(Psalm 40:1-5; Matthew 7:7-11)

Jesus said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.  For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who seeks finds, and everyone who knocks has the door opened for them.”  And the people of God said, “Um, Jesus, we asked that our sick would get better, and some of them died, and others are still in pain; and we went seeking for new jobs for those who are jobless, and some of them are still unemployed; and we knocked on the door of opportunity, and it’s still bolted shut.”  And the preachers of the prosperity gospel rose and said, “Ahh, but you weren’t really asking, seeking, and knocking, because you didn’t have enough faith.  If you didn’t get what you asked for, don’t blame God—it’s your fault.”  And the people of God hung their heads and went away, depressed.

So goes much of the discussion about this passage, and so all too often the preaching of it is not good news but a stumbling block; many have fallen here, and some have never gotten up again.  I don’t believe the problem is with Jesus, however, or with the actual meaning of the text; I think we misread it because of a couple assumptions we make that don’t actually fit with Jesus’ intent.

First, this passage is not about faith.  It’s a subtle distinction, but important:  this passage is not about faith, it’s about trust.  These concepts are closely related, but think about the way we use them.  When we talk about faith, we tend to be thinking about what God is going to do, or what another person is going to do; I have faith that so-and-so will do what I tell them, or that God will give me what I ask.  It’s outcome-based.  That’s why, when we pray for something and God doesn’t give us what we ask for, we call it an unanswered prayer.  It’s also why our focus shifts so easily from God to our faith—we come to see faith as a power we exercise to make our desired outcome happen.

Trust, by contrast, is more oriented to the character of the person.  I don’t trust my wife because she does what I want her to do; sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t.  You know her, she’s not exactly a pushover, and she definitely knows her own mind about things.  But while I have faith that she will do what she needs to do and what God has gifted her to do,  I trust her because of who she is in Jesus Christ:  a woman of integrity, honor, and wisdom who does not play people false.  If I ask her for something, it isn’t in faith that she has to say yes, or that she’ll say yes if I just want it badly enough; rather, I ask in trust that she wants what’s best for both of us, and that her judgment in such matters is sound.  So it is with God, only far more so, for his judgment is infallible, his wisdom is infinite, and his love for us is limitless and perfect.

Praying in trust, then, means setting aside the second assumption we typically make:  that Jesus means, “Ask, and you will be given exactly what you ask for,” and so on.  He doesn’t actually say that.  He says “it will be given to you,” but he doesn’t say what it is—there’s not even a subject there in the Greek, just the verb.  He says those who seek will find, but not what they’ll find; for those who knock, something will be opened, but he doesn’t even say it will be a door, let alone the same door.

As I say this, you might think I’m just splitting hairs for no good reason, but look at verses 9-10, because there’s more going on than we see at first.  There are two pairs here—bread/stone, fish/snake—and the parallel passage in Luke 11 adds a third one, egg/scorpion.  These look like random pairings, but they aren’t.  One, bread, eggs, and fish are staple foods in the Near East.  Two, as the Arabic Christian commentator Ibrahim Sa‘id points out, the round loaves of bread villagers would bake in their ovens look very like common round stones, and what looks like an egg on the table might very well be one of the scorpions of the region curled up to sleep.  As for the fish, there’s a type of catfish in the Sea of Galilee called the barbut which grows to about five feet long and looks very like a snake; by the Old Testament law, it’s an unclean fish and not to be eaten because it doesn’t have scales.

Jesus’ point here is not simply that if your child asks for something good, you won’t give them something bad instead.  When my son asks for candy and points at one of my pill bottles, am I going to give him a pill?  No way.  (I might not give him candy either, but that’s another matter.)  If he asks for food and points to something that isn’t food, am I going to give that to him?  No, I won’t, because for all my faults, I know how to give good gifts to my children.  He asks wrongly, not because it’s wrong for him to ask or because I don’t want to give him what he wants, but because he doesn’t understand what he’s looking at.  I’m not going to give in to his misunderstanding; instead, I’m going to tell him no, and then give him something else that will actually meet his need.

Again, so it is with God, only far more so, because he knows far better than we do what’s good for his children, and how to give us good gifts.  Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and you will see something open up.  It may not be what you wanted, or what you thought you needed, but it will be what you actually needed.  Seven years ago, I was praying hard that things would work out in Colorado; I pointed to that, over and over, and said, “Father, that’s bread—I want it.”  God knew it was really a stone, and said no.  I hammered on that door as hard and as long as I could, and it didn’t even dent, let alone budge; instead, God opened up a trap door, and I landed here.  I only realized after we’d been here a while how badly we had needed God not to give me what I was asking; if I could go back and change the ending to that story, I never would.

Jesus’ purpose here isn’t to promise us that God will give us whatever we ask for if we do it “right”; it’s to free us from the idea that prayer is about us doing it “right.”  The prosperity-gospel types teach you to ask for anything and everything so that God can give you anything and everything, because he wants to say yes to whatever we ask.  On the other end of the spectrum, you have the folks who say that we really shouldn’t ask God for anything much, and they’re making the same basic assumption.  As they see it, asking God for things is dangerous because we’re liable to ask wrongly—for something that isn’t good for us, or out of selfish motives—and so he’s only going to say no.  Either way, our prayers are really about us and how we’re praying.

Jesus wants us to see that prayer is really about God, and he invites us to ask freely.  He doesn’t set any limits at all, he just says, “Ask—seek—knock.”  Ask for whatever, and trust the Lord for what he gives.  Seek, and let the Father lead us.  Knock, and be confident that God will open up our way.  If we’re asking, seeking, and knocking, we might have the wrong idea, but at least we’re moving, and moving toward him.  God can always fix our steering problem.  We don’t have to figure out in advance what we ought to ask for, because he doesn’t only answer prayers that are in accordance with his will, and he doesn’t punish us if we ask unwisely.  If we ask him for bread, he intends to give us bread—if the particular loaf we want is actually a boulder in disguise, he won’t give us the boulder, but he will still give us bread.  His answer might come in a different way than we expect, from a different direction, but it will come.

The key, again, is trust.  Jesus is teaching us to depend on God and God alone—not our resumé, not our income, not our family and friends, not our skills, not our invest­ments, but only our Father in heaven.  If things are going well and we have more money than we need, still we put our trust in God to meet our needs—money is fickle.  If things are going badly and our income is dropping, still we put our trust in God to meet our needs—he has more than enough money, even if we can’t see it at the moment, and he will never leave us in the lurch.  We should strive to live our lives in such a way, and to live as a church in such a way, that if the Father ever failed to come through for us, we would be ruined; because everything else will fail us in the end, but he never will.

This is why Jesus tells us to ask freely, for anything and everything, because it teaches us to depend on God for anything and everything.  It sounds very spiritual to say that we shouldn’t ask God for stuff because that’s selfish and materialistic—but the fact is, we still want stuff even if we don’t ask him for it.  That just means we put our trust in our­selves to get ourselves the stuff we want, and the stuff we think we need.  Asking God for all of it teaches us to put our trust in him instead of ourselves.  The more we trust him, and the more we see him answer our prayers—and the more we see him do things that are better than what we asked him to do—the less we think of God simply saying yes or no to our requests, and the more we trust him to answer our prayers however it may be best for us.  The more all of this happens, the stronger our relationship with him grows.

(2 Samuel 12:1-14; Matthew 7:1-6)

In the Authorized Popular Culture Version of the Scriptures, also known as the Buddy Jesus Bible, Matthew 7 begins, “You’re not allowed to tell me anything I do is wrong.  Jesus said so.  And if you do, you’re a hypocrite.”  That’s why a lot of folks who mostly wouldn’t give the Bible the time of day are nevertheless fond of this passage.  I trust it won’t surprise you when I tell you that’s not what Jesus is talking about here.  In truth, there’s a fair bit of judgment, in one form or another, in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount.  In this passage, verse 5 makes it clear that we aren’t just supposed to ignore the sin in a brother’s life; but how to fit all this together has troubled many people.

