Give Us Today Our Daily Bread ... between a disinterested diety and Jesus in my Back pocket...A Jounrey to the Heart of Prayer: Exploring the Lord's Prayer (part 4) Matthew 6:7-15, Psalm 31)

Is God really concerned about our lives… about the mundane day to day struggles we face? Putting food on the table; keeping a roof over our heads. Our ups and downs be they bumps and dips or tsunami like waves. Or Is God distant and disinterested? Sometimes it feels like that, even the psalmists wondered if God was on the job or at home with his feet up in front of the telle.

 

 Is God more concerned with the big issues, the global things, consumed with ‘land rights for gay whales in a nuclear free pacific’ than what is happening to me and you here and now, please I’m not trying to trivialise any of those causes, but you know what I mean. God are you here do you care?

 

Or maybe we think we’ve got God just where we want him! Rock band Depeche Mode wrote a song called ‘Your own Personal Jesus’ which talks of having someone who is there to meet all our needs, who is always there at the other end of the phone when we are alone, at our beck and call. It picks up the idea of God as being there primarily to meet our individual needs. It’s a song that’s been interpreted in different ways It’s been covered by Marilyn Manson, with a mocking tone, as a critique of religion as a crutch, a critique we have to hear by the way. It’s also been covered by Johnny Cash, and in the shaky voice of man who has been through so much and found faith in Jesus it is a song of trust and dependence.

 

But is God just some sort of cosmic help line and get out of Jail free card? The plastic buddy Jesus of the film Dogma, Sometimes I find myself wrestling with that, sometimes I wonder if we don’t treat prayer like that…like on line shopping…at the push of a button… at the bend of a knee.. And get disappointed when we don’t get the quick fix, the instant answer, the package in the post.

 

In the midst of that the Lord’s Prayer is Jesus pattern for prayer. It addresses both extremes.. It tells us God cares and hears, Christian prayer is not about saying the right words to try and get the attention of a preoccupied God, A Heavenly father with his head stuck in the paper. It is not like the bureaucracies and institutions in our world where it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the oil. In Luke 18 to encourage us to pray in all circumstances Jesus tells the unlikely story of an unjust judge who only answers a widow’s plea because he is worn out by her constant demand to be heard. Jesus says God doesn’t need the constant phone messages, the email after email, txt bombing, the incessant knocking on the door, he is totally the opposite from the unjust judge, we can trust God because ‘Our  Father knows our needs even before we ask him.” Therefore pray. We have that relationship with God as a caring tender-hearted parent.

 

Jesus prayer also stops it being all about our needs… it stops prayer being self-centred. It sets priorities for our prayers and our lives, by putting the ‘your’ in front of the ‘Our’. ‘Hallowed be Your name, Your Kingdom Come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Then and only then it moves to our daily bread, forgive our sins, hold our lives in your hands… lead us not to the time of trial, but deliver us from evil. As I said last week we can spend the hours on the ours, but when we pause and focus on the yours it is put into perspective. The concerns we have don’t lessen but we can bring them to God in the sure knowledge of who God is and his plans and purposes for our world, which are for good not for harm.

 

We looked at the “your” last week and this week we are going to start looking at the “Our” petitions mainly Give us today our daily bread.

 

 “Give us today our daily bread’ is such an amazing shift in the Lord’s Prayer from Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven that early biblical scholars thought that Jesus must have been speaking in some sort of code, that when he said bread it was a metaphor for the ‘word of God’ for our spiritual needs.  It seemed an unbelievable leap from global mission to tummy rumbling. But the radical thing is that here we are invited to bring our basic needs for daily existence before God, God really cares about those things we can pray trusting that God will meet those needs. Yes in his temptation in Luke’s gospel Jesus had said man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’ but the reality is we can trust God with both, we can trust God with what we need for life. We need the daily bread for our bodies and like the well-known devotional book “Daily bread” reminds us for our soul.

 

Give us today… I don’t know about you but I often want to jump straight to the bread part, it’s like walking past a bakery and you have this instantaneous response to the smell of fresh bread coming out of the oven… in fact I was disappointed to discover recently that some fast food restaurants use chemical agents to reproduce that smell to entice people into their stores and make them hungry… when it comes to bread it’s not a conscious coherent thought it’s a mouth-watering, sensory overload gut reaction kind of thing. We can miss he give us today…But the word used for today in the Lord’s Prayer in Greek is such a rare word that it makes biblical scholars and should make us stop to ponder what Jesus is meaning here. It could mean ‘this day’ or ‘the next day’.  Big deal I hear you say. I think it’s quite profound…Jewish men were encouraged to pray three times a day, at dawn mid-day and the end of the day. Jesus prayer here would fit in any of these.

