On Thanksgiving Day I participated in the annual service at St. Paul's Cathedral here in London. It's an amazing event...one of the largest gatherings of Americans each year in the city. You can see some coverage here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/court_and_social/article5247482.ece
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/europe/london.php.
Part of the service involves choosing a charity as the recipient of the offering, and this year I had the chance to introduce the organization we selected.
Some of you know that I worked for two different service providers for homeless people in the LA area. One of those was a 'rolling shelter' in Pasadena, where seven churches committed to one night per week during the winter months. It was a great way to use space and people power that already existed to accomplish something important and helpful and loving.
Through some friends here in London I met the staff of the Camden and City Churches Cold Weather Shelter, otherwise known as C4WS. (See http://www.coldweathershelter.org/) I wasn't surprised to be impressed by their passion and concern for homeless people...there is no shortage of either in most charitable organizations that help the needy. What did impress me was the resourcefulness and competence of the Shelter staff...qualities which are often lacking in a lot of charities. Jhoana and Jamie are good, caring people, who know how to do their jobs well with minimal resources and facilities. We could all learn a lot from them.
We were impressed enough to sign on with C4WS for the coming winter season. The American Church in London will host 14 homeless men and women for the 12 Wednesday nights during January, February and March. We're busy now securing volunteers, buying supplies and planning out meals. At every step of the way, the Shelter staff (all two of them) have been encouraging, inspirational, and most of all, helpful.
So back to the Thanksgiving Day service.
It was my privilege to stand in front of the 2200 people there and ask them for money to support the work of C4WS. Below are my remarks as I shared them in the service.
Happy Thanksgiving to all of you!
Like many Americans, Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It combines the best foods, the best of our families and friends, and even the best sports—all in one special day. It’s a day of sharing, of welcoming, of setting the extra place at the table.
I was speaking with a reporter yesterday who had been posted in the US for a few years, and she was still amazed at how many American families had invited her to join in their Thanksgiving meals. She thought she was intruding, until she understood the meaning behind the holiday.
At Thanksgiving we pause to remember, and to be grateful for the material blessings in our lives. That makes it a perfect day to pause and remember those among us who have fallen on difficult times—who have needs that seem far away from our own circumstances—in particular today we pause to think about the homeless here in London.
Each year the churches who host this service choose a charitable organization to receive the proceeds of the offering. This year we have selected the Camden and City Churches Cold Weather Shelter.
This amazing group of people hosts a rolling shelter, in which a group of churches commit to welcoming homeless men and women for a home cooked dinner, some conversation and fellowship, a warm bed for the night and a hot breakfast in the morning. This year my congregation will be participating for the first time, and we can’t wait to begin.
London, for all its beauty and history and opportunity, can be a tough place to live in the best of circumstances. To be homeless in London brings with it almost unimaginable challenges and dangers. Statistics can tempt us into thinking of homelessness as an abstract idea—something faceless and without much meaning. I’ll share just two related statistics with you this morning.
The life expectancy of a homeless person in London is 42.
The average age of those served by the Cold Weather Shelter is 38.
Think about that for a moment. This shelter is rescuing men and women who are literally nearing the end of their days. The shelter provides a safe place, good food, and a healthy dose of hope for its guests.
But the Cold Weather Shelter doesn’t only provide beds and meals. They also help people find permanent housing, medical assistance, and opportunities to work. One of the Shelter staff told me last week that their goal is to make sure that last year’s guests don’t need the services of the Shelter this year.
The passage of Scripture we just heard (Colossians 3:12-17) reminded us that it is important to be clothed with compassion. That’s one of those everyday truths, but it takes on even more significance as we gather in this beautiful place, to celebrate God’s rich provision for us.
As you consider your offering today, I encourage you to clothe yourself with compassion for the homeless in this great city. If I can be so bold, please consider giving £20 today to support the work of the Camden and City Churches Cold Weather Shelter.
Add this moment to the list of things you’re thankful for today.
Add saving a life to the list of gifts you and your family will share this holiday season.
Thank you very much, God bless you all, and Happy Thanksgiving.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Monday, November 24, 2008
Whose Life is it Anyway?
(This is the eighth and final message in a series titled, 'A Declaration of Dependence: The Lord's Prayer')
You learn pretty early in life that there are some things that shouldn’t be mentioned in polite conversation. The obvious ones are religion and politics, and to that you can usually add the concept of sin and anything to do with money. These things are important to all of us, which accounts for the heat they generate around the dinner table. But we don’t always give them their due.
The real question is: Who’s in control?
Today we complete our journey through the Lord’s Prayer. We’ve been saying that this prayer of Jesus is at the core of our faith—that it shows us the heart of what we believe and also what we’re called to do about it. The Lord’s Prayer functions like a heart in that it takes us in wherever we are: broken, wounded, afraid, and depleted. It takes us in and restores us—it gives us back our spiritual energy—it renews us and sends us out for service again.
Even though we say it over and over, we’re different each time—we’re in different places each time, and that makes the prayer new and different and life-changing…each time.
We’ve prayed the entire prayer already:
Our Father, the one who really exists,
You reveal yourself to us as holy and loving,
Bring your Kingdom,
Make this world into the world you meant it to be from the beginning.
Provide for us, O God, and teach us to provide for others.
Forgive us, and teach us to be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation everywhere.
Don’t test us beyond our limits, O God, and while you’re at it, protect all of us, especially the weakest, from the evil all around us.
The version of the prayer we’ve all learned adds a benediction, a restatement of the themes of the prayer, as a way of communicating the hope that goes along with our faith and our call to action. The last part of the Lord’s Prayer turns us outward—it’s meant to be inspiring—it’s meant to call us to action.
“For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” My life, my family, my possessions—it’s all yours, O God. We believe you. Amen.
This last part of the Lord’s Prayer as we say it isn’t even in the Bible. But it was a common part of the teaching in the early church, and has been a part of Christian practice since the 4th century or so.
So back to religion and politics. The Lord’s Prayer has some important things to say about what we believe, and also about how we think we should be governed. These are two crucial questions about our lives and how we live them—no wonder they cause so much tension and conflict.
We find the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, the longest stretch of teaching by Jesus himself in the entire New Testament. Remember that the Sermon on the Mount has a point—it’s not just a list of interesting things that Jesus said. The point of the Sermon is to describe what the world would be like if people lived according to the values of the Kingdom of God—as if God really existed and meant what he promised. Prayer is a part of that life—of those values—and so Jesus pauses in his sermon to teach his disciples how to pray.
It makes sense that the Lord’s Prayer starts with clear, unmistakable statements about both religion and politics
Our Father, the one who truly exists.
This is your kingdom—run it according to your perfect will.
Now that’s some serious religion, or faith, and it’s also a pretty bold political manifesto.
Believing that God exists is a powerful statement of faith. Part of that comes from our own personal spiritual awareness, part of it is a level of trust that the biblical record is accurate, and the rest comes from our interaction and shared experience with other Christians—with the community of faith you see in this room.
In other words, our belief in God is something we know in a way that is different from the way we know everything else. It’s not a list of facts or theorems or forensic evidence—they’re never going to prove or disprove the existence of God on CSI. And yet our belief in God is just as real—just as valid—just as important as the things we know in other ways.
Believing that God exists is also a powerful political statement. ‘Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done’ is the most radical statement anyone in this room has ever made—that includes those of you who protested the Vietnam War in the 60s, or in the fight for civil rights, or in any other demonstration to accomplish an earthly goal. ‘Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done’ tops all of those other revolutions—even the ones that were driven by faith.
Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done’ is a statement of our belief that the Kingdom of God is exactly that—God’s Kingdom, Christ’s reign, the eternal rule of Father, Son and Holy Spirit over everyone and everything, even death. No revolution or coronation or election can compare to what the world is like when faithful people acknowledge that God is sovereign—that God is in control.