To understand this, it helps once again to see how this fits into the greater structure of the Sermon on the Mount.  Our text this morning stands parallel to a longer passage in the center of Matthew 5, in that both these passages deal with law and judgment, and both are concerned to correct misuses of God’s law.  Their purpose is to teach us how we ought to use his law, and his word more generally.

In Matthew 5, Jesus takes aim at an approach to the law that says, “How can we interpret the law so that it doesn’t stop us doing what we want to do?”  The Pharisees had effectively been doing that by focusing on superficial obedience, which they could then define and interpret to suit themselves and their purposes.  Jesus corrects that by driving down to the true meaning and purpose of the law; to make it vivid, he goes case by case, bringing home the real force and significance of the commandments against murder and adultery, and the laws about divorce and the taking of oaths.

Here, he’s taking on the tendency to treat the law as a tool to be used on others—to control their behavior, to manipulate their actions, to punish them, or simply to beat them up and demonstrate their moral inferiority to oneself.  It’s a much briefer section, since there’s no need to discuss this case by case, but it’s a complex argument for all that, and we do well to read it carefully.

First, a principle I’ve noted before, that God doesn’t give us his commandments for us to tell others what to do, but for us to know what we’re supposed to do.  We see this with special clarity in Paul’s words to husbands and wives.  He doesn’t say, “Husbands, expect this from your wives and make your wives do this,” or, “Wives, you should be getting this from your husbands”; he says, “Wives, you do this,” and “Husbands, you do this,” and each of you let God worry about the other one.  So it is here.

We read God’s word to ourselves, and for ourselves; to understand it, we stand under it, and we look at our own lives in its light.  We apply it to ourselves and let the Holy Spirit speak through it to convict us of our sin.  This is hard; it requires us to humble ourselves to admit and accept that we’re being convicted, rather than denying that conviction, working to make excuses for ourselves, or proudly defying it.  We have to admit, not just intellectually but down deep in our souls, that we need to be convicted and corrected.  But that humility isn’t just a byproduct—it’s part of the point.  The conviction of the Holy Spirit, humbly accepted, moves us to repentance; and when we’re humbly repentant and aware of our own need for grace, then we can correct one another as Christ calls us to—not as something we have the right to do, but as an expression of love.

You see, we don’t have the right to use the word of God as judges, pronouncing others guilty and handing down sentences.  We’ve talked about this before, that judgment comes down from above, from a position of moral superiority; that’s why in a courtroom, the judge sits well above the floor and looks down on everyone else.  It’s a symbol, and a powerful one.  We don’t stand above anyone—we’re sinners saved by grace, that’s all, and that’s everything.  There are certainly many people who’ve done worse than we have, but even so, our need for grace is no less than theirs.  We aren’t qualified to pass judgment on anyone, and we don’t have the right.  Only God is, and only he does.

That said, this doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to call sin sin; in fact, we’re supposed to.  We just need to remember that the judge isn’t the only person in the courtroom.  Often during any trial, the most important person there is the witness on the stand, telling the court what they have seen and heard; and that’s our role.  We witness to what God has done for us, and also to what he’s taught us about himself and ourselves and the world.  Part of that is declaring the holiness of God, and our own sinfulness; part of that is straightforwardly naming sin as sin, without beating around the bush or trying to redefine it for our own comfort.  But if we do so humbly and graciously, not because we want to cause hurt but because we want to bless others, that isn’t judging or being judgmental.  It is, rather, warning others of the standards by which God judges, and will judge.

That’s uncomfortable, if you’re not self-righteous about it—and it’s a service the self-righteous cannot perform, because their spirit negates the service.  In Jesus’ parable, the log in the eye draws our attention for the sheer ridiculousness of the image, and rightly so; but we shouldn’t miss the reality that a speck in the eye is a painful problem that can cause a fair bit of damage.  Helping to remove such a thing is a good work, if you can see clearly to do it.  If your vision is obscured or distorted—by the log of self-righteous­ness, for instance—then you’re only likely to do harm; that’s the reason for Jesus’ injunction.  Challenging a fellow believer about an area of sin in their life should be a work of healing, restoration, and reconciliation, and it is, if we do it humbly and graciously, in an attitude of service.  It’s only when our heart isn’t right that it’s a problem.

You’ll note that I said, “a fellow believer”; so did Jesus.  He could have said, “the speck in another’s eye,” but he didn’t—he specified “your brother.”  He expands this in verse 6, which is pretty harsh in its language; pigs were the very worst animals to a Jewish audience, and dogs were maybe a half-step above pigs, if that.  What is holy, and what are your pearls?  The word of God is holy, and the kingdom of God is the pearl of great price (though that parable doesn’t come until chapter 13).  To your brother or sister in Christ, you go and you help them remove the speck from their eye, because they know the value and the power of the word of God and the promise of his kingdom.  But outside the church?  Maybe so, maybe no.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean we never talk to anyone about their sin if they aren’t a Christian.  If we did that, a lot of folks would never hear the gospel because they would never see the need.  It does mean this, however:  we should try to do so only with people whom the Holy Spirit is preparing to be receptive.  That’s a matter of spiritual discernment, learning to follow God’s leading, which comes only by much prayer; even the wisest and most godly will sometimes get it wrong, but they’ll tell you it’s better to get it wrong sometimes than to never speak.  This isn’t a call to be hyper-cautious, but it is a command to be thoughtful, because there are a lot of people out there who are closed of ear, mind, and heart.  If we try to convict them of their sin, they aren’t going to listen:  they’re going to trample the message underfoot, and probably attack us for our trouble.

If that happens, one thing they’ll probably do is accuse us of being judgmental.  Our culture likes to do that, because it’s committed itself to the proposition that what I want to do is who I am, and so if you tell me it’s wrong to do what I want to do, you’re telling me it’s wrong for me to be who I am, and that’s judging me.  With that, we’ve come full circle on this sermon; and we’ve come as well to the paradoxical title I’ve given it.  We cannot truly judge another from our knees, for that’s the posture not of arrogant judgment, but of humble service.  We also cannot turn away from serving another because we fear to be accused of judging them, and we know that some people will do that.  It’s a risk.  It’s one we need to take, because as the last verse of James tells us, “Whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”

(Proverbs 6:6-11; Matthew 6:25-34)

A couple years ago, I read a post on a blog called Pursuing Titus 2 that I’ve never forgotten.  It’s a post called “Fear and Grace,” and after telling the story of a time when she almost died from pneumonia, the author says this:

When we are simply imagining chilling scenarios, we are facing the horrible emotions without any of God’s sustaining grace.  Every time we imagine something, we put ourselves through agony of a kind we will never have to go through in real life.  Because when awful things are actually happening, God walks with us through them and gives us His grace and strength.  The peace of God’s presence through a trial is something I can never conjure up in my imagination, and something that only comes with real trials, not the pretend ones I make up while driving. Now I know the difference.

This is why anxiety is spiritually lethal, and why Jesus commands against it:  it pitches us out of the present, and out of dependence on God in the present, into a future of our own imagining—which is to say, a future that does not actually exist.  God is present in every place and time that exists; if something does not exist, God is not there.  If we project ourselves into a fu­ture that does not exist, we go alone—and this is what we do when we worry, when we let anxiety rule in our hearts.  When we do that, we are refusing to trust God, we are refusing to live by faith in him; by our actions, we are denying that he can be trusted, asserting that we will only make it through the trials and troubles of the future if we’ve solved them ahead of time by our own wits, and prepared ourselves for them by our own strength, out of our own resources.

Like last week, Jesus is talking about money here, but not for its own sake.  In the previous passage, he’s talking about money as treasure, inviting us to treasure God rather than our earthly possessions; here, his concern is with money as security, teaching us to trust God rather than our earthly possessions.  This fits with the parallel passage at the end of chapter 5, where Jesus asks us to trust that if we give up our claim to punish our enemies ourselves, but instead show them grace and give them over to God, we will not end up victimized, but vindicated; here, he asks us to trust that if we give up our claim to use our wealth for ourselves, and instead live by faith and give it over to God, that we will not end up bereft, but blessed.

