(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.

(Deuteronomy 15:1-11; Matthew 6:1-6)

I’m a Seattle sports fan, and I know what that means:  mostly, it means rooting for teams that are punchlines more than punchers.  The Mariners have been futile for most of their existence, the Seahawks are the only team in NFL history to win their division with a losing record, and we don’t even have an NBA team anymore.  Lately, though, the Seahawks seem to be bucking that trend, turning themselves into title contenders—and arguably the most-disliked team in the NFL.

Much of that comes from our defensive secondary, which is mostly composed of very large men who hit very hard.  Over the course of last season, we noticed that after opposing receivers had been hit once or twice by Kam Chancellor, our strong safety, or a cornerback like Brandon Browner, they began to develop what people call “alligator arms.”  They weren’t focused on catching the ball, they were hearing footsteps; they were afraid of getting hit, and so they wouldn’t extend their arms all the way, because they didn’t want to leave themselves vulnerable—and passes sailed right on by, incomplete.  For receivers to succeed against our defensive backs, they had to be able to put all that out of their minds and focus both eyes and all their attention on catching the football—and let whatever happened after that, happen.

Jesus isn’t a football coach, of course, but he has something of a similar concern here.  His question is simple:  why are you doing this?  Are you doing it for yourself, or for God?  Are you looking to God for your reward, or are you seeking a reward here on earth?  If you do good works—if you give to those in need, if you pray, if you do what’s right—out of the desire to please God, then if other people see what you’re doing, they will praise him because of you; and God who sees everything you do will reward you.  If you call attention to your good works, or make a point of being conspicuous about them, so that other people will see you, then whatever response you get from them will be the only reward you will receive.  God will not reward you for things you didn’t do for him.

Obviously, Jesus is criticizing the Pharisees here, calling them out for their religious grandstanding.  I suspect a lot of us know people like that, whose primary concern seems to be to convince you that they are much better Christians or much more spiritual than you are; Jesus says, essentially, that they’re spiritual frauds.  His point applies more broadly than that, however.  For one thing, whether we seek out an audience for our good works or not, we’ll often have one regardless; and of course, when we gather together as the church, we pray together, we work together, and so on, and we all see each other.  If our hearts are right and we’re focused on God, rather than on how we look to everyone around us, the Devil’s going to try to change that, to tempt us and distract us.  That’s the hard thing about praying in public—keeping it actual prayer, not performance.

More than that, even when there aren’t other people around, we still do everything before our own eyes, as it were; even when there’s no one else to impress, we can still do things to impress ourselves, to feed our egos and stoke our pride.  That’s why Jesus says, “Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing”—it’s a way of saying, “Don’t even be watching yourself.”  If you give to others, but you’re focused on yourself rather than them—if you do good works because it makes you feel good about yourself, or it builds up your ego—then you already have your reward.  Jesus calls us to do his work in a divine self-forgetfulness, focused on him and on those whom we’re serving, leaving behind concern for ourselves and how we look to others.

Along with that, he calls us to leave behind concern for reward in this world, in this life.  We have the expectation, living in a culture in which Christianity has long been assumed and is still broadly accepted, that if we’re good Christians, other people ought to respect and appreciate us for that, and say good things about us.  I tell you, where I lived before coming here, it really didn’t work that way, but around here, it still does more often than not; and when we find our expectation is not met, we feel let down, we get upset, and we start muttering about taking back our country and things of that sort.  When we get caught up in that way of thinking, we take our eyes off Jesus, and we start practicing our righteousness to squeeze a reward out of other people rather than to please God.  Next thing we know, we find ourselves lined up right beside the Pharisees.

The earthly reward Jesus talks about in this passage is the one the Pharisees were focused on (reputation and the praise of other people), but the principle here applies to other rewards as well.  If you go to church and consider yourself a Christian because you want a more fulfilling life, or you like the support it gives to your political views, or you want God to bless you financially, or whatever it might be—and there are a great many churches out there peddling those sorts of messages—then you’re not seeking to glorify God, you’re seeking to bless yourself, and you have received your reward in full.  What­ever it may be, if you conceive of Christian faith as a way to get what you want on earth, you’ve missed the point, and you’ve missed God.  God will never be a means for us to achieve our own ends; he will not be used.

