The Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father in Heaven”

If prayer is more than just talking to ourselves, to whom are we talking? If, as Jesus taught, prayer is primarily asking for things, who are we asking? We’re asking and talking to “Our Father in heaven.”
 

Jesus’ unquestioning faith in God's care led him to begin almost every prayer of his that is recorded in the New Testament this way: "Father." He didn’t invent this name for God. It is found, although infrequently, in the Hebrew Scriptures. However, it is never used there to address God directly. Jesus' did something new when he talked to God directly as Father with a naturalness that was unique.

We even know the exact word he used. "Abba . . . Father"—that's the way Jesus talked to God. It was an unforgettable memory in the early church. Paul tells us that Christians of the first generation, impelled by the Holy Spirit, began their prayers with the same word, "Abba.”

 

"Abba" is Aramaic (the everyday language Jesus spoke) and it is the family word for God. It refers to a child's father: personal, involved, knowing, caring. The nearest equivalent in English would be “Daddy.” To Jesus that needed no proof or argument. In a day when religious people made God so remote that they wouldn’t even pronounce the sacred Name, Jesus cried, "Abba . . . Daddy," and taught his disciples to do the same. “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:15-16).

 

That brings us to the little word "our." Jesus spoke freely of "my Father," but he teaches us to pray "our Father." As I said last week, that’s a reminder that God is not my private Father—or yours. A child in a large family learns very quickly that there are some things you can’t ask your father to do. If you were an only child you might ask; but God has no only children. You can’t ask to rise on the bleeding back of a sister or brother. You can’t ask for a personal advantage that will cost one of God's other children dearly. You can’t ask for your nation to prosper at the expense of other nations, or your church to prosper at the expense of other churches. The "our" in "our Father" makes us all sisters and brothers who pray for one another as well as for ourselves. God is intent on making us all—every human being created in God’s image—into a loving family.

 

Now come some difficult issues. When we begin our prayer with "Our Father," we’re in danger of thinking about God as male. Doing that can be unfair to half the human race.

If you think this isn’t important, let me point out that in the name of the “Fatherhood” of God, some in the early church taught that women are defective males, created less in the image of God than are men. In the name of the “Fatherhood” of God, women have been denied the full exercise of their gifts in positions of leadership in the church. The Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and some protestant denominations—particularly the ones that view the Bible as being without error and interpret it literally—still do this. In fact, I know of one congregation in a small town where I once served (I won’t mention what denomination it is or where it’s located) who didn’t even allow women to vote in congregational meetings, let alone hold office or preach! I hope that it’s changed by now. We need to be aware that there are some serious problems in approaching God as “Father.” We have to be understanding when some sincere Christian women say that, for one reason or another, they simply can’t use “Father” as a name for God anymore.

 

I can understand that. My father was an alcoholic and my mother divorced him when I was a youngster. I had no real father-image until I was a teen-ager, when my mother married my stepfather. He was a terrific father-image, but it came a bit late in my life. So I can relate to those think it’s a mistake to think of God only as “Father.” The Scriptures contain many passages that speak of God in feminine, mothering terms.  At the same time Psalm 103:13 speaks of God as a “father [who] has compassion for his children,” Isaiah 66:13 says, “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.” One denominational statement of faith likens God to “a mother who will not forsake her nursing child” as well as “a father who runs to welcome the prodigal home.” A modern catechism asks, “When the creed speaks of "God the Father," does it mean that God is male?” and it answers:

 
No. Only creatures having bodies can be either male or female. But God has no body, since by nature God is Spirit. Holy Scripture reveals God as a living God beyond all sexual distinctions. Scripture uses diverse images for God, female as well as male (emphasis added).

Mothering terms are every bit as effective in conveying God's intimacy and care as fathering terms are. The question is: In adding the “Mother” language (which we should certainly do, assuring women that they are as much in the image of God as men ever were), should we altogether eliminate the “Father” language?

 

We haven’t solved the problems that surround "Our Father," a phrase designed for comfort rather than conflict, but let’s see if it makes a difference that this Father is "in heaven."

 

It’s true that the biblical writers thought of heaven as “up there.” But the primary meaning of heaven in the Bible is what is not-earth, what is other than the world we know. To call God "our Father in heaven" is to speak of the otherness of God. As it says in Isaiah 55:8–9:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
 

God's way of being, God's way of knowing, and God’s way of loving aren’t like ours. They are mysteries to us.

 

To return to the matter of maleness and femaleness: Our way of being on earth is to be one or the other. But because God is "in heaven," God's way of being goes beyond both of them.

