July 29, 2007 - Pentecost 9, Year C
Saint James Episcopal Church, Saint James, NY

As I was thinking about which of the readings
to preach on today,
I was having a hard time deciding.
The dramatic story of God and Abraham
arguing over Sodom and Gomorrah.
The passionate trust
of the psalm.
The wonderful description of the core of our faith,
what Christ has done for us.
And Jesus' teaching about prayer.
Normally
I try to preach on the most difficult reading,
the one that's hardest for us to make sense of
in relation to our daily lives.
And so my first instinct
was to tackle Abraham and Sodom and Gomorrah,
with all the associations that brings up for us. Why does God
do what he does?
Or even Colossians and it's complex theological argument. How do we untangle the words to find out
what this means for us?
But in the end
it was Luke that kept pulling my attention.
Because while it seems straightforward on the surface — the Lord's Prayer is something that most of us could say in our sleep —
sometimes I wonder
if it's not in fact he most difficult after all.
Because we know it so well.
It seems so straightforward.
And so most of the time
we barely give it
a glance.

It's one of those things
that is so familiar
that we tend to forget what it means; we tend
to just say it
without thinking
what it's all about.

So today, let's take some time to look at the Lord's Prayer
and see what buried in there. It may help if you take out the insert in your bulletins to follow along.

First thing to note
is that this is Luke's version. It's much shorter than the one we normally use in our service;
the one we use
is based more on Matthew's version, which goes into more detail.
And that's important in itself.
Because one of the questions that people often ask of the bible, especially when two gospels disagree
when they are telling the same story,
is how do we know which is the original?
Sometimes history helps us.
When you tell a story about something that has happened, you usually begin with what you know. If it's something you heard from someone else, you'll use everything they say, and then add whatever else you know yourself.
The gospel of Mark is the shortest of the gospels, and pretty much everything Mark says is included, one way or another, in Matthew and Luke. And then they add all the extra stories they've heard from other sources.
So Mark is most likely the earlier, the more original
of the gospels.
But The Lord's Prayer doesn't even show up in Mark. So how do we tell whether Luke or Matthew has the original version?
Well, the same thing follows as before. The one that is shorter
is more likely to be the original, and that means this version,
the one we read in the gospel of Luke
is the basic one; Matthew's version has bits added in
as people maybe remembered more, or maybe added in other things they had heard Jesus say about praying.

Another thing to remember
is that when we read the Lord's Prayer,
we don't read it exactly as Jesus taught it.
Because he was most likely teaching his disciples
in Aramaic. That's how people learned it
for the first few years of what we know as the church, passing it on from one person to another.
Then someone translated it into Greek, and that's the language it eventually got written down in.
Then someone else translated it into Latin, and from there it got translated into English.
The version many of us grew up with, the one that's printed on the left hand side of the page in our prayer book,
was translated in the seventeenth century, using the Latin and the Greek.
The other version, printed on the right hand side,
is a new translation. It uses the Greek,
but it also tries to work out what the original Aramaic might have been
and how that got written into Greek,
and how to catch hold of idiom, the real sense
of what Jesus first taught his disciples.

And the third thing to remember, is that this didn't begin as a prayer to say privately. All the way through, it uses the plural — give us, as we, and so on.
It's okay to use it when we're praying alone, but this prayer is frist and foremost is a prayer for followers of Jesus
to say together.

Now let's look at the prayer
bit by bit.

It begins "Father." This is probably the most radical thing in the whole prayer. For generations upon generations, Jewish people
had been very careful not to say
the name of God. They used all sorts of circumlocutions, all sorts of ways around, to avoid it
for fear of infringing on God's majesty, holiness and power.

But here, Jesus tells his disciples to call God Father.
It's what a child calls his parent, and they would never in a million years
have presumed to use that name
to address God.
And what it reminds us
is that God isn't distant and unapproachable
but close
and attentive
and lovingly cares for us.
God is like the best father in the world,
better even than any of our fathers
no matter how great they may be,
God is the ultimate parent.
We can talk to God.
We can trust God.
We can rely on God.
"Father."

Next come three lines.
Hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.

Sometimes it seems like Jesus just said whatever came into his head, not worrying about the connections. But these three things
actually make more sense together than apart.

Remember back in the story of Jesus
to the time right after he was baptized.
He headed out into the wilderness for forty days,
and while he was there
he was tempted by Satan.

First of all, the devil said to him,
‘If you're really the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.'

"Give us each day our daily bread."

Second, the devil showed him all the kingdoms of then world and said to him, "If you'll worship me, all these kingdoms will be yours."

"Your kingdom come."

Third, the devil put him on the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, and said ‘You call yourself ‘Son of God,', so if it's true, throw yourself down from here. And if God is really who God promises to be, he'll save you!"

"Hallowed be your name."

Maybe it's coincidence, but these three lines
seem to have a whole lot to do
with what happened to Jesus
out there in the wilderness. He didn't succumb to the temptations,
but they must have lurked in the back of his mind,
and so when it came to teaching his disciples to pray, he taught them the prayers
that had been part of his own life
prayers that they would need
as they too
faced temptation.

And of course, that's reflected in the final line of the prayer, the one that most of us know as "Do not lead us into temptation"
but that probably was more like,
"Do not bring us to the time of trial."

In other words, although Jesus teaches a prayer
that comes out of his own struggles,
he has us asking God
to not even let us have to go through that time of trial, that kind of temptation, ourselves.

But back to the three lines,
Hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.*
Give us each day our daily bread.*

As well as speaking about what Jesus experience, they speak of what we experience.
We pray that God's name might be hallowed, might be made holy,
on in other words, that God might be recognized as God
by all people.
We pray that God's kingdom will come,
a kingdom that according to Jesus
is shaped by justice and compassion and love.
And we pray that God might give us our daily bread, that God might provide for our needs.

But of course, none of that means that we sit back and watch while God makes it all happen.
Instead, the way God works things in this world of ours is most often
that God uses us, the People of God
to make them happen.
So when we pray, "Hallowed be your name"
we're committing ourselves to work to help people recognize God as holy,
we're committing ourselves
to tell others about God in Jesus Christ.
When we pray, "Your kingdom come"
we're committing ourselves to work for justice and compassion and love,
to care for the hungry and the poor and those in need,
we're committing ourselves
to take action on God's behalf.
When we pray, "Give us each day our daily bread"
we're saying that we trust God
for everything we need
day by day,
and we're committing ourselves
to only asking of God
the things that we really need,
knowing that we may be the answer
to others'
needs.

And the final part of the prayer.
"Forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us."
We ask God to forgive us,
and we ask it
because forgiveness is a kind of circle.
We can forgive
only because we have been forgiven
and so we ask God to forgive us
because we have forgiven others, and we have forgiven others
only because God has forgiven us.
We need God to forgive us, constantly,
not just because we constantly mess up
but because we need God's forgiveness
to know what forgiveness really looks like.

And as we do our best
to live out the things that we pray
we pray that God will protect us from temptation,
we pray that God will give us strength,
we pray that God will make it possible
for us to live out God's will
here on earth.
Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.'
Amen.

©Raewynne J.Whiteley, 2007