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.

Wrestling With God

 Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Genesis 32:22-31:

Names are important things and convey things about a person. They can give some connection to heritage or family or culture, or perhaps the name means something specific that is supposed to be conveyed. There is also a certain type of person that we associate with some names. So, if I say Cindy of Jennifer, we have an idea of who that person is, or we make a preconceived notion based on other Cindys and Jennifers we have known. And I’m sure you’ve probably met someone and they told you there name, and you wanted to say “No” because they name didn’t match them. And then there is the idea that not naming someone or not using their name is a way of negating them, as we talked about in the story of Hagar in Abraham and Sarah refusing to use her name. That’s why the black lives matter movement has the emphasis of using say their names in order to give identity and belonging and purpose. Names are important things. When Linda was pregnant with our first child Samantha, we already had a girl’s name picked out, But, we didn’t have a boy’s name. So I suggested that we consider using the name of the first Yankee who hit a homerun at the next Yankee game we attended, and Linda was on board.

It happened to be that we were going to see the Yankees play the Cubs, at Yankee stadium. Early in the game, almost everyone in the stadium thought that Gary Sheffield had hit a homer down the left field line, and we thought “well, Gary’s not a bad name.” But, as I said, it was almost everyone, but the one person who didn’t think that was the only one who mattered, which was the third base umpire who called it fair, and this was before instant replay was allowed. Later in the game, Derek Jeter, the Yankee captain, came up with the bases loaded. Jeter had never hit a grand slam in his career, and we thought, this is it. And what was great is you had two options of using either Derek or Jeter, but Jeter flied out, although he did hit his first grand slam the next day. Then in the seventh inning our hard hitting left fielder Hideki Matsui came up, and, of course, he corked one, and Linda immediately turned to me and said “we are not naming our son Hideki,” although Matsui could have worked as well. But, in the end it didn’t matter because we had all girls, and so never got to use our boy name, which was cooper by the way, for Cooperstown, New York. Names are important things, and they matter, and we see that in scripture as well.

The Trinity

Here is my sermon from Trinity Sunday. The text was John 16:12-15:

Jesus said to his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”  And his disciples answered,

"Some say John the Baptist; some Elijah; others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.” And Jesus answered and said, “But who do you say that I am?

Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God, the Logos, existing in the Father as His rationality and then, by an act of His will, being generated, in consideration of the various functions by which God is related to his creation, but only on the fact that Scripture speaks of a Father, and a Son, and a Holy Spirit, each member of the Trinity being coequal with every other member, and each acting inseparably with and interpenetrating every other member, with only an economic subordination within God, but causing no division which would make the substance no longer simple."

And Jesus looked at Peter and said, "What?"

A little Trinitarian humor for today when we look at the idea of the trinity, and we do so for several different reasons. The first is that today is Trinity Sunday, and so it seems appropriate for that reason alone.  The second is that I have had some people ask me to explain the trinity, and so rather than explaining it to a few, I can explain it to all of you at the same time, and I won’t tell you who asked for their protection, and the third is that as our faith development team has been working they have been talking about how a knowledge of Christianity and it’s beliefs, or knowledge about Methodism, is no longer a given and so what do people who are new to the faith or to Methodism need to know. So I thought that we should put together on our website a series of sort of doctrinal sermons, things that we believe either as Christians or as Methodists, that tell people about who we are and what we believe.  And if we are to do that, the Trinity has to be a key part of that because the trinity is at the heart of Christianity. It is not something we can believe in or not depending on our opinion; it is the orthodox position of the church. It is the basis upon how we decide if people are Christian or not, is their belief in the trinity. Indeed the entire reason why the eastern side of the church is called the Orthodox Church, whether they are Greek, Russian, Arminian, or whatever, is because they separated from the western church as it reinterpreted the structure of the trinity.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Three Simple Questions: Who is God?

