Texts: Matthew 6: 5-13
“Our Father, Who Art in Heaven…” (Different Ways to Pray, Part III)
We say it every week. I’ve known the words by heart since I was six, maybe seven. They trip off my tongue in sequence, so that I rarely have to think about what I’m saying. Maybe it’s like that for you too. After the invocation and before the announcements, I give the cue, “And teach us to pray, as Jesus taught his disciples to pray, saying together:…” and then we’re off. The words flow by, and then we’re focused on all the things that are happening around here.
There are times, however, when it doesn’t work out that way. Like this one: at a funeral earlier this summer, I was standing here in the pulpit just as I am right now, and it was sweltering up here. It was a family from out of town, with a loose connection to the church, and so I didn’t know them well, nor they me. I had offered a prayer of invocation, and then had begun saying The Lord’s Prayer, much as we do at the beginning of most all of our services. “Our Father, who art in heaven,” I began, and then several thoughts entered my head at the same time, even as the words were being spoken. I thought: “Geez it’s hot up here,” as sweat was coursing down my face, and then, “I don’t think anyone in the room knows the words to the prayer, maybe I need to speak them a little louder,” and just like that, in an instant, my mind was blank. I’m telling you, not just lost, but empty, blank.
Now some of you out there might be thinking, “Well, Steve, get used to it, it’s the first of many such moments that happen as we age.” And that might be, but it’s small comfort to a guy standing in front of a hundred grieving people in baffled silence. That silence went on for what felt like an eternity, and I’m sure Simon was in the balcony peering out from behind the organ, going, damn, did the guy just stroke out or something, and then I tried a phrase or two, “Forgive us, forgive us, forgive us…” and then somebody from the assembled congregation, which had also fallen into a confused silence, hollered out “…and lead us not into temptation,” and then I was back. “But deliver us from evil…” and so on to the end. By the amen, I could only exhale a little, shake my head, and imagine that most everyone in the room wondered what sort of third rate hack was running the service.
Two things resulted from that moment. First, the next time I came to The Lord’s Prayer in a service, I got totally spooked, and worried that it would happen again, which it didn’t, but I then resolved to make sure I had the words written down, every single time, just in case. The second is this sermon, and I hope several more to follow it. Stumbling over the words had the fortunate effect of helping me focus on the words of that prayer a little more, and the meaning contained within those words. Sometimes we need moments of confusion in order to prompt us toward greater clarity. In a word, failure, of the major or minor variety, often contains a hint about a path worth exploring.
But I also detect within myself, and maybe within the world as I encounter it, a desire akin to what the disciples expressed when they came to Jesus all those years ago and said, “Teach us to pray.” I sense an openness within myself, and among many people that I’ve encountered lately, for a sustained practice of the Spirit. I don’t know about you, but something about this cultural moment makes me yearn for a kind of stillness, a kind of awareness and attention that cuts through the noise and detritus of the moment. “Lord, teach us to pray,” is a refrain that keeps tugging at my imagination.
And what better place to turn for insight than the words that Jesus provided his disciples. Of course, there are hazards. One, as I discovered, is actually remembering the words. Far more problematic, however, is knowing the words so well that they no longer signify much of anything. It was Martin Luther who suggested that the greatest martyr in the history of Christianity is the Lord’s Prayer, so overused and so underexamined. But my wager this morning is that it still has the power to nourish, to provoke, and to ground our spiritual lives. The Lord’s Prayer still has the power to surprise us, if we let it.
Take the very first word. “Our.”[1] It’s one tiny word, a plural pronoun, but it lands with a shattering force, establishing the direction of the entire prayer, if not the overarching meaning of all Scripture and all theology. Not my, not your, not their, but “Our Father.” We can put it in the form of a question: why does it not begin with My God? Why does it not begin with My Father? Given that prayer is so often a personal matter, given Jesus’s own admonition to avoid ostentatious public displays of prayer, wouldn’t the singular be more appropriate?