 

As a Morning Prayer and noon day prayer it has the day we are in in mind in the evening which for the Jews was the start of their day, it is going to bed trusting God for tomorrow. To pray give us today, does two things, it’s an acknowledgement that our times are in God’s hands that each day is a gift from God. It also invites us to trust God for the day the Lord has given us…and as we end the day to hand over to God all the concerns and worries we have for the future and be able to rest in that.

 

Now that’s easy to say and I don’t know about you but I often lie awake concerned about things… or wake up concerned about them in the middle of the night… in praying Give us today this daily bread Jesus invites us to give those things over to him. Invite us to trust him even with the big things that might loom over us and be like a blanket shrouding the future as far as we can see. But you know we are going to have to deal with them one day at a time, one step at a time. We can trust God to provide what we need on that journey every step of the way, every day on the way.

 

Bread… In our supermarket shopping well stocked shelves, full freezers and cupboards, suburban lifestyle we might not connect as readily with what Jesus is saying. In Jesus day in first century Palestine poverty was rife, people lived hand to mouth, much of their time was spent working to simply get bread to eat that day. You couldn’t simply put a couple of loaves in the freezer for latter in the week. Also for Jesus original listeners there was the common history of remembering back to their ancestors in the wilderness when God had provided for his people a daily portion of manna, bread that except for the Sabbath would not last from one day to the next that could not be horded. They remembered as a people they were actually dependant on God each day for their existence.

 

And to pray for our daily bread is to acknowledge our dependence on God today for the basics of life, to bring those things to him and know he cares about them and to live in an attitude of thanksgiving that God provides. We can forget that bread does not just come pre-cut and readily wrapped. God provides the sun and the rain, the soil and those who toil, to grow food, the seed and the stead for ploughing and planting, the skill of the baker or the recipe for the bread maker, he give us the gifts, abilities and opportunities to earn a crust, it seems like we do all the work, but it is dependent on the goodness and grace of God.

 

The challenge of bread is also that we often get our needs and wants confused. We are used to a world where we are constantly bombarded with luxury items being must haves, can’t live withouts, and praying for our daily bread brings us down to focusing on what is essential for us. It stops prayer being the spiritualised wish list in our consumer society. It’s a call to be satisfied with a simpler lifestyle. The answer to commercials on the TV is quite simply ‘Give us today our daily bread’.

 

 “Our” daily bread also stops even this prayer trusting God for the basics of life from becoming self-centred. We are part of a collective humanity that looks to God, it’s creator, for its daily food… It deflects the dig of the ‘own personal Jesus’ because it connects us with people round the world and challenges us to pray alongside the poor. In coming straight after ‘your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ it calls us to be part of God’s answer to our own prayer. Sharing what we have, standing against the injustices and evils in the world that would deprive people of these basics. We know its God’s will that people should be feed and cared for, for justice in the world. In Matthew 9 Jesus sees the crowds coming to him and has compassion on them and calls his disciples to pray for them. “the harvest is plentiful’ says Jesus and the workers are few, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out more workers’. In our bibles there is a chapter break just then and we miss the flow of the story: that in response to this call to pray Jesus sends out his followers on a short term mission trip, to proclaim ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’ and heal the sick and set those oppressed by demons free. It’s the same with praying for our daily food, as we bring that request to God we are to realise that we are part of the answer.

 

Praying this prayer has wider ethical considerations. It invites us to consider fair trade; am I getting my daily bread at the expense of someone else’s? Is it sustainable? Is it just for multinational corporations to have a monopoly on food production… Does the focus on today and my daily food mean we don’t think about the long term effects of food production and land use for the future?. After the Lord’s Pray in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus moves on to economics, in that he echoes what is in the Lord’s prayer… he says put first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these will be added to you’… trusting God with our daily bread, liberates us to be about the God stuff, Kingdom of God stuff… Salvation and transformation.  

