Hilton Head Island, SC – May 26, 2024
The Chapel Hilton Without Walls
Exodus 3:1-14. Matthew 6:5-14
A sermon by John M. Miller
Text - "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." - Matthew 6:9
The Lord’s Prayer is the best-known prayer in Christendom. It probably is spoken every Sunday in every church in the world, and in Roman Catholic churches, convents, and monasteries every day when the Mass is celebrated. There are slight variations in its wording among the Churches, as shall be noted in this series of sermons. Nonetheless it is one of the most important and unifying aspects of Christianity everywhere.
Originally the Lord's Prayer was taught to Jesus' followers as part of what the Church for many centuries has called the Sermon on the Mount. It is a collection of miscellaneous sayings of Jesus which were drawn together in the fifth through seventh chapters of the Gospel of Matthew. It also is found in abbreviated form in Luke's Gospel (11:2-4), but the context in which Jesus said it there is not the same.
We might note first of all that Jesus meant for this prayer to be used by his followers. It is the disciples' prayer; it is not a prayer intended for universal use by all peoples everywhere. It would have no relevance to those who are not Christians. Whoever prays this prayer must do so with the awareness that it depicts Jesus' understanding of God and of some of the elements that Jesus believed should be included in prayer to God.
The prayer begins with what is surely the most distinctive feature of Jesus' understanding of who God is; He starts out by calling God our “Father.” Has it ever registered with you just how revolutionary that notion was? Numerous times throughout the four Gospels Jesus calls God "Father," but are you aware of just how unprecedented that is? Only twice in the Hebrew scriptures, in verses in Deuteronomy (32:6) and Isaiah (63:16), is God ever referred to as "father." And in those two instances He is perceived as the father of the Israelites in a collective sense, the father of all Jewish people, but not as your Father or my Father. It was the deeply personal sense in which Jesus spoke of God as Father which makes his terminology so unique.
Ah yes, you may be thinking, but after all, Jesus was the Son of God, so why wouldn't he conceptualize of God as "Father"? It is, of course, true that in a totally unique sense Jesus was God's Son, and that he was God's child in a way none of us is God's child. Nevertheless, Jesus was the first person in history to declare that God is our Father, yours and mine, and that we are as surely related to God as Father (with a capital “F”) as Jesus himself was. I am not suggesting that we are God's sons or daughters identically to the way Jesus was His Son, but we are no less His children than Jesus was, even if we are His children in a different manner.
A few times in the Gospels Jesus called God not just Father (in the Greek text almost always it is Pater) but Abba, an Aramaic word which means not "Father" but "Papa" or "Daddy" or "Dad." If God is Father to all of us, is He Papa or Dad, or is that too familiar a nomenclature for us? I confess it is for me. I personally cannot perceive God as my Father in the same way that I conceptualized my human father, whom I never called “Father,” and always called him "Dad." Perhaps the primary reason for that is that I always thought of God as being my Father in heaven, until my human father died over thirty-five years ago.
Fortunately, however, I have always had a very positive mental concept of the very word "father" because I had such a positive feeling toward my earthly father. Dad was not a perfect father, nor did I ever expect him to be, but he was as good a human father as I could ever have hoped to have. No doubt much of what I am today is the result of the good influence of both of my parents in my early as well as later years. Therefore when I think of God as Father, I do not have to do what I know many people have to do, namely, to set aside the negative memories they have of their own fathers in order to try to accept the idea of God as Father in a positive light.
In any case, the very concept "father" conjures up a decidedly personal image for most of us, because for better or worse (and I think on balance it is for the better for most of us), we remember having had a father for a varying number of years, but that father is (or was) fundamentally personal to us; he was a he, he was a person, and he was a particular kind of a person.