This is alien to our culture.  I think most of us were taught as kids that we needed to do well in school so that when we grew up, we could get a good enough job to “earn a living,” or to “make a living.”  Not everyone has that sense of responsibility, of course; what do we say about those who don’t?  “They think the world owes them a living.”  (The apostle Paul would say, “If they refuse to work, let them not eat,” but that’s another discussion.)  In discussions about the economy, we talk about the “standard of living.”  In all of this, what’s a “living”?  It’s whatever amount of money is enough to “provide for our needs,” however we choose to define them.  The essential assumption is that we keep ourselves alive and provide for ourselves by our own efforts; and it’s an assumption which most of us in the church share.  Sure, we would affirm that God assists us and his help is important, but at bottom, we still believe it’s basically up to us.

Jesus tells us something very different:  this is God’s work.  He gave you your job, your income, and all the things you possess, and he didn’t do it so that you can provide for yourself.  He didn’t give you the ability to have pension plans and savings so that you can store up to provide for yourself in the future.  God gave you all those things so that you could use them to his glory.  Full stop.  God provides for us because he loves us, and to show his faithfulness.  Yes, he does so mainly through our own work—but he is the one who gave us our abilities and our skills, he is the one who gave us our opportunities and our connections, and he is the one who put the circumstances together so that we could succeed.  Our hands, God’s provision.

Now, I’m not naïve; I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.  I’ve been preaching regularly for over a decade now, I’ve preached in a lot of churches, and I know what some of you are thinking:  this is fine as far as it goes, but I can’t possibly mean—.  Yes, I do.  One of the great problems with the rich church in the First World is that most of us are nowhere near radical enough about this; we’re like Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5, we want to keep something back for ourselves.  So let’s up the ante here:  God didn’t give you money and possessions so that you could keep yourself alive.  Keeping you alive is his job, and he’s better at it than you are.  Our job is to lay down our lives for him, as Jesus says in Mark 8:  “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.  For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the sake of the gospel will save it.”

Just look at the parallel to this section, verses 38-48 of chapter 5.  As we saw some weeks ago, it isn’t about rolling over, being a doormat, or letting yourself be abused—far from it; it’s about trusting God in the face of human evil and fighting it his way.  But to do that, we have to reject our instinct to protect ourselves or defend ourselves and go out on a limb—we have to trust that if we take the radical step of leaving ourselves apparently unprotected and defenseless in the face of evil, that opens up a conduit for the power of God to attack evil through us.  We have to trust that by not protecting ourselves, we will be better protected, and by not defending ourselves, we will be better defended, because God will do what we cannot.  Jesus teaches us to leave our vindication and even our safety completely in God’s hands.

In the same way, this passage doesn’t justify irresponsibility, or never bothering to plan, or freeloading on other people and contributing nothing in return; it’s about trusting God in the face of evil circumstances and dealing with them his way.  Again, we have to reject our instinct to protect ourselves and go out on a limb:  we have to trust that if we take the radical step of putting God first with our money and our assets, using them to seek his kingdom and his righteous­ness, that he will in fact add all these things to us that we need.

I can illustrate this from the life of this congregation.  As I think most of you know, our budget is much larger than our congregational giving.  Our mission giving, our office wing, the founding of our preschool, and most of our staff have been made possible by large financial bequests to the church, most notably that of Harriet Gawthrop; interest from our investments and the sale of investment principal each cover something like a third of our spending.  The elders of this congregation have recognized this as God’s money which he has provided to us to advance the work of his kingdom, and so that’s how they and we have striven to use it.

From a worldly point of view, from a purely business point of view, this is foolish; from a spiritual point of view, it’s profoundly wise, and I commend them for it.  They have sought first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and God has continued to give us our bread that doesn’t run out.  Should God stop providing, it would, and so we’re compelled to acknow­ledge our dependence on him.  Because we’re human, sometimes we’re anxious, saying, “How long shall we have enough money?” and “How long shall we be able to keep going?”; and yet, God continues to show himself faithful, and by and large, we remember that today has enough troubles of its own.  We keep our focus on the challenges God has given us right now, and leave the troubles and challenges to come in his hands.

And why shouldn’t we?  And why shouldn’t you?  We don’t; we get anxious because we don’t fully understand what’s happening and we don’t know what’s going to happen, we worry because we think we have to figure out what to do and how to do it or else everything’s going to come apart, and when we get that way, we may talk like Christians but we walk like atheists.  Why do we do that?  Do we really believe that God values us so little that he’d just let us fall, that he’d let us go smash like a carton of eggs on the sidewalk?  Do you really believe he values you less than you value yourself?

You have all your self-doubts, all your fears, and all your regrets, and you have the Devil perched on your shoulder speaking through all of them to pour his poison into your soul.  God knows about all those things—indeed, he sees your darkness far better than you do—but he also sees the light he has made to shine in your heart.  He knows, not just who you are now, but who you will be by his love and his grace and his power, and he’s heaven-bent on healing and purifying and perfecting you; he made you and he loves you, no matter what you’ve done and no matter what you’re going to do.  And so, consider the corn of the field:  yes, there are tough years, when it’s hot and it’s dry and there isn’t much of a harvest, but the farmer doesn’t just pave it over and set up a fireworks shop; he keeps planting, and next time, it grows tall and green and golden.  So it is with God:  he who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it.  He cares for you, and he will provide for your needs, if you trust him to.

You may say this is impractical, that I’m being unrealistic, that I don’t know what I’m asking; from a worldly point of view, this is impractical.  But we are in Christ, we no longer live according to the flesh, we’ve been given a better point of view and a deeper understanding.

(Isaiah 51:7-8, Isaiah 58:1-9; Matthew 6:16-24)

As we read through our passage from Matthew this morning, it might have seemed like a jumble of unrelated stuff.  After all, Jesus is talking about fasting, and then he’s talking about money, and then you have whatever verses 22-23 are about, and then he’s back to money again; and what do all those things have to do with each other?  In fact, though, this whole passage is about one thing, which relates to each of these areas.

If we look at the Sermon on the Mount as I’ve laid it out, we can see that it’s carefully structured as one large ring composition—working in parallel sections from the outside in.  With such a structure, the climax comes in the middle, and so it is here with the Lord’s Prayer; that marks the turn, and then you begin working back through the same themes as the first half, only in reverse order.  This passage stands in parallel to the first six verses of this chapter—which also, on the surface, dealt with two different things:  giving to the needy, and prayer.  In both, however, if you look at what Jesus is saying, you find one central question and one primary concern:  do you want your reward from other people on this earth, or do you want it from your Father in heaven?

Jesus spends the greater part of these two passages asking that question about our religious activities.  Partly, that’s because of the Pharisees; not only were they his loudest opponents, they were past masters at spiritualizing everything, and com­pletely blind to the issue he’s raising with their religious behavior.  More than that, it’s because it’s so easy to spiritualize things, and assume that if what we’re doing looks religious or spiritual, we must be pleasing God—we don’t need to examine our hearts or question our motives.  Fact is, though, just because we look like a Christian doesn’t mean we are.

Jesus doesn’t stop there, however.  It’s interesting, if you compare these two passages, you can see some additional inverse parallelism going on.  The inner sections, 5-6 and 16-18, deal with fasting and prayer, which traditionally go together; in the outer sections, Jesus talks about money.  In verses 2-4, as noted, his concern is with giving money to the needy; in 19-21 and 24, his focus is broader.  The issue is the same—are you using your money to earn an earthly reward, or a reward in heaven?—but he appears to have more material rewards in mind; and more than that, Jesus expands on the warning he gives in verse 1.  It’s not just that if we get our reward in this world, we miss out in the long run; there’s a greater spiritual cost attached.

The rewards you seek become your treasures.  If you win them, they become your treasures in the present, the things to which you look for meaning and satisfaction in your life now; if you don’t win them, they become your treasures in the future, or perhaps in the past, leaving you dissatisfied with the present because of something that didn’t happen, and may never.  Either way, you set your heart on them, and so that’s where your heart is to be found.