This applies to churches as well as individuals. You know we’ve left the Presbyterian Church (USA)—not that they’re willing to admit that yet—because of their ongoing pattern of setting aside the authority of Scripture to make room for them to change the denominational position on things like marriage and homosexual sex.  I firmly believe the folks who lead that denomination are doing that because they want the approval of the world, or at least the part of the world they care about:  the elite culture, the intelligentsia, the media, the rich and famous.  They want to be called “progressive” and “up to date” and “relevant”; and I think it’s safe to say, they have already received their reward.

To be honest, there are conservative denominations that are much the same at the core—they’re just aiming for applause from a different part of the culture, is all; and there are plenty of congregations that have this same basic attitude.  It can be an effective way to build an organization.  Just identify the kind of people you want to attract, figure out what they want, and then tailor everything you say and do to fit their desires and expectations.  Build it, and they will come (usually, if you build it well enough).  But if the guiding question behind your worship services and your programs is not “What will please God?” but “What will make the right kind of people come?” then you may win all sorts of praise on earth, but you will find none in heaven.

We can’t follow Jesus faithfully if we have one eye out for what kind of reward we’re going to get on earth, any more than a wide receiver can catch the ball effectively if he has one eye out for whether he’s going to get hit.  He tells us to focus our attention on God and what he’s calling us to do, and leave the rest to him.  Don’t worry about whether we’re applauded or criticized, making money or going broke, popular or persecuted; don’t worry whether there’s nothing but grass between us and the end zone, or a safety about to lay the lumber on us.  Just keep our eyes on the ball, and catch it.  Let’s pray.

(Leviticus 19:17-18, Leviticus 24:17-20; Matthew 5:38-48)

“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”  “Turn the other cheek.”  “Go the extra mile.”  These are all reasonably familiar phrases in conversational English; we know what we mean by them, so we assume we know what Jesus means.  The problem is, we don’t, because in fact they don’t mean what we think they do.  Unfortunately, there aren’t even many teachers in the church who realize that.  I’m heavily indebted here to three people who do:  the New Testament scholar Dr. Kenneth Bailey, whom I’ve referenced before; the late Rabbi Dr. Edwin Friedman, one of the seminal figures in family systems theory; and the Rev. Dr. Carolyn Gordon, chair of the Department of Preaching and Communication at Fuller Seminary.

Let’s begin where Jesus does:  “You have heard it said.”  The Old Testament certainly does contain the words, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”—in more than one place, in fact; and no doubt you’ve heard that called barbaric.  Those words are taken as a justification for private vengeance, for getting your own back and doing unto others as they’ve done to you—but as with the law on divorce, that’s the exact opposite of the purpose for which this law was intended.  In our terms, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was a sen­tencing guideline to ensure proportional punishment for those con­victed of assault and battery.  It was intended to bring an end to blood feuds and break the cycle of violence, not to justify it.

The legal authorities have the right to execute judgment; as individuals, we cannot claim that right for ourselves.  Instead, Jesus tells us not to resist an evildoer—and we as­sume he means:  play dead, be a doormat, roll over and let them do whatever they want.  Unfortunately, that gets used to justify some truly horrendous counsel, sending women and children back into abusive relationships, and the like.  It’s a misreading of Jesus and a misreading of the examples he gives.  He isn’t setting forth a program of passivity; rather, in Dr. Gordon’s words, he’s giving “God’s rules for righteous retaliation.”

Take verse 39—did you notice Jesus says, “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek”?  Pay attention to that.  In the first place, it’s assumed that whoever strikes you is doing so with the right hand, because in those days without modern sanitation, the left hand was unclean.  You didn’t use that to touch food, and you didn’t touch people with it, either.  So if someone strikes you on the right cheek with the right hand, how are they doing it?  It’s a backhanded blow.  In that culture, if you hit someone with the palm of your hand (or a fist, I imagine), that was understood as a blow given to an equal which was intended to cause them harm.  If you hit them with the back of the hand, though, that was intended to humiliate them—it was a serious insult.