 

Give us today our daily bread… can I sum it up by saying God cares for us…

People God cares for you… he can be trusted with the big things, the global things, and with the small things… the everyday things of life… God cares for you… this prayer is for you… give us today our daily bread is an assurance that God is willing and able to provide our daily needs… In fact as we pray that it helps us to see God’s hand not always in the miraculous but even in the mundane. At this time of year I grumble about rain and sunshine because the grass grows too fast, but it’s part of God’s provision… the big theological word is it’s God’s prevenient grace.. it’s providence…God cares

People God cares for you… He can be trusted with all the things of life. It’s liberating to know that… in his first letter to the churches spread throughout Asia minor Peter will say Cast all your cares on him for he cares for you’… Psalm 31 is one of my favourite psalms. It picks up the wrestle we have with trouble in our lives. It swings from great heights of praise and thanks to God down to feelings of complete despair… the psalmist says ‘Your my refuge but I feel like refuse’, all the stuff that’s on my plate makes me feel like broken pottery… I can identify with that…can you… but it ends as a prayer of simple trust of simple trust in God… The trust that under pins the prayer for daily bread… God cares for us.

A Journey to change and Transformation on a Journey to The Heart Of Prayer: Exploring the Lord's Prayer Part 3 (Matthew 6:7-15)

One of the places we went to when we moved up to Auckland was the zoo, we’d seen that the tigers had had cubs and well Beth aka ‘The crazy cat lady’ wanted to go and see them. It was great watching the cubs frolic and play. The cubs played rough and tumble with each other,they even had a large teddy bear in the cage which by its batted appearance was a favourite toy… I hadn’t been to the zoo for a while and the enclousures for the animals were so much better than I remembered as a kid, more room, more stuff to keep the animals occupied. But I couldn’t help feeling sad when I saw mum and dad tiger pace up and down those magnificent beasts were caged up. It’s not that they had been domesticated, I’m sure if you’d tried to reach in and scratch them under the chin, they would of let you know they were still wild at heart, but they were caged, yes sadly for the protection of their species, but still caged. I couldn’t help but think that we often treat the Lord’s Prayer like that as well. We’ve kind of domesticated it, it’s become something that we’ve locked into our liturgy and we can say it without thinking but in actual fact it’s a dangerous and wild prayer. A Journey to the heart of Prayer, is a journey of unchaining this prayer Jesus taught us to allow it to bring change and transformation in us and our world, as we bring those things to Our Heavenly Father.

 

Leon Morris says “this is a prayer for the desperate,” Those who know their spiritual poverty who hunger and thirst for righteousness…” who recognise that this world is not as it should be at all and only God can set things right”…a Prayer that says

” God By Your name and in your character,

by your holiness, in your perfects way,

repair the world.

Take all the broken things and fix them.

Take every out of joint thing and set it in its proper place.

Take all the ugly things and make them Beautiful,

Take every tragic tale and weave it into a redemption story,

As you manifest your ultimate kingdom glory now.”

A prayer that a Chinese Christian has summed up Thy Kingdom come…start the work in me’… renew your world and start the work in me.” The journey to the heart of prayer is a journey to change and transformation.

 

The first transformation in praying the Lord’s Prayer is a simple one on the face of it but a powerful one at its heart. It’s a change of one letter.  That it changes our focus to ‘your’ not ‘our’. After we start the prayer with affirming relationship with God is based on God’s Fatherly love, the focus is on God first and foremost, your name be hallowed, your kingdom come, your will be done. Then we have the “ours”, ‘our daily bread’, ‘forgive our sins’, ‘our future’… ‘lead us not into the time of trial deliver us from evil’. These ours are the things that can consume our hours but they come into perspective when we  pause and focus on the “yours”. In light of who God is, what we know of God’s kingdom and his will we are able to be at rest and trust God for the rest… as Jesus will say later in the Sermon on the Mount when he gets down the brass tacks and dollar bills of economics.. why worry about what you will eat and what you will wear… rather put first the Kingdom of heaven and his righteousness and all these things will be added unto you.”… your Father knows what you need even before you ask him… Therefore pray.

 

 Now there is an old clique, an old joke that I wasn’t going to share about the rather archaic use of language “hallowed be your name” … which threw me a curve ball this week. We don’t use the word ‘hallowed’ in our regular language anymore. In fact as a passive tense of the word to make holy it is a rarity. It means to take the ordinary and turn it into something holy or consecrate or give reverence to. We can’t make God holy, we are praying that God would be treated and revered for who he is. The old joke of course is that many people go through life thinking that God’s real name, God’s first name at least is Harold. ‘Harold be your name’ it gets a giggle from preachers who resort to it from time to time. But it came home to me in a new way this week when I read a book where because of the English accent used they said ‘Howard be your name”. wow… now that’s not me being egotistical but it made me think… Do I live in a way in all my life that revers God, that seek God’s kingdom, that desires to do God’s will. John Stott puts it like this “ we are under pressure to conform to our self-centered society, with its emphasis on our own names, our own little empires our own silly little will.”

