September
27, 2015
Matthew
6:5-15
The
Lord’s Prayer: How To Be Different
Last week I began my message by asking what would
be the two verses of Scripture that are most well known. This morning, I would ask you about the
prayers most known to people, which would probably be two. First, the Serenity Prayer, written by the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr in the mid 20th
century –
God grant me the
serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the
things I can;
And wisdom to know
the difference.
The above lines are most familiar, but there is a longer,
less known version that includeds these lines –
Living one day at a
time;
Enjoying one moment
at a time;
Accepting hardships
as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did,
this sinful world
As it is, not as I
would have it;
Trusting that He will
make all things right
If I surrender to His
will;
So that I may be
reasonably happy in this life
And supremely happy
with Him
Forever and ever in
the next.
And certainly, the
other paryer would be the Lord’s Prayer, sometimes called the model prayer, as it becomes the example
of how we should pray (as Jesus says in Matthew 6:9 – this, then, is how you should pray).
This morning I begin a series of messages based on the Lord’s Prayer.
Because our computer is down I can’t show you a picture I would like
you to see, but I’ll use it next week (it is at the top of this manuscript and
in the weekly study guide). It’s a
picture of the Lord’s Prayer hand-etched onto the head of a pin. How do you hand-etch the Lord’s Prayer
onto such a small space? An
Englishman by the name of Graham Short managed to do so. He etched the prayer onto a space that
is 0.0787401575 inches across. It required him to look through a microscope
and to engrave only at night because the vibrations from the daytime traffic
made it impossible to do the work.
Such precision also required that for the first hour of his engraving
session he does nothing but sit still, until his pulse slowed (his resting
heart rate, helped by a great deal of swimming, is 30 beats a minute). He also straps his arm to restrict its
movement, and when all was ready worked between his heartbeats, so nothing
would jolt the movement of the needle across the surface of the pinhead.
Isn’t that incredible? It’s amazing to consider the concentration,
the care, and the dedication required to do such work. But my first response was why? Why would anyone take such time and effort to make an
engraving so small it requires a microscope to see it? The second response was, imagine if we
could devote that kind of concentration, care, and dedication to prayer on a
regular basis.
But perhaps we do, even without knowing it. Paul writes in I Thessalonians
5:17 that we should pray without ceasing.
Does this mean we are we to pray
all the time? Does it mean to
continue in an attitude of prayer?
I think the answers to those questions are found in Romans 8:26, where
Paul writes that in the same way, the
Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but
the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. I think one of the things Paul is
saying is that we pray all the time, even though we might not be aware of it,
because deep within our heart and our soul we are crying out to God in a way in
which we don’t even realize or understand. Prayer comes not just when we bow our head, close our eyes,
and fold our hands, but every moment that we breathe, because there is some
kind of deeply spiritual communion between the spirit of God and our own
spirits. So we pray in two ways –
unconsciously and consciously. When
we pray consciously, Jesus says to do so like this –
5 “When you pray, you are not to be like
the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the
street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have
their reward in full.
6 But you, when you pray, go into your
inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your
Father who sees what is done in
secret will reward you.
7 “And when you are praying, do not use
meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be
heard for their many words.
8 So do not be like them; for your Father
knows what you need before you ask Him.
9 “Pray, then, in this way:
Our
Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in
earth, as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive
our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation, but
deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,
for ever. Amen.
14 For if you forgive others for their
transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
15 But if you do not forgive others, then
your Father will not forgive your transgressions.
Today I’ll begin with
the first words of the Lord’s Prayer – Our
Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.
Our Father
These two simple,
basic, words are very significant, and in using them, Jesus radically
transformed what people thought at the time.
First, note the word our. When we think of the word our we do so in a possessive sense – something that belongs to
us. But our, here, is plural, not singular. It does not denote an ownership claim. We don’t have an ownership claim on
God. In the time of Jesus, there
were plenty of people who felt they had an ownership claim on God, and that
attitude, unfortunately, is still very pervasive today. Having an ownership claim of God
results in an us versus them
mentality, as in we are special to God
and you are not.
In May I was in
Sandusky, Ohio, which sits on the shore of Lake Erie. One afternoon, as I was walking along the edge of town, near
the lakefront, I heard live music, and it immediately caught my ear. The song was Born To Be Wild by Steppenwolf, and I knew immediately I had to
follow the music to see what was going on. It so happened that Biker Week was talking place in
Sandusky, and I soon found myself in the middle of a gathering of bikers And I don’t mean the 10 speed bikers; I
mean the boot-wearing, Harley-riding, leather-vest clad, big beard, lots of
tatto kind of bikers. And there I
was in my khaki shorts, T-shirt, and green tennis shoes. Talk about sticking out. I put a post on Facebook about wandering
into the wrong place and it wasn’t long before someone challendged me for
thinking differently about people just because they looked different from
me. And you know what? They were exactly right to do so. It
takes constant reminders, I think, to keep us from lapsing into a default
position of defining ourselves by what group we are part of and what groups are
not part of us. And too many
groups want to claim God as the father for their group and declare he is off
limites to other groups. We do not
own God. We are his creation and
his children, and that is true of every person, not just the ones that we want
to designate as being part of our group.
