August 3, 2003 (Jimmie Johnson)

Jesus said to his followers, “Pray like this...” and from Jesus we have inherited the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father. Sometimes I hear people speak negatively about saying a memorized prayer from the church’s liturgy. They criticize that such a method of praying is rote and therefore mechanical and thoughtless. They suggest that only extemporaneous prayer is effective and spiritual. Unplanned prayer, unwritten prayer, non-memorized prayer are their recommended way. I say “Hootie” on that.

In all truthfulness, I suspect such so called extemporaneous prayer is shallowness dressed up in what passes for sincerity. An attentive listening to these so-called extemporaneous prayers reveals a pattern of clichéd phrases uttered rotely---what I call the “Lord, we just uh...” way of praying. As I said last week, given the findings of depth psychology that with certainty can link our humanity with any motivation that is pure or sincere?

No, I am and always will be a sinner in all I do, think, believe, or say, so I, thank you very much, had rather focus on God’s sincerity and not my own even when it comes to my praying.

And at the same time, I’d rather rely upon the prayers of the people of God at worship across the centuries for the wording of my prayers. So, I gladly rejoice in being an heir of what we call the Lord’s Prayer and owe gratitude to the early Christians for caring enough about us to pass it down to mentor us in our spiritual life of prayer.

I let this prayer mentor me in the way of Jesus three times a day, sometimes more, by saying it in the morning, at mid day and in the evening. The traditional Jewish times of prayer which Jesus, being Jewish, would have practiced linking his individual times of prayer with the times when the community of faith would also be in prayer. By the way, all the phrases in the prayer are right out of the ancient Jewish liturgy where Jesus would have learned his prayers

As for other elements of my prayers, I begin by praying: “God, be in my head, and my heart, be on my left and on my right.” Then I commend the members of my family and you the congregation to God and, in particular, the sick and dying and the elders and deacons. Then I conclude with the Lord’s Prayer, and then I say what I believe is probably the sincerest statement of my religious heart: “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.”

It was the Reformer Martin Luther who wrote that the Lord’s Prayer is the greatest martyr, for everybody tortures and abuses it. What he had in mind was that yes we can indeed repeat it mechanically and in meaningless fashion. But if I could interview Brother Martin today, I’d ask, “Doesn’t such practice say more about our intimacy issues with the familiar than about the ineffectiveness of memorized and set prayer?

So I hope the series on the Lord’s Prayer will help us rediscover some of the excitement and meaning in the Lord’s Prayer which is the one prayer that for centuries has literally spanned the world: “the world of everyday trifles and universal history, the world with its hours of joy and bottomless anguish, the world of citizens and soldiers, the world of monotonous routine and sudden terrible catastrophe, the world of carefree children and at the same time of problems that shatter grown men and women” (Helmut Thielicke, quoted by William Sloan
Coffin).

Why for so long has the Lord’s Prayer meant so much to so many? Isn’t it that Jesus himself gave us the prayer? It is the reliability of the source that gives authority to the words.

In his farewell address, President George Washington told us “to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” Thomas Paine warned us of “sunshine patriots” who shrink from service to their country in a time of crisis. Surely we should be no less vigilant against “sunshine Christians,” against the “impostures of pretended Christianity.”

I, for one, simply no longer can tolerate God talk from people too shallow to know that it is in the depth of hell that heaven is finally affirmed and life is sanctified. I can’t be mentored in prayer from scared people who give quick biblical answers because they are too frightened to confront tough personal questions. I can’t be instructed in how to pray by people who know perfectly well that the world did not reward Christ for being Christ, yet they feel they are going to be rewarded with wealth, health and prosperity for being Christians. And I can’t take spiritual instruction from folk who are as joyless as the proverbial church member who looks as if she had been bred by a pair of tomahawks. Nietzche makes this point by saying Christians would have to look more redeemed for him to believe in their redeemer.

In contrast, when Jesus says, “Our Father, who art in heaven....” I listen spell bound. Even when I am swept by doubt, I listen because I believe not only did Jesus know a lot more about God than I, but he also knew more about the world. I listen to him talk convincingly about our Father in heaven because he took seriously the earth’s homeless orphans. He talks to me convincingly about living at peace in the hands of love because he knew the world lived
constantly at war in the grip of hatred yet he overcame it. He speaks authoritatively to me about prayer because he in humble fashion gave up power to become strong in love for us by entering into darkness, sorrow, and even death. This is why for me Jesus became my Lord and Savior—not because his divinity coerced me into believing but rather his humanity won me to believe in him as God’s act of unilateral disarmament to intend us no harm. This is why I think it is right to say the authority of the Lord’s Prayer stems from the reliability of the Source. Because I believe Christ gave up all for us, his words have authority for us.

Jesus words about prayer express no chirping optimism. And you will notice as we go along the next several Sundays, each phrase of the Lord’s Prayer tells us just about as much about ourselves as it gives spiritual instruction about God. Indeed, it is Jesus’ knowledge of God and Jesus’ experience of my human heart that establishes Jesus’ authority to teach me how to pray.
Take that first little word: “Our.” “Our” in reference to the Father in Heaven makes everyone related. The personal pronoun “Our” clearly implies all humanity. Though there are people on earth who do not know that they, too, are children of God, when we Christians pray the Lord’s Prayer, we are affirming that we are all children of God, know it or not. Not knowing this does not disqualify anyone from status as a child of God, as related to God and beloved by God. If we pray the prayer, we are acknowledging that the Christian advantage is that we know all are chosen, we know the good news that everyone is a child of God no matter what the person’s nationality, faith, language, skin color, or sexual orientation. God claims us all as family, even those heirs who may have misplaced their religious birth certificates.

The “our” in “our Father” is not a possessive, for who can possess God? No, the “our” acknowledges that we don’t stand alone before God. We stand together all. “Our Father” compels us to join the human family. Yet, it seems all the news is about our attempts to separate, even destroy one another. Therefore, the way Jesus in Matthew begins his prayer for us to pray is dynamite, blowing into bits our favorite creedal, nationalistic and racial and social class prejudices.

How can we dare to say the plural pronoun “our” when we have allowed our God-given differences to become blasphemously divisive? How can we say “our” when the warning mark of Cain is on the brow of a fratricidal nuclear world? We say “our” because Christ is telling us what we are essentially. Essentially, we are all one. That’s the way God made us. “Our” reminds us that Christ died to keep us that way. “Our” reminds us that our sin is that we put asunder what God has joined together. “Our” tells us that the answer to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is quite simply: “No, you are your brother’s brother.” Human unity is not something we are called to create, only to recognize.

How much excitement, tension, there is in no more than the first word of the Lord’s Prayer.

And of course, it confronts us with a hard choice: faced with versions of Christianity that increasingly sound bellicose and exclusive, do we want as a congregation to participate and promote such tribalistic religious speech and behavior, or do we want to be a congregation that welcomes each person and all people regardless of their and our differences?

Let us pray with ever greater fervor “Our Father...”

(Sermon indebted to David Buttrick, Speaking Jesus)