Our Father Who Art in Heaven, Hallowed Be Thy Name

Here is my message from Sunday. The texts were Exodus 3:1-15 and Matthew 6:5-13:

Most of you know by now the importance that I place on prayer, including our expectation that everyone will engage in prayer at least once a day, although doing it even more than that is even better. That expectation is based not just on our membership vows that we will pray, but also that we have said that prayer is one of our core values as a congregation. Richard Rohr, who is a Franciscan priest and author, takes it a bit farther and has said that “The church that does not teach its people to pray has virtually lost its reason for existence.” And so when I recently asked for ideas that I might preach about, it wasn’t surprising that I had some people ask me to talk about prayer. Indeed, that is a perennial request from people, because although it appears to be easy to do, the fact is that praying can be hard. Now some of that, I think, is because we sometimes make prayer harder than it needs to be, or, worse, we compare our prayer lives or what we say against others and we find ourselves lacking. But, that’s nothing new, because the disciples have the same problem. And so in the gospel of Luke, we have an account in the 11th chapter that Jesus has gone off to pray, and when he is done, the disciples say to him “Lord, teach us to pray.” Apparently what they are doing in prayer doesn’t look like what Jesus is doing, and the result of that question is Jesus giving what has become known as the Lord’s prayer. And so we are going to be spending the next six weeks looking at the Lord’s prayer and what it teaches us not just about prayer, but also about God and what we are called to as disciples.

The Lord’s Prayer appears only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and we are going to be primarily using Matthew’s version because it is closer to the prayer that we say at least once a week. In Matthew’s version, as we just heard, it is part of the Sermon on the Mount which is sort of a summation of Jesus’ teachings as well as instruction about the Kingdom of God, which, of course, plays a role in what we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. And because it’s only found in Matthew and Luke, and not included in Mark and John, scholars believe that this prayer was originally recorded in a source known as Q, from the first letter of the German word for source, which is a document that we no longer have but which Matthew and Luke had access to. And because Matthew and Luke give different settings for where the Lord’s Prayer was taught, we don’t know how and where Jesus originally taught the prayer, and perhaps he even taught it multiple times in multiple places.

But, the Lord’s Prayer is obviously a special prayer for Christians. It is the only prayer that we say together every single week, and it’s going to be one of the few things that you are going to find the same, and find to be done, regardless of what Christian church you may go into anywhere in the world. In their book on this prayer, Bishop Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas say that this is the prayer that makes us Christian. I would actually disagree with that statement for two reasons. The first is because we are Christians because we are baptized, and that will become important as we understand our relationship with God as presented in the prayer. And secondly, there is nothing uniquely Christian about this prayer. Everything found in the prayer is firmly rooted in Judaism and the prayer could be prayed by Jews without any issues arising, and that is incredibly important for us to remember as anti-Semitism continues to be a problem with the rise of hate crimes around the county for many different groups of people. This is a thoroughly Jewish prayer which shouldn’t be surprising since Jesus was Jewish.

One other issue that we will address throughout this series is our familiarity with this prayer. That can be a problem because we can just rush through it without really thinking about what we are saying or why, or we become blinded to many of the intricacies and depth of what it is that we are praying. And yet, our familiarity can also be a blessing because it is comfortable for us, like an old friend that we met when we were young and have known for our entire lives. And so the prayer begins, “Our father…” The Aramaic word that Jesus originally used is Abba. Now Abba does mean father, but as some of you have probably heard there are some who speculate that it was a little deeper than that, that it had the connotation of daddy or papa, a term of endearment that implies a closer and deeper relationship. Now this would have been a term used by both children and adults, but it gives us a particular understanding of what Jesus is conveying here about God’s nature and desire for relationship.  This is a God who wants to be in a personal relationship with us, not some distant God. What we also find in the Greek, is that while it’s translated as our father, that it a literal reading is “the father of us.” and so while we can pray this individually, this is ultimately and always a collective prayer, something we will address more in another message.

Some have claimed that addressing God as father, which Jesus does continually, was a new form not found in Judaism, but that’s not actually correct. While it was not common, we do have several instances in the Hebrew scriptures of God addressed as father. The first mention comes just a little bit later in the Exodus story in chapter 4 when Moses is addressing the Pharaoh and asking for their freedom. And so, the fatherhood of God, I think, although I am still working some of this out for myself, is tied up with freedom and deliverance and salvation. But it also says something about God’s relationship with us, and that just like we cannot choose our biological parents, so too we don’t choose God; God chooses us. And our relationship with God, as father, comes because God adopts us through Christ as children. In Romans Paul says, and so listen attentively, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. 15For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ 16it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ…” (Rom 8:14-17a) And so when we address God as father, then it’s a reminder not just of the close relationship that God calls for us to participate in, but it’s also a reminder of the freedom we have received because we know the father through the son and the gift of grace and mercy we have received because of Christ. It is a reminder that in baptism we are adopted as beloved sons and daughters and made heirs with Christ, because of Christ and all our debts are washed clean, something we will also request in the prayer.

