Hey! What Gives!? (Matthew 6:9-10; Tenth Sunday after Pentecost; August 2, 2015)

Hey! What Gives!?

Matthew 6:9-10

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 2, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, IA

If there is a single prayer from our tradition that people know by heart, it is the Lord's Prayer. There are a few variations. Some folks forgive debts where others forgive trespasses. United Methodists forgive trespassers, some wag has said, because we never forgive debts. More on that in a couple of weeks. Most Protestants use some version of the prayer as found in the Authorized Version, the so-called King James Version, named for the guy who did the authorizing. Many, though, use a modern version put forward by the International Consulation on English in the Liturgy. Some folks change a word or two here or there, to remove the patriarchal language. There are some slight differences in the concluding doxology (that is not part of either biblical version).

But all that aside, I can step in front of nearly any Christian body in the English-speaking world, say, "Let us pray as our Lord taught us," and have the assurance that we'll all get through it pretty well. We have this prayer memorized, even if it's only "sing-along" memorized, you know, in the way that we can sing along with a song on the radio that we couldn't sing without help. We also know the prayer by heart, which isn't quite the same thing. It's been a kind of refuge for us. When we have to pray, but don't know what or how, these words give agonized souls a way to pray.

I don't want to take any of that away, but like any set of memorized words that we use often, the Lord's Prayer has been subject to two distortions. First, we may never have read the Lord's Prayer very closely, in a way that let us hear it with something like the force that Jesus gave it. Second, like any common ritual, whether it's saying the Pledge of Allegiance or telling each other goodnight, we have this tendency to do it without really paying much attention. The words just carry us along and the first thing you know it's over and we hardly even noticed. We tell our spouses that we love them and after a few years it becomes automatic.

The solution to that problem is not to stop saying, "I love you." Nor is it to stop praying the Lord's Prayer. The solution is to pay attention, even if it is for the first time.

So, for the next four weeks we'll be looking a little more closely at the Lord's Prayer, learning or reminding ourselves of what it actually says, so that our worship together and our prayers when we are apart will carry more meaning.

The first thing that I want to notice is the sheer audacity of the prayer. With hardly any courtesy and no bowing and scraping at all, the prayer addresses God, lays out seven demands with the seven uses of the imperative. Then it stops so abruptly that Christians of later ages felt compelled to add the familiar doxology, "for thine is the kingdom, and so on..." It's a cheeky prayer, a prayer with sass. It doesn't request little things, either. This is not a request for help in finding a parking space or a lost set of car keys.

The scope of the prayer is huge, as the first five lines of the prayer make clear:

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

These requests aren't really three separate requests but three ways of asking for the same thing. Here's the situation: God, though addressed as a parent, is somewhat removed from us. God is in heaven. And we are not.

God looks around heaven and everything looks okay. God's name is regarded as holy. God reigns. God's will is done. But that's in heaven. That's not where we are. We are on earth. On earth things are not what they are where God is. And perhaps this has escaped God's notice.

God's name is not regarded as holy. God does not reign. I say this because God's will is not being done on earth. How do I know that? I'm glad you asked. I know that because I know what God wants. We all know what God wants. We spent four weeks laying that out in detail before I went on vacation.

To be sure, the Ten Commandments are not the only place in the Bible where God tells us what God wants, but it's a pretty good place. It isn't hard to understand, either. To begin, God is the God who set Israel free from slavery to the gods of Egypt. Israel labored endlessly to ease Pharaoh's anxiety by meeting his whims. They labored without rest. The conditions under which they lived did not allow for rest or neighborliness or community or human being. When Israel cried out, God heard them, God saw their misery, and God determined to set them free.

God does not want people in thrall to any economic system or government or social arrangement or even to any person. It is God's intention, God's will, to "bring out" everyone who lives in slavery.

