Our father who is in heaven

Before we begin tonight, I want to outline my reasons for going through the Lord’s prayer line by line.

I think in the last wee while mainline churches have discarded the communal saying of this prayer for no good reason. Like many other traditions that have endured over the centuries this one has been assessed and deemed trite. And it is a shame.

I suspect the reason for this is because ritual has become a bit of a bogeyman in contemporary Christianity. Tradition has been frowned upon as being old hat and fuddy duddy. But there are two issues with this approach to tradition. The first is that it gives passionless repetition far too much power over the ritual. Just because people look like they don’t mean the words or actions doesn’t make the ritual meaningless or powerless. A good example of how society is discarding tradition is in the view of marriage. It’s cynical because it looks like marriage doesn’t work, and that’s because of the divorce statistics. And there’s a tendency to revise history to such an extent that they cast doubt over the authenticity of previous generations of marriage experience. that kind of projection is unwarranted and only serves to make a case from an argument of silence. There is no weight in those assumptions. Two Saturdays ago I had the privilege of marrying a couple who were not affiliated with any church but wanted a hint of spirituality in their ceremony. We stood there and we declared that marriage was good. We claimed marriage for its greatness and its wonder. We claimed it in the face of the cynicism, we claimed it in the face of the statistics, because the model of marriage is not flawed. It is the way with which people approach it—it is complex, it is difficult, but it is a good thing.

So too with many of our traditions through history we have discarded them because it looks like they are worthless. I’ve heard some people describe churches that have a strict liturgical practise as ‘dead’ churches. They would challenge me and ask me, are you part of a dead church? of course I responded no. our church has contemporary worship.

Upon reflection, by their definition being that dead churches are caught in a liturgical rut, then yes I am in a dead church since each Sunday we follow the same liturgical pattern. If you go to the 10.30 service it goes like this : welcome, songs, notices/offering, kids talk, kids leave, songs, sermon, song. Evening service, welcome, songs, notices/offering, prayer, sermon, response.

These are liturgies and they are fine in and of themselves, but when there is no heart in them, then I listen to the critic. But my point is exactly this. Our services are ok because there is heart in it, there is nothing wrong with the format or the ritual because people are generally meaning what they do and say. In that sense, ritual is important and good. Because without a little bit of formality and structure, we are fickle beings and end up not really knowing what to do with ourselves.

If we didn’t have a structure to this service, what would you do? I imagine, very little. A bit of chatting and hanging around, but after a few weeks, you’d probably lose interest and just go and meet at someone’s place. There’s no guarantee that there’d be a gathered community feeling in what we do, there’d be no mandate to serve, and there wouldn’t necessarily be any prayer or worship in those gatherings. In short without the formality this service would lose it’s way. Without the formality the church would lose it’s way. Now these are big words and you need to understand of course that the strong qualifier here is that the formality will let the heart beat easy. But formality without heart is dry and barren. But we are not to judge this. God is.

So we come back to the idea of the lord’s prayer being discarded and I think tragically from our liturgical tradition. But rather than just introduce us saying it again, I wanted to talk it through so that when we say it we invoke the enormous power that it contains : not in the magical sense, but in the transformative sense. And like the marriage ceremony I mentioned before, I want us to reclaim the prayer in all its glory and power and wonder. For it actually forms the basis of a radical Christian lifestyle. The commitments in it will make all the difference in the world. it is potent. It is beautiful. It is prayer in it’s most distilled form. It’s prayer for all people at all times in all situations.

So why is it so boring?

When I was a kid I thought it was a race to see who would finish it first. It was just a series of words. I made it dead. Recently Julia and I have been using it as a way for us to pray together. And this is when it came alive. We would alternate saying phrases, and then spend a few moments contemplating what the phrases mean to us. Simple as that. And it’s been beautiful.

It is about five years ago that I last tried to tackle this prayer in a sermon. And I was so disillusioned. The sermon actually ended up being a marker point in my life where I felt like I’d gone as far as my cynicism would take me and needed to come back. It was a defining moment because I knew I needed to turn around. And here’s how that story unfolds.

I sat down at my desk and started to read the first lines. The lines we are looking at tonight and I didn’t get past the first three or four words before I gave up knowing my faith was actually in crisis. It all came down to what do we mean when we say these words.

Quote:

“who is we and what does father mean in this context? There are some very profound theological messages that come through here. The word our is the only time that Jesus actually refers to the Father as being ours. Jesus used the term Father quite possibly because historically the title of God’s son would be bestowed upon the king of Israel. Jesus was the new king, therefore it was right for Jesus to refer to God in these terms. However Jesus is now making it possible for us to be able to call God father—us being anyone who is willing to honestly go through the rest of the prayer. That is straight forward enough. That’s profound.

The problem that arises for us is not this theological truth, but in the question what is father. Most of us have no concept of the theological and cultural setting that Jesus was in. When we think of father, there are a multitude of pictures that come into our heads.

Father: like a Church father or founding father, someone whom everyone respects, someone whom everyone holds in awe.

Father: like our own fathers, good or bad, communicative or standoffish, emotional or not, broken and insecure? Blokey? God the Barbeque-er . . .

Father: like the substitute male role model in our lives where perhaps we have been let down by our actual father. But then are we right in actually assuming Father instead of Mother? If Jesus was just trying to put an ill-fitting anthropomorphism together so as to make it easy for the patriarchal society to glimpse the character of God then can we substitute mother in there?

But as we depart from the word father, our picture of God becomes dangerously subjective, and then it seems that that is all that we have to go on. We have to decide for ourselves what father means—and we do, whether we are aware of it or not. The problem is that if we take away the consistency of the definition of Father and make it into whatever we think as individuals, then the word our means nothing.”