But control is still a huge issue for us, isn’t it? The people who poke fun at Christian faith will call it a crutch—an act of neediness—an unwillingness or inability to take control over our lives. And yet, when the Scriptures talk about what the life of faith is all about, they say things like: ‘the first will be last and the last will be first’; ‘in order to be truly free, you have to become a slave’; and the big one…'Present your bodies as a living sacrifice—this is your spiritual act of service.’ Not a lot in there about winning or controlling.
As we look at the Lord’s Prayer, what do we make of that? As we move ahead as individuals and as a community of faith—as a church, what do we make of the Lord’s Prayer?
Do you remember the play and film called “Whose Life is it Anyway?” An artist is paralyzed in an accident, and over the course of the story decides that he doesn’t want to live any longer. The man is hopeless—wanting to have control over his life—and in the end, wanting to die.
The message of the Lord’s Prayer is the polar opposite of the answer given in this play and movie. The prayer is about surrendering control to the one who made us and redeems us. It’s about wanting to live—to live life the way God intended.
“For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” My life, my family, my possessions—it’s all yours, O God. We believe you. Amen
After getting religion and politics out of the way, the Lord’s Prayer turns to the problem of sin, as we saw over the last two Sundays. We forgive as we’ve been forgiven, and we trust that God will keep us out of the way of temptation, and that he’ll protect us from the evil that exists around us and in us. There isn’t much that this prayer leaves untouched.
And then we come to the benediction: “For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” My life, my family, my possessions—it’s all yours, O God. We believe you. Amen.
Everything belongs to God. We could wallow in some pretty deep theological waters on this one, but the basic teaching of the Lord’s Prayer is simple. Everything belongs to God. God is in control. That brings us back to the question from the story we talked about earlier:
Whose life is it anyway?
I read an amazing story in the Guardian last week. Martin Burton was 16 years old when he died, and his family had to make some incredibly difficult decisions at the most awful time of their lives. In the end Martin’s parents decided to allow his heart and other vital organs to be transplanted into a half dozen other people who faced death without those gifts. These are familiar stories these days, but no less touching and powerful when we hear them again. The bare details of the story are what caught my eye.
A boy died—someone’s son died—and some other people now get to live. I know I’ve heard that story somewhere before…
Whose life is it anyway?
“For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” My life, my family, my possessions—it’s all yours, O God. We believe you. Amen.
This last line of the Lord’s Prayer, even if it was added later, is the point of the entire passage. It’s the lesson that we take away from the prayer no matter how many times we mumble through it on a Sunday morning, or say it as the break between our ten Hail Marys, or when we spend two and a half months hearing about it in church. As we think about pledging our time and talent and money, let the point of this prayer be your guide. God is in control.
Whose life is it anyway? Everything belongs to God. God is in control.
“For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” My life, my family, my possessions—it’s all yours, O God. We believe you. Amen.
In a few minutes we’re going to demonstrate our response to that prayer as we bring up our pledges and pray for the ministry of the church.
As you bring your pledge to the front this morning, let the good news of the Lord’s Prayer wash all over you: Everything belongs to God. God is in control.
As we go downstairs to enjoy a wonderful Thanksgiving feast together, remember what we’re really thankful for: Everything belongs to God. God is in control.
Let’s stand and pray the Lord’s Prayer together.
You learn pretty early in life that there are some things that shouldn’t be mentioned in polite conversation. The obvious ones are religion and politics, and to that you can usually add the concept of sin and anything to do with money. These things are important to all of us, which accounts for the heat they generate around the dinner table. But we don’t always give them their due.
The real question is: Who’s in control?
Today we complete our journey through the Lord’s Prayer. We’ve been saying that this prayer of Jesus is at the core of our faith—that it shows us the heart of what we believe and also what we’re called to do about it. The Lord’s Prayer functions like a heart in that it takes us in wherever we are: broken, wounded, afraid, and depleted. It takes us in and restores us—it gives us back our spiritual energy—it renews us and sends us out for service again.
Even though we say it over and over, we’re different each time—we’re in different places each time, and that makes the prayer new and different and life-changing…each time.
We’ve prayed the entire prayer already:
Our Father, the one who really exists,
You reveal yourself to us as holy and loving,
Bring your Kingdom,
Make this world into the world you meant it to be from the beginning.
Provide for us, O God, and teach us to provide for others.
Forgive us, and teach us to be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation everywhere.
Don’t test us beyond our limits, O God, and while you’re at it, protect all of us, especially the weakest, from the evil all around us.
The version of the prayer we’ve all learned adds a benediction, a restatement of the themes of the prayer, as a way of communicating the hope that goes along with our faith and our call to action. The last part of the Lord’s Prayer turns us outward—it’s meant to be inspiring—it’s meant to call us to action.
“For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” My life, my family, my possessions—it’s all yours, O God. We believe you. Amen.
This last part of the Lord’s Prayer as we say it isn’t even in the Bible. But it was a common part of the teaching in the early church, and has been a part of Christian practice since the 4th century or so.
So back to religion and politics. The Lord’s Prayer has some important things to say about what we believe, and also about how we think we should be governed. These are two crucial questions about our lives and how we live them—no wonder they cause so much tension and conflict.
We find the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, the longest stretch of teaching by Jesus himself in the entire New Testament. Remember that the Sermon on the Mount has a point—it’s not just a list of interesting things that Jesus said. The point of the Sermon is to describe what the world would be like if people lived according to the values of the Kingdom of God—as if God really existed and meant what he promised. Prayer is a part of that life—of those values—and so Jesus pauses in his sermon to teach his disciples how to pray.
It makes sense that the Lord’s Prayer starts with clear, unmistakable statements about both religion and politics
Our Father, the one who truly exists.
This is your kingdom—run it according to your perfect will.
Now that’s some serious religion, or faith, and it’s also a pretty bold political manifesto.
Believing that God exists is a powerful statement of faith. Part of that comes from our own personal spiritual awareness, part of it is a level of trust that the biblical record is accurate, and the rest comes from our interaction and shared experience with other Christians—with the community of faith you see in this room.
In other words, our belief in God is something we know in a way that is different from the way we know everything else. It’s not a list of facts or theorems or forensic evidence—they’re never going to prove or disprove the existence of God on CSI. And yet our belief in God is just as real—just as valid—just as important as the things we know in other ways.
Believing that God exists is also a powerful political statement. ‘Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done’ is the most radical statement anyone in this room has ever made—that includes those of you who protested the Vietnam War in the 60s, or in the fight for civil rights, or in any other demonstration to accomplish an earthly goal. ‘Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done’ tops all of those other revolutions—even the ones that were driven by faith.
Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done’ is a statement of our belief that the Kingdom of God is exactly that—God’s Kingdom, Christ’s reign, the eternal rule of Father, Son and Holy Spirit over everyone and everything, even death. No revolution or coronation or election can compare to what the world is like when faithful people acknowledge that God is sovereign—that God is in control.
But control is still a huge issue for us, isn’t it? The people who poke fun at Christian faith will call it a crutch—an act of neediness—an unwillingness or inability to take control over our lives. And yet, when the Scriptures talk about what the life of faith is all about, they say things like: ‘the first will be last and the last will be first’; ‘in order to be truly free, you have to become a slave’; and the big one…'Present your bodies as a living sacrifice—this is your spiritual act of service.’ Not a lot in there about winning or controlling.
As we look at the Lord’s Prayer, what do we make of that? As we move ahead as individuals and as a community of faith—as a church, what do we make of the Lord’s Prayer?
Do you remember the play and film called “Whose Life is it Anyway?” An artist is paralyzed in an accident, and over the course of the story decides that he doesn’t want to live any longer. The man is hopeless—wanting to have control over his life—and in the end, wanting to die.