That slavery can take a lot of forms. It could be the slavery of, say, student loan debt that is so massive it can never be repaid. Or it could be the slavery of endless austerity imposed on one nation by another (who, in the case that I'm thinking about, have had a nasty habit in the last century or so of trying to impose their will on other people, sometimes with tanks, this time with banks). Or it could be the slavery of consumerism that dangles shiny objects in front of people who when they "support the economy" by buying them are then accused of being greedy when the business cycle turns down. Or it could be the slavery of fear that is peddled by those who want our obedience, and use that fearful obedience to make the world less safe and themselves richer and more powerful. Or it could be the slavery of addiction to chemicals that poison the mind and body and leave behind wrecked lives and a tidy profit for the drug lords. Or it could be the slavery of the American Dream that holds out the promise of a prosperous life to any who work hard and obey the rules and shatters that promise at the hands of a racist criminal justice system. Slavery comes in many shapes and sizes. God hates them all. It is God's intention, God's will, to break the chains of bondage.

It is the God who hated Israel's chains in Egypt, who broke those chains, and who gave Israel a new life. We know God's dream for the shape of that new life. It would be a life of freedom from oppression by the gods of endless labor, endless anxiety, endless fear, and endless anxiety, the gods of death in all its forms. God would protect them from those gods. In their new life, there would be rest from labor. There would be freedom from fear that their houses and fields and orchards and vineyards would be taken from them. There would be freedom from violence. There would be relations that were based on truth-telling and where one neighbor would not regard the other as their rival or enemy. There would, perhaps best and least likely of all, be freedom from the envy and greed that gnaw at the roots of community and mutual care like the worm Nithhogg who in malice gnaws at the root of the world tree in Norse mythology.

God's will, in short, is no mystery. The mystery is, What has happened to it? Where is the making holy of God's name? Where is the reign of God? "These things are heaven," someone says. And I say to someone, "That's not good enough."

It wasn't good enough for Jesus. It wasn't good enough for the martyrs. It wasn't good enough for Benedict and those sought to fashion that humane life on earth, even if it was only within a small community, so that the rest of us should not lose hope. It wasn't good enough for Hildegard of Bingen who faced down bishops and demanded the unity of the Church. It wasn't good enough for William Wilberforce whose festival day was just this Thursday whose life-long labor was the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. It wasn't good enough for Martin Luther King, Jr., who saw clearly the destruction caused by the interlocking mechanisms of racism, poverty and militarism.

It's not good enough for us, either. Obamacare not withstanding, there are still plenty of people who need Decorah's free clinic. The so-called recovery from the last recession not withstanding, there are hungry children in our own country, in our own county. A post-racial society not withstanding, a black woman can get arrested and thrown in jail where she dies under suspicious circumstances for changing lanes without signaling.

You see, Jesus told us to pray like this, demanding God's justice in an unjust world. We've been doing it for a long time. We've been praying for two thousands years for God's will to be done, for God's kingdom to come, for God's name to be made holy and it hasn't happened yet.

Are you discouraged? I am. Justice is a long time coming.

God broke Israel's chains and gave them a new life. But it isn't as if God simply snapped the divine fingers and snatched the Israelites from their beds in Egypt and plopped them down in the Land of Promise. At some point the Israelites had to get up on their own feet and walk out of Egypt.

The other half of the Lord's Prayer is that it isn't enough to nag at God for justice, although God's people have never been above nagging. At some point we have to decide that it's well worth giving up some of our privilege for the sake of justice for everyone. At some point we have to decide that it isn't going to be business as usual. At some point we have to decide that we have had enough. At some point we have to get up on our own feet and walk out of Egypt, too. At some point we have to decide that we aren't going to governed by fear or greed. And all of this is part of the answer to the Lord's Prayer that we keep waiting for and resisting at the same time.

This prayer isn't a set of words we say together that comfort us in their familiarity. Still less is it to be prayed on auto-pilot. It is a prayer that demands the full engagement of our minds and our hearts and our hands and our feet. It is a prayer that demands a response from God and from us. An answer might not be soon in coming; it might take another two thousand years. But we're going to keep praying like we expect the answer tomorrow.

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