 

So God's fatherhood is not exactly like human fatherhood. God is a Father in God's own way, a Father who really fathers.

 

These language problems aren’t insignificant.  If the church gives the message to women that they are less in God’s image than men, or that God listens better to men than to women, or that only men are able to serve in certain offices in the church, we need to do something about that language.

It may help to see the problem of exclusive vs. inclusive language as part of the larger problem of all religious language. We have only human words, so we always describe God in human terms; that is, we always use analogies. When we say, “God is like this or that,” we’re also saying, “God is not like this or that.” When we say God is like a human father, we’re also saying at the same time God is not like a human father.

 

Jesus, I think, goes straight to the heart of it. "What man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!" (Matt. 7:9-11 NRSV, emphasis added). God is like human parents, even evil ones; yet how much more is God different from any human parent!

It’s a two-way street. The imperfect human analogy goes to heaven, where it is corrected by the only true motherhood or fatherhood—that of God. Then it comes to earth again as a judgment on all the imperfections of our human motherhood and fatherhood. To do away with the analogy of God as our heavenly Father would be to exempt human parenthood from the judgment and healing that comes back down the two-way street.

 

Whatever words we use, it boils down to something like this: "God our Parent, both Mother and Father, we’re all your children and therefore sisters and brothers of all who wear a human face. You care for us with unfathomable love, and you judge us with perfect justice. You thrust us out to grow toward maturity, yet you remain always present and reliable. We present our prayer to you in confident trust." As we sang in our opening hymn:

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father [and Mother],

There is no shadow of turning with Thee;
Thou changest not, Thy compassions they fail not;
As Thou has been, Thou forever wilt be.
Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see;
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!

That is something of what we mean when we pray, "Our Father in heaven."

 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Stay warm, my friends.

The Lord’s Prayer: “Lord, Teach Us to Pray”

[This series of posts on the Lord’s Prayer is based in no small measure on Al Winn’s wonderful book, A Christian Primer: The Prayer, the Creed, the Commandments (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990).]

  

I can’t even remember when I first learned the Lord’s Prayer. It almost seems as if I was born knowing it. The Lord’s Prayer is used enough in the worship of most churches that regulars find they’ve learned it without really trying. For nearly two thousand years people have prayed this prayer! But just because we’re familiar with it doesn’t mean we understand it. So, what I want to do is to take some time with the Lord’s Prayer to help us all understand it better.

 

Another reason I want to deal with such a familiar part of our Christian tradition is that I’d like you to get to know how I fill something so familiar with my own personal meaning. I begin with the Lord's Prayer because it can be argued that the Lord’s Prayer deals with our most intimate relationship with God—prayer.

 

The Christian Gospels (particularly the one attributed to Luke) tell us that prayer was fundamental in the life of Jesus. It tells how Jesus went away early in the morning all by himself to pray, how he spent whole nights in prayer, how he lifted his eyes to heaven whenever power was needed. Prayer was the secret behind Jesus' teaching, the foundation of his obedience to the will of God. The gospels never portray Jesus’ disciples asking him how to preach or teach, but the disciples do ask, "Lord, teach us to pray."

 

This shouldn’t surprise us. Think about how hard it is sometimes for us to talk with each other. So, if we find talking with other human beings to be such a challenge, it’s no wonder that we struggle to talk with God. So it’s appropriate that we ask Jesus to share what he knows with us. For him, prayer was a basic attitude, a dominant desire, and an unceasing joy. In musical terms, prayer was the deep pedal-note of the Savior’s life, undergirding all its melodies—of that the disciples knew they did not know. So they weren’t ashamed to ask, "Lord, teach us to pray."

I’m asking that too. I’m painfully aware of what I don’t know about prayer and how inept I am at praying. Over the years, I’ve tried many different ways of praying. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on books about prayer. When it comes to this fundamental matter of praying, I know that Jesus of Nazareth has much to teach me. So I also ask, "Lord, teach me to pray." This morning, I hope you will ask that, too.

To begin with, Jesus provides a short, simple model of what prayer is:

Father, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial (Luke 11:2-4).

Most of us are more familiar with Matthew's version (6.9-13) in the King James translation:

Our Father which art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil:
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.

Before we go on, we need to pause and ask: Do we really have here "the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples"? Jesus spoke his memorable sayings freely, scattering them like seed, and many fell by the wayside. The sayings we have are those that were remembered and treasured by the early church. The form in which we have them has been shaped and molded by that church to meet its needs and to answer its questions. That’s why we have two versions of the Lord’s Prayer in the gospels. We see Jesus, as it were, through the filter of the early Christian communities.