 

To Pray Hallowed be thy name’ is to focus on reverencing God.  We often ask the question, what’s in a name? and in the ancient near east, in biblical times when you spoke of someone’s name you were summing up their whole character. To honour God’s name is to honour the whole of who God is. EM Blaiklock says it calls us first and foremost for gratitude and worship. The Lord’s Prayer starts with praise, it starts with us acknowledging the goodness and greatness of God.

 

 William Barkley says we so that in two ways. The first is in having a totally Christian doctrine. That we grasp something of the whole character of God…We can believe in God and many people do, James 2:19 tells us that even the demons believe that there is one God, but it is that we comprehend the whole revelation of God. Of course we have that only in Christ, through the cross. It’s why doctrine, our theology is important.

 

The second is that we honour God in how we live. Not only in our words but in our hearts and in how we live that out in our lives. In his catechism Martin Luther puts it like this ‘How is God’s name Hallowed amongst us?-when our lives and doctrine and truly Christian.”

 

We are very used to thinking of kingdoms as like nation states, that it has to do with territory, while the map may change with great rapidity in our fluid world, in the ancient near east kingdoms were seen not necessarily as a fixed territory but where a certain king held sway, where that King ruled. To Pray thy kingdom come is to pray that the rule of God might break more and more into the Kingdom of humanity. In Hebrew poetry it is not always about rhyming lines but rather rhyming ideas, parallels that help us understand meaning… So here Jesus helps us understand what “thy Kingdom comes” mean by saying “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Heaven scripture tells us is the realm where God rules, and Jesus had talked about in a new and different way establishing the kingdom of heaven as Matthew says or the kingdom of God as the other gospels record it here in the realms of humanity. The prayer is that God might rule in this place.

 

It has a personal element, as we accept Jesus as our Lord and saviour our king our prayer is that God’s rule and God’s will may be done in our lives. To pray this prayer is also a call to confession and repentance to pray that in our lives, our work place, our thought life our use of money, our relationships everything would be committed to Christ. It’s an on-going process, the big word is sanctification, we often think of conversation as a one off event but it is the continued process of opening ourselves up to knowing who God is and what God’s will is and allowing that to shine its light in every corner of our lives.

 

I have heard it put like this imagine your life is a house, the process of praying thy kingdom come in our own lifes is the process of inviting Jesus into the various rooms of our house. Maybe we just let him into the living area, where we have the public space. What about the bedroom, the place where you keep the dirty laundry. You may think that the kitchen is a safe place to invite Jesus to be the boss, can I tell you one of the most challenging verses in life over recent years has been Isaiah 55:1-2 why spend money on food that will not satisfy” handing my whole eating regime over to God. When you think that this prayer also transcends the personal to the societal and the global, how can we consume so much of the world’s food resources when we know that God’s will is that the poor are fed.

 

If you are more in to cars than houses…To pray this prayer on a personal level is to drop a ‘u’-ie. To repent, which means like a handbreak turn to stop going our way to go your way O God. I find great comfort in the honesty of heros of the faith like Paul who in romans speaks of the great wrestling match that goes on not on his pay for view sports channel on his 50inch plasma but in the recesses of his own heart, between his old nature and the new nature, that seeks to follow Christ.

 

It not only calls us to worship and to confession but also to action… It’s also a prayer as we mentioned before about changing the world we live in, at a societal level. I am encouraged and challenged by the words of William Wilberforce. He summed up God’s call on his life as “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.” The second part may seem a bit archaic to us but the scope of which Wilberforce’s reforms carried, he and his cohorts not only stopped the slave trade, they founded the RSPCA, for the humane treatment of animals, school reforms, prison reforms work reforms, they were instrumental in establishing the bible society… I could go on. There Christian faith caused them to see the world’s ills and to act to bring transformation. It not only calls us to see people become followers of Jesus, spreading his kingdom to others, and we know that that is God’s will in 1 Timothy Paul encourages God’s people to pray because God wants all people to come to a saving knowledge of God through Jesus Christ. But also to bring change in the world we see around us. Prayer is action Mother Teresa called her order of nuns a contemplative order which surprised many people, an order dedicated to pray, she said that they gathered to meditate on the face of Jesus and then would go out to see the face of Jesus in the faces of the poor and the dying in the streets of the Mumbai.

