The Lord’s Prayer

a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine

on World Communion Sunday, October 1, 2006

 at The First Parish in Lincoln

 

“But what do [God] look like?  My first step from the old white man was trees.

Then air. Then birds.  Then other people.”

– Shug to Celie in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

 

 

READING: 

 

Our reading this morning is from Matthew 6:9-13.  These verses are the basis for what we call the Lord’s Prayer.  Their context is that Jesus’ disciples have asked him for some instruction about how to pray.  Jesus had no use for people who paraded their religion in the public square – he warns his disciples:“do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners.”  Instead, “when you pray, go into your room and shut the door,” and once you’re there, you don’t need a lot of words – “don’t heap up empty phrases.”  He goes on to say:

 

“Pray then in this way:

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

 

That’s where it ends.  The last line, “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, Amen,” was added decades later by the early church. 

 

This prayer, like everything else in the gospels, was written in Greek.  But Jesus spoke in Aramaic – so his words were translated into Greek, the Greek was later translated into Latin, the Latin into Old English, and the Old English into our modern versions of the bible.  So it’s fair to wonder: what may have been lost in translation.  There are several translations from the original Aramaic – here’s one of them:

 

O cosmic Birther, thou from whom the breath of life comes,

Focus your light within us.

Your heavenly domain approaches.

Let your will come true – in the universe just as on earth.

Give us wisdom for our daily need.

Untangle the knots within us, so that we can mend our hearts’ ties to each other.

Let us not be lost in superficial things, but free us from what holds us back from our true purpose.

---

Nine years ago this month, one of the first two student ministers I was lucky enough to have come here

            gave her second sermon from this pulpit – she called it “Our Father?”

Her name, as many of you know, was Susanne Skubik.

She was raised in the Catholic church, but as an adult living in New York City,

                        where she was an Associate Editor of Ms. Magazine for five years

            she changed spiritual horses and became a member of All Souls Unitarian Church.

She said: “I needed a religious home that honored the questions, that engaged the mind,

            that allowed doubt – and that respected girls as much as it venerated boys.”

 

After a few years as an active member at All Souls Church, she left Ms. and New York

            for Harvard Divinity School –  to do something she could never have done as a Catholic –

                        prepare to be a parish minister.

 

In her first few weeks here with us, Susanne knew she had to give a sermon on the Lord’s Prayer.

It was almost always part of our Sunday service, as it still is.

But she couldn’t say it.

The words would stick in her throat.

She knew the words, of course – she had grown up saying them.

But now those words contained very little of what she had come to believe about God.

 

She knew there were people in this congregation who loved saying the Lord’s Prayer –

            who would not feel that church was complete without it.

So she worried: how do I come clean with my own feelings and not offend those people?

 

That’s why the first line in her sermon nine years ago was:

            “I must begin by saying this: I love this church.”

She really meant that.

After her year with us she did an internship at another church,

                                    she got her Masters in Divinity from Harvard, and then she came back here –

                        she joined this church, she was ordained here,

            and this is where she was married to her husband, James.

They are parents now, living across the pond in Wales.

 

In her sermon that October, she told us that most of her problems with the Lord’s Prayer

            show up right in its first line, in the first two words, “Our Father...”

She said:  “I know that God is not a person.  And I know God has no gender.

            But I grew up in a world that either explicitly or implicitly projected a male image on divinity.”

And that image gave a boost to all the other messages that were still out there –

            that girls can’t do math, can’t be assertive, can’t be ministers, can’t be president.

“It took me a long time to unlearn all of that,” she said.

            “I don’t want that for my daughters.  Or my sons.  Or yours.”

 

So even though she knew that the image of God as father was very real and comfortable

            for a number of people here, she couldn’t say “Our Father...”

                        nor did the words “who art in heaven...” make any sense to her.

Do we really believe, she asked us, that God is up in some distant place, looking down on us?

Or do we believe that God is in us and all around us?

What is the effect on us, and on our children,

            of repeating a prayer week after week in which God is pictured as a remote father?

 

She went on from there to paint her own picture of God as a Creator who brought the world into being

            and then vanished into it – which means that if you look closely, with the eyes of your eyes,

                        you will see God in all living things, and you will feel God’s presence.

It was a memorable sermon, and it sparked a lot of discussion, including two forums in the Stearns Room.

Here’s what we learned from those forums and from two surveys of the entire congregation:

                                    a quarter of us would just as soon get rid of the Lord’s Prayer,

                        another quarter of us do feel this service is not complete without it,

            and half of us would like to rotate the Lord’s Prayer with prayers from other traditions.