That plural pronoun, “Our,” is the first clue as to what happens in prayer. Yes, it can be done in private or in public, it can be done alone or in a group, but it’s not, first and foremost, a moment of self-involvement. Rather, the act of prayer begins with an acknowledgment of the commons – a common humanity, a common world, a shared world, if you will (which, heads up, is the theme of our stewardship campaign later this fall). In that first pronoun, all the categories we devise to subdivide human life are overturned. Gender and racial and class and national disparities are cast aside, party disparities are ignored, where you stand on this or that issue becomes irrelevant before that one shattering and liberating word, “Our.” For the prayer indicates that we all stand before God in the same relationship, as creatures in search of love, sustenance, forgiveness, and hope. “Our” is a word several of us will be exploring when we travel to Cuernevaca, Mexico in the coming weeks. “Our” is a word we learn to speak every time a Tree of Life delegation crosses the Separation Wall that snakes through some 400 miles of Israel and Palestine. “Our” is a word we’ve all learned to speak with just a little more nuance and understanding as a result of our sanctuary work. That’s work born of prayer. Prayer might be something we do on our own – in our homes, in our cars, on our walks. But that first word suggests that prayer is always a movement toward a wider and deeper connectivity. “Our,” the prayer begins. Not “My.”
Let’s keep moving – otherwise we won’t reach the end of the prayer until Easter. But we can’t move too quickly, because the second word too needs to be unpacked. Jesus’s designation of God as “Father” has proven to be a stumbling block for many, who detect in religion, and in Christianity more particularly, a legitimation of patriarchy, paternalism, and misogyny. And who can argue that the Christian faith has been used to justify the worst sorts of gender imbalances, to say nothing of gendered violence. Who can argue that instilling God with male attributes, writing patriarchal assumptions into the core of the universe, has not only distorted our understanding of God, but has undermined and distorted institutions and relationships all over the world? Inscribing patriarchy into the heart of the universe has had devastating consequences, and I suspect churches will never fully overcome that legacy.
The problem, of course, is a failure to recognize metaphors for what they are. They’re words or figures of speech used to point toward a reality to which they’re not fully applicable. What’s so powerful about metaphors is that they establish a relationship with the reality toward which they point, while also undermining that relationship. We talk about the Meetinghouse being a furnace in the summer or a blanket of snow covering the ground in winter, and we all understand the relationship, even as we would never mistake the metaphor for reality. The Meetinghouse is not a furnace, snow is not a blanket and God does not have the requisite body parts to make God a Father, or a He, for that matter. So the metaphor establishes a relationship even while undoing it, which is good news. It means that other metaphors are also revealing – God as Mother, God as a child, God as an animal or some other living creature, a tree for instance. By using the language he does, Jesus seems to be inviting that slippage of language, and thus to be inviting us to substitute our own metaphors for God if need be. The point isn’t to literalize the metaphor, but to get comfortable using them. So what is God to you? What metaphor would you reach for? What form of address would you use?
That question hints at another insight. For it is, of course, a form of address that Jesus is providing. There is a relationship that is being established, and while it is certainly a form of transcendence that is being addressed, most of us tend to describe that transcendence in personal terms. I confess that in graduate school when I was studying theology, I was annoyed by the conception of God in personal terms, as if there were a big powerful person located somewhere in the universe organizing all the minute interactions of the cosmos, a big boss man in the sky. I still don’t think of God in those terms, but neither am I bothered anymore by the description of God in anthropomorphic terms. How else are we to describe a presence that we encounter as love? How else are we to name a reality that overwhelms our hearts, that sustains us through trouble, that calls to the deepest parts of our lives? How else are we to name a reality that stirs us toward greater forms of responsibility, that urges us to resist cruelty and indifference, that pushes us toward moments of tenderness and compassion? How else but in personal terms? Jesus called that presence “Abba,” “Father.” We’re invited to address that reality with the same familiarity, with that same intimacy, even if our preferred metaphor is different.
