St.
Paul’s United Church Sunday, January 9, 2011
The
Greatest Prayer – Rev. David Mundy
Psalm
46 Matthew 6:1-13
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In 1988 we moved with our young
family to the city of Sudbury in Northern Ontario. At that time our oldest
child, our son Isaac, was six years old and entering the first grade. We weren’t
really aware until we moved to Sudbury that a court challenge initiated by a
lawyer in that city would change the way our son’s day would begin at school.
Philip Zylberberg,
a local lawyer, who was Jewish, challenged the practice of reading or repeating
what we Protestants call the Lord’s Prayer and Roman Catholics call the Our
Father as part of opening exercises in the classroom, arguing that it was a
violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. For decades children were invited to bow
their heads in prayer and repeat from memory a prayer which is found in two of
the gospels of the New Testament, a prayer taught by Jesus to his disciples.
Children who were of other faiths or of no faith could “opt out” of the prayer
and it was customary for these kids to go to the hallway for the minute or so
that it took for this to happen.
Zylberberg’s
challenge was successful and children who went to school in the Fall of 1988 no longer repeated the Lord’s Prayer in the
province of Ontario. I remember thinking and expressing at the time that it was
curious that a Jewish lawyer was challenging the use of a prayer which was
taught by a Jew to his Jewish followers, using phrases which can all be found
in other Jewish prayers. But the principle was that it is unconstitutional for
the Christian majority to impose the use of a prayer from its tradition on
others in a public school system.
We have to wonder whether
anyone understood the implications of this change for our society, even though
the repetition of this prayer took sixty seconds each day. “Just like that” we
were a more consciously secular culture, although it could be argued that the
majority of children and teachers who repeated the Lord’s Prayer each day couldn’t
have cared less about its elimination.
Many congregations immediately
made changes to worship and others followed as time passed. Those of you over
the age of 30 might recall that the Lord’s Prayer was once repeated later in
worship, at the conclusion of the Prayers of the People. I remember back in
eighty-eight asking our Worship and Music committee for permission to shift it
earlier in the service so the children would say it and learn it before they
left for Sunday School. I sometimes think about this
when I hear the voice of a child repeating the prayer loudly, perhaps not quite
in rhythm with everyone else, and it is a good feeling.
On the other side, I often “eyeball”
the people who have assembled for a wedding or a funeral to decide whether we
will include the Lord’s Prayer as part of the service. Anyone under the age of
thirty who is not a churchgoer – the majority these days – doesn’t have a clue
about this prayer and I began to realize that I am often next to a solo act.
This is not a good feeling.
Well, this morning and for the
next few weeks we will work our way through the Lord’s Prayer, slowly and
deliberately, and I hope prayerfully, to ask whether it really has a place of
importance in our lives, if it is an indispensable part of our worship and
prayer life. After all we don’t want to be hypocrites in our prayers, do we? Now, there are many versions and
paraphrases of the Lord’s Prayer we could choose, including the one we used at
the beginning of worship today. Our hymn book also includes versions of the
Lord’s Prayer in seven other languages used by United Church congregations.
There is a Text Message version of the Lord’s Prayer as well:
Dad@hvn. Ur spshl.
We want what you want & urth 2b
like hvn.
Give us food &4giv r sins lyk we
4giv uvaz.
Don’t test us! Save us!
Bcos we kno ur boss,
ur tuf & ur cool 4eva! OK!
Perhaps we’ll just stick with
the more traditional version found in Matthew’s gospel, which places the Lord’s
Prayer in the context of Jesus’ teaching about how to pray from the heart, how
not to be falsely pious “phonies.” In other words, not to be the sort of people
a lot of non-churchgoers accuse us of being.
In his introductory remarks
Jesus says that you don’t want to be like the people who get up in front of
others and pray publically – apparently you shouldn’t be like me! He warns
against long-winded prayers with empty phrases, but he doesn’t stop there.
Jesus actually offers a model prayer which is relatively short, but covers a lot
of ground.
It’s good to have this
scriptural reminder that the prayer we say together virtually every Sunday is
Jesus’ prayer model for his followers, a prayer directed to God and which
begins with praise for God. And that it
is meant to be an authentic, deeply personal prayer rather than a “showy”
prayer to impress others.
