Unpacking the Lord's Prayer (Part 3)
Isaiah 2:1-4; Luke 11:1-4; Matthew 5:10
Today we continue our conversations about praying the Lord’s Prayer – and they are turning out to be “conversations.” I am grateful for the responses you have sent about your experiences praying the prayer as well as for your reflections on some of the things I have said. Some of you said that Brother Lawrence’s idea of “practicing the presence of God” while you are doing your daily tasks opened up a new vista on the meaning of prayer. In a couple of cases, it validated something you had already discovered in your own prayer life. A couple of you wrote about the prayer and children. You can see those comments and my responses online on the blog.
Let me again ask you to do the three things I asked of you at the outset of this series: first, pray the Lord’s Prayer each day until August 19th; second, make notes during the service that you can incorporate into your prayer time; and third, continue to share your prayer experiences and questions on the sermon blog.
For many years I prayed this prayer by rote, not excited about what I thought it meant and wondering why the church prayed it so often. That all changed on one Sunday morning in a worship service I was attending at a United Methodist Church on Staten Island, New York. A laywoman was preaching that day, and her topic was “the kingdom of God.” Something she said so jarred me awake—there are a lot of ways to “sleep” in church and I think I have tried all of them—that I went home and began to do some serious study of this prayer, study that I probably should have done years before. I began to see why this prayer had been prayed so often. Thanks to the spark she provided (You’ll hear about what that spark was next Sunday) the Lord’s Prayer began to take on meaning and an urgency that I had never before sensed and that has stayed with me through the intervening years.
What I came to believe is that the petition, “Thy kingdom come,” is the very central petition of this prayer; that this prayer is a very particular, not generic, form of prayer, and that all of the petitions of the prayer must be seen in relation to this petition. If I may paraphrase Jesus’ words at the beginning of the prayer as it is found in Luke, I think this is what is intended: “Whenever you pray, pray for the realization of God’s kingdom.”
What is the “kingdom of God”? This is archaic language that sometimes gets in the way of our understanding what is being said. The “kingdom of God” means the “reign” or “rule” of God. In the past some folks have thought that the “Kingdom of God” was a piece of geography, like other kingdoms of the world. Some even thought that the “kingdom” and the “church” were the same thing. Some have thought that it would only be sometime in the future. If you look at the petition as it is in Matthew 6 and compare it with the version in Luke 11, I think you can get the idea of what is meant by “kingdom of God.” In Luke the petition is simply, “Your kingdom come,” but if you look at it in Matthew you see that it reads, “Your kingdom come,” and then is added “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Is the prayer for God’s will to be done on earth a different petition or is it a part of “thy kingdom come”? I believe that this is a translation of what in Hebrew or Aramaic was a common poetic construction called “synonymous parallelism,” in which one line (“thy kingdom come”) is restated in the second line with words that add to or clarify the meaning of the first (in this case, “thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”). If you want a simple definition of the “kingdom of God,” it is whenever and wherever the will of God is done. The heart of this prayer is for God’s will to be done.
However, the prayer is more than for God’s will to be done; it is a prayer for God’s kingdom to come on earth. In this sense, the petition is much like a prayer that Jesus would have prayed in the synagogue, and that Jewish people continue to pray to this day. It is from the Synagogue Kaddish and it goes something like this: "May God’s kingdom be established during your life and during your days, and during the life of all the house of Israel."
To pray the Lord’s Prayer with this petition at the heart means that God cares about what happens on earth – in our families, in school, in our community, and in our world. I assume it also means God cares about what happens to the earth itself. To pray this prayer is for us to long for the realization of God's kingdom on earth: It is to long to see right prevail; to desire to see justice done in the courts, to yearn for fairness in the marketplace. We are called to make as the center of all our prayers a deep longing for the will of God to be done on earth.
This is the petition that was on Jesus’ lips at the time of his greatest temptation, when he was in the Garden of Gethsemane, waiting to be arrested: “My father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not my will, but thy will be done.” (Matthew 26:39 and 43) “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven” should be the first and last petitions of every prayer we pray, no matter what our situation.