The next two clauses belong together: “…who art in heaven,” and “hallowed be thy name.” Both of them have to do with idolatry, which is really just a fancy way of saying that they’re about getting us out of ourselves, out of our self involvement and self-absorption.[2] In that, they point back to the first word of the prayer, but they also point back to the first commandment, which is “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” The great truth of that commandment, and the great truth of hallowed be thyname, is that the worship of idols isn’t about bowing before great statues – it’s about bowing before the self, for idols, in the biblical sense, are always about the self, writ large. Who worships power, or influence, except the one in power, the one with influence, or the one who wishes to have it? Who worships money, except the rich, or those who wish they were? Who worships America except Americans, Christianity except for Christians, sports except for athletes? One can have a sort of edifying fascination with other practices or geographies, but there are few Americans who will worship at the altar of Brazil, say, and there are few Christians who will die for the principles espoused in Santeria or Vodou, no matter how fascinating those might be. The point I’m making is that idolatry is really about projecting the self onto some external reality, which winds up being a more potent and formidable form of the self, unconstrained by vulnerability, or self doubt, or defeat. As one preacher memorably put it, it usually comes down to “hallowed by thyname, or hallowed be mine.”[3]
However true that insight is, I confess to some discomfort in speaking this way. The danger for many of us, I sense, isn’t the overestimation of ourselves, but rather the sneaking suspicion that we don’t matter at all. For many of us, the struggle isn’t so much to hallow our names, but to confirm that our names are worth saying. Yes, I can think of individuals who seek to hallow their own names. I’m certain you can too. And yes, there are ways that we’re all contained in boxes of our own self-involvement and self-investment. The Lord’s Prayer speaks to that condition, and calls us out of it. But I’m worried about something else – not so much that we aspire to be gods, but that we forget how beloved we are by God in the first place. These days, I sense that many of us are far less bedeviled by pride than by a creeping nihilism, born of a painful awareness of our fragility, or the experience of loneliness, or feelings of insignificance.
But here is where Jesus’s words in the Lord’s Prayer are so valuable. They remind us that we’re rooted and grounded in love – that it precedes us and encompasses us and sustains us. It reminds us of where we begin and end – not with a quest for the self, not with a vision of moral rectitude or social transformation, not even with a vision of the beloved community, important as all of those are. It reminds us that we begin and end with God, in whom we live and move and have our being, as the Apostle Paul puts it. I don’t always understand it, and God knows that I can’t always describe it, but the form of address that Jesus uses comes to us across the ages, meeting us within our loneliness or isolation, in our worship of ever larger versions of the self and in our lowly self doubt, encouraging us to trust that we are, that you are, the beloved children of an “Abba,” who adores you, who travels under many guises and answers to many names. Try it this week. Play the fool, and try speaking it in your head or out loud: Our Father, Our Mother, to whom I most deeply belong, hallowed be your name. Everything else flows from that simple, and profound, form of address.
I end as I began: in a moment where I was foiled, but ultimately instructed, by the Lord’s Prayer. It took place, as many of my most formative moments do, in a hospital room. A middle aged man was lying on a bed, dying of a poisoned liver. I had visited him before, and liked him a lot. He was affable and open, but also consumed by some darker shade of self destruction, one that even he couldn’t understand or explain. On the afternoon in question, his large extended family, Polish Catholics all, had gathered around his bed. At one point, the room fell silent, until an older woman spoke up, addressing me: “Father, could you please lead us in the Our Father?” Protestant that I am, I was momentarily thrown, first by the title, and then by what she was asking of me. Was it The Lord’s Prayer she wanted or something else? She saw my hesitation and rolled her eyes, and then led the prayer herself…Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. By then I caught up, and we all finished the prayer together. Everyone knew the words by heart (even me!) and it was clear that something about those words provided enormous comfort and strength in that moment. It seemed especially so for the man I had come to know, sick and fading as he was. I couldn’t see into his heart, or the hearts of those who surrounded him. I still can’t say what the words conveyed. But maybe it was something like this. Maybe it was an affirmation that the care of the one called Abba was greater than whatever self destructive tendencies might overwhelm us, greater than whatever goodbyes we must finally utter, greater than all the ways we keep ourselves apart, greater certainly than the poor bumbling minister who forgets his lines in the most important moments. The sustaining care of the one Jesus called “Abba” is greater by far.
We breeze through the words every week, so often that we lose sight of their meaning. Thankfully, there are moments when the words make us stumble, the better to catch sight of their meaning. Our Father…Amen.
[1]An insight I learned from a sermon preached by William Sloane Coffin on the Lord’s Prayer. See The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin, The Riverside Years, Vol. 1(Louisville: WJK Press, 2008), pg. 344.
[2]Here again I have learned much from Coffin. See Ibid, pg. 345.
[3]Ibid, pg. 345.