So, someone strikes you on the right cheek, what are they trying to do?  They’re trying to provoke you to react:  to fight, to freeze, or to run.  If you run, or you freeze up in humiliation, you’ve accepted the insult.  If you fight back, maybe you win, and regain some measure of honor; but maybe you lose, and end up worse off than before.  Regardless, you’re letting their treatment of you define you and determine how you will act.

Jesus says, don’t just react—catch yourself, and break out of the script written for you by the aggressor.  Choose to respond differently, and hit them with a different kind of challenge.  If someone slaps you on the right cheek and you stand there and turn your left cheek to them, you are refusing to accept the insult, and you’re giving them a real problem.  To hit you with the back of the hand, they have to use the left hand—and at that point, they’re in trouble.  To use the right hand, they have to strike you with the palm—thus retracting the insult themselves.  Turning the other cheek isn’t passive at all, and it isn’t the least bit submissive.  It is the refusal to submit, to be stampeded, to let an enemy pull your strings; it is acting as a disciple of Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit to do something the world cannot see coming, much less understand.

Now, we don’t have time to dig into everything in detail, so let me just hit one other example, verse 41.  Roman law gave any Roman soldier the right to dragoon anyone who wasn’t a Roman citizen to serve as forced labor, but only within limits.  Thus a soldier could require a Jew to carry his equipment, but only for one mile.  As you can imagine, this caused considerable resentment; but Jesus says, don’t stop with the first mile, but carry the soldier’s burden another mile before you lay it down.

Note that.  Jesus doesn’t say, “Go the rest of the way with him,” he specifically says, “Go two miles.”  If you only do what you are compelled to do—if you just go the one mile and then quit—then you’re not free in that situation.  On the flip side, to carry the burden the whole rest of the way would be to completely surrender your dignity, and you would still not be free.  But if you carry the load a second mile, by your own choice, and then lay it down, on your own initiative, then you are acting beyond compulsion; in so doing, you are reclaiming your own dignity as one who is free to choose how you will act.  You are creating your own meaning out of the situation rather than allowing someone else to impose it on you.  You are refusing to let your identity be defined by how someone else treats you; instead, you are asserting your identity as a follower of Christ.

The key here, as Dr. Bailey put it, is that Jesus says, “Love your enemies”—he doesn’t say, “Join them.”  He doesn’t say, “Enable them.”  He says, “Don’t resist the evil­doer,” but he never says, “Don’t resist evil.”  We have trouble with this because we’ve bought our culture’s definition of love, which is insipid.  We think loving people means doing what makes them happy, and thus that loving our enemies would mean giving them aid and comfort in oppressing us.  Not so at all.  Yes, loving our enemies means wanting what’s best for them, which is salvation in Christ—which entails, among other things, conviction of sin and guilt, confession, and repentance.  To love our enemies is to desire that they repent of their evil and seek to make it right, and thus stop being enemies.

We talked about this when we were going through Romans 12, and we saw Jesus lay the foundation for it in the Beatitudes, where he declares that the merciful and the peacemaker are blessed.  To love our enemies, to turn the other cheek, to go the second mile, is in a sense not to resist them—but it is to trust God to resist them through us, and to oppose the evil they do with a power greater than theirs.  If we react to our enemies our own way, in our own strength, that’s all the strength we have; if we use their weapons, we will tend to become like them.  If we respond God’s way, he can do far more and far better than anything we could ever accomplish.

And in this, God is revealed in us.  This world gets the concept, “love those who love you and hate those who don’t”; it understands “do to others before they get the chance to do to you.”  If we respond to our enemies by trying to take them down, we look just like the rest of the world, because there’s nothing of the power or character of God in that; if we claim to be Christians in one breath and then undermine or attack our enemies in the next, we should be ashamed.  Jesus directs us to pursue the perfection of God.  He doesn’t actually say, “Be perfect now,” though you wouldn’t know that from the English; literally, this is a future tense, “You shall be perfect.”  It’s a promise and a goal, and a command to pursue that goal:  the objective of our lives is to be perfect according to the character and will of God, and God is at work in us to perfect us.

