Our Father -- Relating to God as Jesus Does (First Sunday in Lent, Mar 6/22)

 Scripture Reading: Luke 11:1-4 and Matthew 6:5-13 

Through the season of Lent, for the six Sundays from now until Easter Sunday, our worship – at least the sermons, are focused on the Lord’s Prayer.  A kind of guided journey through the Lord’s Prayer – hopefully, a journey into the Lord’s Prayer, into the meaning of the prayer for our lives.

This will be a personally guided tour into what the Lord’s Prayer means to me, right now and at this time in my life.  If I had preached on the Prayer ten years ago, or thirty, I would have said different things, based on my life then.  Ten years from now, it will be different again.

So, I encourage you to hear what I offer not with a grain of salt, but as an encouragement to listen to and to pray the Lord’s Prayer for yourself, and to hear what it says to you and to your life right now.

The Lord’s Prayer appears in two of the four Gospels.  In Luke 11:2-4 it’s part of a story where the disciples see him praying.  They sense that there’s something pretty important about the way he prays to God and the way it shapes his life, so they ask him to teach them how to pray the same way: 

One day Jesus was praying in a certain place.  When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”  He said to them, “When you pray, say: “‘Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.  Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins,for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation.’”

In Matthew 6:9-13 the same prayer is taught – except the way Matthew tells the story, Jesus includes the teaching as part of the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s given as general instruction in the spiritual life to all who are there and able to hear him. 

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.  Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.  But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.  Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

And when you pray, do not keep on babbling 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 before you ask him.

“This, then, is how you should pray: “‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one, for yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.  Amen.’ “ 

That last extra bit about the kingdom, the power and the glory appears only in later manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew – not in the oldest ones.  Scholars suggest that when the early church prayed the Lord’s Prayer in worship, they added those last words as a kind of liturgical ending, and they just got added to some of the later manuscripts. 

Meditation 

I’d been a minister only a couple of years, back in the early 1980’s, and already I was feeling overwhelmed and empty.  Have you ever felt that way?  Unqualified for the job at hand, and inadequate for the role you’re having to play?

It wasn’t the amount of work, or the number of hours I put in.  It was the kind of work and the quality of presence that was expected.  The kind of intimacy and openness with others.  The depth of faith and breadth of wisdom.  The ability to see and feel and speak from a place of authentic familiarity with God and God’s love for all.

I was only a couple of years into my calling, and already I felt inadequate and empty.  So, when I saw a week-long course offered by the Continuing Education office of the Toronto School of Theology, called “Deepening the Spiritual Life Through Prayer,” I signed up right away.  I booked the week off and drove to Toronto for what I expected to be a week of lectures and discussions about prayer, where I could take notes, get inspired, and then figure out how to put it into practice to become a better minister.

What I found out, though, the first afternoon at the orientation session was that this was not a week of lecture, discussion and note-taking.  It was a week of actual directed prayer.  Each of us would be assigned a spiritual director, whom we would meet each day for up to an hour.  We would talk about our praying, how it was going, what we were hearing and feeling from God.  Our director would give us a Bible reading to meditate on twice during the day, for at least 45 minutes each time.  The rest of the time we would rest, go for walks, sleep, share silent meals with the other retreatants, let ourselves be with God to just listen and be led.

It scared me.  I’d never had to be that open with anyone about what I was actually feeling and how my prayer life was, and how I was with God.  During the first coffee break I had to will myself not to slip away, go back to my room, pack up my things and go home.

But I stayed, and after coffee I was introduced to Sister Maeve, the little Irish nun who would be my director for the week.  She was about 4 foot 11, quite old, on sabbatical for a year from her order, in Canada for a few months and helping out at this retreat.  She was very kind.  Wise.  And loving – both of God and of others around her.

I trusted her and opened up.  At our third meeting I told her I was not doing so well.  I would begin every time for prayer and meditation with good intentions, I said.  I would sit, breathe, let myself be grounded, read the assigned passage several times over slowly and meditatively.  I would open myself to what God was saying to me through it.  And before long, would fall asleep.  I was failing at prayer, I confessed.

To which, after a loving pause, she said, “You must be tired.  Rest is a gift of God.  And how delightful to be able to fall asleep in the arms of God.”

***

Looking back on that time, and through the lens of Jesus telling us to come to God as our Father, I can see that I was approaching things through a particular experience – my experience, of father.  My dad was a good man.  Loving and kind.  Completely dedicated and committed to the good of his family.  He provided and maintained a good home for his wife and children.  He was kind and helpful to neighbours.  Worked hard and well at whatever he did. 

And he was really hard on himself.  Perfectionistic and exacting.  Often, he berated himself for not performing to his standard of excellence.  Which, of course, translated into me feeling I also had to perform well to be accepted by him.  And, by extension, I had to perform well to be accepted my heavenly Father as well.