Now the controversial issue to be raised then is if we address God as father, does that mean that God is male and should only be addressed using male pronouns? And the answer is no, and there are several reasons for that. The first is to ask what we mean when we say that God is male? Does it mean that God has higher levels of testosterone? Does God have male physical characteristics? Can God grow a beard and build up muscles? If not, and I hope you find those questions as ridiculous as they are in me posing them, then can we actually say that God is male? Now some will say that scripture clearly refers to God as he, but that’s a matter of translation into English because neither Greek nor Hebrew or Aramaic for that matter have pronouns, because they are gendered languages, which means that words have genders assigned to them, and so that is that the words have genders assigned to them, and so is it at all surprising that a patriarchal society would ascribe their God as being male? Now a counter point, the word for Spirit in both Hebrew and Aramaic is feminine, and in Greek it’s neuter, or genderless, although still more often referred to as he, or it, but not she. The truth of the matter is that the church has historically agreed, at least in principle, that God is not gendered because God is beyond human understand, that God created humans in God’s image, male and female we were created, and Jesus says that God is Spirit.

And while there is a lot more that could be said, we also have to remember that father is not God’s name as such. We hear God’s name given in the passage we heard from Exodus today. Saying God is father is a metaphor to understand the nature of God. And like all metaphors it says that “yes, God is like that,” and no God is not really like that. And more importantly, if we are only limiting our address of God to that of Father, we are greatly limiting our understanding of God as well as our prayers of God. There are lots of different metaphors and titles given to God in scripture, and all of them should lead us to different understandings and ways of praying. Praying to God as judge is going to be very different than praying to God as the shepherd. Praying to God as potter is going to be different than praying to God as the Great I am. The more ways we see and identify God, the more metaphors and concepts we use, will not only increase our capacity and knowledge of God, but also expand our prayers and help us to realize that the more we know God, the more we realize how much we don’t know, and how unknowable God is, and that is in this prayer too, because we go from the intimate idea of God as father and change immediately to God as transcendent because God is in heaven.

In the Pixar film The Incredibles, the bad guy, called syndrome, invents items to give ordinary people super powers, in order to fight against the super heroes, because he says “if everyone is super than no one is.” Well, the same is true with God. If God is everywhere, than God is really nowhere. And so placing God is heaven does several things. One is that it points, again, to the transcendent nature of God and says that God is above and beyond the creation, because God is the creator. And so we have a God who is both present for us, and yet also cosmic. And what it is does is to remind us that because God is transcendent, that God is not the God of our country, or our state, or our community, or even of this church. We have a tendency to try and tame and domesticate God, to make God our, our possession, which can also happen when we try and name God and say this is who God is, and only this, but the Lord’s Prayer shatters that idea. When we pray to our God, it’s a reminder that God is not my God, which is why it’s not a first person pronoun, but the God of us, of all of creation. And it also should remind us that God is the primary actor and not us. And while we could discuss this for a year of Sundays, there is one more piece of the opening and that is the statement “hallowed be thy name.”

In hearing this petition, some will say that we are asking God to make God’s name holy, although that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me because God is holy. How can God make God’s name any holier? And so if the first part of the prayer is our understanding of God, and God’s claim on us as children of God, then the second part, I believe, is us taking that claim and saying that we are then going to live as God’s children, to do God’s will, as it were, which we will cover next week, so that what we do, how we live our lives will bring glory to God’s name, that we will make God’s name holy. And how do we do that? Well, I’m glad you asked. Jesus says that we are to be perfect like the father is perfect, and in Leviticus 19, before a series of laws about how we are to live and treat one another, God says to Moses, “Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”  We should be holy because God is holy, and how do we become holy? By living holy lives.

When Moses sees the burning bush and God speaks to him, God tells him to remove his sandals for he is standing on holy ground. But what makes it holy ground? It’s God’s presence there, and so it is for us. Our lives are to become holy, we are to be holy because we are taking on the role of disciples of Christ. In 1 Peter, which also says to be holy as God is holy, we hear that we “are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order” so that, “you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:9) We are chosen, made God’s people so that we can glorify God. Or as Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians “Since we have these promises” to live in righteousness and not to be unclean, Paul says, “let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and of spirit, making holiness perfect in the fear,” or in the perfect knowledge “of God.” (2 Cor 7:1) When we live in God’s will, when we answer the call to discipleship and pick up our cross, then we are called to live lives of holiness. And yet, it’s even deeper than that.

We are told that we are not to take the name of the Lord in vain. But, in his book Putting God Second, which I’ve mentioned before, Rabbi Daniel Hartmann says that when we don’t do what we are called to do, when we don’t live to the highest principles and standards we can, when we don’t live in love, when we don’t love God or our neighbor, then we cast a negative light on God, and we desecrate God’s name, and therefore we do not make God’s name holy, it is not hallowed by our actions. And so while, again, we will talk about doing God’s will next week, that call, that petition actually starts here with a petition to God, and a call for assistance that all that we do would hallow God’s name, and let’s not pretend that’s easy. The hardest prayer I say, which is the prayer we have handed out as a shower tag to remember our baptism is to pray that everything that I do this day would honor God. That everything we do would bring honor to the name of God, because a name is not just about identity but a name is also about reputation, and our desire should be to honor God and God’s name in this world. God is the father of us all, and God is both transcendent in heaven, but also imminent, present for us, calling us to live lives of holiness, lives of perfection, or maturity, so that all that we do may hallow God’s name. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.