The message of the Lord’s Prayer is the polar opposite of the answer given in this play and movie. The prayer is about surrendering control to the one who made us and redeems us. It’s about wanting to live—to live life the way God intended.
“For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” My life, my family, my possessions—it’s all yours, O God. We believe you. Amen
After getting religion and politics out of the way, the Lord’s Prayer turns to the problem of sin, as we saw over the last two Sundays. We forgive as we’ve been forgiven, and we trust that God will keep us out of the way of temptation, and that he’ll protect us from the evil that exists around us and in us. There isn’t much that this prayer leaves untouched.
And then we come to the benediction: “For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” My life, my family, my possessions—it’s all yours, O God. We believe you. Amen.
Everything belongs to God. We could wallow in some pretty deep theological waters on this one, but the basic teaching of the Lord’s Prayer is simple. Everything belongs to God. God is in control. That brings us back to the question from the story we talked about earlier:
Whose life is it anyway?
I read an amazing story in the Guardian last week. Martin Burton was 16 years old when he died, and his family had to make some incredibly difficult decisions at the most awful time of their lives. In the end Martin’s parents decided to allow his heart and other vital organs to be transplanted into a half dozen other people who faced death without those gifts. These are familiar stories these days, but no less touching and powerful when we hear them again. The bare details of the story are what caught my eye.
A boy died—someone’s son died—and some other people now get to live. I know I’ve heard that story somewhere before…
Whose life is it anyway?
“For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” My life, my family, my possessions—it’s all yours, O God. We believe you. Amen.
This last line of the Lord’s Prayer, even if it was added later, is the point of the entire passage. It’s the lesson that we take away from the prayer no matter how many times we mumble through it on a Sunday morning, or say it as the break between our ten Hail Marys, or when we spend two and a half months hearing about it in church. As we think about pledging our time and talent and money, let the point of this prayer be your guide. God is in control.
Whose life is it anyway? Everything belongs to God. God is in control.
“For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” My life, my family, my possessions—it’s all yours, O God. We believe you. Amen.
In a few minutes we’re going to demonstrate our response to that prayer as we bring up our pledges and pray for the ministry of the church.
As you bring your pledge to the front this morning, let the good news of the Lord’s Prayer wash all over you: Everything belongs to God. God is in control.
As we go downstairs to enjoy a wonderful Thanksgiving feast together, remember what we’re really thankful for: Everything belongs to God. God is in control.
Let’s stand and pray the Lord’s Prayer together.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Preparing for the Worst
(This is the seventh in a series titled A Declaration of Dependence: The Lord's Prayer.)
When I was in grade school I remember having disaster preparedness drills. The first Monday morning of the month, a horn would sound in our town, testing the warning system for a nuclear attack. Seriously. We saw films and had classroom lessons on what to do if the Soviets hit us with a missile—we learned how to survive the blast, how to deal with the fallout and the effects of radiation… It’s amazing that any of us came out of that era with our sanity intact.
But in Southern California there was another kind of disaster to worry about. I was in 2nd grade when the Sylmar earthquake hit in 1971. It shook our apartment and I can remember my dad running into the room I shared with my baby sister—he grabbed the baby and told me to get out of the building. After 1971, people in California started talking about The Big One, and we all lived under the shadow—under the threat of an enormous earthquake.
Kids in my part of the world grew up with the constant threat of two different types of disaster—of catastrophe either from nuclear war or massive earthquakes. And so we all learned how to be prepared. We all knew—or thought we knew—what we had to do to survive these massive threats.
We continue our journey through the Lord’s Prayer. We’ve been saying that this prayer of Jesus is at the core of our faith—that it shows us the heart of what we believe and also what we’re called to do about it. The Lord’s Prayer functions like a heart in that it takes us in wherever we are: broken, wounded, afraid, and depleted. It takes us in and restores us—it gives us back our spiritual energy—it renews us and sends us out for service again.
It functions, at times, a lot like a disaster preparedness exercise.
Even though we say the Lord’s Prayer over and over, we’re different each time—we’re in different places each time, and that makes the prayer new and different and life-changing…each time.
We’ve prayed most of the prayer already:
Our Father, who really exists,
You reveal yourself to us as holy and loving,
Bring your Kingdom,
Make this world into the world you meant it to be from the beginning.
Provide for us, O God, and teach us to provide for others.
Forgive us, and teach us to be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation everywhere.
Today we get to the end of the prayer the way it appears in the Bible. In the Scriptures the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t end with that great victorious chorus—it doesn’t have the Hollywood ending of ‘For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever.’ In the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus teaches us how to pray, the prayer ends like this:
‘And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’
Well. That’s not very nice or positive or happy sounding at all. You might see French movies and maybe independent films ending with everyone cowering and afraid…or dead. But that’s not the way we like our stories most of the time. That’s certainly not the way we want the Lord’s Prayer to end.
‘And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ Don’t test us beyond our limits, O God, and while you’re at it, protect all of us, especially the weakest, from the evil all around us.
I’ll confess to you all right now, before we go any further with this text: I’ve never liked this part of the Lord’s Prayer. There have been times in my life where I didn’t even say it out loud—it sounded so strange or even wrong to me. It’s always sounded like Jesus was telling us to pray to God for protection from, well, God. Like he was the one who was the source or the cause of whatever was tempting me at the time. ‘Deliver us from evil’ always made sense to me, but why do I have to ask God not to shove me into the path of a train full of temptation?
I’ve been using a book on the Lord’s Prayer by Telford Work, a theologian at Westmont College—where the fires destroyed part of the campus this week. He writes that “The Lord’s Prayer repeatedly makes requests that are obvious to the point of absurdity.”
Of course the Father will give his children their daily bread. Of course his name is holy. Of course his will will be done. The last petition of the prayer is just as obvious: Of course God won’t lead us into temptation or fail to deliver us from evil. These things are exactly what God does, right?
Right.
He finishes by saying: “Readers get into trouble when they treat this prayer as less obvious than it is. Instead of ‘Amen’ at the end of this prayer, we should be saying ‘Duh.’ The clarity and authenticity of this prayer are a function of its bone-headed straightforwardness.”
We’ve been saying all along here that the Lord’s Prayer tells us something about who God is and what he’s promised to do. It also tells us what we’re supposed to do in response. In this last line of the prayer we’re called to trust that God loves us and cares for us and has a disaster plan in place for our salvation.
But what about this business of being delivered from evil? Aren’t we a little too well-educated—a little too sophisticated to be talking about evil? Have you been watching the news this week? On this Sunday especially, when we’re focusing on our ministry to children, is it possible to have seen the two trials that started this past week and still believe that ‘evil’ is an outdated idea? The mother and friends of Baby P and the family of Shannon Matthews are just the most extreme examples of the terrible blend of cruelty and stupidity and deceit and shamelessness that make up just one strand of what we have to call evil.
With that in mind, denying the existence of evil is really an insult to those who live every day as prisoners to evil’s power. In this part of the Lord’s Prayer we pray today that all children in hellish homes like the ones we’ve been hearing about would be delivered…from evil. We also pray today for people who aren’t abused by monsters, but who suffer the effects of evil in the world just the same. For anyone trapped in a place or a situation that prevents them from living and loving and thriving like God intended.
Bruce Thornton is a classics professor in California. In a book called Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge, he wrote this:
“The idea that evil doesn’t exist, or that it is a metaphor for some as yet unknown physical phenomenon, is the most dangerous piece of false knowledge circulating in the modern world—for the simple reason that inexplicable evil does exist, not just in the atrocities of monsters but in every one of our own hearts.”