And it makes me wonder, is there anyone who does not live with a shadowed image of father?  Is there any human life – even the brightest and best-lived, that does not have a shadow side that casts some darkness upon others around them? 

Japhia, for instance, when prayers for healing so consistently went unanswered in her life, sometimes mused aloud that God must be too busy with someone else who needed God’s help more than her, to have time for her.  It was an echo of how her dad whom she adored, was sometimes unavailable to her at a critical time because he was somewhere else in the world helping World Vision take care of people in more need of him than she was.  Even the brightest life casts a shadow of some kind on others around it.

Or, imagine someone being predisposed by experience towards an image of God as a Father who dotes on them like a sugar daddy, whose greatest purpose is to give them whatever they want, who’s kind of like a heavenly Santa Claus giving them whatever is on their list as long as they ask the right way, and stay off the Naughty List?  Even the most loving human life – the most giving human father, casts a shadow that easily leads us astray or a little askew in our understanding of God.

And then, of course, there are fathers who are more shadow than light.  Fathers who are mostly angry, abusive, badly broken, controlling, or neglectful, even absent and unknown.  It’s not surprising that many people – not just women but maybe mostly women, don’t really warm up to a God called “Father.”  Not surprising, too, that many who have been nurtured more by mother than by father, or who nurture others as a mother rather than a father, find it easier to speak of God in feminine language instead. 

In so many ways “Father” can be a barrier to faith and to prayer.

***

There is a difference, though, between what Jesus says about God as our Father in heaven, and the way we often experience and understand these words. 

To start with, Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic.  In Aramaic, and in common with other traditional Hebrew prayers similar to the Lord’s Prayer (Jesus didn't make up the Lord's Prayer all by himself -- it's actually very similar to other ancient Hebrew prayers that Jesus and his disciples would have been familiar with), the word we translate as “father” is the Aramaic word “Abwuun” which means something more like “Father-Mother” or “whole Source of life.” 

“Abwuun” is really a combined word made up of two words brought together – “Abba” meaning father, and “wuun” meaning womb.  In other words, as children of God, we are born of the divine masculine and feminine together.  All the fulness of God is in our making.  Just as a human father and mother bring together their bodies and all that they are in giving birth to their children, so all of God is involved in creating each one of us.

The Aramaic words and other prayers also carry clear echoes of the stories of creation in Genesis 1 and 2.  Our creation in the image and as the likeness of God in Genesis 1 is true not only of all humanity, but also of each one of us.  And in Genesis 2 the story of God making a human body of the dust of the earth, and then breathing God’s own spirit of life into it, is not just about the first Adam, but also every one of us. 

Can you imagine, and do we really believe what this says of us – that each one of us is an embodied breath, a unique embodied breathing of God into the life of the world?  Which means God is not separate from us, nor we from God.  Unlike between us and our parents, or us abd our children, where there is both relationship and distance between us, between us and God – at least from God’s side, there is only and always mutual presence, indwelling and abiding communion.

And it’s true right now, not just in some far-off future.  Because for Jesus, when he calls God our Father “in heaven,” heaven for him is never far away.  Never separate from what already is.  Throughout the Gospels Jesus describes heaven as being within and inside us, among us, between us, near at hand.  As close as our breathing.  As near as a neighbour.  As intimate as our deepest self. 

It’s the already-present completion and wholeness of what is, the inner divine goodness that often is hidden or distorted, but is always there waiting to be glimpsed, tasted, felt and lived out.  There’s no separation to overcome, no distance to bridge, no time to have to wait.  It already and always is part of who you are.  The heart of who you are.  Some call it our Truest Self.  Whatever we call it, it’s present because it’s the presence of God uniquely within each of us.  An eternal gift.

There used to be a little hand-written notice in our church nursery, that said “each child born is a new thought of God brought in the world.”  There’s also a call to worship we sometimes use here at Fifty that says “People of God, look around and see all the images of God assembled here.  In me, in you, in each of us, God’s Spirit shines for all to see.” 

Do we really see others that way?  Even more, can we see ourselves that way?  Do I believe, do you believe that you are, at every moment, an embodied breathing of God into the life of the world?  And that when you pray – at least, when you pray the Lord’s Prayer, you can be reminded of this deepest truth about yourself?

The words that Jesus teaches us to pray are a gift that help nudge us in this direction – towards knowing ourselves more deeply as beloved children of God.  Which means the Lord’s Prayer is not something we learn to say to please God, or to get God on our side.  Rather, it’s something God teaches us to say, to help us grow more fully into what we really are.

And once we know that, maybe the only question worth asking is what on Earth it means for us to be, and to live as embodied breathings of God into the life of the world.