Sermon on Sunday, September 19
Well, as many of you know, today we begin a series on prayer here at First Presbyterian Church. Today and for the next five Sundays, we’re going to explore the Lord’s Prayer together in the sermons, one phrase at a time. By mid-October, you may never want to pray the Lord’s Prayer again. Or (and this is what I hope to accomplish) you may find yourself praying it with more intentionality than ever before.
This past spring I was thinking to myself that while we pray the Lord’s Prayer every single week, it’s not something we necessarily think about much. In fact, I’m going to just go ahead and make a little confession: sometimes my mind wanders when I say it. Am I the only one? It just happens so easily. Beginning the Lord’s Prayer is a little bit like engaging the auto-pilot system of our brains. “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name…” and I’m wondering, is my microphone still on? Hmmm… I’m hungry. What’s for lunch today? Are the Packers “home” or “away” this afternoon? It happens, right? Our lips move and our minds take a little vacation.
This may not be an entirely bad thing. I have been with people who, near the end of their lives, didn’t recognize me or even members of their own families. They didn’t know where they were and couldn’t come close to holding a conversation together. But they could remember the Lord’s Prayer, and they could say it with me. Even more importantly, saying the Lord’s Prayer in those last days of life clearly seemed to bring them a measure of peace and comfort.
Maybe you’ve had that experience with someone else, or maybe you’ve found yourself relying on the Lord’s Prayer in another way—a moment, perhaps, when you knew you needed to pray, but for the life of you, you couldn’t imagine how or what to say. Sometimes it can be nice to just have a prayer ready to go when all else fails. At bedsides and gravesides and following great tragedies, the Lord’s Prayer can come in quite handy, simply because people have it memorized.
This is probably true for most of us—that, having the Lord’s Prayer memorized, we know that it will be there if and when we need it most, but also, because we have the Lord’s Prayer memorized on such a deep level, when we say it each week in worship, we tend not to think about what we’re praying as much as we could.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve chosen to lead us through this series. We pray the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday, and because of that it has become ingrained on a deep level in our spirits, but also it has become something we can easily recite without engaging our minds much. And that interests me—that we have this weekly prayer that is both central to our identity and distanced from our thinking.
My hope in this series is that by dwelling on the language of the Lord’s Prayer, we might find ourselves entering into it a little more deeply each Sunday. My hope is that this prayer becomes something new for you on some level—not just more talking in church, but something new.
I remember when my brother and I were little and we made a case with our parents for why we didn’t want to go to church one Sunday. “We’d rather not go,” we told them. “Why?” my mom asked? “Don’t you like church? Don’t you like Sunday school? Don’t you want to see all your friends?” And we were ready with our reason: “There’s too much talking in church.” Too much talking. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to get up early on a Sunday and it wasn’t that we didn’t like wearing our Sunday clothes. It was that at church, there was too much talking.
As an adult in the church today, sometimes I wonder if we have too much talking in here—which, of course, leads to a bit of a dilemma for me personally, since I’m the one doing much of it. But here we have this hour together and week after week, we tend to fill it up with a lot of words…
Jesus taught, “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.” So maybe Jesus would have joined my brother and me in our plight, claiming that there was “too much talking” in church. Jesus encouraged his followers to get to the point and do it quickly. And so the Lord’s Prayer was born out of a desire to be brief before God—to approach prayer with simplicity, using as few words as possible and certainly to avoid heaping up “empty phrases.”
And so Jesus begins: “Our Father…” Right away, this prayer is different—radically different. Did you know that in the entire Old Testament, the father image for God appears only seven times? Seven! God is called a lot of things in the Hebrew Scriptures, and we’ll get to that shortly, but “Father”? Just seven times. By the way, guess how many times a motherly image for God appears in the Old Testament. Ten. My point here is simple—in the Old Testament, we have seventeen parental images for God—just seventeen. And yet Jesus calls God “Father.”
This was Jesus’ favorite description of God. In fact, Jesus sometimes called God “Abba,” an Aramaic word which really should be translated as something like “Papa” or “Daddy.” Jesus’ word for God was an intimate one—Daddy—and it implied something their relationship. “Daddy, will you tell me a story.” “Daddy, can I stay up late with you tonight?” “Daddy, I fell and hurt my knee.”
