I wanted to another little write up about this section of the Lord's prayer to continue our series, but I am having a hard time spitting it out. I will not leave you longing for my thoughts on this, though, as I do have some scattered ideas and a not great talk on this part. First the scattered thoughts:
1. Just as God’s name opens for us the challenge of living holy lives, so to does the prayer for God’s kingdom. To be God’s kingdom people, the people who pray and work and long for the kingdom, means to be a people whose lives are characterized by Kingdom dreams and hopes.
2. “In saying, ‘Your Kingdom come,’ we are acknowledging that faith in Jesus is not simply an idea or an emotion. It is a concrete reality in which we are to become part or else appear to be out of step with the way things are now that God has come into the world in Jesus. When the kingdom comes, we are ‘to repent [i.e., change, let go of our citizenship in the old kingdoms] and believe the good news [i.e., join up, become part of the revolution].” Lord Teach Us. Hauerwas and Willimon, page 51.
And as promised, an entirely mediocre talk on the Kingdom of God:
Showing posts with label the Lord's Prayer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the Lord's Prayer. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Our Father In Heaven
Over the next few months, I am going to be posting some reflections on the Lord's prayer that are the basis of a sermon series I am giving at St. Mary's University on Wednesday nights. Tonight we begin with, "Our Father in heaven." The designation of God as "Father" is always a bit of an issue, and particularly so right now at places like Princeton where the gender inclusive language sprung up again. Is this prayer claiming that God is a man? What about the other questions for people who have serious "Father" issues? Is this prayer somehow a painful reminder for those who have been abused or abandoned? Perhaps. Lets look a bit at the prayer, and see what we can see. To begin with, Jesus is not calling us to pray to an abstract, ideal, Platonic, Father. Rather, the opening of this prayer surprising tells us something of ourselves- we are God's children. The "our" in this prayer is significant. We are God's children, and through Jesus we can call God Father. This leads to the next observation, namely that the designation of Father, is uniquely Trinitarian. Without the Son, there is no Father, and in fact without the relationship between the two that allows them to communicate as Father and Son, there is no Spirit. All of this to say, that while we sometimes hear "Father" and cringe at our own histories of violence and neglect, we are challenged to overcome those histories. We are called to witness this specific Father, of this specific Son, and in the strength of the Holy Spirit, proclaim our Father.
"When Christians pray, 'Our Father,' we are not merely declaring that God created us. We are saying that, in Jesus Christ, God has saved us." (Hauerwas and Willimon, Lord, Teach Us)
The second point worth unpacking a bit is the "in Heaven" portion of our prayer. I believe that when Christians pray the Lord's prayer, to the extent that they ever think about the "in heaven" part, they think of this as a designation of place. We tend to hear "in heaven" as God's address. This is, of course, no doubt true on some level, but we miss the wealth of Scripture's witness if we are content to simply stop here. I am convinced, that if we take some more time with our Old Testaments, we will uncover that "in heaven" is not simply a designation of God's place, but also of God's person. Heaven moves from simply being where God dwells, to being intimately connected to who God is. The Hebrew God of Abraham (Gn. 14:19-22), Moses (Ex. 20:22, Dt 4:39) and Ezra (Ezra 1:2, 5:11-12) is the God who is "in heaven." When Jesus invokes this phrase, and we follow his lead in repeating it, we are conjuring up all of these Old Testament stories right into our simple prayer. Jesus has masterfully carried in the whole of the Old Testament with two simple words: in heaven. It is not simply where God is, it is who God is.
We began by acknowledging the difficulty around this phrase, "Our Father in Heaven," by hearing the real concerns about God being a man's name, and by acknowledging the terrible images that can come flooding in on us when we even mention the label Father. I think the Lord's prayer is able to hear these criticisms, and hurts, and respond in love. To the question of gender the Lord's prayer says lets not talk about all men every where, lets talk about Jesus' father. To the children of absentee Dad's the Lord's prayer tells story, after story, after story of our Father working on behalf of his children. To the victims of abuse at the hands of fathers, we catch a glimpse of our Father in heaven, and are reminded that heaven is not only the place of comfort and hope, but also of justice and judgement. Our Father in heaven will side with the victims, and God can not be bribed or bought off. This God is not an abstract unknown deity, but rather has a long history, a people, has been faithful even unto death, and is more than worthy of being prayed to as "Our Father in heaven."
UPDATE Here is the audio of this talk:
"When Christians pray, 'Our Father,' we are not merely declaring that God created us. We are saying that, in Jesus Christ, God has saved us." (Hauerwas and Willimon, Lord, Teach Us)
The second point worth unpacking a bit is the "in Heaven" portion of our prayer. I believe that when Christians pray the Lord's prayer, to the extent that they ever think about the "in heaven" part, they think of this as a designation of place. We tend to hear "in heaven" as God's address. This is, of course, no doubt true on some level, but we miss the wealth of Scripture's witness if we are content to simply stop here. I am convinced, that if we take some more time with our Old Testaments, we will uncover that "in heaven" is not simply a designation of God's place, but also of God's person. Heaven moves from simply being where God dwells, to being intimately connected to who God is. The Hebrew God of Abraham (Gn. 14:19-22), Moses (Ex. 20:22, Dt 4:39) and Ezra (Ezra 1:2, 5:11-12) is the God who is "in heaven." When Jesus invokes this phrase, and we follow his lead in repeating it, we are conjuring up all of these Old Testament stories right into our simple prayer. Jesus has masterfully carried in the whole of the Old Testament with two simple words: in heaven. It is not simply where God is, it is who God is.
We began by acknowledging the difficulty around this phrase, "Our Father in Heaven," by hearing the real concerns about God being a man's name, and by acknowledging the terrible images that can come flooding in on us when we even mention the label Father. I think the Lord's prayer is able to hear these criticisms, and hurts, and respond in love. To the question of gender the Lord's prayer says lets not talk about all men every where, lets talk about Jesus' father. To the children of absentee Dad's the Lord's prayer tells story, after story, after story of our Father working on behalf of his children. To the victims of abuse at the hands of fathers, we catch a glimpse of our Father in heaven, and are reminded that heaven is not only the place of comfort and hope, but also of justice and judgement. Our Father in heaven will side with the victims, and God can not be bribed or bought off. This God is not an abstract unknown deity, but rather has a long history, a people, has been faithful even unto death, and is more than worthy of being prayed to as "Our Father in heaven."
UPDATE Here is the audio of this talk:
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