When Jesus called God "Father," He was intimating that God is also a person, but a totally singular kind of “person.” God is, as I have attempted on previous occasions to express, more than a mere "He" or "She," more than merely Father or Mother, but that in some deep and ultimately mysterious way He is Parent to us even more than our human parents. If you choose to call God Mother rather than Father, I'm sure it is okay with God, but unfortunately it is confusing, because the traditional male language about God is so powerful and persuasive that feminist sensitivities enhance feminism but they may obfuscate theological meaning. On the other hand, God surely is not “masculine” in any biological sense of that word.
When Jesus said of God that He is our Father, I suspect he clearly meant to suggest that God is definitely not an Unseen Distant Force or an Impersonal Remote Power or a Detached Impartial Energy. Instead, insisted Jesus of Nazareth, we are to see God as our Father. We are not alone in the universe! We are not isolated from our Creator by the inestimable void of space and time; we have a Father! God did not bring us into being and then disappear as some earthly fathers do; He continues to be and always shall be our Father! The One who made us very carefully and lovingly has related Himself to us as our Father!
When Jesus calls God Father, He is saying that God is more than El Shaddai, “God of the Mountains” or “God Almighty”, that He is more than Adonoy Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts, or even that He is the Holy One of Israel. He is those things too, but most of all, pre-eminently, He is our Father. It is imperative that we understand Jesus departed the traditional Jewish terminology with respect to God. He did not eliminate the old terminology; he expanded on it by using this new term for God; He called God "Father," and he urged us to do the same thing. (I prefer to think Jesus reluctantly surrendered to the excessive masculine linguistics of his time.) It may not seem very significant to you, but in his own time and among his own people, it was a radical departure from the traditional ways to conceptualize God as Father. Perhaps in the minds of some of his theological enemies it was sufficient reason by itself to get him killed.
In the Lord's Prayer there are three petitions having to do with God, and three having to do with us. Those about God are as follows: 1) Hallowed be Thy name; 2) Thy kingdom come, and 3) Thy will be done. Those having to do with us are: 1) Give us this day our daily bread; 2) Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us, and 3) And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. The prayer focusses first on God, as every prayer should, and only then does it focus on us.
How often we get that order reversed! Many people pray only when they are in trouble, and then only for themselves. Jesus says that when we pray, we should pray first that God may be perceived by us and everyone else to be who He is - our Father, God Almighty, the Lord of Hosts, the Holy One of Israel - and further that His will and purposes may be accomplished, and not simply ours. In fact, only to the degree that our will is in concord with His will can we legitimately ask anything of God. Therefore we may be best advised always to pray as Jesus prayed in Gethsemane; "Not my will, but Thine, be done."
We must not try to bend God's will to do what we want; we must try to bend our wills to do what God wants. God comes first, God always comes first, and we must always come second. When we suppose our personal concerns for ourselves are greater than God's concerns for the whole universe, we fall into the trap of human egocentricity which is the foundation of most kinds of sin. I'm not saying that we are not important; we cannot perceive ourselves to be daughters and sons of God and come to that conclusion. Nonetheless, in our praying, in our thinking, and in our living, God must always take precedence over everything else, and if He doesn't, we diminish both Him and ourselves, at least in our minds and actions.
Next, we note that God is our Father; Jesus does not begin the prayer by saying My Father --- He says Our Father. The words "I," "me," or "my" never appear in the Lord's Prayer. In our praying we need to think more in the plural than the singular. It is true that each of us is an "I," but together we are "we," and in the Lord's Prayer, Jesus clearly identifies God as our Father.
Then Jesus notes that God is our Father in heaven. But, you may wonder, who doesn't know that? Of course He is in heaven! Where else would He be?
Without ever once using the word, the Bible, both in the Hebrew and Greek scriptures, frequently refers to the omnipresence of God; God is everywhere. So if He is everywhere, He is everywhere on earth, but He also is in heaven, wherever and whatever that is. He is also throughout the incomprehensible vastness of space. But in stating specifically that God is our Father in heaven, I think Jesus meant to imply that God's presence is not and cannot be limited to the world alone. If we imagine God solely in terms of the earthly, we do an injustice to the conception of who God is.
