In the name of God- Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I’ve
been looking forward to preaching this sermon for quite a while. Three years
ago, I had just begun the work of ministry at St. Francis, and after spending a
week with our high-schoolers on a mission trip, I preached my first sermon
here. I don’t know if you all recall the sermon or not. It likely wasn’t that
memorable, other than the fact that I preached it from the chancel steps without
notes, something you probably haven’t seen since then.
And just as an
aside, sometimes people ask if there’s a reason why some preachers use notes
and others don’t. For me, the words that I chose have been thought-out and
planned, they have been prayed over and practiced, and they’re important to me.
I like the words that I’ve written, and there are just some rhetorical elements
that are lost when a sermon is more about reciting a memorized series of points
versus delivering a well-constructed message. As a preacher, words are my
currency, and so I deeply value them. That’s not to say that those who preach
without notes don’t value words; it’s just not how I value them.
I do remember
that sermon from three years ago though because I remember spending the whole
previous week on a mission trip with no time to plan or write a sermon. And
when I looked at the text three years ago, I felt as if God had given me a gift
in the Lord’s Prayer being the reading. As I’ve said before, the Kingdom of God
is the foundation for my theology. Preaching a sermon on that with the Lord’s
Prayer was a serendipitous first sermon for me. So it’s been a somewhat nostalgic
week as I’ve been preparing this sermon.
But we don’t
live in the past, so onward. I was really split between two very different
sermons this week. I’ve been wanting to preach a sermon about perseverance,
which is a forgotten theological virtue, and also a gift from God that some
people seem to get in larger doses than others. And between the readings from
Genesis and Luke, it really would be the perfect week to do such a sermon. I
would have explored the purposes of prayer and how perseverance fits into our
life of faith and prayer.
The other
direction I could go is to consider why the Lord’s Prayer is the way it is. In
our text this morning, Jesus’ gives a 38 word response to the question, “Lord,
teach us to pray.” Why those 38 words? Why not 57 words? Or why not different
words? What do these words tell us about the nature and being of God, and our
relationship to God?
Two very
different sermons, and you’ll be happy to know that I did not decide to just go
ahead and preach a 45 minute sermon on both ideas. This morning, let’s consider
the fundamentals of our faith, using the Lord’s Prayer as an entry point.
Prayer is
something many of us struggle with. Prayer is often misunderstood. What do we
expect prayer to do? What does it mean when it seems that our prayers don’t
have the desired effect? If God knows everything, what does prayer accomplish?
These are good, and tough, questions. And instead of trying to answer them, I
just want to point out that the disciples struggled with it too. They had been
following Jesus around for at least several months at this point in the gospel.
They had heard the sermons and the parables, seen the miracles and the healings,
and yet, when it comes to prayer, they don’t even know where to begin and they
have to ask Jesus how to pray. So don’t feel bad about your prayer life. Don’t
feel like you have to understand it. Don’t beat yourself up for not praying as
often as you’d like to, or as frequently as you think you should be praying. Maybe
explore some ways to deepen your prayer life. But just remember, prayer is something
that the disciples struggled with too.
Prayer is a
powerful instrument. And regardless of how effective prayer is and what it
means on God’s side, prayer is a revealing window into our souls. What does the
way you pray have to say about your theology? Do you pray to a God who is
similar to a cash register? You pay for certain goods and services through
living a good life. Do you pray to a bank-teller God who will give you whatever
you’ve deposited, so long as you fill out the proper paperwork? Is God a bridge
toll operator, just standing between you and where you want to go? Is God an
angry father? A caring mother? An estranged cousin? Pay attention to how you
pray, when you pray, what you pray about, you’ll learn a lot about what you
believe about God.
And the same is
true for Jesus. We look to Jesus as the Incarnation of God, as the truest and
purest view of God. The Incarnation reveals a profound view of God. What Jesus
reveals about God in the Lord’s Prayer is important and significant.
As I pondered
earlier, why does the Lord’s Prayer exist in its current form? And in the
interest of full disclosure, if you were to read this same passage in Matthew
instead of Luke, the words would be slightly different, but the themes are
mostly the same. It’s a prayer that we all know by heart. Alzheimer’s patients
at the end of life often don’t know anything about the world that surrounds
them, but they can say the Lord’s Prayer right along with you. Children often
know it before they even start school. It’s a wonderful prayer, but anytime
something is this well known, it’s far too easy to pray it without meaning it.
There is a church
that wanted its members to truly pray this prayer, so when the time came in the
service, they left 5 minutes of silence between each line of the prayer. We’re
not going to do that here, but I’d encourage you to try that in sometime this
week. Even take 1 minute between the lines. Let the prayer seep into your soul.
Why these
words? Why no mention of peace? Why no direct reference to giving God thanks?
Why no prayer for guidance? Why isn’t healing found in the prayer? Why no allusion
to courage, or strength? I don’t know. But I know that what Jesus teaches the
disciples and us about prayer through the Lord’s Prayer shows us the fundamentals
of the Kingdom of God.
The Lord’s
Prayer gives us insight into the core values of the Kingdom of God. Many of you
know that I recently attended a CREDO Conference in California as part of my
continuing education. CREDO is a gift and ministry of the Church Pension Fund
that is dedicated to clergy wellness, realizing that healthy clergy will
encourage healthy congregations. So we reflected on wellness in our personal
finances, health, spirituality, leadership, and vocation. And one of the tools
that CREDO uses to work towards wellness is in the defining of your core values.