Now, remember, in the Beatitudes, Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart”; and if you were here when we looked at that verse, remember two things we saw then.  First, when the Bible talks about the heart, it doesn’t mean our emotions, it means the core of our being—the center of our intellect, the wellspring of our emotions, the root of our will.  Where your treasure is, that’s the center of your life.  Everything else falls into place around that, and that’s what drives your decisions.  Second, a pure heart is a heart which is all good, because it’s completely devoted to God; it has no additives and is com­pletely unadulterated.  It is single, all one thing—there are no conflicting loyalties, no contradictory desires.  That’s why Psalm 86 says, “Teach me your way, O Lord . . . give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name.”

Why does this matter?  Well, verse 22 literally says, “If your eye is single, your whole body will be full of light.”  No one translates it that way because people would take it badly, but if we think of it in terms of focus—which is a metaphor we take from eyesight—it makes sense.  Light enters the body through the eye, and God is the source of all light.  If we have a single focus on God, our eyes are open to his light, and it fills us.  If we focus away from God, we turn our eyes into the darkness, and our lives go dark.  The heart focuses the eye on what it desires; through the eye, the heart is filled.  Where your heart is, your eye follows; and where you look, your heart follows.

If, then, you fix your attention on the things of this world, it is the things of this world that you treasure; if your heart is set on this world and the things of this world, then your focus will be on the things you have and the things you desire, and your concerns will be all for them—which means it will be this world that owns you, not God.  And ownership is precisely what’s in view in verse 24, for this is the language of slavery, not employment:  either the world owns you, or God does.  You can’t divide your loyalties between this world and God, because they pull in opposite directions, and both demand exclusive allegiance; to obey one is to defy and reject the other.

If your goal is to have treasures on earth—whatever they might be:  money, expensive things, success, a good reputation, marriage, family—then the desire to get and keep those treasures will run your life; they will be your idols, the gods you really worship.  You will obey the Lord and believe in him only as far as who he is and what he tells you to do fit with what your idols demand of you—which is to say, you won’t really believe in him or obey him at all.  You might say you love him, but you won’t love him as he truly is, only as you want to believe he is; in truth, you will despise him.

This is true even if your idols are religious.  If your treasure is having a big church with lots of programs, if it’s the church building or having lots of money in the church’s bank account, then you’re not actually loving or serving God—you’re trying to serve two masters.  The fact that you might be doing this in the name of God doesn’t change that any; it’s no better to make an idol of the church than to make one of anything else.

Does this mean it’s bad to have money and a good career, to be married with kids, or to have a big church with a beautiful building and lots of money in the bank?  Of course not.   The problem isn’t with having any of these things, it’s when they become our treasures.  It’s not what we own, it’s what owns us.  God gives us many good things, and he wants us to enjoy them and to use them well—but he wants us to hold them lightly.  He doesn’t want us to treasure them, he wants us to treasure him, alone.  The question for us isn’t, “What do you have?” or, “What do you want?”; it is, simply, “Where is your heart?”

(Psalm 31:1-8; Matthew 6:13)

Why do we call this the Lord’s Prayer?  Have you ever wondered that?  I’ve been asked that before, but I only recently found an answer to the question, in a book on this prayer called Ain’t Too Proud to Beg, by Westmont College theology professor Telford Work.  You may remember I mentioned this book a few weeks ago.  Dr. Work notes that many of us who consider ourselves theologically conservative assume that this is just a prayer Jesus is teaching the disciples—sure, Jesus prayed, but his prayers were different.  He meant something different when he said, “My Father” than we do when we say “Our Father.  After all, we’re clearly very different from Jesus, and why would he need to ask forgiveness for his sins?  And so, for the best of reasons, we “separat[e] the Father’s relationship to Jesus from the Father’s relationship to us.”

That’s a grave mistake, because it effectively pitches the gospel out the window.  “If that were the case,” Dr. Work says, “Jesus would have come and gone without changing much of anything.  God’s relationship to us would be no more than a Creator’s relationship with his creatures.  Still aloof from his fellow human beings, the Son would not truly be one of us, not Emmanuel, not God with us.”  He’s right.  The gospel rests on the fact that Jesus became fully human, completely one of us.  He identified himself totally with us—that’s why he could take our sins, and their punishment, on himself.  He prays this prayer along with us—yes, including “forgive us our sins,” not because he committed any, but because we have committed many, and he became sin on our behalf.  He prays with us still, and for us, as our great High Priest in heaven, beside the throne of God the Father.  We talked about that a few years back as we worked through Hebrews.

The key point here is something we keep coming back to as we spend time in the Sermon on the Mount:  this is all about relationship.  Above all, prayer is about relationship, and our relationship with God first and foremost.  That’s why, when Jesus teaches us to pray, he tells us to begin by saying “Our Father”:  we begin by claiming that relationship which is ours by his grace, and acknowledging that relationship which is supposed to be the most important reality in our lives, from which everything else finds its meaning and significance.  That’s why he teaches us to ask God to reveal himself in us, to bring us into full submission to his authority, which means ultimately to remake us according to his will, not ours; it’s why he teaches us to confess our total dependence on our Father in heaven, both for our physical needs and for our spiritual ones.

And it’s what finally makes sense of this verse, and especially the first part of it.  We commonly say this, “Lead us not into temptation,” but the New Revised Standard Version translates it, “Do not bring us into the time of trial,” which should give you a pretty good idea of the problem here.  Temptation, trial, testing, all of those words translate this one Greek word; and all of them pose difficulties.  We already know that God doesn’t tempt anyone, so asking him not to tempt us makes no sense; and on the other hand, he makes it clear that he does test us and he does send us trials, and that he does so for our growth, so why would we ask God not to do something he’s already said he’s going to do?  Especially when he says it’s for our benefit in the long run?

Part of the problem is that “lead” isn’t a strong enough translation for the verb here, which means “to bring” or “to carry.”  It’s the verb used in the Greek version of the Old Testament when they bring the sacrifice into the presence of God.  This is a prayer that God would not put us in harm’s way—we’re perfectly capable of doing that all by ourselves.  We already lead ourselves into temptation without any trouble, we certainly don’t need the help.

But doesn’t that make this an expression of distrust in God?  No, it doesn’t, once we remember that this is a personal and relational prayer.  That’s easy to lose sight of; I’m grateful this week to Andrea Skowronski for pointing me back to this.  With her permission, I’m going to quote her here, because I don’t think I could say it better:

“Lead us not into temptation” is an appeal to God’s very nature as holy and separate from evil.  Lead us not into temptation, because the evil one does that.  Lead us not into temptation because You are holy and apart from the evil one.  Lead us not into temptation because we are weak and small and afraid, and we need You.  Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one, because if You don’t, we are (and I say this with no trace of flippancy) damned.  We know You are holy.  Be holy.  Show us You are holy.  Act according to Your nature.  And also, we know You do act according to Your nature.  We know You will act according to Your nature.

As you think about that, consider also this story from Kenneth Bailey:

Some years ago, in Egypt, my friends and I made a number of extended trips into the Sahara to visit a famous well, named Bir Shaytoun . . .  For that particular journey, we always selected “Uncle Zaki” as our guide. . . .  As we would leave the village on the edge of the Nile and head out into the almost trackless Sahara, each of us in turn felt the inner pressure to say, “Uncle Zaki, don’t get us lost!”  What we meant . . . was, “We don’t know the way to where we are going, and if you get us lost we will all die.  We have placed our total trust in your leadership.” . . .  [This] phrase in the Lord’s Prayer expresses the confidence of an earthly pilgrim traveling with a divine guide.  The journey requires the pilgrims to affirm daily, “Lord, we trust you to guide us, because you alone know the way that we must go.”