That was five years ago and today we move on from that. Today we explore the meanings because they will give us depth and understanding. We will still have our preconceptions but it is my hope that when we pray this prayer we might know what we are praying and realise how dangerous it means to our current lives to pray it honestly.

There are two accounts of the Lord’s prayer, one in Matthew and one in Luke and there are some differences between the two. The main one being that in Luke the phrase, “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is left out. But as we will see, this phrase is very important to Matthew as one of his reasons for writing his gospel was to reinforce the idea of the kingdom of heaven being established here and now as well as in the future. For this series we will use Matthew and it is found in chapter 6:9–13.

Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.

We shall look at the context over the next few weeks, so tonight lets get stuck into some of the words.

So let us begin with the first line.

Our Father who is in heaven.

As I said before the word father is quite tricky because of all the loadings we put on it. But the key to understanding how significant the word father is here can be through getting a handle on the trinity. I don’t want to go into great detail about Trinitarian theology here, but let’s just say that throughout church history it is clearly accepted that the holy spirit and the son come out of the father. Not that they are distinct, but their source or font is the father. Some of us might be gagging at that, but it’s from texts where Jesus will say if you have seen the me you have seen the Father, Jesus is God’s begotten son, and other verses like that. The point being that father in this sense is actually not a word we are meant to interpret metaphorically. Rather it is a word that points us to a great and deep truth, that being this. It’s not that our understanding of the word father gives us an insight into what the Father is like, rather it is the other way round. Ephesians 3:14f shows this to be true. But more than this.

So my fatherhood is a shadow of the relationship that the father has with his son in heaven. But that’s not that inspiring really, but it gives us an insight into how we should deal with the word father if we have a difficult relationship with our own father on earth. This shows that we do not compare God to our dads, but our dads to God.

But the really profound thing here is when we couple this word Father with our. This is the really incredible bit. For a start, we are addressing God. And that’s a miracle in itself. That we can address God conversationally through prayer. It’s like a bacterium having a chat to me about what it needs while it lives on my skin. Actually, it’s more like millions of bacteria chatting to me about all the things they need and then the miracle is that I really care about these bacteria and will listen to them all and answer their prayers. It’s a miracle that we can address God and his ear will be inclined to us.

But then to say our Father, this is a daring, scary thing to say. It’s almost presumptuous because in effect what I am being instructed to say by Jesus here is this : my calling on your name, and claiming you as ours (as a community) we are sourcing ourselves in you. We are identifying with your essence, we are claiming the divine image that we are created with in it’s mysterous entirety.

And Jesus is letting us say this! Pray our Father. Not, my daddy. Not in this case, but our Father, our source of being, our source of existence that we can lay claim to at an interpersonal level.

It’s huge. It’s a miracle. It’s a mystery.

To reinforce that this is not talking about our daddy, the phrase is qualified in Matthew as our father in heaven. And this is where I go into a spin.

Heaven is a strange part of our belief, yet heaven is an undeniably important belief in popular religious movements and also all the major religions. From the dawn of history heaven has always been a feature of the religious landscape. This undeniable sense that there is something more.

But we need to consider this carefully when we read the bible. I don’t think the bible is clear about what heaven actually looks like except for some bizarre depictions in the Revelation of John and scatter throughout other apocalyptic literature. But one thing is absolutely certain. That there is a world of difference between the kingdom of heaven and heaven.

But the first overt reference to heaven as a destination doesn’t come until the book of Daniel. Until that point, one thousand to 1500 years after moses and Abraham, we have good reason to believe that when salvation was talked about it was not to do with tickets to heaven, but to do with this life being saved. This makes no difference of course to the reality of heaven that we all connect with, that there is a destination but, it does highlight that there is something important about heaven for us to understand the reality of the here and now.

That is what the kingdom of heaven is. A kingdom defined by heavenly values.

So what is the concept of heaven that Jesus is referring to here? I think it’s safe to say that it’s the dwelling place of God. A place of perfection, of eternality. It’s not physical, though Paul probably thought it was.

And this is where I go into a spin. Paul would have thought like everyone else, that heaven lay just beyond the dome of the sky. That stars were pinpricks in the canopy that let heaven show through. He would’ve thought that the world was the center of the universe, that everything. Actually even less than that, that this earth was actually seated on pillars above sheol, or the deep. And the planets, sun and moon trekked across the sky. It wasn’t terracentric at all, it was probably more like a flat earth.

Heaven to Paul and the other new testament writers was probably a physical reality just beyond the dome. What happened then when Copernicus blew that paradigm apart with his ideas of a heliocentric solar system? Where did heaven go? Of course this doesn’t matter, we know heaven to not need to be in the physical reality that we inhabit. But this is now an issue of faith rather than empiricism.

Now there’s also an issue with the idea of God being everywhere, something we know as omnipresence. If God is in heaven and heaven isn’t a place then how does that work?

I want to suggest then that heaven is more than just out there somewhere, but that it is actually here there and everywhere. Which is why the kingdom of heaven can be defined so strongly by it. I want to suggest that rather than thinking of God on his throne inhabiting heaven in the distant future, that heaven is actually around us, present with us in terms of location. It’s a thought, it’s my thought, it makes some kind of sense.

All I want to do with this tonight is not so much teach you stuff, but open it up for you. What are the possibilities when we use these words? I’ve given you my two cents about Father and Heaven. Why don’t you break into groups and throw in your two cents.

At the end of it, to pray this prayer is to take a bold and courageous step…