Core values are
those organizing principles that give meaning to our life and shape our relationship
to the world. Core values direct the decisions we make. They are the
cornerstones to our theology, philosophy, action, and worldview. And the Lord’s
Prayer shows us what the core values of the Kingdom of God are.
As Luke
presents it, there are four movements to this prayer. The first is “Father,
hallowed be your name.” This is a deeply Hebraic idea, that God is holy. This
core value shows us that in the Kingdom of God, it is clear that God is King.
The part that
is up for debate is- “Your Kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread.”
Seems pretty easy to understand, until we consider the Greek word that is used
for “daily.” The problem is that the word epiousion
has no clear meaning. The problem is that this is the only time Luke ever uses
this word, and the only other place that it is used in the Bible is in the
exact same place when Matthew records the Lord’s Prayer. And that ordinarily
wouldn’t be a problem; we’d just look to other uses in the vast library of
Greek literature to see how this word is used. The issue is that this word is
never used in any other context. Some scholars suggest that the prayer should
instead read “Your Kingdom come. Give us the bread we need for tomorrow,” with “tomorrow”
being an eschatological reference to the final coming of the Kingdom.
The core value
on display here is keeping an eye on the prize. In other places in Scripture,
Jesus tells us not to worry about what we will eat, or drink, or wear, but
tells us that we will be taken care of, just as the lilies of the field and the
birds of the air are. So a future oriented reading of our daily bread makes
more sense than a plea for the essentials of the day. It has often been said
that the Kingdom of God is an “already but not yet” sort of reality. As Jesus
clearly says in several places, the Kingdom of God is a present reality. But
one look around the world will make it rather clear that this a bad kingdom, or
it hasn’t been fully built yet. So we pray that we might be given the supplies
that we need to build the Kingdom, and that God’s reign of peace, justice, and
mercy might soon come to full fruition.
The next stanza
of the prayer deals with being forgiven for our sins as we forgiven those who
are indebted to us. The core value here is that we are called to be a
reconciled community where love, not debts of sin or shame, is our currency.
And the final
part of the Lord’s Prayer focuses on protecting us from temptation or trial.
Abraham encountered a trial when he was asked to sacrifice his son Isaac. Job
faced many trials in his life. I’ve shared the quote from William Sloane Coffin
before, that what God provides us is “minimum protection with maximum support,”
and that is the sort of core value being espoused here. We will face
difficulties, and so we pray and hope that God will be with us as we face these
trials and temptations.
So the core
values of the Kingdom of God as laid out in the Lord’s Prayer are that God is
holy, that God’s Kingdom is coming, that we are to be reconciled to each other,
and that God will be with us. I hope that those are helpful in leading you to a
deeper understanding and praying of the Lord’s Prayer.
But before I
conclude, I want to give you some homework. I want you to think about what your
core values are. What is foundational in your life? What are you a
fundamentalist about?
We are all
fundamentalists. Now there is a difference between being a fundamentalist and a
radical. Radicals are extremists who misapply their beliefs and do harm.
Radicals kill in the name of God, radicals ostracize in the name of religion,
radicals put themselves and their vision of what is right above the good of
others. And I am not supporting radicalism. But I am supporting fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism is about core values, it is about your foundation, it is about
discipleship, it is about that which you would cease to be without it.
What are you a
fundamentalist about? Vinegar in your BBQ? The designated hitter in baseball?
Always voting the party line regardless of the candidate? The use of incense in
liturgy? Organ music versus prayer & praise music? Only opening Christmas
presents on Christmas morning and not Christmas Eve? There are some people that
I see around town that are runners. And rain or shine, hot or cold, they’re out
there running. They are fundamentalists when it comes to running. There are
some of you that might give a dirty look to someone that would dare to walk
through the doors of this church wearing seersucker after Labor Day. We are all
fundamentalists.
What drives
you? What is so essential to you that it is non-negotiable? When I meet with
couples before their wedding, I always ask them what is fundamental to their
relationship. Is it date night, family dinner, reading books and discussing
them? Whatever it is, I always encourage them to find out what is fundamental
to them, and keep at it, because if they don’t, they’ll eventually drift apart.
Alexander Hamilton said “those who stand for nothing will fall for anything.”
We have to stand for something, we have to have a foundation, we have to have
fundamentals in our lives. What will you be a fundamentalist about?
Today, Jesus is
offering us the Lord’s Prayer and the core values of the Kingdom of God as
something that we can be a fundamentalist about. Discipleship and following
Jesus is to be the most fundamental aspect of our lives. Is it?
And a word of
caution- in the study of core values, there is also the idea of shadow values;
the dark corners of our core values. For example, if one of your core values is
to be gracious to others, you might burnout from being a people pleaser. Or if
you value prophetic witness, the shadow value is that you might alienate
others, something the Biblical prophets all knew well. Let us remember that
principles are never to come above others or their welfare. Jesus did not come
to save a tradition, a principle, or a fundamental idea. Jesus came to save
people.
Sometimes
though we forget this and we place our fundamentals above people. And so while
it is absolutely vital that we are fundamentalists about something, and
hopefully that something is building the Kingdom of God, sometimes we’ll get it
wrong and put our ideals above people. And so when we do, let us remember that
a core value of the Kingdom of God is to pray that we might be forgiven and
reconciled.
It’s the prayer
that we all know and cherish in our souls. The Lord’s Prayer gives us special
insight into the core values of the Kingdom of God. Spend some time with it
this week. And consider what you are a fundamentalist about, and how you might
align the core values of the Kingdom with your own.
