Sermon 2nd February 2014

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Trevor Tayleur, continues our study of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.  The Gospel reading is from Matthew 6 verses 1-15 where Jesus teaches us how to pray.

As the boat was sinking, the skipper lifted his voice to ask: "Does anybody know how to pray?"

One man spoke confidently in answer: "Yes, Captain, I do." The captain nodded. "That's all right then," he declared. "You go ahead and pray. The rest of us will put on life-belts. There’s one short."

For some people, prayer is a last resort. Everything else   has failed; we might as well pray. Yet prayer is very much part of being a Christian; it’s not a last resort. Jesus taught his followers to pray, and he gave us a model to follow – the Lord’s Prayer.

I must confess that whenever I give a talk on prayer, I do so with some trepidation. When I hear about some of the giants of church history such as John Wesley who would pray all night, I feel my qualifications for standing here in front of you are rather meagre. I would certainly not claim to be an expert. But I suspect that’s true for many of us. Prayer doesn’t always come easily; it can be a struggle. So today I won’t be coming up with any instant solutions, but sharing with you some thoughts on the passage we’ve read from the Sermon on the Mount.

Today we’ve come to what is probably the most famous part of the most famous sermon in history – the Lord’s Prayer. We could go through the Lord’s Prayer step by step, but we did that about 18 months or so ago; we had a whole series on the Lord’s Prayer. They are available on the Parish blog and well worth reading. Today we’re going to step back a bit; we’re going to take more of an overview and look at the context, because the context will help to give us a better grasp of Jesus’ teaching on prayer. The context will help us to build a foundation for our prayer life, and then we’ll look at the Lord’s Prayer to help us with the substance or content of our prayers.

A building with no foundations will collapse. Prayer needs to be based on a firm foundation. And what is that foundation? We can see it in the first eight verses from Matthew 6, leading up to the Lord’s Prayer. And it’s a bit startling what Jesus is saying. He’s talking to his disciples and he’s looking at the religious leaders of the day and he’s saying, “Don’t be like them!”

And Jesus uses two tests: the first is in verses 1-4 -giving to the poor, and the second is in verses 5-11 -prayer. Now Jesus is not saying, “Don’t be like them because they don’t give to the poor and they don’t pray.” He’s not saying that, because quite clearly the religious leaders of the day did give to the poor and they did pray. In fact they prayed diligently. And yet Jesus says, “I don’t want you to have their attitudes; their motives. Their reasons and motives are all wrong.”

It’s not the external acts of virtue like giving to the poor and prayer that ultimately matter. Yes, they are important, but everything turns on – Why are we doing them? What’s in our hearts while we are doing them?

Motivation is crucial. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day wanted a reputation. They gave to the poor to get a reputation; they wanted to be honoured. But Jesus says in verse 3, “But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.”

Jesus is using that as a metaphor; you shouldn’t be too pleased with yourself when you do something good. So when your right hand gives some money away, your left hand shouldn’t come up and say, “High fives, right hand!” That’s the wrong attitude; you don’t do good things to build up a reputation and to pat yourself on the back.

Now look at prayer. Again Jesus is saying - Don’t be like that!  “[T]hey love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others…do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.”

They thought if their prayers were long enough and fervent enough, God would have to answer them. The problem with the religious leaders of Jesus’ day is that they thought they could earn God’s blessing. If we live moral lives, if we give to the poor and say lengthy prayers, they thought, if we are seen to be pillars of society, God will have to bless us. They were in effect trying to control God.

So, that’s the wrong motivation. What’s the right motivation? Why should we give to the poor? Why should we pray? Well, because of what God has done for us. We do these things out of gratitude and joy. Not to earn God’s blessing, but out of gratitude for the way God has blessed us. Jesus wants us to pray - and our prayer life should be founded on grace and based on our relationship with God our Father. We have a family grace based relationship with God. That’s why the first words of the Lord’s Prayer are “Our Father”.

The religious leaders whom Jesus criticised thought they were good people. They carefully cultivated an image as good people and thought they could earn God’s blessing. But we can’t earn God’s blessing. As I said at the beginning, I’ve often struggled with prayer but in the past 10 years or so I feel I’ve made some progress. And one of the reasons for this is that I’ve become increasingly aware of how much I really need God’s love. I’ve lived a rather conventional life – no major rebellions as a teenager and outwardly fairly respectable. But I also have my fair share of hang-ups from the past and I became increasingly aware of the negative impact these hang-ups were having on me and my family. Although I was outwardly a good person, that wasn’t enough; it wasn’t nearly enough. And as I realised how much I needed God to deal with all these issues, I found myself more willing and more able to pray.

