40 Days with the Lord's Prayer
February 28-March 1, 2009
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Luke 11:1-13
In the year 1535, Peter Beskendorf, a barber and friend of Martin Luther asked Luther for his advice concerning prayer. Luther responded by writing a long letter called "How One Should Pray, for Master Peter the Barber."
The first thing Luther does in prayer is to prepare his own heart. ("It is of great importance that the heart be made ready and eager for prayer.") To do so, he might read the 10 commandments and their explanations from the catechism, or he might read from the psalms, or from the words of Jesus, or from one of Paul's letters, or a command from God in scripture that we should pray and that God will answer.
Then, when his heart has been warmed and is intent upon the matter, he confesses to God that he is an unworthy sinner. "But because thou hast commanded us all to pray and hast promised to hear us and through thy dear Son Jesus Christ has taught us both how and what to pray, I come to thee in obedience to thy word, trusting in thy gracious promise." ("Here I come, dear Father, and pray not of my own accord nor because of my own unworthiness, but at your commandment and promise, which cannot fail or deceive me." LC, 21)
Then he prays the Lord's Prayer through, word for word. And then he returns to focus on one part of the prayer and expand upon it. Luther advises Peter to let his heart be guided and stirred by the thoughts which are derived from this way of meditating on the Lord's Prayer. "It may happen occasionally that I may get lost among so many ideas in one petition that I forego the other six. If such an abundance of good thoughts comes to us we ought to disregard the other petitions, make room for such thoughts, listen in silence, and under no circumstances obstruct them. The Holy Spirit himself preaches here, and one word of his sermon is far better than a thousand of our prayers. Many times I have learned more from one prayer than I might have learned from much reading and speculation."
According to Luther, you can pray the Lord's Prayer thousands of times and not even taste it. The best way to pray it is to listen to all the thoughts it brings into your mind and heart. Let it become an experience of listening to God, listening to what God wants, listening to what God would teach you. That's what prayer can become. That must be what the disciples of Jesus observed when they witnessed the impact of prayer in Jesus' life.
Through the praying of Jesus, the disciples began to see that prayer was more than a religious duty; it could be the vital connection between God and themselves. "From the beginning to the end of Jesus' ministry, his disciples had a front-row seat to watch the greatest pray-er who ever prayed. And as they watched, they saw him filled with peace, wisdom, spiritual power, and grace. When Jesus prayed, they saw things happen." (Ortberg, Praying With Power, 12)
In our gospel reading, (Luke 11:1-4) the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray in that way. Jesus gives his followers a prayer form, (what we call the Lord's Prayer, but which might better be called a Model Prayer or the Disciple's Prayer).
This prayer form wasn't intended to become a ritualized prayer, that is recited from memory without thought. As we hear from Luther, and as the disciples saw in Jesus, it's benefit would be found more from the listening side than from the speaking side.
That's where we can also grow in prayer. The Lord's Prayer has become so familiar to Christians that we can recite it without even thinking about what we are saying (even in under 10 seconds). That is why we are spending 40 days with the Lord's Prayer this Lenten season, taking the prayer one petition at a time, so we may to pause to think about what we are praying (when we pray this prayer), so that we may pray this prayer with understanding and so that it may become for us a rich resource for meditation and communication with God.
Today we begin with the opening lines of this prayer:
Our Father…..in heaven…..hallowed be your name.
Together these opening words of the Lord's Prayer form a kind of paradox. God, the creator of all is "a transcendent God, a God to stand in awe of, a God clothed in mystery. God cannot be contained in any ideology or even theology." (French, Lenten Journey: 40 Days with the Lord's Prayer, 27) And yet God is our loving parent, desiring that we know him intimately.
