About the Author: Sunday Sermons from Sell Chapel are written by Rev. Preston Van Deursen, Director of Pastoral Care at the Masonic Village at Elizabethtown.
One of the things about working with people is that you run into all kinds…and they never complain. Well, let’s at least use other words. One postal worker says she is used to dealing with “moody” people.
She tells of an irate customer who stormed her desk one day. “What’s the trouble?” the postal employee responded in her calmest voice. “I went out this morning,” the customer began angrily, “and when I came home I found a card saying the mailman tried to deliver a package but no one was home. “I’ll have you know, my husband was home all morning! He never heard a thing!”
After apologizing, the postal employee got the woman’s parcel. “Oh, good!” the woman gushed. “We’ve been waiting on this for ages!”
“What is it?” the postal worker asked. The woman replied with pride, “My husband’s new hearing aid.” Well, no wonder……
When we speak to one another, there are some people who can’t hear us, others who don’t listen to us. Women I don’t want you elbowing all the husbands this morning. But when we speak to God, we speak to One who hears all and listens to all.
Today our Gospel Lesson deals with prayer and more specifically the Lord’s Prayer. All of us know it by heart. Our lesson from Luke contains one version of the prayer. Matthew 6 contains another, almost identical. The version we are accustomed to praying in the church has been honed and polished over the years, but it is essentially the same prayer Jesus taught his disciples and the same prayer that people have been praying for 2000 years. A sermon cannot do justice to the Lord’s Prayer but perhaps for a few moments we can capture the beauty and the significance of this ancient address to God.
The prayer begins with an acknowledgement of who God is. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…..” God is not merely a detached observer of world affairs, as the Deists believed. God is our Father. This is critical to our understanding of prayer. We know of God’s power. We see it in the wind and the storm of the one that may have kept you up last night. But does God care? That is what we really want to know as we kneel in communion with God. And the answer is Yes, God cares. The foundation of Christian prayer is God’s love for us. God cares about his children like a loving parent cares about his or her children.
A Roman war hero was returning home. Soldiers were lined along the streets to keep the masses from getting in the way of the parade. A little boy tried to break through. A soldier grabbed him and said: “Don’t get in the way of the emperor.”
The boy replied, “he may be the emperor to you, but he is my father.”
God is our Father. That makes all the difference when we pray.
When we approach god, we do so not with fear, but with respect. God is our father, but God is also “hallowed.” The word “hallowed” means we treat God’s name with holiness. Our Jewish ancestors understood the holiness of God in a way that we may not. They steadfastly resisted making images of God. They resisted even in describing God because they knew that God was so high above us that no description would be adequate. They considered God’s name too holy to be spoken by human lips. If the name needed to be written, the scribes would take a bath before they wrote it and destroy the pen afterwards. God is our Father, but God is also hallowed, holy. The Lord’s Prayer begins with an acknowledgement of who God is.
“Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven….” We pray that our own hearts, our community, our country, our world will become like the Kingdom of God. Luke says simply, “Thy Kingdom come…” Matthew adds, “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Unless you have read the Gospels recently, you might have forgotten Jesus’ passion for the Kingdom of God. He came preaching the Kingdom. It was the Kingdom that He said was the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in the field, the tiny mustard seed that produces a great tree. Wherever God’s will is done, whether in Heaven or on earth, there is the Kingdom.
You and I need a passion for the Kingdom of God in our time. It is unbelievable that 2,000 years after Christ our world would still have as much hatred, as much violence, as much evil as it does. If we had maintained Christ’s passion for the Kingdom, it would not. For you see by teaching us to pray for the Kingdom, Christ surely expects us to be working for the Kingdom as well.
A little girl is kneeling beside her bed. She says, “Dear God, if you’re there and You hear my prayer, could You please just touch me?” Just then she feels a touch. She gets so excited! She says, “Thank You, God, for touching me!”
Then she looks up, and sees her older sister, and gets a little suspicious. “Did you touch me?” The sister answers, “Yes, I did.” “What did you do that for?” she asked.
“God told me to,” was the reply.
Even as we are asking God to bring His Kingdom to our community, God is showing us things that need to be done if this community is to resemble the Kingdom of God. We are His hands, His feet, His mouth in our world. He is counting on us just as we are counting on Him until that day comes when truly the Kingdoms of the world become the Kingdom of God.
Only after we acknowledge who God is and what God wants do we make our petitions to God. We begin not with our wants and needs, but with an acknowledgement of God.
