Our Father is Holy ~ June 17, 2018 Romans 8:15-17, Psalm 19, Luke 11:1-13

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1 Our Father is Holy ~ June 17, 2018 Romans 8:15-17, Psalm 19, Luke 11:1-13 Lord Teach us to pray One area in which many people struggle (me included) is prayer. They re not sure if they are doing it right; they think their words don t sound eloquent; or they ve had unmet expectations or unanswered prayers in the past so they struggle to pray. But we are not the only ones who struggle with prayer. The signup sheet for Prayer 101 contains some familiar names: the disciples John, James, Andrew and Peter. When one of Jesus disciples requested, Lord, teach us to pray (Luke 11:1 NIV), none of the others objected. In fact, the only tutorial they ever requested was on prayer. i Lord, teach us to pray they asked. Jesus responded: This is how you should pray and he taught them the greatest and most dangerous prayer ever. We call it the Lord s Prayer. Perhaps we should call it the disciples prayer for it is a primer on prayer for people like us an outline, a blueprint that guides us as we pray. Pastor Karl Jacobsen says, It is a prayer, yes, but a prayer that teaches us to pray. If all we do is repeat this prayer, we are not learning all that is being taught. We are merely sipping milk when we are ready for solid food (Heb. 5:13-14). If we pray the Lord s Prayer only by memory, by rote, in even the most pious and faithful recitations.we [are] missing out on all that the prayer can give us. ii Martin Luther said the Lord s Prayer contains seven reminders of our wretchedness and poverty blasphemy of God s name, disobedience to his will, rejection of his kingdom, a hungry land without bread, and existence full of sin, a precarious [journey] and an abounding in every evil. iii Praying this prayer informs us of who we are before our holy God and reforms us. Over the next few weeks we will look at how this prayer shapes us as followers of Jesus. 1

2 A BOLD pattern for prayer When I was on vacation over Memorial weekend, one of the churches where I went to worship was Episcopalian. The liturgy for the service I attended was very similar to our liturgy except for it was all Elizabethan style English. But one statement in particular grabbed my attention. As the priest presided at the communion table, he stated the following as our savior has taught us we are BOLD to say and the congregation responded with the Lord s Prayer. We are BOLD to say. This is a powerful and dangerous prayer that we pray. We do well not to pray it lightly. Our Daddy As we begin to pray, we need to know to whom we are praying. Most of you have learned the traditional form of the Lord s Prayer in Elizabethian style English. While there is beauty in those ancient words and a commonality when everyone prayers it together I think we miss some of the intimate and powerful language of this prayer. Q: what term do you use when talking with your male parent? For me it is dad. I don t ever use the term father - it seems so formal (besides it makes me think of a priest). The word Jesus used in teaching the disciples was a radical word to address God. It was a close familial term; the warmest term one would use to address a male parent something like dad, daddy, papa. It expresses intimacy, proximity, closeness. It is a tender term, an everyday family word there is no formality here. In the book The Prayers of Jesus, Joachim Jeremias notes this is such an intimate term that No Jew would have dared address God in this manner. iv Jesus teaching to pray in this way was a radical idea that we can boldly approach God with the intimacy of a child to parent. When a father leads his 4 year old son down a crowded street, he takes him by the hand and says, Hold on to me. He doesn t say Memorize the map. Or Take your chances dodging the traffic. 2

3 Or let s see if you can find your way home. The good father gives the child one responsibility: Hold on to my hand. God does the same with us. v When we pray Our Father, we are speaking words of love and trust in this God who invites us to call him our daddy, our papa, our good Father. It is an astounding recognition that this God, the one who created the universe and flung planets into their courses vi allows us to approach him in prayer and address him as Our Father, vii our daddy. The one who is in heaven This is not just any Father, but the one who is in heaven. We pray in heaven not to suggest that God is distant, but to confess that God is different from earthly fathers. This is the God of creation, the God who rules the cosmos. God is not living here in our country, not a pale image of ourselves, and not housed in our sanctuary but this is the God who rules from heaven, whose power and wisdom know no limits. The address, Our Father in heaven, not only recognizes the intimacy that we have with God as our Father, but it also speaks of the awe we should have as we come to him in prayer. Jesus is saying that the one to whom we come as Father is the sovereign God of heaven, the God of all power, the God of all authority. viii Most people suffer from small thoughts about God. In an effort to see his as our friend, we have lost his immensity. In our desire to understand him, we have sought to contain him. The God of the Bible cannot be contained. He brought order out of chaos and created creation God s goodness undergirds everything else we can say about prayer. If he is like us, only slightly stronger, then why pray? If he grows weary, then why pray? If he has limitations, questions and hesitations then you might as well pray to the Wizard of Oz... HOWEVER, if God is at once Father and Creator, unlike us and high above us, then we, at any point, are only a prayer away from help. ix 3

