Sermon 24th June 2012

Today, our Curate, Gill Tayleur, preaches about The Lord's Prayer

THE LORD’S PRAYER 

YOUR KINGDOM COME, YOUR WILL BE DONE, ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN

Have you heard how young children are said to have mis-learned the Lord’s Prayer?

There’s Our Father who does art in heaven! Howard be thy name! Give us this day our deli bread! Or jelly bread – they must both be American. Lead us not into temptation

but deliver us some email. Groan.

Today we’re taking our second look at the Lord’s Prayer. Last week Cameron started us off, introducing the Lord’s Prayer as we read it in Matthew’s gospel (chapter 6). This morning we’ve just read from Luke, and straight away we see that the prayer is shorter in Luke. Some of the lines we are used to saying in the LORD’S PRAYER, are from how it’s given in Matthew’s gospel, and aren’t in this one in Luke. For example, Luke has “your kingdom come” but Matthew has “your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

 Most scholars say that’s probably because Luke wrote earlier than Matthew, and by the time Matthew was written a few years later the prayer was already in liturgical use, that is, being prayed in group worship. But of course as Jesus gave this as the model for prayer, it’s very possible that he did so on more than one occasion, sometimes an expanded version, sometimes not.

Anyway, this is our first look together at the Lord’s Prayer in Luke, and I want to start by looking at its context. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus teaches his followers to pray the LORD’S PRAYER having spoken about the importance of integrity and humility, saying not to pray loudly and proudly, for everyone to see and be impressed. Instead, Jesus says, go do it in private and with sincerity.

Here in Luke’s gospel, Jesus gives the LORD’S PRAYER to his disciples in response to a request. One of the disciples asked him to teach them to pray. Presumably this was partly because they’d seen him pray, as it says the disciple asked when Jesus had finished praying. But the request says, “teach us to pray, just as John (the Baptist) taught his disciples”. It was a normal thing for followers of a rabbi or religious leader to have their own set prayer or prayers. It was an expression of their common identity as a group, and brought a sense of unity and family.

Jesus replies, “When you pray, say...”. The words used for ‘when you pray’ are you plural, when you all pray, or pray together. And of course every single aspect of the LORD’S PRAYER, as we have it from Luke and from Matthew, is also in the plural. OUR father, give US OUR daily bread, forgive US OUR sins/debts, lead US not into temptation/or evil, and so on. Prayer, like so many aspects of Christian discipleship, isn’t just a solitary thing we do alone, we also do it together. We follow Jesus together, as a community, as a family.

One more introductory thing about the Lord’s Prayer in Luke’s gospel. After the prayer, Jesus tells a story to encourage his disciples to be confident in prayer. It’s a funny little story about a man who wanted bread for an unexpected guest in the middle of the night. This story or parable reflects the culture of the time. In the ancient world, food wasn’t as readily available as it is today. Most food was prepared daily, as there weren’t preservatives. That culture valued hospitality very highly indeed, and hosts were expected to provide for even unexpected guests. So the man who received a late-night guest had a problem - he had a guest but no food. He had to make a choice: either to be rude by not welcoming this guest with food or to get food from a neighbour, who may be able to help but would be asleep in bed. And of course most ancient Palestinian homes had only one room and one bed, so waking the father would mean waking the whole family.

And that’s what happens. The man does go to his friend, does get him up and does get bread for his guest. And Jesus uses this story to teach about being bold, unashamed, and persistent in prayer. And he follows the story up with exhortations to further encourage confidence in prayer: “ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find

knock, and the door will be opened to you.”

This kind of prayer has holy boldness, an insistent asking, a search that refuses to give up. They should be the hallmarks of our prayer too. We can be confident that our loving heavenly father is ready and waiting to respond to us, not to give us everything we want, but in the context of the Lord’s Prayer, to give us our daily bread or needs. More about that next week.

Back to the beginning then. Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.