This is probably hardest petition we are asked to pray. It seems somehow easier to pray for God’s kingdom as some far off future event in a way that doesn’t affect us here and now. But to earnestly desire that God’s will be done on earth is something else. It reminds me of a story I heard about a ten-year-old boy in a revival meeting. The preacher was preaching about “heaven” and he described the gates of pearl and the streets of gold. As preachers sometimes do he got so excited about what he was saying that he shouted, “How many of you want to go to heaven?” All the people put up their hands, everybody except that ten year old boy. The preacher saw it and shouted again, “How many of you want to go to heaven?” Again, everyone but the little boy put up hands. Unnerved -- that’s what sometimes happens to preachers when people don’t respond the way they anticipate -- the preacher spoke directly to the boy: “Son, don’t you want to go to heaven?” “Sure,” responded the boy, “I just thought you were getting up a load to go today.” Sometimes we are tempted to pray, “Lord, let your will be done in my life, just not today.”
We have had a wonderful week of Vacation Church School. You got just a taste of it as you heard the kids sing. They sang songs, prayed, and played games; they also heard Bible stories and talked about what they meant. Seeing parents get their kids to experience this said to me that they wanted their kids to learn about doing God’s will on earth. Seeing all of the adults that took precious time, just when the red run might be starting, said we have adults committed to learning about doing God’s will on earth. But I must tell you, seeing our young people, from the sixth grade up, here working with the kids, teaching them; that said to me that we have young people who care about doing God’s will on earth as it is in heaven, and teaching it to our children. And I thank God for all of them. I hope you express your thanks to God and to them for what they did here this week.
In the morning and evening we also had adults in classes. We studied one of the most familiar of all Jesus’ stories; it was the story of the good Samaritan. (Luke 10:25-37) You remember the story, don’t you? A man was walking along the road to Jericho only to be beaten by robbers and left for dead on the side of the road. Two religious leaders came walking on the road, saw the man lying there, but passed by on the other side. A hated Samaritan came after them, saw the man, cared for him, took him to an inn, and paid for his care.
You probably remember the story, but you may not recall why Jesus told it. Jesus was teaching when an expert in the law came up and asked Jesus about how he could receive eternal life, or how he could get into God’s kingdom. The man was a religious leader, so Jesus turned the question back on him and asked him what the scripture said. The expert gave the answer that most good religious folks would have given in Jesus’ day. He quoted the Schema from the Hebrew Bible: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your minds; and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus responded that the man had answered rightly and that if he did this he would live, and he might have said “you will live in the kingdom.”
The man wasn’t satisfied. He said “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus answered him with the story of the good Samaritan. At the end of the story, Jesus asked the man which of the three—the two religious leaders on the road or the Samaritan—were neighbor to the man lying on the road. The man responded, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus told the man to “Go and do likewise.”
God’s kingdom is whenever and wherever someone shows mercy or acts justly. It is as simple, and as difficult, as that. When we pray this petition, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we are not only looking to the day when God’s reign will be over the earth, but we are committing ourselves to working for that day by acting with justice and mercy.
This petition involves all of the decisions we make—how we raise our kids, how we vote, how we are involved in the community, how we spend our money. If we long to see God’s will done on earth, then nothing on earth is beyond our purview, and we are accountable to God for the decisions we make. Jesus teaches us to pray for God’s will to be done on earth. We know that involves us, all of who we are, and all the resources with which we have been entrusted. Keep on praying!
Today we continue our conversations about praying the Lord’s Prayer – and they are turning out to be “conversations.” I am grateful for the responses you have sent about your experiences praying the prayer as well as for your reflections on some of the things I have said. Some of you said that Brother Lawrence’s idea of “practicing the presence of God” while you are doing your daily tasks opened up a new vista on the meaning of prayer. In a couple of cases, it validated something you had already discovered in your own prayer life. A couple of you wrote about the prayer and children. You can see those comments and my responses online on the blog.
