Reading: Matthew 6: 5-15
A cargo ship was out at sea one night when a great storm blew up. Steadily the storm grew worse, so that the waves were coming up over the side of the ship. They started to bail out the water, but the water kept coming in faster than they could get it out. The captain realised it was no good. The ship was going to sink.
So he shouted out, ‘is there anyone here who knows how to pray?’
One of the crew stepped forward and said ‘yes, sir. I do!’
‘That’s good’ said the captain. ‘You pray. The rest of us will take the life jackets. We’re one short.’
Prayer.
Every faith has some sort of prayer.
Most people of faith will say prayer is important, vital even. Remote tribes make offerings to pray for food, rain, health, children, victory in battle. Devout Muslims stop whatever they are doing, 5 times a day, to pray. Outside Buddhist temples in Nepal, priests turn large prayer wheels, and with each rotation a prayer is sent to heaven. Some Buddhists download these prayers onto their computer hard drives which rotate over 5000 times a minute. (Source: Philip Yancey; Prayer: Does It Make A Difference?)
Why do we do it?
Does it make any difference?
All sorts of research has been done on whether prayer ‘works’; whether it makes any difference to the situation we pray about, or to those who do the praying. Mostly it is hard to reach any real conclusion. It’s hard to prove. It remains a matter of faith.
I heard about one piece of research quite recently which interested me. It was by a neuro-economist called Paul Zak. A few years ago he made a presentation at a TED conference. TED stands for Technology, Education and Design, and the TED group organise conferences at which some of the great thinkers of our age get to talk about what they have been working on. Paul Zak presented a TED talk called ‘Trust, Morality – and Oxytocin.’
Oxytocin is a hormone in our body which is linked to happiness. People who release Oxytocin tend to be happier. It turns out the easiest way to release Oxytocin is by having a hug. Zak recommends 8 hugs a day.
But there is another activity which releases oxytocin into our brain and bloodstream: Prayer.
Which is interesting because we might say prayer is like being held in a spiritual embrace. (My source for this was Brian Draper; Soulfulness)
More people pray than we might think. Some might not really think of it as praying. You’re in a rush, you can’t find the car keys and you’re saying ‘oh, where are they? let me find them…’
Who are you talking to?
are you talking to yourself…?
…or praying for help?
Hundreds of millions of people use social media… twitter, facebook and the like. Many of you might think it’s an enormous waste of time. Maybe it is. But I’d suggest that in many ways it’s like prayer for a secular age. People are sending their thoughts out there, hoping someone listens or cares…
…which makes it more like prayer than we might like to admit.
Because although believers might claim prayer is important, and might even feel guilty about how little they do it, those who try to take it seriously will, if they’re honest, admit it’s not easy. Yes, there are times when we do feel a closeness to God, when we feel we are making a difference, when we even feel that sense of being embraced by God.
But often, maybe more often, prayer can be really frustrating. You pray for help day after day and things don’t improve. It can feel like you’re talking to yourself, or that your prayers just hit the ceiling and come back. We can feel ‘is anyone listening? Does anyone care?’
Or is that just me?
If you ever find yourself thinking that way, as we return to the Sermon on the Mount, we discover that we are not alone. Those questions are not new. Those questions and anxieties have been with us for as long as humans have prayed.
In this morning’s reading Jesus introduces what we have come to know as the Lord’s Prayer. It’s the prayer Jesus gives to his disciples and to the really diverse crowd watching on, listening in. It’s one of the very few parts of worship which we can directly trace all the way back to Jesus himself.
When Jesus gives them this prayer, he contrasts his approach to the prayers of pagans. Jesus tells them ‘when you pray, don’t babble on like pagans, who think that their god will hear them because they’ve have prayed for a long time. You have a God, or a Father, who knows what you need before you ask him…’
Now Jesus isn’t against long prayers. In the Gospels, Jesus prays for three hours in Gethsemane. On other occasions we read of Jesus praying all night.
Nor is Jesus opposed to praying the same thing over and over. The Jewish tradition in which Jesus was raised made a lot of use of set prayers. Jesus prayed the same thing over and over in Gethsemane. When he gives the disciples the Lord’s Prayer in Luke it seems clear that he did intend them to recite these words. Early Christian sources suggest that followers of Jesus were commanded to recite this the Lord’s prayer three times of day.
So what is Jesus talking about?
We can see something of this by looking at some other prayers from the ancient world. Take this one, prayed to Egyptian God Amun-Ra.