The prayer starts with God, with his name and his kingdom, not with us and our needs or wants. It starts with the desire that God’s kingdom becomes fully present, for the beauty and glory of heaven to be turned into earthly reality as well. We’ll look at what that means in more detail in a moment, but in the places and situations where God’s kingdom reign is an earthly reality, his name, his character, reputation, his very presence, is held in high honour everywhere.

So the first half of the prayer is all about God. It’s not about me, it’s about God. Prayer that doesn’t start there, with God, is always in danger of concentrating on ourselves, and very soon it stops being prayer altogether and collapses into the random thoughts, fears and longings of our own minds.

What a lesson for us! I so easily slip into prayer being my list of my requests, rather than starting with recognising who God is, our loving heavenly father, and what he’s like, for his holiness to be honoured/hallowed, and what he has done and will do, in bringing in his Kingdom reign. Prayer must be centred on God, not me.

...

Now, to look at the particular phrase we are focusing on this week: your kingdom come. In Matthew, it says, “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Scholars say that the grammar of this sentence means that the phrase, “on earth as it is in heaven” actually applies to all 3 parts that go before:

(Our Father in Heaven)

honoured be your name, on earth as it is in heaven

your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven

your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

“On earth as it is in heaven” applies to all 3 parts.

So, first let’s clarify what’s meant by heaven and earth.

Heaven and earth are the 2 interlocking arenas of God’s good world. Heaven is God’s space, where God’s authority rules and his future purposes are waiting in the wings.

Earth is our world, our space. The two are separate, but touching, for now. But think of the vision at the end of Revelation, about the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven to earth when Jesus comes again. God’s space and ours, heaven and earth, will finally be integrated. That newly renewed and recreated earth, with God and his rule central, is what we have to look forward to for all eternity. That’s what heaven will be. But now, it’s God’s space, where his rule, his glory and his love abound, and earth is our space.

Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven. So what’s God’s kingdom?

Well let’s start with what Jesus’ listeners would understand God’s kingdom coming to mean. The idea of God coming as King was a familiar and welcome one. They were fed up with the other kings they’d had for so long. As far as they were concerned, the Roman emperors were a curse, and the Herodian dynasty was a joke. They were longing for God to come as the true king, to step into history and claim the crown and the kingdom for his own. Prophets had promised it. Ezekiel, Zechariah, Isaiah and Malachi had all prophesied about God coming in power to rule his people. And when Israel’s God came as king, the evil empire would be defeated and God’s people would be set free at last. And bring God’s healing and light to all nations through them. This idea had echoes of the Exodus story, when God’s people were brought out from Egypt and freed!

So Jesus’ listeners were familiar and eager for God’s kingdom to come, anticipating it bringing bread for the hungry, forgiveness for the sinner and deliverance from the powers of darkness.

Now, this side of the death and resurrection of Jesus, we know that Jesus did fulfil these prophesies in bringing in the kingdom of God, but not in the way the people expected. The freedom he brought wasn’t freedom from the oppression of Roman rule, but from the tyranny of evil, sin and death! Jesus spoke and acted as if evil’s long reign would finally be defeated through his own work. And Jesus spoke of his work in these same terms, of the new and right king coming. He told stories about a king or a master returning to his servants to see what they were up to.

In his life, death and resurrection, Jesus did indeed bring in the kingdom of God. He defeated the power of sin and death, and paved the way for the complete and full reign of God forever, when heaven and earth will be fully united.

But that’s not yet. God’s kingdom has come, and still has yet to come fully. Which explains why there is still evil, still sin, injustice, guilt, hunger and everything else that won’t be part of God’s kingdom when heaven and earth are united as one.

Tom Wright says think of it like this. Think of Jesus as the medical genius who discovered penicillin. And think of us as doctors, ourselves being cured by the medicine and now applying it to those who need it.

Or think of Jesus as a musical genius who wrote the greatest music of all time. Think of us as the musicians, captivated by his music ourselves, who now perform it to a world full of muzak and cacophony.

The kingdom did indeed come with Jesus, but it will only fully come when all the world is healed, when the whole creation finally joins in the song. But it must be Jesus’ medicine, must be Jesus’ music. And the way to be sure of that is to pray his prayer.

