“New Light on an Old Prayer”

2. All in the Family

Luke 11:1-4

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

March 4, 2007

Lent 2

Here is, to me, one of the most intriguing sentences in scripture. It comes from the portion of Luke’s gospel we read a few moments ago: “Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray…’” That the disciples wanted Jesus to teach them to pray implies that Jesus prayed in a way that was markedly different from much of what commonly passed for prayer, and the disciples wanted in on it.

Prayer would not have required instruction for the disciples if they construed prayer simply as sending wish lists upward. No one needs to be taught how to do that. So, I want to suggest that prayer as Jesus prayed is not so much informational in nature as it is formational. Informational prayer tells God what we want or think we need. Informational prayer tries to arrange and rearrange the world, at least our little part of it, according to our desires and designs. We want God to act on the information we provide. God as a Divine Dispensing Machine granting our requests. “Please, God, let me get the job.” “Please, God, let him live.” “Please, God, don’t let her find out.”

But prayer is not so much informational as it is formational. Prayer is God’s means of forming and fashioning our lives so that we can grow into maturity as human beings. Taking our cue from the Aramaic language in which Jesus spoke, I offered last week the image of setting a trap to catch the thoughts and dreams of God as one of the ways for us to conceive of prayer. The other metaphor suggested by the Aramaic word for prayer is tuning in to the thoughts and dreams of God that all the time are streaming to us via God’s Spirit much as we tune in to a radio station to receive the signal that is all the time being sent to us through the air. Then, having trapped God’s thoughts, God’s ways, and God’s dreams or, if you prefer, tuning in to them, we allow them to shape how we think and act and imagine the world.

The Lord’s Prayer is the response of Jesus to the disciples’ desire to learn to pray. While he did, in fact, give them words they could say, and we have been saying them ever since, it is not the words themselves that constitute prayer as Jesus taught but the disciples’ own embodiment of them. It is not that God needs or wants to hear over and over and over again the words that Jesus gave the disciples except as they are formational for us. God’s hope is that people will embrace in their own lives and in the communities of which they are a part the meaning and essence of the words so as to grow into their full and true humanity. In that way, God’s reign of justice and joy can flourish on earth. I like how Hafiz, the fourteenth century Iranian mystic and poet, says it:

Now is the time to understand

That all your ideas of right and wrong

Were just a child’s training wheels

To be laid aside

When you finally live

With veracity

And love.

(-Hafiz, “Now Is the Time”)

When we love, rules about right and wrong fade into necessity’s background because love always seeks to do the best for others. “Love is patient and kind; it is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in the wrong, but rejoices in the right”(1). Similarly, the words of the Lord’s Prayer are training wheels for teaching us how to tune in and live in synchronicity with God’s dream and delight for human life and community.

The first words of the Lord’s Prayer are crucial for understanding the rest of the prayer and for teaching us about the nature and reality of God. “Father,” or, in Matthew’s version of the prayer, “Our Father,” is how he starts. Notice that Jesus did not say, “Oh omniscient, omnipotent, transcendent, almighty, sovereign Master and Supreme Being, hear now, Thou, my prayer.” He said, “Father,” or, to be more specific about the Aramaic word that Jesus used for God, “Dad.” “Daddy.” Jesus is not suggesting gender when he says, “Daddy.” He knows that God is Spirit. Anyone who tries to make a case for the maleness of God, as often has been attempted in the church, is way off base. Jesus is not assigning gender to God when he begins his teaching prayer by saying, “Father.”

Jesus means rather to say that God is not some colossal, impersonal deity who needs to be petitioned, placated, and pacified in order to find God’s favor. Jesus portrays the God he knows as a surrounding presence, a compassionate and munificent Spirit that he likens to the steadfast love of a good parent for his or her child. Jesus wants us to know that we do not need to approach God with a defense attorney by our side but as a child secure within a loving parent’s heart.

“Our Father,” Jesus says. “Awoon dwashmaya” in the Aramaic words. Think of the parables that Jesus told to counter the too common notion that there is a huge chasm between God and us that needs to be bridged before we can have a relationship with God. A shepherd leaves the ninety-nine sheep who are safely in the fold to go searching for the one that had strayed (2). A grieving father ambles every day to the end of his lane hoping his wandering prodigal will come home(3). A publican overwhelmed by his sin is prized more than the Pharisee in his overweening piety (4).

What the Lord’s Prayer teaches at its outset is that there is no distance between God and us. St. Paul quoted the ancient poets in affirming that “in God, in God, we live and move and have our being.” Thus there is only one Reality, God’s Reality, the Reality in which we all participate and live. It is to the one Reality that some call God and others call Life (5), same thing, that we are called to awaken, to bear witness, and to give expression. How ironic it is, and unacceptable, that so much contemporary religion fosters a dualism that separates, divides, and partitions God from God’s creation or Life from life, human beings from other human beings, religions from other religions, nations from other nations. We all are members of the same family. The poet, Hafiz, again:

I have come into this world to see this:

all creatures hold hands as

we pass through this miraculous existence we share

on the way

to even a greater being of soul…

I have come into this world to see this:

the sword drop from men’s hands

even at the height of their arc of

anger

because we finally have realized

there is just one flesh

we can wound. (6)

The Lord’s Prayer is the teaching of Jesus par excellence about the oneness, the interconnectedness, and the harmony of all life. One more brief poem, this one by Mary Oliver, entitled “Breakage”:

Breakage

I go down to the edge of the sea.

How everything shines in the morning light.

The cusp of the whelk,

the broken cupboard of the clam,

the opened, blue mussels,

moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—

and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,

dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the

moisture gone.

It’s like a schoolhouse

of little words.

First you figure out what each one means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop

full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story. (7)

It is surely the purpose of prayer to get us to “read the whole story” of life. It is in prayer as Jesus teaches it that we imagine the healing of this fractured world and to commit ourselves to the sacred work of reconciliation, of being repairers of the breaches among us. When Jesus says “Father” at the beginning of his teaching prayer, he is acknowledging the encompassing, intimate presence of God. Prayer, then, does not seek oneness or union with God; prayer is the expression of it in our lives as we are living them. Prayer is only rarely to be found in the words we say to God but always in the ways our lives are changing by trapping, or tuning into, the thoughts and words of God as they come to us by God’s Spirit.

The Lord’s Prayer contains the thoughts and words of God that Jesus trapped. The first word is “Father.” That word implies the presence of a family. We all are in God’s family- everyone, everywhere. That means that the will of God for our lives, and the purpose of them, is to learn to love one another and all others in the very specific and tangible ways that the rest of this prayer of Jesus teaches. To that work we shall attend in the weeks ahead.

Amen.

(1) 1 Corinthians 13:4-6

(2) Luke 15:3-6

(3) Luke 15:11-32

(4) Luke 18:9-14

(5) Leo Tolstoy in chapter XV of his War and Peace. The passage reads: "Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in innocent sufferings."

(6) Hafiz, “I Have Come into This World To See This” in Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West by Daniel Ladinsky

(7) “Breakage” by Mary Oliver as found in her collection of poems, Why I Wake Early published by Beacon Press in 2004.

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