This fits with the one change I would make in the way we say the Lord’s Prayer—you saw it in the NIV:  not “deliver us from evil,” but “deliver us from the evil one.”  Jesus isn’t teaching us to ask God to keep evil things from happening to us, or to keep our lives from being affected by the power of evil, much as we might wish that.  Rather, he tells us to ask God to set us free from the power of the evil one in our lives.  This is in part the power of temptation, and in particular those temptations to which we fall again and again, but it’s far more.  It’s the power of lies, about ourselves and others.  It’s the power of fear, of all the fears that hold us captive—of rejection, of loss, of inadequacy, of pain, and on and on and on.  It’s the power of despair, and its minions sloth and burnout, that tell us to give up because it’s all just wasted effort anyway.

We know those powers, and we know they affect us.  Whatever we pray, whatever we do, temptations come, and trials come, and we are tested, and sorely.  Has God ignored our prayer?  No.  First, we remember that God does not tempt us; he allows the temptation, but he isn’t trying to make us fall, he wants us to overcome it.  Second, we remember that in every temptation and every trial, Jesus is right with us by his Holy Spirit.  We are not alone, and we do not face trials and temptations in our own strength alone.

And third, we remember that we do not pray, “Keep us safe from the evil one,” but “Deliver us from the evil one.”  We can run away from some temptations (and when we can, we usually should), but the root of temptation is in each of our hearts, and we carry it with us wherever we go.  The only way we might ever keep the evil one from going after us would be to make ourselves completely harmless to him—to abandon our liberty in Christ for the sake of a little temporary safety—which would mean turning away from the one who said, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.”

We look at that, and we look at our struggles with temptation, and the ways the enemy attacks us and our families, and all the ways the world is at war with the church—and don’t imagine it was any less so thirty years ago, or sixty, or a hundred sixty; there has never been a time the Devil has gone easy on the people of God—we see all that and we want to pray, “Deliver us from evil”; we see the battles raging and we cry out, “Father, lead me around all that.”  It’s perfectly understandable that we look for the wide gate and the easy way.  But Jesus looks at us and says, “No, when you pray, pray this way:  Father in heaven, I see the battle up ahead, I see the valley of the shadow on the horizon; please stay with me all the way to the other side.  If you lead me in, please lead me through.”

(Psalm 103:8-14; Matthew 6:12-15, Matthew 18:21-35)

I’m sure most of you know that when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, some churches say “debts” and some say “trespasses.”  Do you know why?  Well, Presbyterians are are old Scottish bankers, so they’re worried about debts, while Episcopalians are stuffy English landowners, so they care about trespassing.  Or so the story goes, anyway . . .

In all seriousness, there is a good reason.  “Trespasses,” in its older, deeper meaning, names the things we have done that we shouldn’t have done.  “Debts” names the things we owe to God and to each other that we have failed to do.  Theologians call these sins of commission and sins of omission; if we just say “sins,” we tend to think of trespasses and forget about debts.  But while English and Greek treat these as two different things, the Aramaic that Jesus spoke used one word for both, and both are in view here.

Of course, that makes this passage harder, not easier, because it piles that much more weight on that word “forgive.”  We have a painful time with that, because there are people we don’twant to forgive, and some we don’t think we can forgive; does that mean we’re asking God notto forgive us?  Is his forgiveness conditional on ours?

To untangle this, we need to begin by asking ourselves a critical question:  what does it mean to forgive?  We need to begin here because most of the common answers to that question are wrong, and they can mess us up pretty badly.  First off, forgiveness does not mean saying, “It’s okay.”  It doesn’t mean pretending the past didn’t happen or that we weren’t hurt; it most emphatically does not mean denying that evil was done, to us or to someone else.  To forgive the debts and trespasses of another is, first, to look at them clearly and name them clearly as wrong, as sinful, as violations of the character of God.

Second, forgiveness does not mean pretending, or assuming, that the sin which we forgive will never be repeated.  As one of my old professors, Dr. John Stackhouse, writes,

People generally don’t become perfect after a single round of repentance and forgive­ness.  Jesus tells us to forgive the same person seven times in a single day to make hyperbolically clear that a single episode of repentance and forgiveness may not be the end of it.

Part of forgiving others is recognizing that even redeemed sinners are still sinners, and that in one way or another, they will do it to us again.

Third, forgiveness does not mean trust.  Now, hear me carefully on this.  When we don’t forgive wrongs that have been done to us, we have the tendency to re-member­ them—to give them new bodies in the present, so that they have new life to cause hurt all over again.  We keep bringing them up and beating other people up with them, and beating ourselves up with them, rather than leaving them in the past.  Forgiveness means letting go of that.  But it doesnot mean “forgive and forget.”  We can’t, and we shouldn’t.  If you have a repentant embezzler in the congregation—even someone who stole from the church—you commit to forgive them and to embrace them as a brother or sister in Christ; you don’t keep punishing them for it.  You also don’t make them the church treasurer.  You don’t re-member their sin, but you don’t forget what you learned about their spiritual weakness.

Fourth, forgiveness does not mean tolerating injustice.  If anything, forgiveness strengthens the pursuit of justice, because anger and bitterness do not overcome injustice, they only continue the cycle.  True justice does not arise out of hatred and resentment and the desire to return evil for evil; it is rooted in the character of God, who created all things good and beautiful, and who hates all sin—ours included.  Forgiveness means recognizing that we are not innocent, that we too have done wrong; it means laying down the self-righteous desire for vengeance, and seeking to make things right.

Fifth, forgiving someone else does not require their repentance.  Forgiveness and repentance both are first and foremost between us and God, because every sin is ultimately against him, whomever else it may also be against.  We are also called to confess and repent to one another, yes, and to express our forgiveness to one another, because this is necessary for us to be reconciled to one another and our broken relationships to be repaired; but if others refuse to repent—or refuse to forgive, for that matter—if they reject reconciliation, we are not bound to their rejection, nor are we bound by it.  We are free to forgive those who hurt us whether they repent of their sin or not.

And yes, I did say free, because freedom is precisely the point.  When we refuse to forgive someone because they will not repent, we aren’t hurting them any, but we are hurting ourselves.  We bind ourselves with strong chains to the wrong done to us so that it will be a constant burden on our souls.  Rather than letting the wound heal, we hold it open, we continually pick at it and aggravate it, letting its poison continue to seep into our hearts.  As long as we do that, we cannot move forward.  It’s only when we forgive that we can “cut [ourselves] loose from the burden and corrosion of anger, vengeance, fear, and other horrible feelings arising from the offense,” as Dr. Stackhouse says; it’s only then that we are “free to walk away from this horrible part of the past and heal.”

When we understand this, we begin to see why forgiving others isn’t just a gift to them, it’s a gift to ourselves; it’s not a regrettable duty to which Jesus commands us, but a blessing which he offers us, and a source of life.  This is half the reason he calls us to forgive those who hurt us.  The other half, of course, is something we’ve talked about before in this series:  we do not forgive others from a position of moral superiority, we stand on the same ground.  We too owed a debt we could never hope to repay; we too had done wrong to others that we could never hope to set right.  We too deserved only judg­ment and punishment, but in Jesus, we were and are forgiven.  He let go of his rightful claim against us—he let go and let it fall on himself.  He paid the price justice demanded in order to show us mercy.  If we understand that, how can we not show mercy to others?

As we saw when we were going through the Beatitudes, Jesus says “blessed are the merciful” not because we have to show mercy to earn God’s mercy, but because the merciful are those who have received God’s mercy and are being changed by it.  When he says, “If you don’t forgive others, your Father in heaven won’t forgive you,” the point is not to set a condition on God’s forgiveness, but to help us see clearly the state of our hearts.

We may struggle to forgive someone who’s hurt us badly; we may try over and over again to forgive them, and find over and over again that we still aren’t free of the bitterness.  But that struggle is evidence that God has forgiven our sins and his Holy Spirit is at work in our lives, because it’s a struggle that’s only possible by his power.  It’s profoundly different from holding a grudge and cherishing unforgiveness in our hearts; the flat refusal to try to forgive another is what Jesus is talking about here.

When we pray, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” we aren’t asking that God would measure his forgiveness by the hardness of our hearts.  I think part of Jesus’ purpose in teaching us to pray this way is to soften our hearts, to challenge us with the greatness of God’s mercy toward us and to grow in us the desire to forgive others just as we are forgiven.