 

We  often pray ‘thy will be done’ as a sort of cope out, usually when we are praying for a situation we use it as an out clause for God. We understand if the answer is no God, we accept that this is your will. We think that the will of God is a hidden thing, a mystery, can I just say that God has revealed his will to us through scripture and through Jesus and calls us out into the world to do that.

 

In the end thy kingdom come and thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ are a catch cry for action in this world but also a cry for the future, knowing that God kingdom has been established in Jesus, knowing that God’s will has been revelled to us and also knowing that they will only be consummated, made perfect when Christ returns again. Until then we are called to wait. Not a passive thing but rather a call to pray. To worship, confess, bring the world before its God and to see where God is at work in the world and go and be part of that.

 

You know I often find myself wondering what to do with my hands when I pray. I don’t know if you noticed the motif in most of the slides we used in our service today was hands, hands held out in prayer, in worship, holding the scriptures to seek to know God and his revealed will more and reaching out in action… The Lord’s prayer calls us to all these postures in our lives. The Lord’s Prayer as I said before is dangerous and wild it cannot be tamed, or domesticated. It is a call to change and transformation. NT Wright says to pray

 

 ‘Thy kingdom come is seeing the world in binocular vision. To see it with the love of the creator for its spectacular beauty, and see it for the battered and battle scared state in which the world now finds itself. Put those two together and bring the binocular picture into focus, the love and the grief join into the Jesus shape, the Kingdom shape, the shape of the Cross’.

Prayer of Thanksgiving and Confession: we've got so much to sing and shout about

 

 

Hallelujah O lord

You give us so much to sing and shout about

We are truly blessed by the wonder of who you are

And the way you’ve shown us your constant love

You are truly an awesome God

 

You are eternal

You were before the beginning

And will be beyond the end 

AS we read the scriptures we see you cared for your people then

And as we live our lives out in a totally different time and place

We are aware that you care for us today

You do not change yet you are able to meet the needs of our time

Your love is constant

Yet it is fresh and new every morning

 

You are not a stand off God

Some sort of cosmic observer

You stand with your people

You are so with us and for us

That The psalmist could say ‘you hold the hands of your people’

 

We thank you in particular for Jesus Christ

That you laid aside your greatness and became one of us

Lived in our world

Taught, healed and loved

Cared for the poor and embraced the outcast

Inviting people to repent and turn to you

That in Jesus death and resurrection

We can be forgiven for our sins

And have new life in you

 

We also see your goodness and love in the everyday things

The start of new life in spring

The sparkle of sun on the sea by which we live

The food we eat

The laughter of children and grand children

The hug, embrace and support of loved ones

Companions, brothers and sisters, to share the journey with

Thank you lord for these things

 

We also come before you today aware of your goodness

And know that we have sinned and are in need of your forgiveness

 

We do not love as you call us to love

We have talked it up, when we should have listened

We have been silent when injustice has crowed its triumph

We have enjoyed our comfort when others have gone without

We have been quick to point the finger and ignored our own faults

We’ve thought about our stuff when others have needed self giving care

Forgive O Lord

 

Thank you, that as we have confessed our sins you have been faithful and just and forgiven us and cleansed us from all unrighteousness.

 

Pour out your spirit afresh upon us, fill us with your abiding presence that we know you more, that we may be empowered to take the love we have received from you and share and declare it to the world. 

A Journey to Our Father In Heaven... Part 2 of A journey to the Heart of Prayer:exploring the Lord's Prayer in Matthew' Gospel.

We are working our way through the Sermon on the Mount and over the next few weeks as part of that wider exploration we are embarking on a journey to the heart of Prayer; by exploring what is known as the Lord’s Prayer or the Our Father. It seems natural that as Jesus teaches those he had called to follow him and live in a new way as citizens of the kingdom of heaven, that prayer, communication with God, would be included, in fact you could say it takes centre stage coming right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel.   Jesus had started by talking of God’s revolution of grace in the beatitudes, blessed are the spiritually poor for theirs  is the kingdom of heaven  Then moved on to how those who experienced that revolution are called to be  saltand light in the world. How our changed heart attitudes should be reflected in how we treat others and as we started to look at last time how it should changeour devotional life as well, our spiritual disciplines, of which Jesus gavethree examples…giving to the poor, prayer and fasting. As part of that Jesus teaches us how to pray.   

