“New
Light on an Old Prayer”
3.
For His Name’s Sake
First Presbyterian
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The disciples asked Jesus to
teach them to pray and he gave them what we call the Lord’s Prayer. It
is in some ways a cheat sheet on prayer. There
are forms of prayer other than the wordless, silent, contemplative prayer that I
have been for some time commending to you. There
is meditative praying in which we read a passage of scripture or a poem, for
instance, and meditate on its meaning for our lives.
There also are spoken prayers and thinking prayers- prayers that we
“say” in our minds even if we do not verbalize them aloud.
These prayers usually are prayers of thanksgiving, prayers of petition
(prayers for ourselves), and prayers of intercession (our prayers for others).
The value of these kinds of spoken and thinking prayers, I think, is not
in whether or not they “work” because God is neither a Cosmic Santa Claus
nor a Divine Dispensing Machine. If
praying worked that way, there would be no wars, no holocausts, no
famines, and fewer funerals because prayers too many to number are offered all
the time for peace, for plenty, for healing, for longer life.
But, as even Jesus himself observed, “The poor are always with
us,” bad things happen to good people, and the bloody war machine stands
unbowed despite the fevered pleas of multitudes who pray endlessly for peace.
The value of spoken prayer, it
seems to me, is its contribution to the energy and work of love.
Our love of the creation, for instance, or the love we have for a
neighbor or the world or ourselves often gets expressed in spoken prayers and
love’s expression is always to be commended.
It contributes to the good. But,
if God answers prayers in the way that some Christians assert, God’s record of
doing so is spotty at best, and capricious.
I have told you before of two simultaneous email messages I received one
afternoon a few years ago in which the writer of one of them is profuse in her
thanks to God for the safe return of her son from Iraq while the sender of the
other message announces her son’s death in a firefight outside of Baghdad.
Both writers were Christians. Both
writers prayed. One son lived.
The other son died.
So I conclude that God does not
answer prayers in the way that some people claim not because God is uncaring or
unconcerned or whimsical, but because God cannot answer them that way.
God is not a wizard hiding behind a cosmic curtain pulling levers and
pressing buttons in order to effect actions or outcomes on earth.
Rather, God is Spirit and, as I suggested several weeks ago, we come to
know God as the call that comes relentlessly upon our lives to live into our
true and full humanity. Mary Oliver,
in her poem called When I Am Among the Trees says it this way:
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness
I would almost say they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.” (1)
I shared that poem a few days
ago with a new friend I did not even know this time last week saying that it,
and especially the last verse, reminded me of her and she wrote back to me,
saying, “We all are here to shine.” Yes!
Yes! Shining, though, is
different than being shiny, the distinction well articulated in a web log I read
this week on the internet. The
blogger wrote, “The most successful marketers tell two stories at the same
time. A shiny one and a deep one.
The shiny story is easy to notice, easy to enjoy, easy to spread.
The deep story is fascinating, worth your time.
It has texture and mystery and it lasts…Most marketers choose to be
just shiny. Deep, it seems, is way
too much work.” (2) Living
into God, which is really about living into the call to become fully and truly
human is about shining, and not about being shiny.
Said another way, it is about the deeper work of becoming both divinely
human and humanly divine, as Jesus did.
I began the sermon this morning
by claiming that the Lord’s Prayer is a cheat sheet of sorts in that,
in it, Jesus passes on to us the fruit of contemplative praying, of praying
without words, of being still and quiet and knowing God, the kind of prayer in
which Jesus routinely engaged. Last
week, in exploring the Aramaic word for “Father,” we saw that the
word has nothing at all to do with divine gender.
Rather, it indicates that God is not an entity “out there” and
external to us and removed from us, not a colossal, impersonal deity.
God is Spirit, a surrounding presence.
Jesus wants us to know that we do not need to approach God with a defense
attorney at our side. Rather, we
live in God like a child secure within a loving parent’s heart.
The whole creation does. There
is only one Reality, God’s Reality, the Reality in which we all live and
participate and that we know as life. “Life
is God,” Leo Tolstoy said (3), and we experience God in the call to live
justly, generously, hospitably, joyfully. A
shining life, not shiny.
Today, I want to move on to the
phrase in the prayer that in Aramaic is nithqadash shmakh and in English
is translated “hallowed (or holy) be your name.”
Qadeesha means “to be holy,” “to set apart,” “to be
distinct.” I think Mary Baker
Eddy’s description of a holy life is the best I know.
“A holy life,” she writes, “is one that brings goodness
to the world.” When we have
set a trap in our lives to catch the call of God, or when we tune in to the
divine call to us, remembering that “setting a trap” and “tuning
in” are the meanings of the Aramaic word for prayer, and when we obey that
call, we live holy lives. We bring
goodness to the world. We are called
by God to hallow God’s name, to make it holy, because, in so doing, we bring
goodness to the world.
It is possible, of course, for
those of us who identify ourselves with God, and for the church, to discredit
God’s name by our actions, by our dogma, by living in ways that are not holy
in that they do not bring goodness to the world.
How many wars have been fought in the name of God, inquisitions held,
voices silenced? How many times have
we wrapped our prejudices in piety to give them the garb of divine authority?
Our Wednesday preacher this past week said wisely that “There is no
conflict you have with your beloved or with your child or with your neighbor in
which you cannot, with generous genius, discover a hidden door through which you
can step down to serve them as one who looks up.
There is not a grievance in your mind or in your body whose pain will not
be transformed by your free choice to let go and go down, to find the low seat,
there to serve.” (4) And yet,
how many times have we aggravated or exacerbated conflict by making it a contest
of personalities? The psalmist said
that he was led by the call of God in his life to journey on paths of
righteousness for the sake of upholding God’s holy name and reputation, for as
he did so he was bringing goodness into the world. (5)
You get the drift. The call
to us today is no different.
I want to read to you a brief
poem by Denise Levertov who, until her death in 1997, was one of
Brilliant, this day – a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadows cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy
of green –
whether it’s ferns or lichen or needles
or impatient points of bud on spindly bushes –
greener than ever before.
And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for blessing,
a festive rite, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom. (6)
Is that not a superb picture of
the holy gospel Jesus gave to the world? “…a
first-prize brass band swinging along the street of a coal-dusty village, wholly
at odds with the claims of reasonable gloom.”
Is that not the promise of holiness, that despite the reasoned claims
for being gloomy about the world, gloom is neither inevitable, irreversible, nor
eternal but is transformed as goodness is brought into the world?
So says the prayer that Jesus
taught. Nithqadash shmakh.
Hallowing God’s name, each one and all of us, is the way the world
will be saved and prosper in the joy for which it has been made.
Amen.
(1)
Oliver, Mary, Thirst.
(2)
Found on internet blog at http://sethgodin.typepad.com
(3)
Leo Tolstoy in chapter XV of his book entitled 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."
(4)
The Reverend Stephen H. Phelps in his sermon entitled “The Sent-Down
Man” preached here March 7, 2007.
(5)
Psalm 23:3, The Holy Bible.
(6)
Levertov, Denise, Selected Poems.
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