Some scholars have suggested that the prayer as we know it doesn’t go directly back to Jesus, but that the early church took some of his scattered sayings on prayer and wove them into the two versions of what we now know as "the Lord's Prayer.”

 I think it’s fair to say this: the early church certainly had a hand in the Lord’s Prayer, as it had a hand in all parts of the gospels. But this prayer (particularly Luke’s version of it) breathes the pure air of profound Jewish piety and the arresting originality of Jesus himself. Here, I think, we are as close as we’ll ever get in this life to the mind and heart of Jesus of Nazareth.

But, to go on, the familiarity of the prayer is a problem. What I mean by this is that the words are so familiar that we all too often don’t think about them when we say them. Sometimes we rattle them off mechanically. We miss how profound they are. We overlook how difficult they are. So let’s look—really look—at them. At the outset, let’s observe three things about the prayer as a whole.

 First, Jesus understood that the heart of prayer is asking God for what we want. His model prayer is basically a series of requests. A modern catechism defines prayer this way: “[W]hen calling upon God to hear our requests, we affirm that God draws near in every need and sorrow of life, and ask God to do so again.” That’s the essence of prayer.

 As if to underline this, the prayer is followed in the Gospel of Luke by one of the strangest stories Jesus ever told—in Luke 11:5-8. We’ve already read it as one of our Scripture lessons.

 Picture this: It’s midnight. The owner of a house is in bed with all his children. That’s the way people slept in those days. It’s quiet and peaceful. The doors are all shut. Suddenly there’s a terrible racket. The next-door neighbor is pounding on the door. "Get up, get up," he says, "a friend of mine has come on a journey. He’s hungry and I don’t have any food. Give me three loaves of bread."

"I can't get up, says the owner. The door is locked. We’ve all gone to bed. Go away!"

"Get up, get up, and give me some bread."

"Go away!"

"Get up; get up, my friend’s hungry."

"Okay, okay! Here’s all the bread in the house. Take it, go away, and leave me alone."

Jesus’ stories usually make one point. And the point here isn’t that God is a sleepy, grumpy, reluctant giver but that we should be persistent askers, not easily discouraged in our asking. It’s even clearer in the original Greek. I tell you, says Jesus, ask (and keep on asking), and you’ll receive. Seek (and keep on seeking), and you’ll find. Knock (and keep on knocking), and it’ll be opened to you. For Jesus, that's prayer.

Quite honestly, this raises all sorts of problems for us. It’s hard for us to see how—in a regular and orderly world governed by natural law—God will (or even can) answer our prayers. Moreover, the common human experience is that when we pray the answer often doesn’t come—at least it doesn’t come in the form we had in mind. In the face of this, a teaching has developed that says prayer can’t possibly consist of making requests to God for things. Prayer is meditation. Prayer is contemplation. Prayer is adjusting to the way things are. Prayer doesn’t change the world; it changes us.

Now this kind of teaching may appeal to us. It may be what you and I have believed for a long time. Please note: I’m not saying that Christian meditation and contemplation aren’t good. But, to be perfectly honest, this isn’t what Jesus thinks prayer is. God actually invites us to ask for things, says Jesus. God shares power with us. God waits for our prayers. There are things God will not say or give or do until we pray. It’s this childlike, confident attitude toward prayer that Jesus teaches in the Lord's Prayer.

Second, the requests fall easily into a simple outline. The Lord's Prayer is divided into two parts, preceded by an opening address, and concluded by a "doxology" or word of praise. Each part consists of three petitions or requests. The first part concerns God's glory; the second part, our salvation. The first part involves our love for God; the second part, God's love for us. The petitions in part one will not be fulfilled perfectly until the life to come; those in part two relate more directly to our present needs here and now. The first three concern God: God's name, God's will, God's kingdom. The second three concern human beings—our bread, our sins, and our struggle with evil.

Combining these two sets of petitions in a single prayer says something important. Prayer can’t be confined to lofty, spiritual matters, the name and will and reign of God; it must also include common, earthy things like food and sin and temptation. On the other hand, prayer can’t be purely secular and earthy; it has to deal with sacred things as well. Even the order is significant. We begin with God, because only then can we pray properly about our concerns. To fail to put our needs in that larger framework could make prayer a very, very selfish thing.