Certain kinds or hymns or songs diminish God by their very wording. I know this is a very delicate ox to gore, but I have serious objections to In the Garden. "I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses/ And the voice I hear, falling on my ear/ The Son of God discloses/ And He walks with me, and He talks with me/ And He tells me I am His own/ And the joy we share as we tarry there/ None other has ever known." The kind of God who takes strolls in a garden with any earthling is far too anthropomorphized for me. Or there is that popular song many years ago that referred to God as “The Man Upstairs." Think about it: if you were God, how would you feel when someone crooned about you as The Man Upstairs? If I were God, and if God is only “up there,” and somebody said that, I'd drop a king-sized bed on the offender. And if not that, at least a huge pillow as big as an entire king-sized bed.
The verb "to hallow" means "to be praised as holy"; "hallow" and "holy" have the same root meaning. Thus Jesus tells us that when we pray we are to remember that God's name is holy.
But that raises an entirely new issue; just what is God's name? Is it "God"? Is it "El," as in the Hebrew Bible, or "Elohim," the one meaning God and the other meaning, literally, Gods (plural)? Is it Yah, as in El-i-Yah, Elijah: literally, God-the-God? Is God's name El Shaddai, as Abraham called Him (God of the Mountains)? Is it Adonoy (Lord), or Adonoy Sabaoth (Lord of Hosts?) Just what should we call God, if we are always to remember that His name is to be hallowed?
The third chapter of the Book of Exodus is one of the most important passages in the Bible. It describes God's call of Moses to go from the desert of Midian back into Egypt to lead the Chosen People out of bondage and into the Promised Land. Moses is not at all eager to take on this assignment, and he does everything he can to discourage God from pursuing the matter. Finally, when he has exhausted all other excuses, Moses says, "When I go to the people of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?', what shall I say to them?" Oy, the chutzpah! “How will they know this is for real, God, if neither they nor I know Your name?” "So alright already," says God, who is tiring of these tedious excuses, "Tell them my name is I Am Who I Am; tell them I Am has sent you" (Exodus 3:13-14). He is the Father of the Holy Name.
In Hebrew God's name is Yahweh. It literally means I Am or I Am Who I Am or I Will Be Who I Will Be. Its root meaning has to do with "being." God is the Creator of everything that is, to put it one way, or He is the Ground of Being, as the theologian Paul Tillich put it in another way. To the ancient Israelites, God's name was so holy that they never pronounced it. In the Hebrew Bible the name Yahweh was written frequently, but whenever they read scripture aloud and they came to the word Yahweh, they substituted the word Adonoy: the Lord. To the original people of God, God's name was that holy.
Christian people, His name is Holy who has brought us into being! Our creator is Yahweh, I Am; our lives are a gift of I Am Who I Am, and not only that, but Yahweh is our Father! Our God is a Father! He is not a remote, dispassionate, apathetic deity; He is our Father! Not only that, He is always our Father, the Father of the Holy Name! When we have gone to the far country, when we have sowed wild oats by the barrelful and spent everything in riotous living, we can still go home, because we have a Father, and He is waiting for us, He is searching for us, He scans the horizon to see us, and when we appear in the distance, He runs to meet us, He runs to us, Yahweh, I Am, He is so delighted to see our return! What a Father is our Father! What a God is our God! How holy is His name!
When Jesus first taught the disciples the Lord's Prayer, according to Matthew he was on a mountain. Tradition has determined that mountain to be on the north side of the Sea of Galilee, the Lake of Gennesaret, the Lake Shaped Like a Harp, Harp Lake. A mountain rises above the lake on the north side. Near the crest is the Church of the Beatitudes. You can look down from there and see that the lake looks like a biblical harp.
Wordsworth wrote a poem, about which you may have vague memories from an English literature class long ago. It was called "Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey." It described looking down from a high hill at the old monastic church of Tintern.
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (The Ground of Being)
We have a Father, we all have the same Father, He is both in heaven and in the entire universe and here on earth with us every moment of every day. His name is Yahweh, “I Am”, and He is holy. Hallelu-Yah: Praise God!