(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.