To pray for God’s kingdom to come, on earth as it is in heaven. We’re praying for that final marrying of earth and heaven when Jesus comes again, and we’re also praying for God’s kingdom rule on earth even now, even as it is. It’s like praying for the spread of that healing medicine, for the spread of the glorious music. Praying for God’s kingdom rule of his love and justice and mercy and grace and glory and delight and joy and goodness and kindness, for them to be manifest, to be happening, here and now, on earth as it is in heaven.

At its simplest, God’s kingdom is everywhere God and his traits, his values, reign as king.

So when we pray your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, we pray seeing the world as needing his kingship: we see the world as the spectacularly beautiful creation that it is, but we see it battered and battle scarred, needing to be saved from evil.

And we pray for it to be brought under his kingship, saved, evil defeated, for heaven and earth to be united at last, for God to be all in all.

Tom Wight says praying like this is the way we sign up for the work of the kingdom. It’s the way we take the medicine ourselves, so that we may be strong enough to administer it to others. It’s the way we retune our instruments, to play God’s music for the world to sing.

And if we pray this way, we must be prepared to live this way. To be kingdom bearers.

Which brings us to ‘your will be done’. It’s another way of saying I’m up for it, I’ll join in! I’ll pray for it and I’ll act for it. It’s not just a resigned, “Oh well, if God’s really determined to do something then I guess I can live with it”. Praying your will be done is an active commitment to join in making it happen, an active commitment to instant, complete, joyful obedience to God and his will. Your will be done – in my life! Your will be done – in the situations I face today! Your will be done in the people I meet! By MY love and service for them. By MY fighting for justice. By MY involvement in God’s purposes anywhere and everywhere I perceive them to be.

Your will be done is the phrase of an apprentice. Last week Cameron said that praying this prayer is a way of signing on as an apprentice of Jesus, as one who learns by watching and doing. Jesus prayed ‘your will be done’, to his Father God, in the garden of Gethsemane, when faced with the agony of death by torture on the cross. If he could pray it in those circumstances, surely we can in ours?

So, here we have a model or framework for prayer given by our master, Jesus himself. It isn’t just a string of petitions. It’s a prayer for people who are following Jesus on a kingdom journey. This prayer grows out of the mission of Jesus himself, and is ideal both as it stands and as a framework for wider praying, for his followers ever since.

So, how are we going to pray it? We’re going to pray it together a bit later, as Jesus said to in Luke’s gospel, when you plural pray. But how are we going to pray it individually, as Jesus said to in Matthew’s gospel? Last week Cameron gave 3 very helpful suggestions on how to pray this prayer from Tom Wright’s book, and in case you weren’t here last week, may I say them again?

Maybe you’d like to try breathing it 3 times daily, say. If you’ve never prayed in this way before, you focus on one phrase as you breathe in, and on the next as you breathe out, until you’ve gone through the whole prayer. Or perhaps you’d rather try praying it phrase by phrase, each day, adding to these headings that Jesus gave. The third option is by taking the Lord’s Prayer a phrase a day, as this series divides it. Or try all 3 of these ways of praying the Lord’s Prayer over the next few weeks.

One very practical tip in this week’s chapter of Tom Wright’s book, is about how we include our bodies in our prayer. Your kingdom come on earth as in heaven – we who pray it are also bits of that earth, made from lumps of clay. And so our bodies are included in how we pray, in the physical act of prayer. What posture helps you pray best? Kneeling, lying face down, standing, walking, crossing your arms, lifting them?!

The ideal posture, we’re told, is relaxed but not slumped, poised but not tense, alert but not fidgety, humble but content in the presence of the creator we are learning to call Father. Find the posture that suits you, gestures that express and symbolise the life and love of the Father for you and you for him, and you’ll teach your body as well as your mind, heart and soul to pray too.

So, let’s get praying. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

As Tom Wright says, if we learned a bit better how to do this, to pray it and to live it, the medicine and the music of the gospel might make fresh inroads into the sick and cacophonous world all around us. So let’s get going!