Hail to thee, Amun-Ra,
Lord of the thrones of the earth,
the oldest existence, ancient of heavens,
support of all things; Chief of the gods,
lord of truth, father of the gods,
maker of men and beast and herbs;
maker of all things above and below …
Lord of wisdom, lord of mercy;
most loving opener of every eye …
That’s just the introduction!
What’s going on there?
Well, suppose I’m stood at the door at the end of the service. Someone comes up to me and says ‘Andrew, that was the finest sermon I ever heard. Not that I’m surprised because I’ve always said your sermons are up there with the writings of St Paul. And can I say you’re looking really handsome today. That suit shows just what a hunk you are. And those bits of grey in your sideburns? They make you look really distinguished….
If that happens, I’ll probably start thinking one of two things…
What do you want?
Or what have you done?
That’s what’s going on here. If you want something from the God, you want them to know you appreciate them. Pay them lots of compliments. Let them know how great they are. That’s how the ancient Gods worked.
If something goes well you want them to know how grateful you are. If you don’t let them know, they might not help you next time. You want them to be aware that you know just how fantastic they are. It wouldn’t do to have Amun Ra thinking ‘I’m not just maker of men and beasts, you know. I also make herbs. Mrs Smith also praised me for making spices!’ Amun Ra might get upset.
If you’ve done something bad, you want to get them back on your side. Or if something has gone wrong, you might think you have somehow offended them. You might not even know what it is…
That’s when you get prayers like this, from the 3rd Century BC, to the god Jupiter Grabovius
Jupiter Grabovius,
if on the Fisian mount fire has arisen,
or if in the nation of Iguvium
the owed preparations have been omitted,
let it be as if they had been made.”
“Jupiter Grabovius, if in your sacrifice
there has been any flaw, any defect,
any ritual violation, any fraud, any error,
if in your sacrifice there is a flaw,
either seen or unseen … “
At the heart of these prayers are questions like
how do I get the god’s attention?
How do I know the god is listening?
How do I know that god is smiling on me?
How do I know if I’ve done enough to tell them how great they are?
If they’re angry with me, do they know how sorry I am?
Are the god and I ok?
How do I know the god will help me, or give me what I want?
So they piled the phrases up. Prayers went on and on.
It wasn’t just pagan prayers that worked that way. There are examples of Jewish prayers where God is described in 14 different ways as an introduction. One rabbi said ‘whoever is long in prayer is heard.’
In contrast to that Jesus says; when you pray you don’t need to do all that. Just pray ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by your name…’
Then he offer the Lord’s Prayer. It’s really simple and direct. It covers a lot of ground, very briefly. God is recognised as a loving heavenly Father. His name is hallowed, his kingdom extended, his will is done, our needs supplied, our sins forgiven and trial is overcome… all in 66 words in your church Bible. 57 in Greek. The version he teaches the disciples in Luke’s Gospel is even shorter.
And I’m taking 2 weeks to talk about it. Next week I’ll talk about bread, tresspasses, deliverance. Today I’m concentrating on the first half.
How can Jesus pray so differently? It’s because of the kind of God to whom we pray.
You don’t have to go far to find the reason. It’s there in the very first phrase. Our Father.
Jesus can encourage us to pray differently than the pagans because the God Jesus speaks of, the God revealed in Jesus is different. Jesus speaks of the prayers of the pagans and says ‘do not be like them. We don’t have to be like them, because our God is not like theirs.
Some people get quite worried about using the image of Father for God. The term comes with baggage. Some people didn’t grow up in a happy home. Some didn’t know their fathers, some had bad experience of their fathers.
I’m not certain there is any way you could describe God which everyone would find helpful. But to those gathered round listening to Jesus, the word father wouldn’t have instantly given them warm, fluffy feelings either. I do hear what those who struggle with the term Father are saying.
But I would prefer to allow the idea of God’s fatherhood to challenge, stretch and rebuke the failures in our practice, rather than ditch the term Jesus most consistently uses to describe God and encourages us to use.
Besides the word Jesus uses is abba. A very personal, intimate, title. It was a word which suggested that the Father in question was good, kind could be trusted. He was one who could be approached in confidence.
This God is not like those in the pagan prayers about whom Jesus spoke; who may or may not be interested in those who pray to them; who may or may not want to help. Those gods might need to be coaxed, battered, flattered and pestered to get them to pay attention. The same is not true of a God who is approached with a name like abba.
The God of whom Jesus spoke wants us to live in intimate, trusting relationship with him. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that prayer releases the same hormones in us as being embraced, for that’s exactly how abba God longs to relate to us. The God revealed in Jesus is concerned about the things we care about. He invites us to bring our needs and concerns to him.
