Romans 8.18–27
Luke 11.1–10
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts,
be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
This evening we come to the beginning of our Lent sermon series, which this year is focused on the Lord’s Prayer – a prayer that’s so familiar to us that it’s easy to take it for granted.
Prayer is a mystery. It is also hard work. Tom Wright, in his book on the Lord’s Prayer, describes prayer as an ‘agonising dialogue between the living God and the pain of the world.’ No wonder, then, that St Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, ‘We do not know how to pray as we ought,’ but he then went on to assure the Romans that ‘the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words’ and that God knows what is in our hearts.
It’s good to hold on to this as we explore the words of this familiar prayer together over the next few weeks. No doubt the intercession of the Holy Spirit was part of what Jesus himself learnt about prayer during his earthly life. St Luke, in particular, describes Jesus as a man of prayer, seeking the quiet and lonely places, often praying at night.
Certainly at the beginning of his ministry in the wilderness and again at the end in the Garden of Gethsemane, we see him wrestling with God and with temptation – literally sweating in prayer. On both occasions he goes forward in the strength of the Spirit to fulfil the task set before him.
Prayer was his sustenance. It’s in John’s Gospel that he tells the disciples that he has food they do not know of. And the disciples must often have seen him at prayer.
The words of the Lord’s Prayer appear in two of the four Gospels. In Matthew the prayer forms part of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is encouraging his listeners to be careful not to parade their piety before others. When you pray, he says, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.
In Luke’s Gospel, as we heard a moment ago, Jesus is responding to a specific request from his disciples. They had seen him at prayer and they had seen how prayer was the foundation of his life, and so they said: ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’
This evening we are going to look at the first two lines of the prayer that Jesus gave his disciples: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.’
Imagine being a disciple and asking Jesus how to pray – imagine the impact of those first two words: ‘Our Father’ – our Father. It’s actually extraordinary and tells us so much about the nature of God – that he is inclusive, his love is for all, we are all his children and heirs of his kingdom – he is our Father.
It also tells us a great deal about Jesus. That while he often prayed in solitude, in secret, at night, yet he wanted to share the fruits of that prayer with all of us. To quote Tom Wright again, in giving the disciples this prayer, Jesus gave them ‘his own breath, his own life, his own prayer.’ It’s a prayer that grows directly out of his own experience and work – his own understanding of his vocation. And it’s a prayer that begins by gathering us all into a relationship of intimacy with God – by making us all part of God’s family – sons and daughters of a heavenly Father.
Our Father – our Dad, if you like. Because the word Jesus used, ‘Abba’, is not quite as formal as the English word, ‘Father’. It’s a word that small children would have used to address their own fathers – it’s a word that embodies love and trust and protection of the deepest kind. Perhaps some of us are fortunate enough to have known such love and trust and protection in our own human fathers, but that may not be so for all of us; and we know that many children grow up without a father at all or in a situation where they are abused by their father. And so their image of fatherhood is a negative one.
But whatever our experience of earthly fatherhood, this prayer encourages us to trust in the love and protection of our heavenly father – to find in him a safe place where we can grow and flourish and be healed. A place where the image of fatherhood is made perfect.
If the opening of this prayer is one of intimacy, it is also one of challenge. If we join with Jesus in saying ‘Our Father’, we also join with him in working for the Father’s kingdom – which is what the rest of the prayer is about.
The fatherhood of God is not unique to Christianity. The concept of ‘Abba’ has its place in the Hebrew Bible – in our Old Testament. In the Book of Exodus, as Moses prepares to lead the enslaved Israelites out of Egypt and into freedom, God says to him: ‘Israel is my firstborn son’, and in the Prophecy of Hosea, the Lord says: ‘When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.’ The Israelites were the children of God – and Jesus affirms this in the opening of his prayer.
Perhaps he is encouraging them to prepare for another Exodus – for a new coming of the kingdom – to be led once more from slavery to freedom. He encourages us too to pray for a new kingdom – to strive for justice, bread, forgiveness and deliverance. These things remain as relevant today as they were two thousand years ago when Jesus himself prayed for them.
In embracing God as ‘our Father’ we join Jesus both in the intimacy of a Father’s love and in the challenge of working for the kingdom. These are not things that happen overnight. Relationships take time to grow and kingdoms take time to build – both are a lifetime’s work. Jesus spent the whole of his ministry learning about God and his kingdom, until he could say from the cross, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’
If we accept Jesus’ invitation to call God ‘our Father’ – if we are bold enough to do that – we are also saying with Jesus, ‘Let the kingdom be now – let the kingdom be us’. It’s a hugely risky thing to say. Jesus called his disciples, and he calls us, to take that risk and to say ‘Our Father’.
‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.’
God is our heavenly Father, loving us and accessible to us. Yet he is also holy and thereby, perhaps, remote – untouchable even – beyond our knowledge and comprehension. We stand in awe of him and bow before his greatness. For he is the creator – of us, of our world, of our universe – he is the being that was there before all else.
It is God’s holiness that takes us out of the sphere of our own lives into the wonder of creation and into the adoration of the creator. We cannot then help praising him and worshipping him in the beauty of that holiness.
God is also our redeemer, and there may be times when we understand this in such a way that we find ourselves standing on holy ground, held captive in wonder, utterly silent and still in the grace and abundance of such generosity – a holiness revealed to each one of us personally and uniquely.
In working for the kingdom, we call all of humanity – all of creation – to join with us and acknowledge their creator. To know God as their Father, and to worship him in spirit and in truth.
This is the essence of our Christian faith – to know both the intimacy and the holiness of God. It is worth noticing that in this prayer the intimacy comes first. Jesus does not try to belittle us by beginning his prayer with the majesty and greatness of God. Rather he begins by making God accessible to us and then leads us into God’s holiness.
In approaching the Lord’s Prayer we are called to hold these two things together – God’s intimacy towards us and God’s holiness. The opening words of the prayer are a constant reminder that these two aspects of God go hand in hand. This is the essence of our Christian faith, and it is this that Jesus first taught his disciples when they asked him how to pray.
Amen.