Finally, there’s another safeguard against selfishness in Jesus' teaching on prayer. In the parable, the neighbor begs bread for his friend who has come on a journey. I need bread, but so do all people. So we ask our Father, "Give us today our daily bread.” I need forgiveness, but so does everyone else. So we ask our Father, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” I need protection, but we all do. So we ask our Father,  “Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil.” Those plural terms include not just Christians but all human beings.

Think about what that says about the greatness of prayer. What a privilege it is to stand before God, who gives us permission to call him our Father. What a privilege it is to ask not just on our own behalf but on behalf of every man, woman, and child created in God's image.

Allow me to suggest  some practical ways to use the Lord’s Prayer [from N.T. Wright’s book, The Lord and His Prayer (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996)].

1. The time-honored method of making the Lord’s Prayer the framework for regular daily praying. [Martin Luther suggested that one should say the Lord’s Prayer immediately upon waking up in the morning and when you go to bed at night.]
2. Repeat it slowly, again and again, in the rhythm of your breathing, so that it becomes, as we say, second nature.
3. Take the clauses of the prayer one by one and make each in turn your “prayer for the day”—something like this: Sunday—Our Father.  Monday—Hallowed be thy Name. Tuesday—Thy Kingdom Come. Wednesday—give us this day our daily bread. Thursday—forgive us our sins. Friday—deliver us from evil. Saturday—the kingdom, the power and the glory. Use the clause of the day as your private retreat, into which you can step at any moment, through which you can pray for the people you meet, the things you’re doing, all that’s going on around you. The ‘prayer of the day’ then becomes the lens through which you see the world.

In this way the Lord’s Prayer develops into a way to ask God for the basic things all human beings need. It allows us to take our place among those through whose prayers God chooses to be involved with the world.

Let me conclude with a little story:

Me (in a tizzy): God, can I ask you something?

GOD: Sure.
Me: Promise you won't get mad?
GOD: I promise.
Me (frustrated): Why did you let so much stuff happen to me today?
GOD: What do you mean?
Me: Well I woke up late,
GOD: Yes
Me: My car took forever to start,
GOD: Okay....
Me (growling): At lunch, they made my sandwich wrong and I had to wait.
GOD: Hmmmm
Me: On the way home, my phone went dead, just as I picked up a call.
GOD: All right
Me (loudly): And to top it all off, when I got home, I just wanted to soak my feet in my foot massager and relax, but it wouldn't work. Nothing went right today! Why did you do that?
GOD: Well let me see..... The death angel was at your bed this morning and I had to send one of the other angels to battle him for your life. I let you sleep through that.
Me (humbled): Oh...
GOD: I didn't let your car start because there was a drunk driver on your route that might have hit you if you were on the road.
Me (ashamed): ............
GOD: The first person who made your sandwich today had the flu and I didn't want you to catch it. I knew you couldn't afford to miss work.
Me (embarrassed): Oh.....
GOD: Your phone went dead because the person that was calling was going to lie about what you said on that call, I didn't let you talk to them so you would be covered.
Me (softly): I see, God
GOD: Oh and that foot massager, it had a short that was going to throw out all of the power in your house tonight. I didn't think you wanted to be in the dark.
Me: I'm sorry, God.
GOD: Don't be sorry, just learn to trust me.........in all things, the good and the bad.
Me: I WILL trust you, God.
GOD: And don't doubt that my plan for your day is always better than your plan.
Me: I won't, God. And let me just tell you, God, thank you for everything today.
GOD: You're welcome child. It was just another day being your God and I love looking after my children.

Stay warm, my friends.

The First Log On the Fire

Here are some things you should know about me at the outset. My faith begins with the conviction that God is real, not just something that happens somewhere inside my brain. I know God personally through a lifelong relationship with Jesus Christ, that began with my baptism as a little baby in a church basement in Two Harbors, Minnesota. Yes, God was at work in my life before I could possibly know anything at all about what that meant. That relationship has changed my life and continues to do so. I feel called to share my experience with others and to provide a place where others can share their experiences with me and the other readers of this blog. Many of my contributions will be revisions of the sermons I preach weekly in the interdenominational worship services at Sierra Winds, a life care community for seniors in Peoria, Arizona. My goal is that my posts will be thought-provoking and based on the biblical witness to the life and teaching of Jesus. Your comments are invited and encouraged. I can assure you that I will read them all and respond whenever I feel like doing so. My earnest wish is for us to explore together just how "The Way" of Jesus translates into who we are and what we're called to do at this time in our lives.

Grace and peace to you all. Stay warm, my friends.