But equally we’re reminded that such a God is not our cosmic butler or fix it man. He is Our Father, not My Father. His concern and love extends to his whole world; not just us.
And Our Father is in heaven. He is sovereign, over and above us. God is not a computer we program to do our bidding. His role is not to organise the world according to our whims. Faith and trust won’t mean that we avoid the darker side of life.
Everything that follows in the prayer depends on that understanding of God as Our abba in Heaven.
If gods are impersonal and not particularly bothered one way or the other about us, the best you can hope for is that you can do enough to get them on your side to help you out once in a while.
But the God we are invited to approach as abba is not like that. A point we’ve kept coming back to week after week, since we started with the very first beatitude is that this God looks on us, however we come to him and pronounces us ‘blessed.’ However we approach him we find the God revealed in Jesus loves us, this God is for us, this God is on our side.
And we need that, because the Lord’s prayer doesn’t just challenge our views of God. It challenges us about why we pray and what we pray about. In prayer, before anything else we commit ourselves in the hands and care of abba God. Rather than cutting straight to what we need from God, the first half of the prayer is about God, his name, his glory, his will.
No-one could have reverence for an impersonal, amoral God who really doesn’t care. We might fear them, but not reverence them.
But because we know this God looks on us with favour, with blessing, with generosity, because we know that the God revealed to us in Jesus loves his world, has plans for his world, longs for his world to flourish that’s why we can pray
hallowed be your name;
your kingdom come;
your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Sometimes people think of faith or prayer is running from reality, that we’re trying to get some kind of superman in the sky to sort out our problems. We’d be better off doing something.
But the theologian Karl Barth had a different view. He said ‘to clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.’
If we pray as Jesus taught us, we name and confront the fact that our lives and our world are not as a good, loving God intended. And we join in the longing for them to be made new.
It’s easy for our prayer to be overly polite. There is a sense in which prayer should be shaking our fists at all that is wrong in the world and crying ‘how long?’ Far more of our Psalms are given over to that sort of prayer than the praise the Lord stuff.
Some of my prayers haven’t been polite this week. If you look in the prayer requests in the order of service you will work out why. As I sat with those involved, my heart broke for them. I would have done anything to put it right.
I felt useless and I was angry.
Yet somewhere deep within me was still this sense that pain and love I felt for them but the merest flicker of the love God had for them.
Prayer is a vote of no confidence in our own ability to heal it ourselves. But it’s also an acknowledgment that we don’t have to. For in abba we approach a God who knows, loves and cares about his world even more than we do. In prayer we approach a god who is not only able to rescue and heal his world. But he is also a god who has promised to do so.
To pray hallowed be thy name is to call on God to make good on his promises. To pray hallowed be your name has implications for how we live. It challenges us about whether our lives reflect the truth that this world is God’s and he is its true Lord.
But these words are primarily an appeal for God to act so that his world becomes as he intended. To pray ‘hallowed be your name’ is to pray ‘how long, O Lord.’ The world is not as you intended. How long?
And it’s not concerned with somewhere else, some time else. It’s about a God who is interested in this world, here and now. We pray thy kingdom come, thy will be done here, on earth, as it is in heaven.
We can’t pray that honestly, unless we are prepared to allow it to happen in our own lives. We can’t pray these words, then live as we like. But we don’t pray those words in defeated surrender or resentment. It’s not case of ‘well there’s nothing I can do about it. You might as well have your way, God.’
No we are invited to say them in love and trust to an abba God, who longs to hold his world in everlasting embrace. We are approaching with confidence a God who loves his world, longs for it to flourish, who cares for us and the world even more than we do and whose longings for the world are the best.
And has promised to make it so.
When we come to this table we are reminded just how much love the god revealed in Jesus has for his world. How committed he was to healing our world and restoring us to relationship with him. When we come with our questions and our doubts, when we come wondering how we can ever mend, how the tears can ever be wiped away, we’re invited to look to the cross and the table and be reminded how much we are loved; then to turn our eyes to the empty tomb and remember that nowhere will we be beyond his reach; nowhere will we be beyond hope. For we have a God who loves us and cares for us; who has plans for his world when his name will be hallowed in all the earth, when this earth and heaven come together. We come in trust because we are approaching a God described as abba, who loves us and longs for him and longs to hold us in the deepest embrace and in his hands we are secure.
Because we have this god, the god revealed in Jesus, the God who is abba father, we can pray hallowed be your name. your kingdom come, your will be done.
paper dolls 