And yet, we repeat the Lord’s
Prayer with a sort of “pack mentality,” don’t we? Maybe I’m misjudging you, but
it’s easy to drift through this prayer without really thinking about what we
are saying. If I said to you “do you know the Lord’s Prayer?” the
majority would answer confidently “of course, I’ve said it hundreds, maybe
thousands of times!” Yet if I then asked “well come on up here and say
it solo!” you might hesitate. What are the words again? The irony is that while Jesus taught the Lord’s
Prayer as the example of an authentic prayer, it too easily becomes empty words
which require very little thought on our part.
Whether we have just learned
the Lord’s Prayer or have said it more times than we can remember, it is
probably time for a “tune up,” a reconsideration of why this prayer is so
important in our tradition and in our personal lives. I should say here that I
am deeply indebted to the New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan and his recent book The Greatest Prayer:
Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the LORD’S PRAYER.
Crossan
maintains that the Lord’s Prayer is Christianity’s greatest prayer but he also
points out that it is our strangest prayer:
It is prayed
by all Christians, but it never mentions Christ.
It is prayed
in all churches, but it never mentions church.
It is prayed
on all Sundays, but it never mentions Sunday.
It is called
the “Lord’s Prayer,” but it never mentions “Lord.”
It is prayed
by Christians who focus on the next life in heaven or
hell,
but it
never mentions the next life, heaven, or hell.
Now, reading this you might
think that Crossan is not impressed by the Lord’s
Prayer, but the opposite is true. He invites us to pay attention to what he
calls both a radical manifesto and a hymn of hope for all of humanity. That is
lofty language, but it is also an invitation for us to “step up our game” in
our appreciation to the message of this prayer so that our faith will be
nurtured and deepened.
What we can hope during the
next few weeks is that we revive our relationship with this prayer which we
could so easily take for granted and at the same time renew our commitment to
the God who is addressed in these phrases.
It is a marvelous gift to us as Christians, to have this example for
prayer which has endured and continued to inform our faith through the
centuries.
As strange as this may sound,
it may have been a good thing that the Lord’s Prayer was turfed
out of the school system. Instead of its repetition becoming a rather mindless
exercise, we are brought back to its important role as a prayer for those who
are prepared to listen for God and to serve Christ in the world.
So, what will we consider
during the next few weeks? Each Sunday we will sing or say a different version
of the Lord’s Prayer to “keep us on our toes” with the prayer we have come to
know a little too well.
|
I will preach sermons on
different phrases in the prayer to sharpen our focus: 2. Our
Father, who art in heaven, hallowed
be thy name. 3. Thy
kingdom come, Thy
will be done on earth as it is in heaven 4. Give us
this day our daily bread 5. and
forgive us our trespasses/debts, as we forgive those who trespass against us: |
6. and lead
us not into temptation, but
deliver us from evil. For thine in the kingdom, and the
power, and the glory, for ever
and ever. Amen. |
Our starting point will be the
phrase Our Father, looking at our relationship with a respected parent
whom we can trust, knowing that we are loved in return.
Your Kingdom
Come will help us ask what it means to be a part of the
reign of God, the “new world order” which is realized in Christ. This is the “radical
manifesto” aspect of Crossan’s observation.
Then we will consider what it
means to have enough -- Give us This Day our Daily Bread -- rather than
scrambling after everything we think we want in this age of excess.
Forgive us our
Debts and Our Debtors will allow us to ponder the grace of
forgiveness of debt, both literal and spiritual.
Lead Us Not
into Temptation will be our starting point to explore how we make
the daily choices for good rather than evil. There may never have been a more
complicated age in which to sort through our temptations.
Each week I will offer a
question for you to mull over related to the phrase we are considering. You
might keep today’s bulletin cover to pray in your home to start the day, or at
mealtime, or before you go to sleep.
I can only hope that this will
be an adventure of discovery for all of us. I hope that you choose to be
disciples with me as we find a deeper meaning in what is “the greatest prayer”
for Christians. Together we can reacquaint ourselves with the Christ who
offered this gift to us.
One last thought today. I will
not preach a sermon on the final word of the Lord’s Prayer, but it is still an
important word. It is “amen,” or OK in the text message version. That word “amen”
is really an exclamation point, an emphatic statement of conviction, and a
matter of the heart.
Jesus, the living Christ, is at
the heart of this prayer, and to this we can say Amen!