(Proverbs 30:7-9; Matthew 6:11)

You probably noticed that the way Kaleb read this verse from Matthew isn’t the way we’re used to saying it.  There’s good reason for that, but you’ll have to let me go full language-nerd on you for a moment.  You see, the word here in the Greek doesn’t really exist anywhere else, except in early Christian writers trying to interpret it; neither Matthew nor Luke uses it outside their record of this prayer, and none of the other books of the New Testament picks up on it.  By the time we see leaders in the church writing about the Lord’s Prayer, its meaning is unclear to them.

Over the years, various explanations of this word have been offered.  It could, of course, refer to time, and this is the interpretation that has prevailed in the Western church tradition; those who understand it this way then divide over whether it means today or tomorrow.  Obviously, our standard English translation presents this as a prayer that God would give us bread for today.  It’s also possible that the word here isn’t a time word at all, but refers to an amount of bread; this has been more common in the Eastern church, especially in the non-Greek-speaking communions.  Some then interpret this as a prayer that God would give us just enough bread to stay alive, while others translate it more generally as “the bread we need.”

Now, you might be wondering if this really matters all that much; but we can see that it does, once we realize what bread meant to Jesus’ audience.  Nowadays, bread is easily available, just one food among many; you can go without it altogether, and many people have to for health reasons.  That’s a recent development, though.  In a review in The Atlantic of a book on Wonder Bread, Benjamin Schwarz writes,

In the early 20th century, Americans got more of their calories from bread than from any other single food.  This meant that they had to depend either on keeping women close to home . . . or on buying bread from the thousands of unregulated “cellar bakeries” that typically produced adulterated loaves in filthy conditions. The solution, developed early in the century (a period “when food-borne illnesses were the leading causes of death”), was inexpensive bread mass-produced in sanitary, factory-like conditions, wrapped in packaging to prevent exposure to germs. . . .  To an underfed population, however, it was a cheap and safe source of calories and—thanks to vitamin enrichment, a radical innovation of the war years—essential nutrients.

Wonder Bread and its ilk were “safe, reliable, nourishing, if hardly delicious, food [that was] universally available.”  We take that for granted now, but that was a major change in the human economy.  Jesus and his disciples lived in a very different world.  For them, bread was the staple food; it was the one absolute necessity, and not just as a source of calories to fill the stomach.  As Kenneth Bailey writes, in the Near East,

Bread is the knife, fork, and spoon with which the meal is eaten.  The different items of the meal are in common dishes.  Each person has a loaf of bread in front of him.  He breaks off a bite-sized piece, dips it into the common dish, and puts the entire “sop” into his mouth.  He then starts with a fresh piece of bread and repeats the process.  The common dish is never defiled from the eater’s mouth . . .  The bread must be flavored with something for the meal.  In absolute desperation the bread is dipped into a dish of salt.  Thus the Oriental phrase “eating bread and salt” means . . . abject poverty.

In Scripture, bread represents all that we need, and all that we must have to stay alive; it’s the absolute foundation of God’s provision for us.  That means that how we understand this verse is critical to our understanding of our needs, and how God provides for them, and how he wants us to pray about them.  Are we supposed to pray just that he would meet our needs for today, and take no thought for tomorrow?  That would seem to fit with Jesus’ words later in this chapter.   Or are we praying for tomorrow’s bread—and if so, what does that mean?  That one can actually get pretty strange.  Or is the point that we’re only supposed to ask God for the bare minimum and nothing more?

Here again, I think Dr. Bailey is helpful, as he points us to one of the very earliest translations of the New Testament, into the Syriac language—a language closely related to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus; Syriac was the language of Syria and parts of the Middle East before the rise of Islam, and is still preserved by the ancient Syriac churches.  In the Old Syriac, this prayer reads, “Ameno bread this day give to us.”  Ameno is related to the word “amen,” and according to the lexicons, it means “lasting, never-ceasing, never-end­ing, or perpetual.”  As I had Kaleb read Matthew this morning, “Give us this day our bread that doesn’t run out.”  Give us the bread we need for today, yes; give us enough to meet our needs, yes; give us more than just the bare minimum, so that we have enough to share and enough to take care of others, definitely; but there’s more here than that.  To quote Dr. Bailey,

One of the deepest and most crippling fears of the human spirit is the fear of not having enough to eat. . . . [which] can destroy a sense of well-being in the present and erode hope for the future.  I am convinced that . . . at the heart of the Lord’s Prayer Jesus teaches his disciples a prayer that means, “Deliver us, O Lord, from the fear of not having enough to eat.  Give us bread for today and with it give us confidence that tomorrow we will have enough.”

In other words, when we pray this—and saying, “Give us this day our daily bread” works just fine, as long as we understand that this is what it means—we aren’t just praying that God will provide for our needs; as with verses 9-10, that’s a prayer that he would do what he’s already said he’s going to do.  It’s also a prayer that he would give us the faith that he will provide for our needs, that he would teach us to trust him to provide for our needs without reservation.  To borrow from FDR, we aren’t just asking for freedom from want, we’re asking God for freedom from fear.

Now, as we say this, we should bear in mind that the prayer is for bread, not for cake; this is Jesus, not Marie Antoinette.  He teaches us to ask for the things we truly need, for the things that sustain life and give us strength to follow him, not for the luxuries.  That doesn’t mean we’re forbidden to ask for things above and beyond what we absolutely need; it does, however, give the lie to those who teach that God wants to give you whatever you want, as long as you ask for it the right way or with enough faith or whatever it may be.  That’s not Jesus, and that’s not how he teaches us to pray.

In line with that, note also that we are to pray for our bread, not my bread.  As I pray this prayer, I don’t just ask God to take care of me and provide for my needs; I don’t ask for blessings for myself alone, or even just for myself and my family.  Instead, I ask him to provide for us—which means, in part, that he would give me and my family enough to share, that we would have our part in providing for those around us.  That’s one of the reasons I believe this is a prayer for more than just subsistence, and more than just today:  once we’re free of the fear of running out, going hungry, going broke, we’re able to be generous in sharing God’s gifts to us, and in showing hospitality to others.

At the heart level, that’s the deepest meaning of all to this prayer.  This world teaches us to believe that it’s my bread.  I’ve earned it because of my work, I made it happen, I have a certain right to feel superior to those who haven’t done as well, and it’s up to me to continue to provide for myself; in that mindset, I put my trust in my bread and my ability to earn it and bring it home.  That’s the foundation of our whole under­standing of wealth.  Jesus upends it.

The Bible certainly affirms the importance of good, hard work, and of responsibility and self-discipline in using the gifts God gives us—but that’s the key point:  the things we have, and the things we’re able to do, are God’s gift, nothing we’ve earned.  We see wealth as something that belongs to us, that we need to use carefully to make sure we’re provided for.  Jesus calls us to understand that all wealth belongs to God, and that he is the one who makes sure we’re provided for; it isn’t ours to use for our own purposes.  We need to use it carefully, yes, but not to keep ourselves alive, not to keep ourselves afloat; we need to use it carefully to make sure that we’re doing what God wants us to do with it, that we’re using it to bless others, not just to take care of ourselves.  He wants to set us free from the fear of running out so that we may be free to give it away.

(Ezekiel 36:22-23; Matthew 6:9-10)

Two weeks ago, I challenged you to do two things:  to listen for God and expect him to speak to you, and to pray the Lord’s Prayer every day, specifically for this church.  I hope you started doing both of those things, and I hope you’re still doing them; and as you’ve been praying the Lord’s Prayer, I hope you’ve been thinking about what it means to ask these things of God.  In particular, I hope you’ve been thinking about these two verses:  do we really know what we’re getting ourselves into here?

Take this first one.  Our Father in heaven, may your name be made holy.  Be made holy by whom?  You may remember a little while back I talked about the “divine passive”—the Jewish practice of using the passive voice to say that God did something without using God’s name, just to be sure they didn’t use it in vain.  That’s what we have here; this means, “Father, make your name holy.”  But what does that mean?  We don’t ask God to make the water wet or the fire hot—they already are, by definition.  God doesn’t have to make his name holy, it already is.  So what do we do with this?

