Scripture: Matthew 6:9; Luke 22:42; Luke 23:46; Acts 17:28 Series: 2023
Opening a Lenten series walking slowly through the Lord’s Prayer, this sermon dwells on the first line, ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name.’ It argues the prayer’s strangeness can renew its power. Calling God ‘Father’ names God as the source and basis of our existence through a generative relationship in Christ, not procreation or gender; God is also described with motherly imagery, so gender is the wrong question. ‘Heaven’ simply means sky, clarifying we pray to the transcendent God. To ‘hallow’ is to set apart God’s name as holy, a habit cultivated repeatedly, especially in Lent. Prayer is about God, not our external wants (intercession-as-desire) or internal wants (mindfulness-for-productivity); even Jesus in crisis begins with the Father. The plural ‘our’ makes prayer communal, calling us out of ourselves into the messy church and toward God’s vision.
Illustrations: halloween-hallowed, tetragrammaton-hashem, pagan-sexualized-gods, workplace-mindfulness, sky-daddy-genie, learned-prayer-language, closing-prayer-song
February 26, 2023
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Then in this way you should pray. Our Father in heaven. Sanctified be your name.
If you grew up as a Christian, the Lord’s prayer might be so familiar that it has lost its power. If you didn’t grow up in the church, the words of the Lord’s Prayer are strange. ‘Our father who art in heaven? This is strange. If you say the Lord’s prayer in a non-King James Version way, it is also strange. “Our Father in Heaven.”
It is all strange. It should all be strange.
Strange is not bad. Something strange can help us see something in a fresh way. The problem with something that is too familiar is that it no longer has the power to change us. The problem with something that is too strange, is we can’t take it seriously.
Series Intro
My friends, for this season of Lent, we are going to be slowly reading and praying through the Lord’s Prayer. These familiar (or unfamiliar words) are a radical call to seek God’s will in this world. And to understand God’s vision for ourselves and those around us. We are starting with the first line today: Our Father in heaven. Sanctified be your name.
For us to go deeper into the Lord’s Prayer, we need to talk about the name of God, the location of God, and what it means to make God’s name sacred. First, we start with the name of God, our Father. These are the words of Jesus. These are the words Jesus tells his disciples to say. In other places, he says Lord in prayer, but mostly it’s Father.
Now, there is some controversy today about gendered language in the Bible, but i don’t think any argument comes to the issue of what to call God in prayer. Jesus uses the language of Father when he teaches his disciples to pray. The word Father for Jesus is about a relationship. It’s not about a genetic or sexual connection. Most pagan religions have gods whose sexual activity is a part of their identity. The immediate neighbors of the Jews, the Greeks and the Sumerians, both had highly sexualized pantheons. This is not the case with Christianity or Judaism. In the prophet Isaiah, especially, God is referred to as Father, but throughout most of the Jewish Scriptures, God is transcenentally distant from humanity. Jesus consistently calling God the Father, Father, in prayer, is one of the starker breaks with classical Jewish religious practice. The name of God is super important in the Jewish faith. It is something that is not said. There’s a name in Hebrew, I just call it the four letters. Sometimes it’s referred to the Tetragrammaton, which just means four letters. Sometimes it’s translated as Yahweh or Jehovah, but it would never be spoken in a Jewish context. When Jews are praying to God, they would say, Adonai which means Lord. When Jews are talking about God, like at the bar, they would say Hashem, which means “the name.” Everybody would understand what name is being talked about. Jesus calls God, Father, based on a generative relationship that Jesus, the Son of God, has to God the Father. As well, it is a generative relationship that we have to God the Father through Jesus Christ. God is our Father. Not in the sense of procreation, but in the sense that God is the source and basis of our existence. The new covenant given to us by Jesus Christ offers us a relationship with the source and basis of our existence. There is an an analogy to earthly fathers that is not connected to procreation, it’s not connected to gender, but to relationship and love and support. The complex thing about gender and the language of God is that God is also referred to with motherly analogies. Multiple times, as well, Jesus is referred to in language like a mother. There isn’t a gender fluidity to God. There is not a gender to God. It is the wrong question to ask. To call God father is to name God as the source of our existence, the foundation, the very basis of prayer, which is what we are doing by saying ‘our Father.’ The ‘our’ is so important. Not ‘my’ Father. It isn’t about my one-to-one relationship with God, but our connection to the source in whom we live and move and have our being. All prayer is based on community, on this relationship. “With the words “Our Father who art in heaven” we name, we claim that relationship which God offers us through his Son, who became our brother.” Christ has given us his Spirit so that we may enter into familial relationship with his Father.
Our father in heaven, in the sky. Heaven is not this cosmological term, it’s an astronomical term. It’s just sky. Our Father in the sky. Even in Greek, it’s strange because there’s a pagan God named Uranus, but that is not who we are talking about. We are referring to our father in heaven, not our Father on earth.