How does that sound? That last part is a kicker, right? I can see the emails and notes in my inbox now: ‘John, I didn’t know you were going to talk about us having evil in our hearts.’
But of course I was going to talk about that. You don’t pay me to stand up here and lie to you. If I said to you that there wasn’t evil in each one of our hearts—in yours and in mine—I’d be cutting the legs out from under the Gospel. Because only when we acknowledge and confess the evil in our own hearts can we fully experience the renewing, restoring, forgiving grace of Jesus Christ.
‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ Don’t test us beyond our limits, O God, and while you’re at it, protect all of us, especially the weakest, from the evil all around us.
The point here is to remind ourselves that the Kingdom of God—that Christ’s reign—is both now and not yet. Jesus taught that the Kingdom had arrived, and he also taught that it is still on its way. The answers to each petition of the Lord’s Prayer reflect the now and not yet of our lives—of our struggles to remain faithful.
It may sound quaint or backward somehow to talk about the struggle to be faithful in the face of temptation, but that doesn’t make it any less true. It would also be silly for me to stand up here and say that each person here is somehow immune from temptation—you might want to agree with me, but that would just be a way to cover up the temptations that we all want to hide from each other. There’s no need for me to list them here. You know exactly what they are for you—they might even have crossed your mind as soon as I said that—I know they did for me.
The bottom line is this: We don’t try to resist temptation just to follow the rules. Think about that for a moment. We don’t try to resist temptation just to follow the rules. We try to avoid these things because they keep us from living according to the values of the Kingdom. They prevent us from being living witnesses to the rest of the world of what it means to be disciples of Jesus Christ—living under his reign, in obedience to his call on our lives.
On the other hand, when we accept God’s gracious gift of deliverance—his gift of standing in front of that train full of temptation, in our place—we experience the full presence of Christ in our lives. We experience the full measure of the Kingdom of God here, now, in this place and everywhere we go.
‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ Don’t test us beyond our limits, O God, and while you’re at it, protect all of us, especially the weakest, from the evil all around us.
Remember the disaster preparedness drills at my school? The Lord’s Prayer, and especially this last plea for salvation and help, teaches us what to do to be prepared for the threats we face in our lives. Praying this prayer like we mean it doesn’t mean that temptations and other disasters won’t happen, but it does mean that we don’t have to face them alone.
Telford Work, who I’ve quoted already, wrote that ‘every biblical drama features ungodly characters who rely on their own devices and whose love for God grows cold. Faithful ones, on the other hand, rely on God their savior and endure to the end.”
We’ve called the Lord’s Prayer our ‘declaration of dependence,’ and nowhere is that more true than when we try to stand firm against the temptations to live as if God didn’t exist. As we pray this prayer together this morning, claim your piece of God’s promise to stand beside you, to work within you, and to go before you in everything you do. Pray that your love for God won’t grow cold. Pray that God will help you endure to the end. Let’s stand and pray together.
When I was in grade school I remember having disaster preparedness drills. The first Monday morning of the month, a horn would sound in our town, testing the warning system for a nuclear attack. Seriously. We saw films and had classroom lessons on what to do if the Soviets hit us with a missile—we learned how to survive the blast, how to deal with the fallout and the effects of radiation… It’s amazing that any of us came out of that era with our sanity intact.
But in Southern California there was another kind of disaster to worry about. I was in 2nd grade when the Sylmar earthquake hit in 1971. It shook our apartment and I can remember my dad running into the room I shared with my baby sister—he grabbed the baby and told me to get out of the building. After 1971, people in California started talking about The Big One, and we all lived under the shadow—under the threat of an enormous earthquake.
Kids in my part of the world grew up with the constant threat of two different types of disaster—of catastrophe either from nuclear war or massive earthquakes. And so we all learned how to be prepared. We all knew—or thought we knew—what we had to do to survive these massive threats.
We continue our journey through the Lord’s Prayer. We’ve been saying that this prayer of Jesus is at the core of our faith—that it shows us the heart of what we believe and also what we’re called to do about it. The Lord’s Prayer functions like a heart in that it takes us in wherever we are: broken, wounded, afraid, and depleted. It takes us in and restores us—it gives us back our spiritual energy—it renews us and sends us out for service again.
It functions, at times, a lot like a disaster preparedness exercise.
Even though we say the Lord’s Prayer over and over, we’re different each time—we’re in different places each time, and that makes the prayer new and different and life-changing…each time.
We’ve prayed most of the prayer already:
Our Father, who really exists,
You reveal yourself to us as holy and loving,
Bring your Kingdom,
Make this world into the world you meant it to be from the beginning.
Provide for us, O God, and teach us to provide for others.
Forgive us, and teach us to be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation everywhere.
Today we get to the end of the prayer the way it appears in the Bible. In the Scriptures the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t end with that great victorious chorus—it doesn’t have the Hollywood ending of ‘For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever.’ In the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus teaches us how to pray, the prayer ends like this:
‘And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’
Well. That’s not very nice or positive or happy sounding at all. You might see French movies and maybe independent films ending with everyone cowering and afraid…or dead. But that’s not the way we like our stories most of the time. That’s certainly not the way we want the Lord’s Prayer to end.
‘And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ Don’t test us beyond our limits, O God, and while you’re at it, protect all of us, especially the weakest, from the evil all around us.
I’ll confess to you all right now, before we go any further with this text: I’ve never liked this part of the Lord’s Prayer. There have been times in my life where I didn’t even say it out loud—it sounded so strange or even wrong to me. It’s always sounded like Jesus was telling us to pray to God for protection from, well, God. Like he was the one who was the source or the cause of whatever was tempting me at the time. ‘Deliver us from evil’ always made sense to me, but why do I have to ask God not to shove me into the path of a train full of temptation?
I’ve been using a book on the Lord’s Prayer by Telford Work, a theologian at Westmont College—where the fires destroyed part of the campus this week. He writes that “The Lord’s Prayer repeatedly makes requests that are obvious to the point of absurdity.”
Of course the Father will give his children their daily bread. Of course his name is holy. Of course his will will be done. The last petition of the prayer is just as obvious: Of course God won’t lead us into temptation or fail to deliver us from evil. These things are exactly what God does, right?
Right.
He finishes by saying: “Readers get into trouble when they treat this prayer as less obvious than it is. Instead of ‘Amen’ at the end of this prayer, we should be saying ‘Duh.’ The clarity and authenticity of this prayer are a function of its bone-headed straightforwardness.”
We’ve been saying all along here that the Lord’s Prayer tells us something about who God is and what he’s promised to do. It also tells us what we’re supposed to do in response. In this last line of the prayer we’re called to trust that God loves us and cares for us and has a disaster plan in place for our salvation.
But what about this business of being delivered from evil? Aren’t we a little too well-educated—a little too sophisticated to be talking about evil? Have you been watching the news this week? On this Sunday especially, when we’re focusing on our ministry to children, is it possible to have seen the two trials that started this past week and still believe that ‘evil’ is an outdated idea? The mother and friends of Baby P and the family of Shannon Matthews are just the most extreme examples of the terrible blend of cruelty and stupidity and deceit and shamelessness that make up just one strand of what we have to call evil.
With that in mind, denying the existence of evil is really an insult to those who live every day as prisoners to evil’s power. In this part of the Lord’s Prayer we pray today that all children in hellish homes like the ones we’ve been hearing about would be delivered…from evil. We also pray today for people who aren’t abused by monsters, but who suffer the effects of evil in the world just the same. For anyone trapped in a place or a situation that prevents them from living and loving and thriving like God intended.
Bruce Thornton is a classics professor in California. In a book called Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge, he wrote this:
“The idea that evil doesn’t exist, or that it is a metaphor for some as yet unknown physical phenomenon, is the most dangerous piece of false knowledge circulating in the modern world—for the simple reason that inexplicable evil does exist, not just in the atrocities of monsters but in every one of our own hearts.”