So that’s the foundation: a grace based family relationship with God as Father. But now let’s look at the Lord’s Prayer – the substance or content of the prayer. The Lord’s Prayer provides a model or framework for us, and I’m going to highlight three points about it – three things Jesus wants us to do when we pray.

So here are the three points. First praise; second petition and the third – also starting with a P! – is a passion for God’s justice.

So firstly – praise. “Hallowed be thy name.” Jesus doesn’t let us get to our needs straight away; we must first honour our Father. So why do we start with praise?

If we have a family relationship with God as father, we will want to praise him and adore him for the beauty of who he is and the grace and mercy he has poured on to us. We are saying to God, “You are heavenly, infinite and way above us.” But we’re also saying, “You are our father.”

Our God is personal; our God has a name. He’s not an impersonal life force; he has a name. He’s a person, someone we can talk to and who can talk back to us through the Bible. He’s a person whom we can love and who loves us.

Praise, then petition – or asking. You may have noticed I’ve left out a verse, but I’ll come back to that later. But now we get on to asking for the things we need.

“Give us today our daily bread” – our everyday needs.

“And forgive us our debts.” We need mercy and forgiveness for all the things we’ve done wrong. And last week Ben reminded us it’s not just about our external actions; what goes on our hearts is also crucial.

“And lead us not into temptation.” We face challenges, sometimes immensely difficult challenges, and we need the strength to face them. Indeed, as Christians we follow Jesus who died an agonising death on the Cross. As followers of a crucified Lord, we may well have to face darkness. But we must pray to be kept from its worst ravages, and to be spared from evil

Now these requests are actually very much about our own needs; they’re vertical requests – asking God to meet our needs. But what about the horizontal aspect – the needs of others? It is there; “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

And at the end of today’s passage, Jesus makes an important point: “For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” (vv.14-15)

Prayer isn’t just vertical. It’s not just us praising God and asking him to meet our needs. Prayer must be horizontal; it must also affect our social relationships. We should also be asking God to put our relationships right. And prayer will help us to do that.

Jesus isn’t wagging a big finger at us and saying, “If you don’t forgive X over here, then God won’t forgive you.” The point Jesus is making is this: if we don’t forgive people, we won’t repent. If we don’t forgive people, then we don’t realise that we too are sinners saved by grace. If we don’t forgive, that shows a lack of humility on our part and that we’ve forgotten that the only reason we have a relationship with God is because we have been forgiven. If we know that we have been saved only by God’s grace, then we will seek justice and reconciliation in our relationships.

And, thirdly, the Lord’s Prayer reflects a passion for God’s justice. Karl Barth, a famous 20^th Century Swiss theologian once wrote, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”

We pray, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” God created a world that was good, but we live in a world that is riddled with injustice and racism, and with sickness, disease and death. So what does it mean to pray for God’s Kingdom to come?

At the moment, heaven and earth are the two interlocking arenas of God’s 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 there’s a marvellous 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. The world will be renewed and recreated, with God and his rule central. That’s what we’re praying for – for the time that God will defeat evil and end all the suffering and injustice that it brings. We don’t know exactly how God will do this, but we know that at the end God will put everything right. But in the meantime we are on God’s side and we pray against evil, and we pray for signposts of God’s Kingdom to be established in the world today.

“May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Praying for God’s will to be done also involves us in action. We’re not saying, “Over to you, God, put the world to rights.” We’re committing ourselves to being part of the process. We’re not going to accept all the suffering and injustice out there in the world; we’re going strive for God’s will to be done – in the world and also in our lives.

Praying for God’s will to be done is a prayer that Jesus prayed at the climactic moment of history. When? In the Garden of Gethsemane and on the Cross. In Gethsemane, seeing the death he was going to die, he fell to the ground, praying, “‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

And on the Cross he finished the Lord’s Prayer by saying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Jesus didn’t have to pray, “Forgive me my sins,” because he was sinless. But the reason he had to die, the reason he had to drink that cup, was so that the Father could forgive them – and us. He took that punishment on himself; all the punishment we deserve fell on Jesus. Jesus prayed the ultimate Lord’s Prayer at Gethsemane and on the Cross.

So when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, let’s remember the foundation that’s it’s built on. The foundation that it’s built on is our family relationship with God, our Father in heaven. And God showed his love for us by sending his Son to die for us. In response, we can praise God, bring him our needs and commit ourselves to building his Kingdom.

Let’s pray.

Help us to grasp the treasure that we have in the Lord’s Prayer. Help us to honour your holy name, to strive for your Kingdom here on earth and to lead lives of penitence and forgiveness.

In Jesus’ name.

Amen.

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[i] 2 February 2014