Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 7 C – The Lord’s Prayer Lk 11.1-4

I want to start with a sentence from our Colossians reading before we look at some of the Lord’s Prayer we just heard. In Colossians 2.9, we read, In Christ the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Please let that sink in. In Christ the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Last week, we saw Mary listen to Jesus to the exclusion of anything else. She was listening to the whole fullness of God. Listening prayer.

Alan Cadwallader says the Lord’s Prayer was given as a model for prayer; not as an unalterable formula of words. He can say this because the Lord’s Prayer here in Luke is different from the version we read in Matt 6 9-13 … So today we’ll look at a small part of this model prayer; not so much as the prayer we repeat, but as the model to help us shape all of our prayer – listening and speaking prayer.

Before the prayer even appears in today’s Gospel, we see Jesus praying, and his disciples ask him to teach them how to pray as they remember John the Baptist taught his disciples. It’s basic to Christianity that we shape our lives according to the example Jesus has given us. We see the example Jesus gives us in how often we see him pray, and in what he prays; in his very close relationship with God.

That close relationship with God is exactly what Jesus offers us in the first word of his model prayer; Father. In English today, Father is a pretty formal way of addressing your Dad. Scholars believe that the way Jesus would have said it to his friends would’ve been to use his native Aramaic word Abba; a far more familiar, intimate word than Father. I remember how delighted I was when I first heard a little Israeli boy we knew, Jonathan, calling out to his Dad to come and push him on the swing: his word was, of course, Abba!

We Christians are used to calling God Father. It’s something we take for granted. But pious Jewish people, back then and today, won’t ever say or even accurately write the Name of God. They avoid the risk of reading out God’s Name from the Hebrew Bible by writing it with the vowels for a different word; Adonai—which means My Lord. And in English, they write G_d. So the first thing Jesus is teaching through the Lord’s Prayer is that we can call God by a personal name; that we’re invited into a place of privilege that people of his time who revered God would never even have dared enter. We’re invited into intimate conversation with God who knows and loves us; God who we can know and love; God who we can be bold to approach confidently as our any loving Father. So when we approach God in prayer, the first word of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke teaches us to address God with a name that assumes that God loves us; that we can be very intimate with God.

That may sound obvious; some people may think I don’t need to say it. But I’m painfully aware that lots of people don’t feel confident to approach God. Some don’t feel worthy – some can’t imagine that God would love them. I’m also painfully aware that for some people, the name Father has difficult associations. If that’s the case, and if it’s true that the Lord’s Prayer is a model for prayer and not an un-alterable, set form of words, then I’d say Jesus wouldn’t mind us giving God a name that has associations for us of safety, love and intimacy. The model we’re given here is the type of relationship; not a compulsory word.

Using our personal, intimate name for God doesn’t make God smaller. We don’t domesticate God by calling God Mother or Friend or Beloved. The very next phrase sees to that. Again, there’s that reverence pious Jews express in their extreme care with God’s Name. Hallowed be your Name. We say it so often, maybe we lose touch with its full meaning. We know that hallow means make holy, sanctify, consecrate, dedicate. But God’s Name already contains all of those meanings. So isn’t it perhaps redundant for us to pray this? In one way, yes; nothing we can do will stop God’s Name meaning all those things. But the way Jesus puts it, Hallowed be, he makes it a prayer that we, people who know and revere God’s Name, that we might show others the holiness and the beauty of the Name by the way we live. So it’s a prayer that we might grow to be more like God. Remember Hosea’s words! “…it shall be said to [you], ‘Children of the living God.’” Hosea 110.

This phrase is also a model for all our prayers. Here, it means that we ask for God’s grace so our lives might reflect God’s beauty to others, just like Jesus’ life did. This has always been the calling of God’s people; to be light where there is shadow. This helps us understand the next phrase a lot better: Your Kingdom come. Kingdom means sovereignty, royal power. So Reign is probably a better translation. Once again, the prayer is a call for us to be aligned with God’s purposes – with God’s Reign; Your reign be evident in and through us. So the answer to our prayers will be that people see God’s Reign, here and now, in the life of this community.

And once again, the power to accomplish this is God’s. Our part is to choose to live in response to that loving, kind, intimate, beautiful strength. The model prayer says that we are to do what we see Jesus do; pray; pray in trust that God loves us; ask God’s beauty to shine through us, and ask that we can live visibly as citizens of God’s Reign here and now. And we are to do that as a body; the body of Christ. Which takes us back to a new perspective on Col 2.9 In Christ, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. As the body of Christ in our time, this prayer calls us to open up to God’s leading like Jesus, and like him, to be God’s blessing to all. Amen