God is called by many names in the Old Testament: Strong One, Rock, Refuge, King of Kings, and Most High. When God reveals himself to Moses, he uses the term Yahweh: which may be translated as: I am who I am, or I will be what I will be, or simply: I am (Ex 3:13-15) God is other. "In ancient Israel, the name of God was considered so holy that it was not to be spoken or written." (French, 32)
In the Old Testament, God is described and describes himself as a Father to his people, Israel. But in the New Testament, there is something quite new with the word Jesus uses to refer to God - "abba." It is one of the words children use for their parents (abba and imma, like our mommy and daddy). "Abba" was an everyday word, a family word. "No Jew would have dared to address God in this (intimate) manner. Jesus did it always, in all his prayers which are handed down to us." (Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus, p. 97)
When Jesus invites us to speak to God as "our Father," even our "daddy," we can be assured of several things:
- First, that God the Father wants to meet us in prayer. That God is accessible, waiting to listen to us, and to talk with us, like a mother to her child.
It means that we that we can approach God with a simple childlike confidence and trust.
- Jesus goes on to describe God as the ideal parent who provides us with what we need. Jesus says that human parents have their obvious weaknesses, but in general they give their children the things they need. If human parents provide their children with the things they need, then how much more will the perfect parent, our Creator, give us what we need –the Holy Spirit.
- By calling God our Father, we do not mean to say that God is masculine
or of the male gender. God does not possess our human traits. God is also portrayed in the Bible as having qualities attributed to females: like nurturer, life-giver, comforter. But God is neither male nor female. "The words father and mother both make the point Jesus was making when he taught his followers to pray 'Our Father.' We are dependent upon God as a child to a parent. We are to obey God as a child obeys a parent, trusting that whatever God asks of us will be good for us. We are to respect and love God as a child respects and loves a parent,
when the parental relationship is grounded in love and care for the child." (French, 25)
German pastor Helmut Thielicke puts it this way: Even more important that presenting our prayer petitions is our entering into communion, into a personal relationship with God the Father. The greatest blessing of prayer "does not consist of our receiving the specific things we have prayed for…We learn that the happy gift of prayer consists in receiving the fellowship of the Father, that he gives us his whole heart—that we can accept everything from his hand." (Thielicke, The Lord's Prayer, 37, 39) That's what it means to pray to God as Father.
After way pray "our Father," we then pray "Hallowed be your name." Which means, may your name be held holy. Of all the things Jesus teaches that we need to pray about, honoring God's name is first on the list. Why is that?
When we pray "hallowed be your name," we begin the prayer with praise and worship of God. Praising the Lord sets the tone for the entire prayer. Adoration of God puts us in the right frame of mind: we are reminded whom we are addressing, whose presence we have entered. We give God the honor and reverence due God.
(We are reminded that God is God and we are not. God doesn't need reminding that God's name should be holy—we need to be reminded of it.)
A Japanese solider approached a wise teacher. "I have mastered all of the martial arts," he said calmly. "I have risen to the highest rank possible for a man of my training. I now wish to learn about the spiritual life. Can you help me?" The teacher smiled and invited the man to sit at the table. "Let us have a cup of tea," before we talk further." After the soldier sat down, the teacher began to pour the tea into the man's cup. He filled the cup and kept on pouring until the tea was running over the table onto the floor. The soldier watched dumbfounded until he could no longer be silent. "Stop! It is full! The cup will not hold more tea!" Placing the teapot on the table, the teacher addressed the soldier, "You are so full of yourself that there is no room for God. It is not possible for you to learn, until you empty yourself." (White, Stories for the Journey, p. 63)
When we pray, hallowed be your name, we are led to ask ourselves: Whose name am I seeking to honor? God's name? Or my own? Here is Martin Luther's summary for this petition: "O dear Father, may your name he hallowed in us; that is, I confess and am sorry that I have dishonored your name so often and that in my arrogance I still defile your name by honoring my own. Therefore, help me by your grace so that I and my name become nothing, so that only you and your name and honor may live in me. (Exposition, 35-36)
Luther teaches us that we hallow God's name, we honor God's name, when we are
"gentle, merciful, chaste, just, truthful, guileless, friendly, peaceful, and kindly disposed toward all, even toward our enemies." Because the one in whose name we were baptized works these works in us.
I want to close the sermon by reading from the Psalms. Feel free to read along with me or to close your eyes and listen and meditate on what it means to hallow God's name. Here the psalmist gives us some excellent examples of honoring God's name. Psalm 95:1-7; 96:1-3; 97:1-6; 99:1-3; 100.
The psalmist invites to into praise and thanksgiving, as we honor God's name.
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