Let me again ask you to do the three things I asked of you at the outset of this series: first, pray the Lord’s Prayer each day until August 19th; second, make notes during the service that you can incorporate into your prayer time; and third, continue to share your prayer experiences and questions on the sermon blog.
For many years I prayed this prayer by rote, not excited about what I thought it meant and wondering why the church prayed it so often. That all changed on one Sunday morning in a worship service I was attending at a United Methodist Church on Staten Island, New York. A laywoman was preaching that day, and her topic was “the kingdom of God.” Something she said so jarred me awake—there are a lot of ways to “sleep” in church and I think I have tried all of them—that I went home and began to do some serious study of this prayer, study that I probably should have done years before. I began to see why this prayer had been prayed so often. Thanks to the spark she provided (You’ll hear about what that spark was next Sunday) the Lord’s Prayer began to take on meaning and an urgency that I had never before sensed and that has stayed with me through the intervening years.
What I came to believe is that the petition, “Thy kingdom come,” is the very central petition of this prayer; that this prayer is a very particular, not generic, form of prayer, and that all of the petitions of the prayer must be seen in relation to this petition. If I may paraphrase Jesus’ words at the beginning of the prayer as it is found in Luke, I think this is what is intended: “Whenever you pray, pray for the realization of God’s kingdom.”
What is the “kingdom of God”? This is archaic language that sometimes gets in the way of our understanding what is being said. The “kingdom of God” means the “reign” or “rule” of God. In the past some folks have thought that the “Kingdom of God” was a piece of geography, like other kingdoms of the world. Some even thought that the “kingdom” and the “church” were the same thing. Some have thought that it would only be sometime in the future. If you look at the petition as it is in Matthew 6 and compare it with the version in Luke 11, I think you can get the idea of what is meant by “kingdom of God.” In Luke the petition is simply, “Your kingdom come,” but if you look at it in Matthew you see that it reads, “Your kingdom come,” and then is added “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Is the prayer for God’s will to be done on earth a different petition or is it a part of “thy kingdom come”? I believe that this is a translation of what in Hebrew or Aramaic was a common poetic construction called “synonymous parallelism,” in which one line (“thy kingdom come”) is restated in the second line with words that add to or clarify the meaning of the first (in this case, “thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”). If you want a simple definition of the “kingdom of God,” it is whenever and wherever the will of God is done. The heart of this prayer is for God’s will to be done.
However, the prayer is more than for God’s will to be done; it is a prayer for God’s kingdom to come on earth. In this sense, the petition is much like a prayer that Jesus would have prayed in the synagogue, and that Jewish people continue to pray to this day. It is from the Synagogue Kaddish and it goes something like this: "May God’s kingdom be established during your life and during your days, and during the life of all the house of Israel."
To pray the Lord’s Prayer with this petition at the heart means that God cares about what happens on earth – in our families, in school, in our community, and in our world. I assume it also means God cares about what happens to the earth itself. To pray this prayer is for us to long for the realization of God's kingdom on earth: It is to long to see right prevail; to desire to see justice done in the courts, to yearn for fairness in the marketplace. We are called to make as the center of all our prayers a deep longing for the will of God to be done on earth.
This is the petition that was on Jesus’ lips at the time of his greatest temptation, when he was in the Garden of Gethsemane, waiting to be arrested: “My father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not my will, but thy will be done.” (Matthew 26:39 and 43) “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven” should be the first and last petitions of every prayer we pray, no matter what our situation.
This is probably hardest petition we are asked to pray. It seems somehow easier to pray for God’s kingdom as some far off future event in a way that doesn’t affect us here and now. But to earnestly desire that God’s will be done on earth is something else. It reminds me of a story I heard about a ten-year-old boy in a revival meeting. The preacher was preaching about “heaven” and he described the gates of pearl and the streets of gold. As preachers sometimes do he got so excited about what he was saying that he shouted, “How many of you want to go to heaven?” All the people put up their hands, everybody except that ten year old boy. The preacher saw it and shouted again, “How many of you want to go to heaven?” Again, everyone but the little boy put up hands. Unnerved -- that’s what sometimes happens to preachers when people don’t respond the way they anticipate -- the preacher spoke directly to the boy: “Son, don’t you want to go to heaven?” “Sure,” responded the boy, “I just thought you were getting up a load to go today.” Sometimes we are tempted to pray, “Lord, let your will be done in my life, just not today.”