Then there’s the word father. The word father is
such a personal word to use as a designation for God, which was a very
different concept than what people were used to at the time. The Aramaic word Jesus used was abba, which means daddy. It was one of
the first words a child learned to say, and it reflected a very significant
shift in the manner in which people viewed God. Jesus presents God as not being distant and detached but as
close to us and as interested in us and as loving us as would one of the most
significant relationships we can understand.
There is an element,
certainly, of the holy and majestic and powerful to God, but at the same time
God – the mighty creator, sustainor, and Lord of this universe – is as close to
us and familiar to us as a member of our own family.
Who Art In Heaven
The past week must have
created a lot of uncomfortable moments for atheists. With all the coverage of the pope, it must have gotten under
their skin quite a bit. The wall
to wall coverage, even if you tired of it or weren’t interested, was undeniably
quite extraordinary. That so much
of life came to a halt to focus on the gospel message is testimony to the great
spiritual hunger that exists all around us, and within us. Obviously, we are nowhere near as
secular as some claim.
It was a week that
served as an important reminder that life is more than just the physical and
material. Who are in heaven reminds us that there is more to this life. In spite of the claims of some that we
can only believe in the things we can see, touch, measure, or test, that is
incorrect. Just because some
people have a scientific, materialistic, reductioninst view of the world
doesn’t mean that is the reality.
There is a spiritual component to every life, even among those who deny
the spiritual part of life. Who
can gaze upon a beautiful sunrest or sunset and not feel something
spiritual? Who can listen to a
beautiful piece of music and deny that is moves something deep within us, a
part of us that I would refer to as our soul?
Through my years of
ministry, while visiting people in their final days, I’ve seen the proof that there
is more to this life than just the physical. There is this very thin layer between this life and
eternity, and at the end of life many people are blessed to see both worlds at
once. They have one foot in the
temporal but the other is already stepping into the eternal. While they see this world in which we
live, they can also peer into the next world. I have been with people who will speak of seeing Jesus in the
room with them, they will speak of departed loved ones who have come to comfort
them as they prepare for the greatest of journeys, and they are not
hallucinating. When people
experience such moments there is a clarity about them that is more pronounced
than what we experience in our daily lives and there is an alertness and
awareness that proves to me that what they see, what they experience, is not an
illusion but the ultimate in reality.
Hallowed Be Thy Name
The word hallowed is a combination of two words
that together refer to what is holy,
and holy because of being different. Any object that is holy has a different
purpose. A church is different
from other buildings because it has a different purpose. The Sabbath is different from other
days because it has a different purpose.
The priests and prophets of the Old Testament were different from other
people because they had a different purpose. An altar was different from other monuments because of a
different purpose.
To say, then, that God’s name is to be hallowed is to recognize that God is
different, holy, and must be treated differently from anything else in
existence.
I never wanted to be different growing up. None of us like to be different. It’s why we follow fashion trends, even
very questionable fashion trends.
I didn’t always dress like this, in a conservative blue suit, blue
shirt, blue tie, and dress shoes.
Back in the 70s I dressed way cooler than this. Do you know what kind of suit I wore
back in the 70s? A leisure
suit. It was dark blue, with a
collar that was wider than my shoulders and had bold, white stitching all
around. My shirt was silky and
white and imprinted on the front was a picture of some deer in a meadow with
mountains in the background.
Completing that really cool outfit was a pair of platform shoes and my
big afro. When I went out of the
house dressed like that my dad would say, are
you really going out looking like that? My response was, dad,
when you look this good, you’ve got to go out! But I very distinctly remember wearing that leisure suit one
too many times. One Sunday morning
I wore it to First Christian Church in Kingsport, Tennessee, and I noticed I
was the only one wearing a leisure suit.
Suddenly, they were out of fashion and I didn’t get the memo. That leisure suit went from a source of
fashion awareness to a source of embarrassment, and I put it away forever
because I didn’t want to feel different.
No one wants to feel different. When I was in high school I had a patch
sewed onto my blue jeans that proclaimed I’m
a non-conformist! Do you now
why I had that patch on my jeans? Not because I was a non-conformist, but because everybody
else had that patch sewed onto their jeans! We are so afraid of being different that we will sometimes
do things we don’t want to do just because we want to be like everyone else.
I was often given a hard time when I was young
because I went to church and because of my faith. There were times when I was bullied and ridiculed because of
it. I didn’t like it, but at the
same time I didn’t really care.
Don’t ever be afraid of what people think of you, especially if they
think less of you or differently of you because of faith. As followers of Jesus, we are different,
and there’s nothing wrong with being different!
When I arrived in the church parking lot this
morning, I pulled into my usual space and sat for a few minutes admiring the
sunrise. The sun was not far above
the horizon, and the colors radiated beautifully throughout the early morning
sky. As I enjoyed the view, I was
reminded of a couple of important truths – no matter how bad things might be
today, the sun will come up tomorrow, and it will come up tomorrow because God
is still in control this vast universe.
There are many things we can legitimately pray,
and one of those is the fear of being different. But let us also remember that, because God is in control, we
really do not need to be afraid.
But if you are, pray. If
you are afraid of being different, pray.
If you are worried people will reject you because you are different,
pray. When you are afraid,
pray. In all things, pray!
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