(Leviticus 19:11-12; Matthew 5:33-37, Matthew 23:16-22)

Let me begin by clarifying a couple things.  First, the statements in the Law to which Jesus refers—we read one of them this morning, there are others—deal with two different but related subjects, oaths and vows, but Jesus goes on to talk only about oaths.  Vows are solemn promises which are made ultimately to God, though often to other people as well; marriage vows, for instance.  Oaths are invocations of God or of some object which is sacred, or at least very important to us, for the purpose of assuring others that we’re telling the truth or that we’re going to keep a promise; I swear by my Aunt Priscilla’s grave, that’s how it happened.  (Since I don’t have an Aunt Priscilla, this should not reassure you.)  In court oaths and oaths of office, we see these combined, as vows are taken with one hand on the Bible, thus invoking the Bible to affirm the vows.

Second, Jesus is not declaring a new law in Matthew 5.  The Mennonites have historically interpreted his words as forbidding Christians to take oaths under any circum­stances, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses agree; for that reason, they refuse even to swear an oath in court.  This is not what Jesus is saying here.  The Old Testament law required oaths in certain circumstances; if he had intended to set that aside, he would have had to do so explicitly:  “Even when the Law commands you to take an oath, you may not do so.”  That’s not his concern, because that’s a matter of legal requirement—it’s not about what we as his disciples choose to do or not to do.

If the law says we have to swear an oath, that’s to serve the law’s own purposes.  If I choose to swear an oath, that’s to serve my purpose—it’s because I want to convince someone to believe what I’m telling them.  It’s a response to mistrust.  That mistrust may be justified, or it may not, but either way, it puts a wall between us; an oath is like piling stones and furniture at the bottom of the wall, hoping we can build the pile high enough to enable us to climb over.  If we can’t prove we’re telling the truth, maybe we can convince the other person that we wouldn’t dare lie, and they’ll believe us for that reason.  That’s what oaths are for.

The thing is, though, that if we use oaths to convince others that we’re telling the truth, it’s easy for us to tell ourselves that when we don’t swear an oath, it’s okay if we lie; after all, since we didn’t swear to it, we weren’t really committed to tell the truth.  Oaths, then, don’t make us more honest, but less—and they distract us from what really matters.  They tell us that we only have to tell the truth when we swear that we are; and in calling God to witness for this one thing, they imply that God isn’t paying attention to anything else we say.  This is disastrously untrue.  As the German pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Disciples of Jesus should not swear, because there is no such thing as speech not spoken before God.  All of their words should be nothing but truth, so that nothing requires verification by oath.”

There is no such thing as speech not spoken before God.  When­ever we speak, God is standing right behind us listening to every word.  Oaths are unneces­sary, because they’re redundant:  God is already witness to everything we say, and he already holds us to account for all of it.  Part of Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees is that they take the truth, and oaths, and the things by which they swear, far too lightly.  Indeed, they take God far too lightly.  For all their commitment to holiness and righteousness (as they understand it), we see no awe in their religion; the Scriptures told them that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” but they do not appear to have taken that to heart.  They had no real conception that they served a God who would dare upset all their expectations and careful schemes, much less that they should expect him to.

Jesus says, “Just speak the truth, as simply and plainly as you can; anything you clutter it up with only makes it easier for you to lie.”  We resist that, because we sense that the truth is dangerous; and we’re right.  The truth is dangerous.  Honesty is dangerous.  God is dangerous.  As Annie Dillard writes in Teaching a Stone to Talk,

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

God is dangerous because God is alive, and the source of all life; only death is safe, because the worst has already happened.  If we want his life, we have to accept the danger of the truth, plainly spoken, with no crossed fingers and no loopholes.  As Bonhoeffer put it, “There is no following Jesus without living in the truth unveiled before God and other people.”  God is true, so if we are his people, we must also strive to be true, in our relationship with him and our relationships with others.  We must be committed to speak the truth to him, to each other, and to ourselves, and to live according to the truth we speak.