Jesus begins the prayer with a model for understanding God’s relationship with us. And it’s not an invitation to think of God not just as some far-distant force in the universe or as some untouchable, unapproachable presence, but rather as a parent.
I tend not to get too caught up in discussions of God’s gender. In the Old Testament, we’ve got seven images of God as father and ten as mother. Jesus’ favorite way of thinking about God was as “Father” or “Daddy,” but certainly the Bible’s got lots of other names. God is Spirit, and the Eternal Word, and God is Wisdom. The Old Testament psalmists and prophets sometimes used images of animals to describe God: a mother bear, an eagle, a lion, a mother hen. And then we’ve got some nature images for God. In the book of Deuteronomy, God is Fire, in Acts, God comes as the Wind. God is a Rock in Isaiah and Water in Jeremiah. Finally, in John’s gospel, God is referred to as Light. The Bible also contains a number of human images for God—shepherd, baker, potter, midwife, friend…
So which is it? Should we call God “Father” or “Mother.” Well, the problem with that question is that it’s too small. Remember that story from Exodus, where God’s voice comes to Moses from the burning bush? Moses asks, “Who are you?” and God responds, “I am who I am”—or—“I will be who I will be.” In other words, there is no pinning me down. If all you do is call me “Father” or “Mother,” it’s not enough.
We have no human categories to contain God. All our words fall short. God is God, and there is no word or phrase or image in the human language that can pin God down to one identity or name. [10:13] So what do we do? We call God “Father” and “Mother” and “Spirit” and “Truth” and “Shepherd” and “Jesus” and “Love” and…
A lot of kids think God’s name is Howard. Did you know that? There’s at least one in every church. “Our Father, who art in heaven, Howard be thy name.”
I love the phrase, “Hallowed be thy name.” Hallowed is your name. Holy and Sacred is your name. And so it’s as if Jesus makes two moves in the beginning of the Prayer. First, he names God something specific, “Father”—and so he implies that closeness, that intimacy between parent and child. But then, without naming God specifically, Jesus says that God’s name is “hallowed”—sacred, holy. Jesus, in good Jewish tradition, understood that God’s name was beyond a human being’s ability to pronounce—that there is no human word that can speak to the depths of God’s existence, and so it is better to say instead that God’s name is hallowed, sacred and beyond what we can say or imagine.
So now I’d like to give you two things to do the next time you pray the Lord’s Prayer. Just two things. The first is this: think of God as a child thinks of his or her parent. “Daddy.” “Mommy.” When you pray, approach God in that way, knowing God intimately, trusting God completely. And remember that a child doesn’t worry about how the words come out. Believe me, a three-year-old or a six-year-old child isn’t overly concerned about proper form when it comes to making herself heard in the presence of a parent. So quit worrying about praying the “right way.” Don’t try to sound like a serious Christian. Don’t try to sound like your pastor. Don’t try to be anybody you’re not. Just pray. “Daddy… Mommy… God…”
The second thing I’d like you to do the next time you pray the Lord’s Prayer is to simply dwell for a moment on the phrase, “hallowed be thy name.” In fact, let’s all begin the prayer together, and let’s stop right there, after that phrase. Ready? “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name… God, your name—your identity—is hallowed, holy, sacred. It’s beyond all our words. We could talk to the end of time, God, and still not completely name or describe you. All the words in the Bible and all the words in human language can’t make a word to adequately name you, God.”
Friends, next time you pray, “hallowed be thy name,” remember that! And then remember this: you were created in God’s image! Just as God is known as “hallowed, sacred,” there is a part of you, too, that is beyond knowing. There is a depth to your character that is beyond words. Part of your adventure in life is plunging the depths of your own soul, knowing that you will never reach the bottom.
That’s a beautiful way to think of yourself, and you should think of yourself that way. And while you’re at it, remember that the people around you contain that same hallowed, sacred quality. Everyone around you… here in this church, in your family, that angry guy who cut you off in traffic, the people you work with, the woman on the street who’s going to ask you for spare change this week… all created in the sacred, hallowed image of God.
Hallowed-holy and sacred-be the name of God, the name that is beyond all our words. And hallowed be our sense of God's presence in our own lives and in the lives of those around us. Amen and amen!
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