How does that sound? That last part is a kicker, right? I can see the emails and notes in my inbox now: ‘John, I didn’t know you were going to talk about us having evil in our hearts.’
But of course I was going to talk about that. You don’t pay me to stand up here and lie to you. If I said to you that there wasn’t evil in each one of our hearts—in yours and in mine—I’d be cutting the legs out from under the Gospel. Because only when we acknowledge and confess the evil in our own hearts can we fully experience the renewing, restoring, forgiving grace of Jesus Christ.
‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ Don’t test us beyond our limits, O God, and while you’re at it, protect all of us, especially the weakest, from the evil all around us.
The point here is to remind ourselves that the Kingdom of God—that Christ’s reign—is both now and not yet. Jesus taught that the Kingdom had arrived, and he also taught that it is still on its way. The answers to each petition of the Lord’s Prayer reflect the now and not yet of our lives—of our struggles to remain faithful.
It may sound quaint or backward somehow to talk about the struggle to be faithful in the face of temptation, but that doesn’t make it any less true. It would also be silly for me to stand up here and say that each person here is somehow immune from temptation—you might want to agree with me, but that would just be a way to cover up the temptations that we all want to hide from each other. There’s no need for me to list them here. You know exactly what they are for you—they might even have crossed your mind as soon as I said that—I know they did for me.
The bottom line is this: We don’t try to resist temptation just to follow the rules. Think about that for a moment. We don’t try to resist temptation just to follow the rules. We try to avoid these things because they keep us from living according to the values of the Kingdom. They prevent us from being living witnesses to the rest of the world of what it means to be disciples of Jesus Christ—living under his reign, in obedience to his call on our lives.
On the other hand, when we accept God’s gracious gift of deliverance—his gift of standing in front of that train full of temptation, in our place—we experience the full presence of Christ in our lives. We experience the full measure of the Kingdom of God here, now, in this place and everywhere we go.
‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ Don’t test us beyond our limits, O God, and while you’re at it, protect all of us, especially the weakest, from the evil all around us.
Remember the disaster preparedness drills at my school? The Lord’s Prayer, and especially this last plea for salvation and help, teaches us what to do to be prepared for the threats we face in our lives. Praying this prayer like we mean it doesn’t mean that temptations and other disasters won’t happen, but it does mean that we don’t have to face them alone.
Telford Work, who I’ve quoted already, wrote that ‘every biblical drama features ungodly characters who rely on their own devices and whose love for God grows cold. Faithful ones, on the other hand, rely on God their savior and endure to the end.”
We’ve called the Lord’s Prayer our ‘declaration of dependence,’ and nowhere is that more true than when we try to stand firm against the temptations to live as if God didn’t exist. As we pray this prayer together this morning, claim your piece of God’s promise to stand beside you, to work within you, and to go before you in everything you do. Pray that your love for God won’t grow cold. Pray that God will help you endure to the end. Let’s stand and pray together.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Sorry Isn’t Enough
(This is the sixth in a series titled 'A Declaration of Dependence: The Lord's Prayer.)
In the film The Mission, Robert De Niro plays a very bad man—he’s a slave trader who at one point kills his own brother over a woman. He comes to a point where he’s stricken with guilt, and confesses his sin to a priest. For penance, De Niro’s character climbs a muddy mountain with a huge load of junk on his back. It takes him forever to get up the hill, only to be confronted by a child from a tribe he had sold into slavery. The child comes up to him with a knife, pauses, then cuts the rope that tied the heavy burden to his back, and pushed it over the side and down the mountain.
That scene is about forgiveness, but it’s also an illustration of the difference between justice and mercy. Justice is getting what we deserve, but mercy is getting something better than we deserve. The character in the film carried his burden to the point of exhaustion, and in the end expected to be punished. But that’s not what happened.
We continue our journey through the Lord’s Prayer. We’ve been saying that this prayer of Jesus is at the core of our faith—that it shows us the heart of what we believe and also what we’re called to do about it. The Lord’s Prayer functions like a heart in that it takes us in wherever we are: broken, wounded, afraid, and depleted. It takes us in and restores us—it gives us back our spiritual energy—it renews us and sends us out for service again.
Even though we say it over and over, we’re different each time—we’re in different places each time, and that makes the prayer new and different and life-changing…each time.
We’ve prayed more than half of the prayer already:
Our Father, who really exists,
You reveal yourself to us as holy and loving,
Bring your Kingdom,
Make this world into the world you meant it to be from the beginning.
Provide for us, O God, and teach us to provide for others.
Today we start to focus on being living examples of God’s Kingdom on earth—living examples of God’s mercy.
‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’ Teach us to live by the values of your Kingdom. Teach us to be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation everywhere.
It’s interesting how different church traditions have translated this part of the prayer. You hear it each time we pray the prayer together: Some people say ‘debts’, then have to wait for the ‘trespasses’ crowd to catch up. The real word translates most accurately to sins, and so the variation tells us something about the way this part of the prayer has been understood in the history of the church.
Debts and Trespasses are breaches of human relationships. We owe people debts that they can reasonably expect to be paid, and we trespass onto property owned by others. I suppose the point here is that these examples of brokenness among and between people matter somehow to God. But the bigger point is that—from the perspective of the Cross and Resurrection, our relationships with each other mattered enough to God for him to do something decisive to heal them.
‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’ Teach us to live by the values of your Kingdom. Teach us to be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation everywhere.
Forgiveness has fallen out of fashion in our culture. It makes us appear weak. To ask for forgiveness is to need something from someone else, and we’re pretty well trained not to do that these days.
But it also gives control over to another person. In our ‘master of our own destiny’ culture, giving this kind of power to another person seems ridiculous. Giving this kind of power to someone else goes against all of our conditioning and even our therapy.
But the biggest reason we don’t talk much about forgiveness anymore is that we’ve been taught by the culture that we don’t have anything we need forgiven. We’ve individualized faith so much that we’ve lost touch with the idea that there’s anything we might do that, well, we shouldn’t do.
Someone told me recently that the church or the Christian faith wasn’t in a position to discuss ‘moral imperatives’, but what they really meant was that they didn’t want anyone—and certainly not the church—telling them right from wrong. But if we’ve lost our sense of what sin is, how do we go about confessing and forgiving? If it’s not in our cultural language anymore, who exactly is listening when we confess and forgive?
The Christian faith is based on the idea that God made the world to be a certain way, but that things were broken—shattered—by our rebellion. Now the story doesn’t end there. God didn’t reject or condemn or turn his back on his creation. He allows it to be self-governing, to a certain extent, but he is also active in trying to repair and restore what we’ve broken. More importantly, God has acted—acted decisively through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, to reconcile his creation to himself.
The Second Helvetic Confession, which dates back to the Reformation, describes it like this: ‘By Christ’s passion and death and everything which he did and endured for our sake by his coming in the flesh, our Lord reconciled all the faithful to the heavenly Father.’
Four hundred years later, the United Presbyterian Church—which ironically was still divided at that time from the Southern Presbyterian Church—described God’s actions on our behalf like this: ‘The reconciling work of Jesus was the supreme crisis in the life of humankind. His cross and resurrection become personal crisis and present hope for men and women when the gospel is proclaimed and believed. In this experience, the Spirit brings God’s forgiveness to all people, moves us to respond in faith, repentance, and obedience, and initiates the new life in Christ.’
God’s reconciling work—his forgiveness of our rebellion—is truly an amazing thing.