I think this is the whole point of the location. It’s clarifying which Father are we talking about when we pray. We are not praying to our genetic or procreative father, but to the God beyond where we are. We are praying to the transcendent one.
Hallowed be thy name is the standard King James translation. Hallowed is not a word we use at all anymore. Halloween is the only other time you used the word hallowed. So we use it on the Lord’s Prayer and on October 31st.
The word means to make sacred, to make holy, haggs, haggs, um, set apart. And this is where we start getting into what we are doing with prayer. It is setting apart who God is and God’s name, setting apart our understanding of who God is in God’s name. And we need to repeat this again and again and again. We cannot settle and think we’ve made the sacred God’s name enough. “Our thinking and speaking, and acting become holy when we cultivate holy habits by living in the company of the spirit.” This is what Lent is for. We have a time of year set aside to cultivate holy habits, like prayer.
As one of my teachers wrote, all prayer is about God. We, however, are often tempted to make ourselves the centerpiece of our prayers. This temptation goes both ways. It happens sometimes with intercessory prayer. When our prayer to God is solely based on things we want, we turn prayer into our own desires. They might be good things we are asking God for, but it’s still centered on us.
Or on the complete opposite side, prayer as meditation or mindfulness. In the contemporary world, companies promote mindfulness in the workplace, not really for the betterment of the people, but to make people more efficient workers. If if you give your worker some meditation time, maybe they’ll be a little more productive during the rest of the day, kind of like giving a lunch break. . But prayer is neither about what we want external to ourselves or what we want internal to ourselves. From beginning to end, prayer is about God. Jesus begins prayer with God in a concrete way. There is nothing vague about it. “Christian prayer takes its stand on the solid ground of the revealed Word and has nothing to do with vague, self-seeking vagaries.”
So often, as well, prayer is something to do when we don’t know what to do. When tragedy strikes. When life changes directions. Jesus also prayers in those moments. Jesus prayers the night before he is arrested. Father, if it be your will, take this cup from me. . From the cross, Father, into your hand I commend my Spirit. He begins the same way. To say Father in prayer is not simply a social convention but a declaration of relationship. We call to God in times of stress not to be a sky daddy and answer us like a genie in a bottle. God is our source and in prayer we return to our source to seek to align our will with God’s will. Before that, we have to begin with God’s name.
Our Father in heaven. May your name be sacred, may your name be holy. May your name be venerated.
The Lord’s prayer begins with our calling to God and seeking that God’s name be sanctified. Another way to look at it is to seek to enter into God’s vision. Yes, that is what making God’s name holy is about. Entering in to God’s vision. God’s vision for ourselves, God’s vision for the world, for us here, God’s vision for the church. What is the name of God to you? I like to pray saying, heavenly Father. For a long time I said, Father God, in part, because I was around a lot of people who said ‘Father God’ when they prayed. For most of us, the way we pray connects back to the people around us when we learned how to pray. It is intimate.
In that connection of relationship, most often the language of our prayer, the language with which we refer to God, comes from where we come from, where we learned to pray. We must realize we don’t learn prayer in a vacuum, there are people whom we heard, whom we model ourselves after. What is God’s name to you? How are you making God’s name holy?
It is a powerful claim to call God father. It is a powerful thing to sanctify God’s name. To claim that you are doing that. What are ways we can sanctify God’s name? The Bible gives us a lot of good ideas about what to do. And this, as much as anything, should help us to understand that prayer is not a passive thing. This is what Jesus teaches us in the Lord’s Prayer. Of course, we humans love to make things passive. We love to pass the buck
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to slowly go through this prayer, these words of Jesus, to try to deepen our understanding of what prayer is, but also what God’s vision for us is. Our Father, not my father. God calls us out of our own lives into the messiness of the world. The messiness of the church. The church has always been messy. If we think we can worship God apart from others, we deceive ourselves into thinking we are better than them and that we can rest secure in our salvation apart from them. Jesus teaches his disciples to pray in community. Lent can be a time ti remember that.
Lent at its best is a time to slow down and see where we are in connection to God, our relationship to the source, and who we live and move and have our being. It is a time to prepare ourselves for Easter, a time to prepare ourselves for the future. May this prayer be a little stranger to you this day, but may it lead you closer to God’s vision. May you see that in praying as Jesus taught, we can be the people Jesus called.
Let us pray, Heavenly Father, thank you for being our Heavenly Father. You are our source, the giver of life. May we honor your name. Maybe sanctify your name in all we do. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Our father in Heaven. On a scale from one to ten your love is eleven. Our father in Heaven. When we are feeling sad or lost we sing to you, we sing to you
Holy be your name May we never talk about you, God, with words that bring you shame. Holy be your name, may we remember that your love for us has truly changed the game.
Holy be your name.