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Pray Then Like This: Our Father Who Art in Heaven…
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 13, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 4:21-23 Matthew 6:5-15
“Last night, going to bed alone, I suddenly found myself (I was taking off my waistcoat) reciting the Lord’s Prayer, in a loud, emphatic voice—a thing I had not done for many years—with deep urgency and profound and disturbed emotion. While I went on, I grew more composed; as if it had been empty and craving and were being replenished, my soul grew still; every word had a strange fullness of meaning that astonished and delighted me.” The words are those of Edwin Muir; the day is March 1, 1939. On his mind is his wife’s serious illness as well as Europe’s gathering storm. Alone and half-dressed, the words that come to his mind are the words of the prayer many of us have whispered by rote ever since we can remember, words first used by Jesus to teach his disciples how to pray, words we pray when, alone and half-naked in our bedroom, we can find no words of our own to say. And though I do not know what particular turn in the road may have caused your soul to be empty and craving or full and satisfied, I pray that in these forty days every word of this prayer may prompt, between you and God, a conversation that will astonish, terrify and maybe even delight. While Luke set the Lord’s Prayer in an undesignated place and as a response to the disciples’ request for instruction, Matthew places the words in Jesus’ speech as he sits on a mountain with his disciples. Without their asking, Jesus has begun to teach them, blessing the poor in spirit and them that mourn, speaking of the salt of the earth and the light that cannot be hid, commanding that enemies be loved and those who persecute them be prayed for. It is in the middle of what amounts to his inaugural address that Jesus begins to tell his disciples how they are to pray, particularly how they are to pray when speaking with God alone. Not at the street corner but in their own room with the door shut, he says; not with many words but with a few, like this: Our Father who art in heaven. Mostly we have no idea what we dare when we pray like this. Mostly we remember being taught that Abba in Aramaic really means Daddy, a name suggesting intimacy and tenderness. There is that in the name to be sure, a solace when your wife lies ill or your child is in distress: the one on whom we may call in utter dependence who is utterly dependable. Yet when it comes to the storm that once gathered in Europe or the storm raging now across the sea, when it comes to pledging our allegiance or casting our lot, I think much of human life as we know it and have ordered it is put at risk when we pray like this. I think to pray “Our Father” is to put our whole trust in the God who alone is trustworthy…all the way to Golgotha. I think I have never prayed this prayer. Pray first the “Our” of “Our Father” and you will see immediately what I mean. The word is in no way possessive but rather inclusive. Pray not “my Father” even alone and half-naked in your bedroom, but our. For if it is not inclusive, said one commentator, it is simple mockery; or more theologically put, it is rank idolatry, a God fashioned to our liking possessed by those in whose company we would prefer to spend eternity. Yet “who is not tempted to close his eyes,” asks Daniel Berrigan, “…the privilege of those detached enough, or rich enough, to create their own dream world? Who is not tempted to be led about in this dream world by the hand, to receive on the hour the specific drug that nurtures the illusion—whether its name be bland religion or civic trust in madmen? No,” he says; “to retain the circle of ‘our’ is undeniably a harsh discipline and struggle. ‘Our’ consolation is---God. A resisting God, in Christ Jesus.” Pray like this, Jesus said: Our Father…. What in the second place can we say of the Father Jesus tells us to call upon in prayer? The prayer’s invocation returns us first to Matthew’s very human genealogy, a blood line that begins “Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham” and ends with “Joseph the husband of Mary of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.” Matthew takes great pains to tell us, from the beginning, who Jesus’ father is not: not Joseph! And though an angel instructs Joseph to name the child in public as though he were the father, Matthew has made sure we know better. Jesus’ true identity, he goes on to point out, is revealed in baptism, even as is our own. “This is my Son,” a voice from heaven says, “the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” The voice surely must be that of the Son’s Father, of “Our Father”. Given these details in Matthew, not to mention the church’s Trinitarian doctrine, it should come as no surprise that Jesus should call God his Father. He does so no less than forty-five times in this gospel, fifteen of those invocations being found in the Sermon on the Mount. But that we are invited to do the same should never cease to astonish us. It has, of course. Over the last few decades, the church’s privileging of this name for God to the exclusion of all others has downright angered many for whom the address brings to mind