We have had a wonderful week of Vacation Church School. You got just a taste of it as you heard the kids sing. They sang songs, prayed, and played games; they also heard Bible stories and talked about what they meant. Seeing parents get their kids to experience this said to me that they wanted their kids to learn about doing God’s will on earth. Seeing all of the adults that took precious time, just when the red run might be starting, said we have adults committed to learning about doing God’s will on earth. But I must tell you, seeing our young people, from the sixth grade up, here working with the kids, teaching them; that said to me that we have young people who care about doing God’s will on earth as it is in heaven, and teaching it to our children. And I thank God for all of them. I hope you express your thanks to God and to them for what they did here this week.
In the morning and evening we also had adults in classes. We studied one of the most familiar of all Jesus’ stories; it was the story of the good Samaritan. (Luke 10:25-37) You remember the story, don’t you? A man was walking along the road to Jericho only to be beaten by robbers and left for dead on the side of the road. Two religious leaders came walking on the road, saw the man lying there, but passed by on the other side. A hated Samaritan came after them, saw the man, cared for him, took him to an inn, and paid for his care.
You probably remember the story, but you may not recall why Jesus told it. Jesus was teaching when an expert in the law came up and asked Jesus about how he could receive eternal life, or how he could get into God’s kingdom. The man was a religious leader, so Jesus turned the question back on him and asked him what the scripture said. The expert gave the answer that most good religious folks would have given in Jesus’ day. He quoted the Schema from the Hebrew Bible: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your minds; and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus responded that the man had answered rightly and that if he did this he would live, and he might have said “you will live in the kingdom.”
The man wasn’t satisfied. He said “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus answered him with the story of the good Samaritan. At the end of the story, Jesus asked the man which of the three—the two religious leaders on the road or the Samaritan—were neighbor to the man lying on the road. The man responded, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus told the man to “Go and do likewise.”
God’s kingdom is whenever and wherever someone shows mercy or acts justly. It is as simple, and as difficult, as that. When we pray this petition, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we are not only looking to the day when God’s reign will be over the earth, but we are committing ourselves to working for that day by acting with justice and mercy.
This petition involves all of the decisions we make—how we raise our kids, how we vote, how we are involved in the community, how we spend our money. If we long to see God’s will done on earth, then nothing on earth is beyond our purview, and we are accountable to God for the decisions we make. Jesus teaches us to pray for God’s will to be done on earth. We know that involves us, all of who we are, and all the resources with which we have been entrusted. Keep on praying!
4 comments:
YOU ARE WRITING SO MANY THOUGHTFUL THOUGHTS THAT ARE SO REALISTIC AND BRINGS SO MANY THINGS TO MIND.
BROTHER LAWERANCE'S STATEMENT IS SOMETHING I HAVE DONE ALL THROUGH MY LIFE.
OREN
Oops! See my comments on last week's sermon page!
Sorry!
Robin Bassett
Anonymous said...
God Male/Female:
Savannah (age 9): I really can't think of God as a girl. [why?] because the Bible say "He" everywhere about God (she tried using "She" instead and again proclaimed) It's just hard for me!
Julia (age 7): Sure, I can think of God as a boy or a girl - or BOTH! [why?] Because he's God - he can do anything (note: this one's really been paying attention in church!)
Savanah and Julia,
It was hard for me to begin to think of God as a girl as well as a boy because it does say "He" almost everywhere in the Bible. But then I noticed there were those places that suggested girl images of God like "Mother Hen," "Mother Eagle," and "Baker Woman." Mostly, though, it was hard because almost everybody I knew thought of God as "He," but then that began to change and I was helped, especially by a lot of girls, who didn't think it such a wrong idea to imagine God as a girl.
As Julia said, she can think of God as a boy or girl, or both, because God is God!
Thank you both for thinking about this! Keep on!
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