Last week one of my friends in California sent me a link to a singer songwriter with a new CD out. His name is Dustin Kensrue, and one of the new songs retells the story of The Prodigal Son, a parable that isn’t really about the son at all. It’s about the Father who waits, ready to run out and meet his wayward child—to put his arms around him and kiss him and throw a party for him. The song goes like this:
And now you've hit bottom,
all those open doors have shut,
and you're hungry stomach's tied in knots,
but I know what you're thinking,
that you troubled me enough,
nothing could ever separate you from my love.
I still stand here waiting,
with my eyes fixed on the road,
and I fight back tears and I wonder,
if you're ever coming home,
don't you know son that I love you,
and I don't care where you've been,
so please come home.
The foundation of God’s forgiveness toward us is the simple fact that he loves us more than we can ever understand. No matter where we’ve been or what we’ve done or even believed before. God loves us and waits to run to us and throw a party.
But all of this so far is about what God has done for us, which is great—don’t get me wrong. The saving, restoring, reconciling work of God through Jesus Christ is the single most important event in human history. No war, no peace, no election can even come close to what God has offered to his creation through Jesus Christ. But in our prayer this morning we see that there’s a little more to this story that saying simply saying sorry to God, and being forgiven.
The Lord’s Prayer is telling a bigger story than that.
The Lord’s Prayer is calling us to a far more radical action than that.
The Lord’s Prayer is our way of proclaiming not only God’s work in our own lives, but also his work on behalf of the world he made and loves.
‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’ Teach us to live by the values of your Kingdom. Teach us to be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation everywhere.
Last week we talked about our role in bringing ‘daily bread’ to people who need it. This week is no different: we hear a clear call in this part of the Lord’s Prayer to not only receive forgiveness, but to share that gift with the rest of the world. Sorry isn’t enough—there’s more to God’s reconciling work than simply receiving it.
‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’
Here’s the dark question that confronts us in this ancient prayer. Do we forgive those who sin against us? Whose burdens do we release and push down the side of a mountain somewhere?
Forgiving is hard—for the reasons I said earlier and for countless more. Forgiving is hard.
But forgiving is also one of a handful of indicators that shows Christ living in us and through us. Remember that the Lord’s Prayer is a part of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus describes what life would be like if God’s people lived as if God really existed—what relationships would be like if God’s people lived and loved as if God truly reigned.
In that sense it’s not really about whether forgiving is hard or easy. The real question is the extent to which each one of us will allow Christ to work—to love and help and serve and forgive—in and through our lives.
Miroslav Volf was a professor at Fuller Seminary, and now teaches at Yale Divinity School. In his book, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a World Stripped of Grace, he wrote this:
“Just as Christ grieved more over our sin than over the injury our sin caused him, so we can grieve for others if Christ lives in us. Just as Christ overcame evil with the power of good rather than avenging himself, so can we. Just as Christ absorbed the effect of wrongdoing so as to free wrongdoers from punishment, so can we if we’re united with Christ. Just as Christ lifted the guilt from their shoulders, so can we.”
The discipline of forgiveness—of forgiving those who sin against us—that’s really the discipline of allowing Christ to live and work through us. It’s the decision to live according to the radical rules of the Kingdom of God—of Christ’s reign over all creation and his power over all things, even death. The discipline of forgiveness is the foundation of living as a disciple of Jesus Christ—of being a Christian in the truest sense.
‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’ Teach us to live by the values of your Kingdom. Teach us to be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation everywhere
The invitation to all of us today comes in two parts. First, it’s to experience the amazing gift of reconciliation that God offers through Jesus Christ. It’s to see the Father waiting along the road—waiting for us to turn his way so he can throw that party. It’s to acknowledge that even if we can’t know, we can still believe and experience the presence and promises of God.
But that invitation calls us to be not only forgiven, but also to be people who forgive. The sign of Christ’s work in us is when we can show someone else what it means to live according the values of the Kingdom of God—of Christ’s reign. When we can help someone lose the bag of junk on their back—whatever burden they carry that keeps them from enjoying the presence of God and fullness of the life he made—when we can do that we are living as agents of the Kingdom—we’re living as citizens under God’s reign, where the love and mercy of God splashes around freely and gets all over everything.
That’s what we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer. Let’s stand together and pray it now.
In the film The Mission, Robert De Niro plays a very bad man—he’s a slave trader who at one point kills his own brother over a woman. He comes to a point where he’s stricken with guilt, and confesses his sin to a priest. For penance, De Niro’s character climbs a muddy mountain with a huge load of junk on his back. It takes him forever to get up the hill, only to be confronted by a child from a tribe he had sold into slavery. The child comes up to him with a knife, pauses, then cuts the rope that tied the heavy burden to his back, and pushed it over the side and down the mountain.
That scene is about forgiveness, but it’s also an illustration of the difference between justice and mercy. Justice is getting what we deserve, but mercy is getting something better than we deserve. The character in the film carried his burden to the point of exhaustion, and in the end expected to be punished. But that’s not what happened.
We continue our journey through the Lord’s Prayer. We’ve been saying that this prayer of Jesus is at the core of our faith—that it shows us the heart of what we believe and also what we’re called to do about it. The Lord’s Prayer functions like a heart in that it takes us in wherever we are: broken, wounded, afraid, and depleted. It takes us in and restores us—it gives us back our spiritual energy—it renews us and sends us out for service again.
Even though we say it over and over, we’re different each time—we’re in different places each time, and that makes the prayer new and different and life-changing…each time.
We’ve prayed more than half of the prayer already:
Our Father, who really exists,
You reveal yourself to us as holy and loving,
Bring your Kingdom,
Make this world into the world you meant it to be from the beginning.
Provide for us, O God, and teach us to provide for others.
Today we start to focus on being living examples of God’s Kingdom on earth—living examples of God’s mercy.
‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’ Teach us to live by the values of your Kingdom. Teach us to be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation everywhere.
It’s interesting how different church traditions have translated this part of the prayer. You hear it each time we pray the prayer together: Some people say ‘debts’, then have to wait for the ‘trespasses’ crowd to catch up. The real word translates most accurately to sins, and so the variation tells us something about the way this part of the prayer has been understood in the history of the church.
Debts and Trespasses are breaches of human relationships. We owe people debts that they can reasonably expect to be paid, and we trespass onto property owned by others. I suppose the point here is that these examples of brokenness among and between people matter somehow to God. But the bigger point is that—from the perspective of the Cross and Resurrection, our relationships with each other mattered enough to God for him to do something decisive to heal them.
‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’ Teach us to live by the values of your Kingdom. Teach us to be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation everywhere.
Forgiveness has fallen out of fashion in our culture. It makes us appear weak. To ask for forgiveness is to need something from someone else, and we’re pretty well trained not to do that these days.
But it also gives control over to another person. In our ‘master of our own destiny’ culture, giving this kind of power to another person seems ridiculous. Giving this kind of power to someone else goes against all of our conditioning and even our therapy.
But the biggest reason we don’t talk much about forgiveness anymore is that we’ve been taught by the culture that we don’t have anything we need forgiven. We’ve individualized faith so much that we’ve lost touch with the idea that there’s anything we might do that, well, we shouldn’t do.
Someone told me recently that the church or the Christian faith wasn’t in a position to discuss ‘moral imperatives’, but what they really meant was that they didn’t want anyone—and certainly not the church—telling them right from wrong. But if we’ve lost our sense of what sin is, how do we go about confessing and forgiving? If it’s not in our cultural language anymore, who exactly is listening when we confess and forgive?
The Christian faith is based on the idea that God made the world to be a certain way, but that things were broken—shattered—by our rebellion. Now the story doesn’t end there. God didn’t reject or condemn or turn his back on his creation. He allows it to be self-governing, to a certain extent, but he is also active in trying to repair and restore what we’ve broken. More importantly, God has acted—acted decisively through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, to reconcile his creation to himself.
