"New
Light on an Old Prayer"
4.
How to Make the Kingdom Come
First Presbyterian
The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
March
18, 2007
Lent
4
Sermons arise out of the
community in which they are preached. At
least good sermons do. Good congregations produce good preachers while
lesser congregations yield lesser preachers.
(How is that for passing the buck?) Good
congregations are inquisitive, open, responsive, and engaged.
Good congregations know that sermons are not ends in themselves and that
their value is determined by the life they take on in the lives of their
hearers. Sermons are the results of
conversations between a particular text, a particular preacher, a particular
community, the world around us, and the Spirit of God.
Take away any of those partners in the conversation and we are left with
something other and less than a sermon.
It is not in my gathering a roundtable of members to
brainstorm about a particular passage of scripture that you make your
contribution to our sermons. It is
not that you would have nothing to give to such an exercise, but, that is, after
all, my training. I do not need help
so much in exegeting Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as I do in exegeting your
lives. It is as I listen to you
during the week in the variety of venues we share that I learn about your lives
and the questions you are asking, the circumstances you are facing, the
discoveries you are making, and only then do the sermons begin to find their
focus.
One of my reasons for offering this series of sermons on
the Lord’s Prayer is my growing awareness that there are many of you in
this congregation who are desirous of a prayer life that not only connects you
to God but also to the world. My
conviction about prayer is that it is primarily formational, not informational,
and that prayer so understood evokes in us a holy life that, as we said last
week, is defined by Mary Baker Eddy as “bringing goodness into the world.”
(1)
We grow up, many of us do, praying as if prayer is a means
of transferring information from ourselves to God so that God can respond,
preferably in the ways that we desire. "Johnny is sick, dear
God, and you need to make him well again.”
A prayer I distinctly remember praying as a frightened child one Tuesday
night at the height of the Cuban missile crisis was, “God, our nations are
about to start a terrible war. Stop
them.” While that kind of praying
is explicable on emotional and psychological levels, and it does give voice to
our good wishes and best hopes and that is not a bad thing, it turns God into a
Divine Dispensing Machine to serve at our behest.
The thing is, the God I know would not hold back on healing someone or on
forestalling war until someone prayed for such.
Those gifts would be freely given by the God I know.
The fact that the result of prayers for healing is uneven and that people
and nations have not ceased their fighting means that perhaps we need to
re-calibrate our thinking about God and prayer.
For instance, we have talked a
bit this winter about John Caputo’s conception of God as a summons or a call
into a future not yet defined. That
idea of God fits very well with the Aramaic sense of prayer, Aramaic being the
language and ethos of Jesus, as “tuning into God” as we might tune into a
particular radio station. As long as
a particular radio station is on the air, we can tune into it if we turn to the
right frequency. Scripture says that
God is encompassing spirit, that we all the time are living our lives in God and
so no matter what happens to us in life it happens to us in God.
Our lives are secure in God. God
is all the time wooing us to a holy life, inviting us, calling to us and we tune
into the call, into God, in prayer.
God, in other words, is not a
supernatural being sitting in a celestial throne room somewhere pulling levers
and pressing buttons that cause specific things to happen, or not.
God is not a “super power” bending the course of history irrespective
of our involvement in it. Rather,
God is the call within every event and moment and experience of our lives to
live justly, compassionately, hospitably, generously.
Or, to quote again Heather McHugh as we have done so often since Dick
Redington introduced us to her poem, “God is no fixed point or central
government but rather is poured in waves through all things.” (2)
I am convinced that Jesus experienced God not as ponderous deity lording
it over his subjects but as the spirit that inspires and aspires, as the call
to do in every situation or circumstance of life what love requires.
We hear that call in prayer that listens.
Speaking of sermons as
conversations, one of you sent me a note this week that speaks to the way in
which I have been trying to suggest that we think about prayer.
The note told of a television program that aired in the mid-nineties
called “Earth 2.” It
was about a group of people who left earth to find another planet to inhabit and
got stranded "out there" in space on a planet called Earth 2.
One episode featured a man from earth who had gone exploring and ended up
in an underground cave. He had been
in prison on earth and was hurting emotionally over his past.
So he began to pray to God and, as he was doing so, one of the women of
Earth 2 came in and asked him what he was doing. "I am talking to God,”
he said. “I am praying." The woman asked him to stand
and she led him over to the exposed earth on the cave walls.
She had him lay his hands on the earth, and then she closed her eyes
and got very quiet, and said to the man, "When we pray, we
listen." (3)
The Lord’s
Prayer is the fruit of what Jesus “heard” as he listened to God across a
lifetime. When the disciples asked
Jesus to teach them to pray, he gave them that prayer as a tool by which to form
and shape their lives and as a guide to what they would “hear” as they
listened to God’s call to them.
Taking
a primary position in the Lord’s Prayer is the line, “Thy kingdom
come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
It is the
After
centuries of suppression to various empires, the Jews in the time of Jesus
wondered: if God is just and the world belongs to God, why is the world so
unjust? One stream of Jewish
tradition said that God would overcome the world someday, sometime.
At some point in the future, God not only would clean up this mess of the
world but also would create a perfect one, a point in time that has been
mistakenly called in some theological circles “the end of the world.”
But the Jews believed that God, having created the world and declaring it
good, never would finally or fully destroy that creation.
(Dominic Crossan wryly says, though, that we can imagine what is meant
by the “end of the world” since we ourselves now can do it atomically,
biologically, chemically, demographically, ecologically – and we are only up
to the letter E.) (4)
What
the people longed for was not an end to the world, but an end to violence,
injustice, and oppression. What they
expected was not a transference of earth to heaven but of heaven to earth.
“Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Jesus
came out of this stream of Jewish tradition but modified it.
First, he said, and we heard this clearly in our gospel reading this
morning, the kingdom of God is not reserved for some distant time.
It is at hand; it is here already, now.
Second, for those who had expected God’s great clean-up of the world to
happen in a blinding flash came the news that the transformation of the world is
a process and the process has begun. And,
third, they, the people themselves, are the means by which it will happen.
They are, we are, the ones who will make it happen by heeding the call to
participate in the
By the
way, in naming it the Kingdom of God rather than the People of God or the Family
of God or the Community of God, Jesus was meaning to make the point that this
kingdom, the kingdom of God, superceded the Empire of Rome and any other empire
forever after that would presume to usurp its place in our lives. (5)
In the early days of the church, for instance, to say that Jesus is
Lord was a political confession, the clear insinuation being that Caesar is
not, and that a Christian’s primary allegiance is to the kingdom of God.
That still holds.
God’s
call to us and God’s will for us are to grant to others the experience of the
“Thy
kingdom come.” Indeed.
Amen.
(1)
attributed to Mary Baker Eddy
(2)
Heather McHugh in her poem- What He Thought
(3)
story related by Lori Rothfus in
personal correspondence with me
(4)
contained in an article by John
Dominic Crossan found on beliefnet.com
(5) ibid.
©
Copyright 2007 First Presbyterian Church