And I don’t know about you but I’m pleased about that, pray isn’t the easiest thing in the world. When it comes to prayer I’m still on my learners licence. In fact  I really identify with what NT Wright has to say about prayer, “At its lowest Prayer is shouting into the void on the off chance there maybe someone out there listening. At its Highest Point prayer merges into love, as the presence of God becomes so real that we pass beyond words and into a sense of God’s reality, generosity, delight and grace. For most Christians, most of the time it takes place between those two extremes, to be fair for many people it is not just a mystery but a puzzle.”

In this prayer that Jesus teaches his disciples he helps untangle that puzzle. He is not just giving words to say, a formula that we know by heart, and can rattle off without thinking, rather he is giving us a framework that guides our prayer life and the focus of our hearts. He puts some very deep profound spiritual truth not into magical words like an abracabra, or religious jargon, some mumbo jumbo, but into straight forward everyday language. 

William Barkley has a very helpful summary of the Lord’s Prayer that shows us how this simply but far from shallow prayer encapsulates the whole of life and brings it before God. How it sets the priorities for communication between humanity and God.

He says the first three clauses of this prayer stop prayer from becoming self-centered, it may come as a surprise to you but we are not the centre of the universe. They focus us on what is at the centre of Prayer… that is that prayer is about God. “Hallowed be your name”, “Your kingdom come”, “Your will be done”… Focuses us first and foremost on God. We can so easily get caught up in what we want and what we need, what we have to say or even what we think God should do… and we forget that God is wanting to speak, that God has spoken, that he is the one who Jeremiah tells us is working out his plans and purposes, for our good.

Then in its last three petitions we find a comprehensive list of our needs in life. Our daily bread that God the creator would provide our basic needs, forgive us our sins, that God our saviour would deal with the wrongs and pains of our past, lead us not into times of  trail and deliver us from evil, that our future welfare would be in the hands of God our comforter and guide. A journey to the heart of prayer it a journey to knowing and trusting God with the whole of our life, trusting the God we know through Jesus Christ.

Today we are focusing on the first clause of this prayer that ties all of it together: “Our Father in heaven.” It has been said that the whole of the Lord’s Prayer, with its focus on seeing God’s name be honoured and God’s will being done and his reign being established on earth and our putting our trust in God for all our lives could be summed up in what it means to call God Father, and, in fact it has been said that the whole of the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus explaining, what it means to call God Father.

Jesus had started his teaching on prayer by saying “Don’t keep babbling on like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your father knows what you need even before you ask him therefore this then is how you should prayer… Our Father in heaven”. The basis of our prayer life our communication with God, our life with god. is not in having the right words to say so we can plicate an angry God, or grab the attention of a disinterested distant deity, or say the right thing to get what we want… it is based on the character of God and God’s relationship with us. Our Journey to the heart of prayer is a journey to the father heart of God.

Jesus invitation to call God Father is quite radical, in what we have of Jesus prayer life we see that Jesus calls God ‘abba’ which is the most intimate expression for father in Aramaic Jesus mother tongue. It’s the first words that an infant would say to their parent, like ‘dada’ in English. Naomi’s first words were dada, and they were just about her last as well. She was about 4 months old and I was giving her a bath and she looked up into my eyes and smiled and said ‘dada’ I was so amazed, Ok shocked, that I almost dropped her, then and there. Jesus invites us into that intimacy with God.

Jesus use of the word father has its roots in the Old Testament and gives us a great understanding of the father heart of God. It speaks to us of God being the source of all life, we often equate God the Father with God the creator. The first time the metaphor of God as father is mentioned in the Old Testament is in the context of God caring for God’s children, in Exodus 4:22,23, in what follows on from what we looked at in the burning bush last week, in our detour from the heart of prayer because of another trip tothe heart, that God calls Israel, ‘my son’. That God’s saving action is based on that fatherly relationship. We have hope because God cares for his Children, hears and sees their suffering, comes down and acts to see them have liberty and freedom. It is Jesus who invites us to pray “our Father” and that invitation must be set in his whole ministry and life and death, as it says in the beginning of John’s Gospel that the word became flesh that whoever would believe in him he gave the right to become the sons and daughters of the Most High God. 

