Text: Luke 11:1-10
This year as we journey through Lent, we are being led by prayer.
Well, one prayer in particular.
The prayer that Jesus taught us.
We teach it to our children.
We recite it each week in worship.
It is often a prayer that I will recite with families at the bedside of a dying loved one.
We know it by heart…
But has it sunk into our hearts?
I once heard a story about a church and every Sunday when the said the Lord’s Prayer, they turned around and faced the back of the sanctuary.
When a new pastor arrived, she was curious about this practice, but no one could remember why they did it that way.
That is until the church did some restoration work in the sanctuary.
As they stripped back layers of paint on the old walls, they discovered that at one time, the words of the Lord’s Prayer had been painted along that back wall.
In a time without printed bulletins, the church members had turned around to read the prayer from the wall.
Just as that congregation forgot why they said the Lord’s Prayer facing the back wall, sometimes we have forgotten the meaning behind the words that we speak.
We take the words for granted or rush through them without thinking.
Yet, contained within these beautiful verses is everything we need to know about our faith.
It reminds us of whose we are.
It tells us that we are not alone, but a community.
This prayer invites us to place our lives in God’s hands.
It asks for forgiveness and the strength to forgive others.
It calls us to acts of justice and compassion.
It is a prayer that can truly transform our lives… if we let it.
So, throughout this season of Lent, we are going to dive deep into this prayer and learn once again what it has to teach us.
Richard Foster once wrote:
“Real prayer comes not from gritting our teeth but from falling in love.” (Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, p.3)
And that is because prayer is a relationship.
The Lord’s Prayer is recorded in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke.
In Matthew, it is included along with other teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.
But in Luke’s gospel, the disciples are seeking guidance.
As they seek to grow in their faithfulness to God, they ask Jesus how they should pray… and he teaches them.
But then Jesus expands upon this idea of prayer being a relationship.
When we pray, we are asking and seeking and requesting things from the one who created us.
Now, this idea that God as our parent is not new.
Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophets tell us that God thinks of Israel as a child… often a wayward child… but that God’s love is everlasting and unchanging, in spite of what the people might do.
Yet this prayer is not simply a metaphor.
God is not distant.
Rather at Christ’s own invitation, we join in calling God “Our Father.”
We are invited to approach God in the same way we might our own parent… knowing and trusting that we are loved and cared for and believing that God will respond out of that love.
There is a level of intimacy here, of deep relationship, of ordinary acts of care, that truly is like falling in love.
And at the same time, we are invited into a sort of paradox, for the name and presence of God is to be revered as extraordinary.
God is holy… and wholly other.
I am reminded of Exodus chapter 3, when Moses approaches the burning bush and hears a voice thunder around him… “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”
Moses hides his face, afraid to look upon the divine presence.
In the midst of this exchange, God claims the people of Israel as his own.
God has heard their cries and can stand by no longer.
Like a parent who will rush to the rescue of a child who has fallen, God is acting to bring about deliverance for their suffering.
And yet, when Moses asks the name of this God…
When Moses asks, whom shall I say has sent me?
God replies – I am who I am.
A God who is distant, powerful, holy, undefineable…
A God who is close and intimate, full of love and compassion…
Our God is both of these things and more… all at the same time.
And thank God for that!
While it isn’t easy to wrap our heads around this paradox, the truth is that we need a God who is more than just an earthly parent.
The troubles and concerns of this world are far greater than any human could tackle.
The loss of life from tornados…
Deliverance from oppression…
Peacemaking in the midst of conflict – not just in Ukraine, but in Palestine, and Honduras, and Nigeria and in our country and in our families…
Healing and restoration from illness, disease, disaster, and death…
These are not simple requests and are far greater than asking for a loaf of bread.
We can only approach God in prayer with confidence because God is bigger than the problems we face.
But at the same time, a holy and powerful being that holds the life of the world in its hands can itself be a terrifying concept.
I am reminded of the eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
Remember…Moses initially hid his face from God’s presence!
But Moses also came to understand God’s love.
During his time on the mountaintop in the presence of God, receiving instruction for the people, Exodus 34 tells us that the Lord proclaims again his name.
But then the Lord continues… The Lord, the Lord, is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.
Coming to understand God as the one who is intimately concerned for my life, my welfare, my needs, allows me to let go of fear and rest in God’s presence.
We can trust that God truly does care about my needs and we are free to approach God in love expressing the yearning of our heart.
God is holy.
God is love and acts with parental love.
I am God’s child.
But there is one final piece of this first phrase that we cannot ignore.
While we do not capture it quite so clearly in Luke’s version of the prayer, it is part of the language we carry forward from Matthew’s gospel.
Jesus does not say “My Father.”
He does not ask us to think of ourselves as individual children.
We say “Our Father.”
Not once in this prayer do we say “I” or “me.”
Victor Hoagland recently shared a story about his close relationship with his eight-year-old granddaughter. She is the youngest of the bunch and they have had a chance to spend a lot of time together.
One evening, he and his wife invited all five of their grandchildren to come over for dinner and Hoagland noticed as they gathered that this little one seemed upset.
When he asked her what was wrong, she answered: “I thought I was the only one coming.”
Hoagland reassured his granddaughter of his great love for her… but also how much love he has for all of his grandchildren and that it was such a great thing they could all be together.
We often find ourselves in the shoes of that little girl.
We claim our relationship with this holy parent for ourselves, but we are not as quick to think about all of God’s other children.
And the truth is that prayer is not just about our relationship with God, but our relationship with one another.
We are called to consider that others are God’s children, too.
People we love, but also people that we can’t stand.
People we disagree with and people who are actively working to harm us.
People we have never met and those whose values and perspectives are vastly different than ours.
I have to admit that this concept hits me in a very different way this week.
Last night, my grandmother, my Babi, died from damage caused to her lungs by Covid.
I am navigating how to be present and offer love and care for family.
But it is hard and messy and complicated.
My family has been separated and split from one another by conflict that has gone unhealed for more than a decade.
And yet, we are all still family. We belong to one another.
But even more than that, we are all claimed by God as children.
Every time we say the words of this prayer, we are speaking into being the reality that we are connected to one another.
Our loved ones… our friends… yes… but even those who have caused us pain… even those we might sometimes think of as enemies… even those we struggle to understand or forgive.
We are all children of God.
And just as my own heart is full of concerns and fears that I bring before this Holy Parent, so too are others.
As the words of “This is my song” remind us:
“this is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mind.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.”
Our. Holy. Parent.
This opening phrase of the prayer that Jesus taught us invites us to claim three truths:
God cares intimately about what happens in our lives and responds in love.
God is holy and powerful and has the capacity to act and transform.
And we are called not just to think of ourselves, but to recognize that we are connected in one family.
Over these forty days of Lent, we will continue to explore this prayer and learn more about what it teaches us.
But we are also invited not just to intellectually process these words, but to allow them to transform us.
And to that end, for this holy season, I want to invite you to claim a practice with me.
I want to invite you to pray this prayer with me not once per day, not twice, but three times every day.
I want to invite you to make it a part of your living and breathing as you go through your life.
I want to invite you to allow it to fall into your heart and settle in your being.
May it be so.
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