Two things.  First, we need to understand these three petitions in light of the line that concludes them:  “on earth as it is in heaven.”  Second, his name represents God as he reveals himself to us as a person whom we can know and with whom we can communicate.  Kenneth Bailey illustrates this with Moses at the burning bush—his first words are a request to be told God’s name.  If he doesn’t know God’s name, he can’t communicate with God; it’s only the name that makes relationship possible.  So, yes, God’s name is holy, his character is holy, and in heaven, everyone knows it and everyone knows that’s a good thing—but down here on earth?  Not so much.  That’s why Telford Work, in his marvelous book Ain’t Too Proud to Beg, titled his chapter on this petition “The Reputation of God.”  That’s a bit too small, but it makes the point.

When we pray, “Father in heaven, make your name holy”—we’re painting a target on our foreheads.  If we’re asking that his name would be recognized as holy on earth just as it is in heaven, if we’re serious about that, we don’t get to specify that happening through somebody else:  it’s coming down on us.  Praying “Father in heaven, make your name holy in me and in our church” doesn’t actually change the prayer at all, it just focuses our attention on what we’re saying here.  Father, change my heart, change my life, change the hearts of our congregation and the life of our church, so that when people out­side the church look at us, they will see the holiness of God and praise him for it.

If that’s starting to frighten you, it gets better—and by better, I mean “even scarier.”  Consider this holy God, consider Isaiah’s reaction when he’s given a vision of God’s holiness, and then think:  not only do we pray that he would make his name holy, we pray that his kingdom would come, on earth as in heaven.  A lot of folks say this is just a prayer for the end of time, but I don’t buy it; yes, the kingdom of God is still in the future, but it’s also already here.  We’ve talked about this before.  In Christ, the kingdom of God breaks into this world—and he leaves us behind as his body, in whom by his Spirit the kingdom of God is still breaking into this world.  We are the beachhead, we are the em­bassy, we are a colony of heaven among the nations of earth.  We pray that the kingdom of the holy God would come, and the answer he gives us is—us.  Not in our power, not in our wisdom, not in our riches, but only by his Spirit; but still, his Spirit in us.

As we are praying that God would display his holiness unmistakably in us, so too we pray that his reign and his authority would be revealed—would be realized—in us.  This is partly a matter of our obedience, our dedication to seek and to follow his will, and so the third request ties in closely here; again, we don’t get to pray, “May your will be done—but only through those people over there; let me do my own thing.”  If we say it and we mean it, we’re putting ourselves front and center, asking God to change our hearts and our minds so that we would do his will.  Tell truth, even if we say it and don’t mean it, I’ve known God to take people at their word and grant this kind of request even when it was insincere, only offered for appearances.  Prayer is a dangerous thing.

Beyond obedience, though, this is about our allegiance.  I said last year that our model for faithful discipleship is the Jews in exile under kings like Nebuchadnezzar, Belteshazzar, and Darius; in the Wednesday afternoon group right now, we’re working through Daniel, and one of the most striking things about the first part of that book is the absolute clarity Daniel and his friends had that their true allegiance was to God and God alone.  They served pagan kings faithfully because that was how God had called them to serve him; part of their service to those kings was to make that point clear.  Thus in Daniel 3, the three young men tell the king, “It doesn’t matter what you can give us, or what you can do to us; it doesn’t matter what God does for us, or doesn’t.  Regardless of all of it, we bow to him, and we only bow to him.”  That was the kingdom of God made visible.

This isn’t easy, and in a worldly sense, it isn’t safe.  God doesn’t promise to keep us safe, he just promises to bring us through.  Those three young men, after all, got them­selves thrown in a furnace going somewhere north of 1000°.  If we show the holiness of God, we will be called unloving (and worse) by those who demand we compromise.  If we show allegiance to his kingdom, we will be called un-American (and worse) by those who put this country first.  And if we commit ourselves to do his will, we’re going to find that he meant what he said about laying down our lives; we can’t refuse to do something just because it’s too risky, because sometimes he calls us to risk everything for him.

At least, in a worldly sense, for the only thing he calls us to risk are the treasures of this world, which are here for a season, then gone like the dew; and he calls us to risk them, to put them all at hazard, in order to wean us from our trust in them and our depen­dence on them, that we might learn to trust in him alone.  He wants us to hold all our riches and all our plans lightly, with open hands.  For those who reject God, this is where many, perhaps most, turn away; like the rich young ruler, they’re not willing to let go—not willing to give up control.  As Telford Work puts it,

The line between the greatest faith and the bitterest unbelief is nothing more than the willingness to kneel.

(Isaiah 57:15-16; Matthew 6:9, Luke 15:11-32)

Religions tend to have sacred languages.  In Islam, God mainly speaks seventh-century Arabic.  The Qur’an was supposedly dictated to Mohammad word for word, and so when you memorize it, you memorize it in that language—whether you understand it or not.  That’s why the God of Islam is always called “Allah,” because that’s the Arabic word for “god”; and it’s why the traditional prayers are offered in seventh-century Arabic, even if you don’t speak it at all.  Most Jews of Jesus’ day spoke Aramaic, and maybe Greek, not Hebrew—but prayers were offered in classical Hebrew, all the same.  Some in this country firmly believe God speaks King James English, and if you don’t say “thee” and “thou” when you pray, you’re not doing it right.

And then along comes Jesus, and he says, “Pray like this,” and the next word out of his mouth is, “Abba.”  It’s the Aramaic word for “my father,” or “our father”; and when he said that, the earth shook.  No, not because this means “Daddy”—it doesn’t, despite what you may have heard—but with that one word, he gave his disciples a new way to talk to God, and a whole new model for what it meant to be the people of God.  Gone is the idea that you have to talk to God in just the right way for him to listen; and gone with it is the idea that any one people or culture or group has an inside track on God’s love and attention and favor.  All are welcome at the throne of grace.

That’s only half the punch of this word abba, though.  The Old Testament sometimes describes God as father when talking about him as Creator and King, and the Redeemer of his people; and in the prophets, God sometimes calls Israel his son.  But to address God as Father—and especially as my Father—that was different.  There’s nothing casual about this, for abba was a respectful word; but it was also a word which affirmed a profound personal relationship.  If you call God Abba, if you address him as “my Father,” you aren’t talking to him as someone who’s far distant and far above you.  You may understand, rightly, that he is indeed far above you, far bigger and greater than you, and far more good; but at the same time, you’re talking to him as someone who’s right here with you, who knows you completely and loves you deeply, without question or hesitation.

Of course, we have to be careful not to let our image of human fathers control our image of God, since none of us live up to his standard, and some fall infinitely short; we need to see how Jesus describes his heavenly Father, and ours.  That’s why we read the parable of the two lost sons.  (Your Bibles probably call it the parable of the prodigal son, but ignore that; both those sons are prodigals, one’s just more obvious about it.)  I’m not going to cover this parable in detail this morning—come back in October for that—but I want to give you an idea just how shocking this parable was to Jesus’ audience.

First, in that culture, for the younger son to say “Give me my inheritance now” basically meant, “I wish you were dead.”  Second, for such a traumatic insult, the father would have been considered perfectly justified in beating his son within an inch of his life and throwing him out of the house with nothing.  I heard that same reaction in seminary, by the way, from fellow students from Israel and also from East Asia.  Third, that inheritance was not money, but land—the land which sustained the family; for the son to sell it was to violate the Law of Moses, to betray his family, and to make himself the enemy of his entire community.  The only way he could possibly redeem himself would be to come back so rich that he could buy it all back and then some.  Fourth, if he came home a failure, the village would shower him with abuse, and probably with rocks.