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Acts 17:22-31:

Several years ago when I was appointed here, we did a sermon series based on a book by Bishop Reuben Job entitled Three Simple Rules.  Bishop Job didn’t create those three rules, instead they came to us from John Wesley, the found of Methodism, and they were his general rules, the things we were supposed to do if we were to call ourselves Methodists, and those three things were to first do no harm, second to do good and third was to stay in love with God.  Several years after Bishop Job wrote that book, he wrote another book entitled Three Simple Questions.  These questions go to the heart of our faith even more than Wesley’s rules did, and those three simple questions are: Who is God?; Who am I?; and Who are We Together?  Now those three questions might be a lot of things, but I don’t think they are very simple, and yet we have to answer them in order not only to proclaim a faith, to have a set of beliefs, but also, more importantly, to live our faith because how we answer those questions should impact our actions, although sometimes there is a disconnect between what we say we believe and how we actually live our lives out and the God that we worship in our lives.

Everyone has to answer who is God.  Even atheists and agnostics have to answer this question, and every one of us has a god, whether it’s the God, or a different smaller god, money, fame, fortune, power, education. But there is something that holds our allegiance, something or someone we serve to give our lives meaning and purpose, something gives us the rules, guidelines, whatever you might call them, about how we are to live our lives.  So what can we say about God?  First is that God is obviously a baseball fan because it’s the one sport that’s mentioned the most times in scripture, the other is tennis.  And second, and most importantly, we can say that God is a Yankee fan simply because the Yankees are twenty-seven time world series champions.  That’s more than the next three best teams combined.

I know they haven’t won in a while, but that’s because God has to give other fans a chance as well, right?  But isn’t that what we hear all the time, that someone is winning, especially in sports, because God is favoring them, and so athletes point to God, or where they imagine God is, when they score, or do something great.  So that must be who God is and how God works right?  And anything that contradicts that must be wrong right?  When Arian Foster of the Houston Texans says that he doesn’t believe that then it must mean that he’s an atheist right?  But perhaps the players who say things actually believe in a different idea of God, but don’t live that reality.  Who we imagine God to be is incredibly important to who and what we are.  So who is God?

Like a Mother

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Isaiah 49:8-16a:

Today we continue in our series on prayer by looking at our images and metaphors for God.  If I were to ask you to tell me or to me draw me a picture of what God looks like, I can probably guess that most of us would describe the image we see all the time.  God is an older man, white of course, with a long white beard, maybe, like Michelangelo’s famous portrayal in the Sistine chapel of the creation, he is incredibly buff, but he’s floating in the clouds looking powerful and maybe all knowing.  If you do a Google image search this is the first image that comes up, and we would all shake our heads and say, “yep, that’s what God looks.”  But is that really what God looks like or who God is?

The scriptures give plenty of metaphors for who God is and most of them are male, not necessarily of someone who spends all their time in the gym as Michelangelo would have us believe, but male nonetheless.  Now, some of the male imagery used for God is not very flattering.  The prophets Hosea, Jeremiah and Ezekiel all picture God as an abusive husband, but it’s okay because his wife, who is Israel or Jerusalem depending on the prophecy, “Hey, she was asking for it.”  How we think about God and the metaphors we use for God matters.  Is the image of an abusive husband the image of God we want to hold onto and someone we want to pray to?  If we were to always conceive of God as an abusive husband, our practice of Christianity would be very different, and I strongly suspect that many of us would not be sitting here.  We would not want to follow or worship a God who was like an abusive husband.

Jesus, of course gives us the masculine identity of God as father.  But, the word translated as father, abba, might be better translated in most cases as daddy.  It’s not a title as it is a deeply personal relationship.  So when we pray to God as father, do you conceive of that as someone who is an authoritarian figure, who is sort of around but not intimately involved in our lives, who is more there as protector or provider or disciplinarian, or do you conceive of God, as daddy, someone carrying you on his shoulders, teaching you how to throw a ball or slide into a base, or sitting down and having a tea party with you?  These are two radically different images of God from the same metaphor, and depending on how we use them will impact how we pray.