Our petitions are twofold. The first is physical: “Give us this day our daily bread.” We pray that God will meet our daily, physical needs. Not our wants, but our needs. If you are praying to win the lottery, you probably are on the wrong track. If you are praying for a new Mercedes, good luck. However we can legitimately pray for our needs. All our physical needs. This includes our health; this includes our concern for those we love.
Quite obviously, God already knows our needs as well as our wants. That’s why we do not spend an inordinate amount of time with this part of our prayer. This is again where many people miss the mark in their prayer life. The prayer is all about them, their wants, their needs, but most of our prayers should be about thanksgiving because we have so much.
I enjoyed one of those church humor pieces that talked about a Couples Club in a Methodist Church. They sponsored an auction each year. Everybody gathered up their accumulated junk and sent it down to the church. They brought in a professional auctioneer for the occasion. He sold all this stuff and the event raised some money for missionaries and the club budget. Well, one couple, Joe and Mildred, had some old lawn furniture that had been lying around on the veranda. Mildred thought the auction sale was a marvelous opportunity to get rid of it. So she sent it all off to be sold. But when the time came for the auction, Mildred was ill and couldn’t go. Joe went instead. And you guessed it! Joe saw this lawn furniture and bought it. He thought he had found a terrific bargain. Poor Mildred! She had to wait another year to get rid of the stuff.
Let’s be honest, we don’t worry about our daily bread. You and I worry about gaining weight. We don’t worry about life’s essentials. We worry about what to do with all the leftover junk. Rather than praying for our daily bread, which is a legitimate prayer for much of the world’s people, our prayers should be chiefly prayers of thanksgiving. I don’t know about you, but I want the Father to know that I don’t take any of it for granted. I want to thank him everyday for the blessings He has given me.
“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors….” OUR NEXT PRAYER IS FOR FROGIVENESS AND THE POWER TO FORGIVE OTHERS. Many people turn this into a legalistic demand. “If you expect God to forgive you, you must forgive others!” That’s true of course, but forgiveness is not that easy.
I love the story about the elderly lady who was driving a big, new expensive Cadillac and was preparing to back into a parallel parking space when suddenly out of nowhere a young man in a small sports car zoomed into the space beating her out of it. The lady
charged out of her car and angrily demanded to know why he had done what he did when he could easily see that she was trying to park there and had been there first. His response was simply, “Because I’m young and I’m quick.” When he came back out a few minutes later, he found the elderly lady using her big Cadillac as a battering ram, backing up and then ramming it into his parked car. Now he was very angry and asked her why she was wrecking his car. Her response was simply, “Because I’m old and I’m rich.”
Anger comes from inside of us so easily and quickly. Forgiveness requires the grace of God. We are able to forgive because we have experienced forgiveness ourselves.
Edith Bunker, of “All In The Family” fame, describes the confessional boxes in the Roman Catholic Church as “telephone booths to God.” Well. Maybe they are not quite that but every prayer should contain an element of confession. We are not all God means us to be. We are finite creatures in every respect. We need His mercy, His compassion, His amazing Grace. So we pray for forgiveness and we pray for the ability to forgive.
“And lead us not into temptation…” OUR FINAL PRAYER IS FOR GUIDANCE. It’s a tricky world out there. There are many snares. This is one of the most important prayers we will ever pray. “Deliver Us From Evil.” Sometimes temptation comes to each of us. Powerful Temptations….Temptations that will overwhelm us if we open the door just a crack. We need by God’s grace to flee the situation.
Some of you may remember the old TV show “Hee Haw,” with all its corny jokes and country music. In one episode, the doctor, played by Archie “Grandpappy” Campbell, was confronted by a patient who said he broke his arm in two places.
Doc Campbell replied, “Well then, stay out of those places!”
Sometimes that is the best advice. So we pray daily, “Deliver us from evil….”
“For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever…” These words were probably added later, but they are certainly an appropriate ending to the prayer. We begin with God and we end with God.
The Lord’s Prayer is a perfect prayer but it is not a prayer to use only when we get in a tight spot. When we feel there is no other source of help, and we cry out, “God, help me!” “Thy kingdom come THY WILL BE DONE, on earth as it is in heaven..” That’s what it means. It is a prayer for us to use so that we begin and end with God. It is a prayer that if we will internalize it and make it the core of our very life, will move heaven and earth.
Let me close with this…
There is an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin is getting undressed for bed, and he says to Hobbes, “Any time when you don’t finish the day with grass stains on your knees, you ought to seriously re-examine your priorities.”