4 Max Lucado tells a story in his book Before Amen about an experience he had on an airplane. As Max boarded the plane, the pilot called out his name. Max looked up to see his good friend Joe. Joe has been flying forever. He flew transport plans in Vietnam and has logged a book full of hours as a commercial pilot. He s faced every flight crisis from electrical storms to empty fuel tanks. He s a good pilot and a good friend. Max went to his seat thinking I am in good hands. This was knowledge that came in handy an hour into the flight when they hit a wall of winds. Many people on the plane grew anxious and fearful. But not Max. He said, I stayed calm. Because I had an advantage. I knew the pilot. I knew his heart and trusted his skill. The storm was bad, but the pilot was good. So, as much as one can relax in a squall, I did. A glimpse of God s goodness and holiness changes us. Everything changes when you know the pilot. x It s a stormy world out there. Every day brings turbulence. Changing economy. Aging bodies. Increasing violence. The question during these troubling times is this: Do we have a good pilot? The resounding response of the Bible is yes! xi God is good. It is repeated over and over in the Bible. God is good in skill and good in heart. In an effort to see him as our friend I wonder if we have lost some of the awe and wonder of his immensity? Holy is your name When we recognize with awe the amazing God who gives us the privilege to call him Father, the fitting response is to honor in all that we do and say xii God is holy, sacred and pure and our prayer, our speech and all of our conduct should praise and honor this God. In fact, that is what the next part is all about. God is the God of holiness, grace and righteousness out of that understanding we will hallow God s name. Hallowed means to treat as holy, to respect, to set apart, to hold in awe, to revere a person as that person deserves to be treated. The opposite of hallow is to profane, to disgrace, to slander the name. 4

5 When we say hallowed be thy name, we are praying that God may be God to us; that God will be set apart in our prayers and in our lives in such a way that it will be clear that we revere God. xiii In Luther s large catechism he writes it is our duty in every way, to behave as good children so that God may receive from us not shame but honor and praise. It is our duty as Christians to respect God just like it is the duty of all children to respect their parents and others in authority. God s name is holy even without our prayer, so why do we pray that God s name will be holy? Martin Luther pondered this question and answered it in his small catechism. God s name is indeed holy in itself, but we pray in this petition that it may be holy among us. When we pray Holy be your name, we are both asking God to make his name holy and pledging ourselves not to misuse God s name. This is what the Ten Commandments are getting at when they prohibit our taking God s name in vain. xiv A young man went off to college. While he was there another student offered him drugs. He refused telling the dealer my mother cleaned houses and washed floors to send me to this college. I m here because of her. I m here for her. I wouldn t do anything that might demean her sacrifice for me. That is close to how we are to react to our holy God. Christians don t steal, don t cheat in their marriages or business practices, don t bless war, not in order to get on God s good side, since in Christ we ve already been made right with God. But because of the sacrifice Christ has made on our behalf. xv When we pray holy is your name, we are not only worshiping the God of all creation but we are committing ourselves to living lives that bring honor to his name. This has been a lot of teaching let me close with this: A little boy didn t quite understand the words of the Lord s Prayer. He thought it said: Our Father, who does art in heaven. Harold is his name. 5

6 May we boldly accept the invitation to turn to our loving God in prayer, trusting in his goodness, overwhelmed by his magnificence and responding with all of our lives. Amen i Max Lucado, Before Amen: The Power of A Simple Prayer (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2014), 3. ii Karl N. Jacobson, A Word in Season: Preaching the Lord s Prayer, Word & World, Volume 22, Number 1, Winter 2002 (Saint Paul: Luther Seminary). iii Jacobson iv Joachim Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1967), 57 v Max Lucado, Anxious for Nothing (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2017) 137 vi Willimon and Hauerwas, 25 vii Robinson, 7. viii Haddon Robinson, Jesus Blueprint for Prayer (Grand Rapids: Discovery House Publishers, 2001), 7. ix Lucado, Before Amen x Lucado, Before Amen xi Lucado, Before Amen 22 xii Willimon and Hauerwas, 45. xiii Robinson, 9. xiv Willimona dn Hauerwas, 48 xv Willimon and Hauerwas, 49. 6