The Second Helvetic Confession, which dates back to the Reformation, describes it like this: ‘By Christ’s passion and death and everything which he did and endured for our sake by his coming in the flesh, our Lord reconciled all the faithful to the heavenly Father.’
Four hundred years later, the United Presbyterian Church—which ironically was still divided at that time from the Southern Presbyterian Church—described God’s actions on our behalf like this: ‘The reconciling work of Jesus was the supreme crisis in the life of humankind. His cross and resurrection become personal crisis and present hope for men and women when the gospel is proclaimed and believed. In this experience, the Spirit brings God’s forgiveness to all people, moves us to respond in faith, repentance, and obedience, and initiates the new life in Christ.’
God’s reconciling work—his forgiveness of our rebellion—is truly an amazing thing.
Last week one of my friends in California sent me a link to a singer songwriter with a new CD out. His name is Dustin Kensrue, and one of the new songs retells the story of The Prodigal Son, a parable that isn’t really about the son at all. It’s about the Father who waits, ready to run out and meet his wayward child—to put his arms around him and kiss him and throw a party for him. The song goes like this:
And now you've hit bottom,
all those open doors have shut,
and you're hungry stomach's tied in knots,
but I know what you're thinking,
that you troubled me enough,
nothing could ever separate you from my love.
I still stand here waiting,
with my eyes fixed on the road,
and I fight back tears and I wonder,
if you're ever coming home,
don't you know son that I love you,
and I don't care where you've been,
so please come home.
The foundation of God’s forgiveness toward us is the simple fact that he loves us more than we can ever understand. No matter where we’ve been or what we’ve done or even believed before. God loves us and waits to run to us and throw a party.
But all of this so far is about what God has done for us, which is great—don’t get me wrong. The saving, restoring, reconciling work of God through Jesus Christ is the single most important event in human history. No war, no peace, no election can even come close to what God has offered to his creation through Jesus Christ. But in our prayer this morning we see that there’s a little more to this story that saying simply saying sorry to God, and being forgiven.
The Lord’s Prayer is telling a bigger story than that.
The Lord’s Prayer is calling us to a far more radical action than that.
The Lord’s Prayer is our way of proclaiming not only God’s work in our own lives, but also his work on behalf of the world he made and loves.
‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’ Teach us to live by the values of your Kingdom. Teach us to be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation everywhere.
Last week we talked about our role in bringing ‘daily bread’ to people who need it. This week is no different: we hear a clear call in this part of the Lord’s Prayer to not only receive forgiveness, but to share that gift with the rest of the world. Sorry isn’t enough—there’s more to God’s reconciling work than simply receiving it.
‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’
Here’s the dark question that confronts us in this ancient prayer. Do we forgive those who sin against us? Whose burdens do we release and push down the side of a mountain somewhere?
Forgiving is hard—for the reasons I said earlier and for countless more. Forgiving is hard.
But forgiving is also one of a handful of indicators that shows Christ living in us and through us. Remember that the Lord’s Prayer is a part of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus describes what life would be like if God’s people lived as if God really existed—what relationships would be like if God’s people lived and loved as if God truly reigned.
In that sense it’s not really about whether forgiving is hard or easy. The real question is the extent to which each one of us will allow Christ to work—to love and help and serve and forgive—in and through our lives.
Miroslav Volf was a professor at Fuller Seminary, and now teaches at Yale Divinity School. In his book, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a World Stripped of Grace, he wrote this:
“Just as Christ grieved more over our sin than over the injury our sin caused him, so we can grieve for others if Christ lives in us. Just as Christ overcame evil with the power of good rather than avenging himself, so can we. Just as Christ absorbed the effect of wrongdoing so as to free wrongdoers from punishment, so can we if we’re united with Christ. Just as Christ lifted the guilt from their shoulders, so can we.”
The discipline of forgiveness—of forgiving those who sin against us—that’s really the discipline of allowing Christ to live and work through us. It’s the decision to live according to the radical rules of the Kingdom of God—of Christ’s reign over all creation and his power over all things, even death. The discipline of forgiveness is the foundation of living as a disciple of Jesus Christ—of being a Christian in the truest sense.
‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’ Teach us to live by the values of your Kingdom. Teach us to be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation everywhere
The invitation to all of us today comes in two parts. First, it’s to experience the amazing gift of reconciliation that God offers through Jesus Christ. It’s to see the Father waiting along the road—waiting for us to turn his way so he can throw that party. It’s to acknowledge that even if we can’t know, we can still believe and experience the presence and promises of God.
But that invitation calls us to be not only forgiven, but also to be people who forgive. The sign of Christ’s work in us is when we can show someone else what it means to live according the values of the Kingdom of God—of Christ’s reign. When we can help someone lose the bag of junk on their back—whatever burden they carry that keeps them from enjoying the presence of God and fullness of the life he made—when we can do that we are living as agents of the Kingdom—we’re living as citizens under God’s reign, where the love and mercy of God splashes around freely and gets all over everything.
That’s what we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer. Let’s stand together and pray it now.
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Another Night to Remember
So I've been working with a member of the clergy team at St. Paul's Cathedral to organize this year's Thanksgiving Service. She called me this week and invited our family to watch a fireworks show from the Stone Gallery--a balcony along the ridge of the Cathedral Dome, almost 200 feet high.
Here's the view at dusk from the Dome, looking out over the front of the Cathedral.
Fireworks over the River Thames, celebrating the Lord Mayor's Parade.
That's us, at our viewing spot.
Here's the view at dusk from the Dome, looking out over the front of the Cathedral.
Fireworks over the River Thames, celebrating the Lord Mayor's Parade.
That's us, at our viewing spot.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
One Moment Among Many
It's hard to find the right words to describe my reaction to Barack Obama's election to the presidency. My 8-year-old son will never know what it's like not to have had a black president. I'm moved, proud, happier than I expected, and a little awestruck, but I'm not surprised. I think that I'm most pleased about that last bit.
I'm not surprised.
What a great feeling. What an incredible thing it is to see an American of African descent elected to that high office, and to not be surprised. Sen. Obama is young and untested in many ways, but on the other hand is so obviously gifted and intelligent. And besides, he ran an amazing campaign: he emerged as a candidate because of his ability to articulate the American idea in a new way, he defeated a powerful and well-funded political machine within his own party, and then showed himself to be calm, reasoned and unflappable right up to the general election. This 'morning after' feeling is all the more special for the sense that it was inevitable and right, rather than shocking.
I watched his speech this morning and it put tears in my eyes. It is the job of a leader to define reality...Max De Pree said that in one of his books on leadership. Sen. Obama defined a peculiarly American understanding of the world, and the reality he described is the same one my parents, both lifelong conservatives, raised me to believe in. I do believe that the American idea...the American political experiment...remains the best this world has to offer. It has been a while since someone has put that idea into such beautiful words on such a grand stage, but Sen. Obama wasn't alone.
In your celebration (or lamentation...you know who you are) of this election's outcome, don't allow the words of another very special American to be drowned out. Sen John McCain is a unique American political figure in his own right, and his concession speech was the best I've ever heard. If you supported Sen. Obama, make sure you hear what this man said about your candidate. If you were a McCain supporter, hear this call to remember that your political identity isn't primarily with your party, but with your country.
Both of these men ran honorable, hard campaigns, treating each other with respect and even grace at times. Both ended their campaigns in much the same way. Think about that. Two politicians, both after the same job, competing vigorously without losing their sense of honor and integrity. You know what?
I'm not surprised.
Here's most of John McCain's speech (I took out his comments to his campaign team):
My friends, we have come to the end of a long journey. The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly.
A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Sen. Barack Obama to congratulate him. To congratulate him on being elected the next president of the country that we both love. In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.