only absence or abuse or authoritarian excess. I do not want to minimize the difficulty. Yet I cannot sidestep the paradox Jesus’ pointed instruction introduces to our prayers and our humanly conceived paternity, to our piety and especially in these days to our politics. Of our human blood lines we know, in relation to Jesus, that family “never seemed to be of great moment to him….He had other business in the world than to glorify that dark call of the blood,” writes Berrigan. Yet he is born into the world with our blood in his veins, the blood he will shed on a tree for us, the blood that will in love redeem us and remind us around this table whose we are and so set us free from even from our own genealogy, from “the whole subtle strong web that binds us, holds us in place, tells us in a thousand colorations of tone and glance who we are, gives reason and sense and continuity to existence,” the web that sometimes nevertheless enslaves us. Of our blood line, whether the blood literally courses through our veins or is the line into which we were adopted before we took notice of our big toe, of this we understand so little, its havoc and hope indistinguishable. What chance of the draw placed us in the stream of the upwardly mobile or stymied us in the inertia of familial sediment or left us compromised for life by a mother’s crack habit? Is it dumb luck that we were there when the brains were passed out or missing when the winning team was chosen or asleep at the wheel of fortune? And of faith, could it be true that a gene—VMAT2 to be exact—has determined our aptitude for, well, if not God (whose existence no gene will ever prove) then at least an aptitude for this phenomenon now on the culture’s radar called spirituality? “People with one variant of that gene tend to be more spiritual,” according to Dean Hamer in his book The God Gene, “and those with another variant to be less so.” Predestination proved at last? Scientifically verifiable as this one day may be, even this would be of no great moment to Jesus, nor is our family tree, our social status, our national allegiance. As regards both our biological origin and our social conditioning, Jesus could not be less interested. He is, in fact, downright hostile when any of these threaten, as they all do in every age, to trump discipleship. Pray like this, he insists, “Our Father,” telling us in so many words to “leave father and mother and come follow me,” denying the ties that keep most of us close to home…saying when his own family comes calling for him that he does not know them: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Turns out they are the ones who “do the will of my Father in heaven,” a doing that comes as a surprise in the end: When did we see thee naked and clothe thee, hungry and feed thee, in prison and visit thee? Those who pray “Our Father” do not assert in public with bold certainty such faithfulness to their heavenly father, but ask this in astonished whispers. I mention these things this morning because the radical witness of those who have prayed, in truth and in times gone by, “Our Father” appears to be not a pledging of allegiance to God alongside kith and kin and culture, but rather a “Here I stand, I can do no other”, a stand in opposition to the institutions that would tell us still, in a thousand colorations of tone and glance, who and whose we are, thereby securing life with a tip of the hat to the God in whose grace all are kept from falling. Hence it is only in baptism, not the sentimental cultural rite of passage, but the sacrament by which we enter into the Christian community--in our baptism as a child and more assuredly in the baptism of an adult--that human identity is forged anew and apart from blood relations or national origin or even particular religious ties. How obvious and fearful, therefore, was the decision made by Martin Neimueller not to baptize the children of Nazis in his suburban Berlin kirche! And how inextricably tied to his baptism was the destiny of Dietrich Bonhoeffer? “Who am I?” Bonhoeffer asked at the end of his life before walking naked and alone from his cell to death for his part in the plot to assassinate Hitler. For this act he claimed no righteousness, asking only God’s pardon. Discipleship, you see, had trumped every other loyalty. Bonhoeffer knew himself only as the child of God he had been since the day of his baptism, upheld by God’s grace and mercy, writing at the last, “Whoever I am, I am thine.” How dare we pray “Our Father”? Not with an indicative but an imperative Jesus says to his disciples, “Pray like this…” We are bold to pray…the liturgy reminds us…and until now I have never understood why. So going before us in all things, Jesus prays in the end, “Abba, Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” It was not, for the Father whom Jesus invites us to call “Our Father” wants our life and nothing less. Pray like this: Our Father. “It was late,” concludes Muir. “I had sat up reading; I was sleepy; but as I stood in the middle of the floor half undressed saying the prayer over and over, meaning after meaning sprang from it; overcoming me with joyful surprise; and I realized that simple petition was always universal, always inexhaustible, and day by day sanctified human life.” Thanks be to God! |