Hallowed Be Your Name

The first point to make about this line is that it serves as a bridge between the first phrase we talked about last week (Our Father in heaven), and the phrase (your Kingdom come) that immediately follows it. Our separating out this phrase, and all the phrases for that matter, is simply an effort to explore more deeply some of the individual pieces of the prayer, but we should always be aware that these phrases make up one, beautiful, cohesive prayer.
We begin by admitting that we almost never use the word "hallowed" unless we are a sports announcer talking about Lambeau Field or Cameron Indoor Stadium. For our purposes it will do to simply mean "holy" when we think of hallowed. As is often the case, by defining the one difficult word, with another difficult word we have gotten really nowhere at all. A quick survey of college students yielded these definitions of holy, "happy," "blessed," "special," "sacred," and "something about God." All of these touch on an element of the way we use the word, but the etymology of the word goes to something like "separate, different, other." Holy be you name becomes a short hand way of saying that God is different than us. Our father who is in heaven is not us. In fact, God is not us too such a degree, that even God's name is holy.

We have no idea how to live until we first know who God is. So when we say that God's name is holy, that tells us how we ought to live. Knowing the creator tells us where the creation is meant to move...The Lord's Prayer us like a bomb ticking in church, waiting to explode and demolish our temples to false gods." Hauerwas and Willimon, Lord, Teach Us. 46-47.

Once we begin to trace the idea of God's name being holy, we open up a ton of interesting stories and images from the Scriptures. We are reminded of Moses meeting God in the burning bush, and quickly recognize how holiness works in Exodus 3, when even the ground near the bush is considered "holy" just because of God's presence. God's presence doesn't just make the ground holy, but also causes Moses to hide his face. As we trace God's holy presence, we begin to see a pattern of people encountering God in God's holiness and being left silent. God's holiness is where our language goes to die. In even naming God's name, we have reached the limits of language. In the face of this limiting, we are forced into the most basic of Christian practices- confession and prayer. Here again we notice that throughout the New Testament there is an understanding that some day, all will bow before the name of God. Just on hearing God's name, all of creation, humans, whales, trees, turtles, everything will bow in reverence. The Christian life then is a call to live this now. Contrary to the often misunderstood command about taking the Lord's name in vain, when we pray the Lord's prayer and ask God to make God's name holy, we are attempting to bow our lives to God's will. This finally is the picture of God's name being made holy. All of creation bowing before a loving creator. This is God's kingdom coming on Earth as it is in Heaven. More on that next week.
UPDATE Here is the audio of this talk.