be changed. I think that John realized that the congregation was not happy to learn about this in that way. Interestingly, above the headline that day was a report of the then-gubernatorial campaign primaries, the headline being “Roland Burris’s Popularity Drops.” My colleague, Ann Rehfeldt, remarked, “There you go—nothing changes in twelve years.” Not the popularity of politicians or, as you will see, the wording in our Lord’s Prayer in our worship. So I’m not going to argue for changing the words of the Lord’s Prayer this morning.

I should say, though, that there are good reasons for making such a change. Good reasons of unity, for example. Anyone who has conducted a wedding or a funeral in this place knows that when we say the Lord’s Prayer during a service, we say, “Forgive us our debts” and then we take a big, long breath so that the trespassers can catch up with us. It would be nice for us all to say the same words sometimes.

Prayer is a vexed topic. The disciples encounter Jesus in prayer, and one of them says, “Lord, teach us to pray.” That might be the kickoff of an enormous publishing phenomenon, because if you go in to Borders or any such bookstore, you will find shelves and shelves of books on prayer and how to pray and where to pray and when to pray. It is a topic that we, as pastors, hear about from worshipers. People, it seems, are looking for guidance in prayer, much like the disciples were. Martha Moore Keish is a theologian at Columbia Seminary. She wrote a lovely book on prayer and its meaning for today. She writes, “Some people begin with doing prayer and then move to reflection, while others begin with theological reflection and then move into practice.” I am not sure if it is as clear cut as that, but it is an interesting place to start off.

A favorite story of mine, on prayer, comes from the Hasidic tradition in Judaism. It’s a story of a poor farmer who was coming home late one evening from the market. At the time that is allotted for prayer, he found himself without his prayer book. Worse than that, the wheel of his cart had come right off in the middle of the woods, and he was distressed that this day would pass without his having said his prayers. So this is the prayer he made: “I’ve done something very foolish, Lord. I came away from home this morning without my prayer book and my memory is such that I cannot recite a single prayer without it. So this is what I am going to do: I shall recite the alphabet five times, very slowly, and you, to whom all prayers are known, can put the letters together to form the prayers I can’t remember.” God said to the angel, “Of all the prayers I’ve heard today, this one was undoubtedly the best, because it came from the heart that was simple and sincere.”

It is a great story about theological reflection, about the understanding of God, and about doing prayer. The Lord’s Prayer, as we have it here in Luke, is really a very simple and, of course, profound prayer. The words are short and unsophisticated: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive our sins, for we forgive everyone indebted to us. Do not bring us to the time of trial.

Jesus then goes on to share a parable about prayer, about God’s faithfulness. It’s a peculiar story about this persistent friend knocking on his neighbor’s door until finally, in exasperation, the friend gives up and gives him what he needs. Charles Cousar, a New Testament scholar, says that in this story God is contrasted with the unfriendly neighbor. If the neighbor finally responds, then how much more will God, who loves us, respond to our prayer.

In the liturgy of the Church of England, the introduction to the Lord’s Prayer goes like this: “Now as our Savior Christ hath taught us we are bold to say . . .” Isn’t that an interesting use of the word bold?

There’s an important paradoxical juxtaposition of words at the beginning of the prayer that Jesus teaches in Luke. “Father,” it begins, using that intimate form of address that Jesus uses in all his prayers to God. The word is Abba in Aramaic. We’re told that it is an intimate, warm form of address, and so in inviting the disciples to use that form of address, Jesus is inviting them into that intimate relationship of a child or parent. “Father, hallowed by your name.” And so we go from the intimacy to this word, hallowed, which lifts up the otherness of God, what we call the Holiness of God. There is warning in this for us, a struggle perhaps. We love to sing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and reflect on our personal relationship with God as parent, as father or mother. And yet there are dangers of chumminess in this, the danger that we take for granted the presence of God, the creator, the great mystery.

There is a story in the Old Testament that warns us about this. It’s in 2 Samuel in the sixth chapter when David is bringing the Ark of the Covenant, the presence of God among the Israelites, on a cart into Jerusalem. As the cart is going along, it starts to wobble, and it looks like the Ark is going to fall off. So Uzzah, who is one of the guards for the Ark, reaches out and puts his hand on it to steady it, and God strikes Uzzah down and kills him. It’s an extraordinary story, but a story that holds a warning to us about not taking for granted the relationship we’ve been offered by God.

Frederick Beuchener reflects on the “unbearable” nature of the Lord’s Prayer for what it offers as an alternate vision of God’s reign, and, in fact, Beuchener says, “It is only the word Father that makes the prayer bearable.” We do indeed “boldly go” (in Star Trek’s famous phrase) when we pray these words. For the Lord’s Prayer offers a vision of an alternate reality, one in which we are turned to God, focused on God and God’s kingdom, God’s reign, God’s new order of relationship come into being. The prayer itself is, as we have seen, is a simple series of petitions for the reign of God, for the kingdom, for bread, forgiveness, deliverance. William Willimon, the Methodist bishop and theologian, writes about the Lord’s Prayer and its political nature. Willimon writes, “Note that the Lord’s Prayer is meant to be prayed out loud as a public gesture. Rarely do we mumble this prayer quietly; it is meant to be very audible, a very public event. This is one of the most defiant politically charged things we Christians can do, to pray the Lord’s Prayer.”

Isn’t that interesting? Do you think of the Lord’s Prayer as a political act? Janet Morley, an English writer of devotions and prayers and hymns, reflects on what it means to say the Lord’s Prayer from the context we live out of in the affluent West. She talks about how we find the Lord’s Prayer familiar and comforting. I wonder if perhaps that’s why we don’t ever want to mess with the wording of it. She says we don’t find it “unsettling or full of painful longing because most of us are not actually hungry for bread and we pray for a kind of spiritual stamina day by day. The forgiveness we pray for is for our personal sins, and we celebrate a spiritual kingdom of power and glory that somehow authorizes and blesses the systems that we presently live under.”

If we pray the Lord’s Prayer intentionally, not just reciting it blankly, we might find in it a place of connection with the wider church and the wider world. We start to get at the heart of the prayer that Jesus taught the disciples to pray, one in which our orientation is towards God. Martha Moore Keish says, “True prayer is participation in God.” And that’s what the Lord’s Prayer is calling us to, to participation in God. Praying the Lord’s Prayer is a communal act; it’s why we say our Father at the start. The Lord’s Prayer is an act of solidarity with the church and the world, remembering Leonardo Boff’s words that “solidarity is love made public.”

And so every once in a while I pick up my prayer book called Praying with the World’s Poor and reflect and read and pray a version of the Lord’s Prayer that comes from a base Christian community in Central America.

And so, as Jesus taught us, let us pray.
Our Father who is in us here on earth.
Holy is your name in the hungry
who share their bread and their song.
Your kingdom come which is a generous land
which flows with milk and honey.
Let us do your will standing up
when all are sitting down
and raising our voice when all are silent.
You’re giving us our daily bread
in the song of the bird and the miracle of the corn.
Forgive us for keeping silent in the face of injustice
and for burying our dreams,
for not sharing bread and wine,
love and the land, among us, now.
Don’t let us fall into the temptation
of shutting the door through fear,
of resigning ourselves to hunger and injustice,
of taking up the same arms as the enemy,
but deliver us from evil.
Give us the perseverance and the solidarity
to look for love,
even if the path has not yet been trodden,
even if we fall.
So we shall have known your kingdom,
which is being built forever and forever.
Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church