Helmit Thiekicke puts it like this “ Absolutely everything depends on this one fact, that it is Jesus Christ who teaches us this Prayer. He alone, in his life and his death is the guarantor that there is a father, that God is nevertheless at work in this cruel, hard and fatherless world building his kingdom of mercy in the secrecy of the cross.”

But also this image of God as Father is the basis of our living out our Christian life as well. In the book of Romans Paul uses the metaphor of adoption as a way of explaining Christian ethics. In Roman society people would adopt someone to be their heir, usually this was done by wealthier people, however not only would this mean that they received the privileges and benefits of being part of the family, also there was the expectation that the adopted person would reflect the character of their adopted father and carry on the family business. In John 20:21 Jesus expressed this by saying Just as the Father has sent me so I send you’. The compassionate saving God sends us out as expressions of his care and compassion to the world around us. NT Wright sums it up by saying “when we call God father, we are called to step out, as appreciative Children, into a world of pain and darkness’. When we do that we need to pray, we need the Lord’s Prayer because the father who calls out into the darkness is also the father who we call out to shine his light into that darkness.

OK I want to finish up today with some thoughts about praying Our Father in heaven.”

Firstly it’s the family prayer. It’s our… it’s not my Father… it is not the one lone voice calling out to the great alone, but rather it calls us into community, even when we pray it by ourselves. There is a real sense that as we pray this prayer that we are not only affirming our relationship with God through his mercy and kindness, but acknowledging that we belong together. We are brothers and sisters, we are a people. We are celebrating communion together and in that there is symbolism that we share the same bread, and drink from the same cup, that we are one.

There is an ethical side to that. When we pray thy kingdom come there is the expectation that we want God’s righteousness, god’s fatherly mercy and goodness for all people, when we pray for our daily bread there is the understanding that we desire that for all God’s people and we need to be part of that provision, we share what we have. Likewise as we encounter God’s forgiveness, we forgive those who have wronged us.

Secondly, just because we call God Father it does not mean that God is male. Feminist Mary Daley famously said ‘If God is Male, then Male is God’, sadly that has been how some people have acted down through history. One of the big movements in the Church in the twentieth century has been to wrestle with the God language we use and for some that has meant they want to do away with talking about God as Father. It’s important to acknowledge that God is spirit and we are made male and female in God’s image. That the scripture is full of male, female and non-gender imagery of God, all of which we are free to use and explore. The metaphor of Father, is how Jesus best sums up his relationship and ours with God. Its about relationship not gender.

Thirdly, we are praying to our Father in heaven. It is simply coincidence that we are looking at Our Father in heaven on a day when in New Zealand we are celebrating our earthly fsathers, father’s day, it may of course be divine coincidence. Some of us wrestle with calling God Father because of our relationships with our earthly father, we can project that on to God as father and some people because of their experiences of abuse and neglect say they can never relate to God as Father. But Knowing God as our heavenly father I believe can be healing. Remember it is Jesus, who calls God his Father who is inviting us into that relationship with God as Our Father. I know my Father loved me but he never told me, he was a good provider but because of what happened to him in his childhood he was never able to express love physically or verbally, you know I went through my whole life thinking I wasn’t good enough for him, it wasn’t till after he died that that I discovered he was proud of me, he had told his work mates and at his funeral they passed that titbit onto me. But I’ve found it quite healing to hear God say, and not with any sense of my having a messianic complex, you are my Son and I love you. It is as come to know Our Heavenly Father’s love that we are made whole.

Lastly,  family legend has it that when Beth says ‘daddy’ in a particular tone that she gets what she wants, Can I say that despite what others may say that’s not the case. But it is possible to simply think that when we pray ‘Our Father’ that there is a sense that we can manipulate a tender hearted God, that God becomes a vending machine , that we put in the right things and push the right buttons and we get what we want, whether it’s good for us or not. As JB Phillips says Our God is too Small, we have a thin view of God, that god is some sort of cosmic credit card. It’s true like a good father God now what we need even before we ask him, and he can be trusted to hear and respond to our cries, but as Rowan Williams the arch Bishop of Canterbury says when you add “hallowed be your name” to Our Father in heaven you realise that God is beyond manipulation. God is near and tender hearted but cannot be made a tool for our purposes, to put others down or to make themselves feel safe.  We come to realise that “when you’re talking about God, this is serious, this is the most wonderful and frightening reality that we could imagine, more wonderful and frightening than we could imagine”. Two awesome truths about God combine, God is a tender hearted Father and awesome beyond all our comprehension.