For them, the most important thing is to say a prayer together, in unison, whatever it is.

 

We also learned that when we do say the Lord’s Prayer, most of us want to leave the words untouched.

 If we’re going to say it at all, most of us want to say it in King James’ English.

 

So what do we do?

What we’ve done so far is: we haven’t touched the language,

                        and every now and then we try out a prayer from some from other tradition,

            or most often, the beautiful Prayer of St. Francis, from our own tradition.

I know that some of you miss the Lord’s Prayer  every time we put something in its place,

            and I know some of you, like Susanne, stand mute when we include it.

 

Jesus told his disciples to “go into your room and shut the door” when you pray,

                        but the first word of the prayer he teaches them is “Our...”

            this is a prayer meant to be said in community.

And I think that any prayer we say together here

            should express our deepest beliefs and hopes about the world –

                        that is what makes the words of a prayer come alive.

So let’s look at the words.

 

Jesus says, “Our Father...”

In the first century, both Jews and Greeks commonly addressed God as “Father.”

Jesus liked the image of God as Father.

He sometimes used an intimate expression – abba – which was like saying “daddy.”

 

Some translators say that the Aramaic word for father embraces both male and female elements.

Should we be saying “Our Father and Mother...”?

And some say the word has more to do with creation:

            “O cosmic Birther, thou from whom the breath of life comes...”

So should we be saying, “Our Creator...”?

 

Unlike Susanne, I can say “Our Father,” but I don’t like letting it be our primary image for God.

It saddles us with the bad habit of anthropomorphizing God.

God is a Spirit, with a capital “S,” not a person, either male or female.

So like Susanne, I wish we could agree on an image for God other than “Father.”

 

But I do love most of the Lord’s Prayer, both it’s content and its cadence.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”

These words work on several levels:

            they point to the presence of God in our midst,

                        the power of God working through us,

                                    and the politics of God’s justice.

The people listening to Jesus were mostly peasants.

“Thy kingdom come” was a call for both social action and social change.

The people who came to hear him lived under the harsh rule of real kingdoms and real kings.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” looked forward to “what life would be like on earth

                        if God were king and the rulers of the world were not...”

On earth as it is in heaven.

 

And think about the words“Give us this day our daily bread”

when your daily bread is not a given, when on some days there is no bread –

            here, in this line, the Lord’s Prayer comes right down to earth.

 

And it stays there with the next: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

This line is definitely about financial debt.

Both the Aramaic and the Greek translate that way.

Even peasants could own land, but indebtedness could mean the loss of your land,

               and a hard life as a tenant farmer or a day laborer,

                        so the forgiveness of a debt could literally change your life.

 

It was the Christian teacher, Origen, in the third century, who changed debts to trespasses,

                        and most churches in the U.S. use trespasses because debts seems too narrow,

but it’s good to remember why Jesus used the word “debts” in the first place.

In any case, the most important word in that line is the verb: “forgive.”

 

The last line in the prayer begins: “Lead us not into temptation...”

But why do we have to ask God not to lead us into temptation?

I thought tempting us was supposed to be the devil’s job.

 

I say this tongue-in-cheek because this line is mired in a first-century cosmology I don’t share.

The words “deliver us from evil” or, more accurately, “from the evil one”

            imply the existence of some external and independent evil being – “the devil made me do it!”

The world surely does need deliverance, but if we really want to fix what’s wrong in it,

            we need to look within – Jung taught us that.

The temptation we must all avoid is to know what’s wrong and look the other way.

 

At the end of the day, I believe what matters most is:

            what ideas about God, forgiveness, and service to others do we want to teach our children?

            and does this prayer help us do it?

The good news is that when we ask our kids in Sunday School to draw a picture of God,

                        they draw everything from trees and ocean to stars, sun and wind,

            and only rarely, thank God, do we get a picture of an old man with a white beard!

 

In Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple,

                        two young black women from the south are talking – Celie and Shug –

            they’re are talking about God.

Shug says to Celie, “God ain’t a he or a she.”

So Celie asks, “What do [God] look like?”

And Shug says,

            “My first step from the old white man was trees.  Then air.  Then birds.  Then other people.

                        But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was,

                                    it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all.

                                                I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed.”

Amen.

 

 

__________________________

 

Notes: My source for the context of the words “Thy kingdom come” and “Give us this day our daily bread” is Marcus Borg’s book, The Heart of Christianity, p. 132f.

 

If you want to see several translations of the Lord’s Prayer from the Aramaic, you can Google Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic and find a number of sites, but my conclusion in looking at them is that the translators have taken liberties with the original Aramaic.