All of which is to say, the way the younger son acts, someone’s going to kill him, or the next thing to it—if the father doesn’t, his neighbors will.  But not only does the father not punish him at all, he blesses him; and then he sits every day on his front porch, looking down the road, watching for his son to come home.  And when he sees his son away off in the distance, he takes off running—and in that culture, grown men never ran, and the more important you were, the slower you walked; you wore a robe that reached all the way to the ground, and to run, you had to tuck it all up into your belt and expose your legs, and that was shameful.  But he does it, running all the way through the village, protecting his son from the abuse and attacks of his neighbors by taking all that shame on himself; and then he welcomes his son back into the family, without any reservation.

This is who God is; and this is who we are.  If we come to him, it isn’t as people he hopes to punish, who have to figure out a way to get on his good side; we come to him as his beloved children, welcomed home.

(1 Kings 18:25-29; Matthew 6:7-13)

We have come to the very heart of the Sermon on the Mount:  the Lord’s Prayer.  This isn’t at the center of this sermon by accident, but by necessity.  Jesus begins the Sermon by talking about the way of the disciple—the one who is truly blessed is the one who is living life God’s way, by the power of his Spirit.  Then he describes that life in greater detail, looking at specific cases and examples; as part of this, he teaches us how the Old Testament law relates to our lives as followers of Christ.

Such a life can only be lived by prayer, and in prayer, and through prayer; prayer is and must necessarily be at the heart of everything, because only the Spirit of God makes this possible.  I said on the Beatitudes that we must be careful not to read them as law, because we can’t live up to their standard by our own effort; they describe the life the Holy Spirit is creating in us, by his power alone.  If we would know the blessing they describe, we must begin and end by opening our hearts and minds to God in prayer.

And yet, even as I say this, that word “must” creates the danger of reading this passage—the Lord’s Prayer itself—as law.  It’s subtler here than in the Beatitudes, but just as real a possibility.  Jesus gives us this prayer as a model for our own prayer, and the easiest thing in the world would be to break it down into categories and say, “OK, when you pray, you need to cover these categories, in this way, in this order; go out and do it like this and you’ll be praying correctly.”  That would be the easiest thing in the world, and yet it would be hard to miss the point of this prayer more spectacularly than that.  Prayer is not just a matter of piling up the right words or the right subjects in the right order until we achieve the desired result.

Indeed, Jesus makes that clear in his brief introduction on prayer, verses 7-8.  We see an example of the kind of thing he’s talking about in 1 Kings 18, as the prophets of the Canaanite god Ba’al dance around and cry out and even cut themselves, over and over, for hours and hours and hours, in an effort to compel him to respond.  Kenneth Bailey offers another, from a nineteenth-century note written by a Persian scholar to an American medical missionary in Beirut:

A souvenir to the esteemed spiritual physician and religious philosopher, his Excellency, the only and most learned who has no second in his age, Dr. Cornelius Van­Dyke, the American.  As a souvenir presented to his loftiness and goodness and to him that is above titles, who is a propagator of knowledge and the founder of perfections, and a possessor of high qualities and owner of praiseworthy character, the pole of the firma­ment of virtues and the pivot of the circle of sciences, the author of splendid works and firm foundations, who is well versed in the understanding of the inner realities of soul and horizons, who deserves that his name be written with light upon the eyes of the people rather than with gold on paper, at Beirut, in the month of Rabia, in the year 1891, by the most humble.

Dr. Bailey drily comments, “I trust that Dr. VanDyke was suitably impressed!”  But if that’s how you communicated with another person when you were giving them a small gift, how much more would you do that with God, especially when you wanted something?  And to that, Jesus says, “No.  That’s not the point at all.”

That said, he’s also not forbidding long prayers or written prayers; if that were the case, why would he have given us a model prayer here?  And what would we make of the fact that Jesus himself often prayed for hours?  Again, this isn’t law, because law is about the outward form, and Jesus is rejecting the whole idea that if you just have the right outward form, the right words and the right structure, then you have prayed correctly.  That assumes we have to say the right things in the right way for God to hear us and know what we need—and that if we can get him to hear us, he’ll give us our request; to which Jesus says, “This isn’t about informing the Father of anything.  He already knows what you need.”

If that’s the case, some might wonder, then what is prayer about?  Well, what is any conversation about between two people who love each other?  When I talk to my wife, there are some things I tell her that she doesn’t know, to be sure; but much of it isn’t news to her at all.  When I tell her I love her, she already knows that—but I need to say it, and she needs to hear it.  Expressing it is part of the thing itself.  When I talk about the things that are bothering me, or that I’m happy about, or when I thank her for things she’s done, she knows much of that too—much of it I’ve said before; but I need to say it, because it’s where I am at that point and what matters to me, and she needs to hear it so she can share it with me.  Relationship requires words, even if only to express what both of us already know; we need to speak, and we need to know we are heard.

So it is with prayer; we need to talk to God because we need to say what’s on our hearts, and also because what we say shapes our hearts.  Thus Jesus in this prayer lays out things that we need to say, not because God demands them or because he’s somehow restricted if we don’t say them, but for our own sake; because we need to learn to mean them, if we don’t already.  We also need to learn to listen to God, because like any good conversation, prayer is not a monologue; God answers us, not just by giving us what we ask—what we normally mean by “answers to prayer”—but by talking back to us.

That begins with Scripture.  In Luke, Jesus gives a shorter version of this prayer in response to his disciples—they make a request, and this is his response.  He gives us the Lord’s Prayer as an answer to prayer.  All Scripture is like that, in that all Scripture is God’s word given to us, and the Holy Spirit speaks to us through all of it.  We tend to think of prayer as us talking to God and reading the Bible as something else again, but in truth, both are parts of the ongoing conversation we are always having with God; when we read the Bible, that’s part of our prayer, and we ought to approach it in that spirit, in the expectation that he will speak to us through his word.

That’s not the only way he speaks to us, though.  If we believe that God is Lord in every place and every moment, and that his Spirit is at work everywhere and in everything that happens, why shouldn’t we expect him to speak to us at any moment and from any angle?  As the late British writer Malcolm Muggeridge put it, “All happenings, great and small, are parables whereby God speaks.  The art of life is to get the message.”  We’re like travelers rowing up a jungle river; at any moment, one of those logs up ahead could suddenly open an eye and a long mouth full of teeth.  Look out—it’s alive!

As the Session, we’re working on articulating a vision statement and strategic plan for this congregation; one of our goals is to make this much more of a praying church than we currently are.  We’re putting some things in motion already to work on that, and we have some other ideas we’re developing; but as we were discussing this, one statement kept coming up:  “We need to learn how to pray.”  I listened to that, and then later I remembered that in Luke, the disciples make a slightly different request to Jesus:  not “Teach us how to pray,” but “Teach us to pray.”  The first is a request for information and understanding; the second means, “Help me do this.”  Of course, learning how is still part of that picture, and we’ll be spending the next five weeks living in this prayer line by line, much as we did through the Beatitudes, but none of it means much if we don’t follow it up, together, by going out and praying.

In that spirit, then, I’d like to close by giving you all some homework, two assign­ments.  First, expect to hear from God this week.  Listen for his voice, and expect to hear him; note down what you hear.  Maybe you want to carry a little notebook with you this week, if you can.  If you’re not sure it’s God, note it down anyway; check it against Scripture, and if you feel you need a little guidance, please feel free to call or e-mail me, or one of the elders, or one of our prayer warriors—I think especially of Jean Ansell, Mary Ann Cox, and Nancy Shaffer.  But listen carefully, with open ears and open hearts.

And second, please pray the Lord’s Prayer every day this week, but with one addition:  pray every part of it for our church.  You can do this as simply as adding the phrase “in our church” to every line—“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name in our church,” and so on—or you can word it your own way, but please pray every part of it specifically for our church each day this week.  Please make a point of taking home the prayer insert, and as you pray this prayer for our church, please think of some of the spe­cific things on that list, and maybe come back to them.  What would it mean to pray that God’s name would be hallowed in our preschool?  Anna’s brother’s medical debt was forgiven; how does that change how we pray “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”?  Open yourself up—pray this prayer specifically for us; pray it for yourself.  Listen for God to answer.  See what he does.