This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight. I've always believed that America offers opportunities to all who have the industry and will to seize it. Sen. Obama believes that, too.
But we both recognize that, though we have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our nation's reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship, the memory of them still had the power to wound. A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt's invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and frightful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States.
Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth.
Sen. Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and for his country. I applaud him for it, and offer him my sincere sympathy that his beloved grandmother did not live to see this day, though our faith assures us she is at rest in the presence of her creator and so very proud of the good man she helped raise.
Sen. Obama and I have had and argued our differences, and he has prevailed. No doubt many of those differences remain. These are difficult times for our country. And I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face. I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited.
Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans. And please believe me when I say no association has ever meant more to me than that.
It is natural. It's natural, tonight, to feel some disappointment. But tomorrow, we must move beyond it and work together to get our country moving again. We fought—we fought as hard as we could. And though we fell short, the failure is mine, not yours. I am so deeply grateful to all of you for the great honor of your support and for all you have done for me. I wish the outcome had been different, my friends.
The road was a difficult one from the outset, but your support and friendship never wavered. I cannot adequately express how deeply indebted I am to you. I'm especially grateful to my wife, Cindy, my children, my dear mother and all my family, and to the many old and dear friends who have stood by my side through the many ups and downs of this long campaign. I have always been a fortunate man, and never more so for the love and encouragement you have given me. You know, campaigns are often harder on a candidate's family than on the candidate, and that's been true in this campaign. All I can offer in compensation is my love and gratitude and the promise of more peaceful years ahead…
I don't know what more we could have done to try to win this election. I'll leave that to others to determine. Every candidate makes mistakes, and I'm sure I made my share of them. But I won't spend a moment of the future regretting what might have been. This campaign was and will remain the great honor of my life, and my heart is filled with nothing but gratitude for the experience and to the American people for giving me a fair hearing before deciding that Sen. Obama and my old friend Sen. Joe Biden should have the honor of leading us for the next four years.
I would not be an American worthy of the name should I regret a fate that has allowed me the extraordinary privilege of serving this country for a half a century. Today, I was a candidate for the highest office in the country I love so much. And tonight, I remain her servant. That is blessing enough for anyone, and I thank the people of Arizona for it.
Tonight, more than any night, I hold in my heart nothing but love for this country and for all its citizens, whether they supported me or Sen. Obama—whether they supported me or Sen. Obama.
I wish Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president. And I call on all Americans, as I have often in this campaign, to not despair of our present difficulties, but to believe, always, in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here.
Americans never quit. We never surrender.
We never hide from history. We make history.
Thank you, and God bless you, and God bless America. Thank you all very much.
I'm not surprised.
What a great feeling. What an incredible thing it is to see an American of African descent elected to that high office, and to not be surprised. Sen. Obama is young and untested in many ways, but on the other hand is so obviously gifted and intelligent. And besides, he ran an amazing campaign: he emerged as a candidate because of his ability to articulate the American idea in a new way, he defeated a powerful and well-funded political machine within his own party, and then showed himself to be calm, reasoned and unflappable right up to the general election. This 'morning after' feeling is all the more special for the sense that it was inevitable and right, rather than shocking.
I watched his speech this morning and it put tears in my eyes. It is the job of a leader to define reality...Max De Pree said that in one of his books on leadership. Sen. Obama defined a peculiarly American understanding of the world, and the reality he described is the same one my parents, both lifelong conservatives, raised me to believe in. I do believe that the American idea...the American political experiment...remains the best this world has to offer. It has been a while since someone has put that idea into such beautiful words on such a grand stage, but Sen. Obama wasn't alone.
In your celebration (or lamentation...you know who you are) of this election's outcome, don't allow the words of another very special American to be drowned out. Sen John McCain is a unique American political figure in his own right, and his concession speech was the best I've ever heard. If you supported Sen. Obama, make sure you hear what this man said about your candidate. If you were a McCain supporter, hear this call to remember that your political identity isn't primarily with your party, but with your country.
Both of these men ran honorable, hard campaigns, treating each other with respect and even grace at times. Both ended their campaigns in much the same way. Think about that. Two politicians, both after the same job, competing vigorously without losing their sense of honor and integrity. You know what?
I'm not surprised.
Here's most of John McCain's speech (I took out his comments to his campaign team):
My friends, we have come to the end of a long journey. The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly.
A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Sen. Barack Obama to congratulate him. To congratulate him on being elected the next president of the country that we both love. In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.
This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight. I've always believed that America offers opportunities to all who have the industry and will to seize it. Sen. Obama believes that, too.
But we both recognize that, though we have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our nation's reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship, the memory of them still had the power to wound. A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt's invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and frightful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States.
Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth.
Sen. Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and for his country. I applaud him for it, and offer him my sincere sympathy that his beloved grandmother did not live to see this day, though our faith assures us she is at rest in the presence of her creator and so very proud of the good man she helped raise.
Sen. Obama and I have had and argued our differences, and he has prevailed. No doubt many of those differences remain. These are difficult times for our country. And I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face. I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited.
Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans. And please believe me when I say no association has ever meant more to me than that.
It is natural. It's natural, tonight, to feel some disappointment. But tomorrow, we must move beyond it and work together to get our country moving again. We fought—we fought as hard as we could. And though we fell short, the failure is mine, not yours. I am so deeply grateful to all of you for the great honor of your support and for all you have done for me. I wish the outcome had been different, my friends.
The road was a difficult one from the outset, but your support and friendship never wavered. I cannot adequately express how deeply indebted I am to you. I'm especially grateful to my wife, Cindy, my children, my dear mother and all my family, and to the many old and dear friends who have stood by my side through the many ups and downs of this long campaign. I have always been a fortunate man, and never more so for the love and encouragement you have given me. You know, campaigns are often harder on a candidate's family than on the candidate, and that's been true in this campaign. All I can offer in compensation is my love and gratitude and the promise of more peaceful years ahead…
I don't know what more we could have done to try to win this election. I'll leave that to others to determine. Every candidate makes mistakes, and I'm sure I made my share of them. But I won't spend a moment of the future regretting what might have been. This campaign was and will remain the great honor of my life, and my heart is filled with nothing but gratitude for the experience and to the American people for giving me a fair hearing before deciding that Sen. Obama and my old friend Sen. Joe Biden should have the honor of leading us for the next four years.
I would not be an American worthy of the name should I regret a fate that has allowed me the extraordinary privilege of serving this country for a half a century. Today, I was a candidate for the highest office in the country I love so much. And tonight, I remain her servant. That is blessing enough for anyone, and I thank the people of Arizona for it.
Tonight, more than any night, I hold in my heart nothing but love for this country and for all its citizens, whether they supported me or Sen. Obama—whether they supported me or Sen. Obama.
I wish Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president. And I call on all Americans, as I have often in this campaign, to not despair of our present difficulties, but to believe, always, in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here.
Americans never quit. We never surrender.
We never hide from history. We make history.
Thank you, and God bless you, and God bless America. Thank you all very much.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Supply Lines
(This is the fifth in a series titled 'A Declaration of Dependence: The Lord's Prayer.')
Matthew 6:9-13
I love bread. I like all kinds of bread, from French baguettes to Italian focaccia—from really good California sourdough to a nice slice of Wonder bread. The worst thing that ever happened to my enjoyment of bread was the Atkins diet—the low-carb diet. The last thing I ever needed was to have a hint of guilt to spoil my enjoyment of a good cinnamon twist or some Rye toast.
My love for bread goes back to my childhood. My Italian grandmother used to make bread every week. When I was little she used to let me help—I had a little single-serving bread pan, and she would give me a lump of dough to make my own mini-loaf of bread. When it came out she would make a fuss over it like I had done this amazing thing. She’d hide the 6 large loaves she made and call my grandfather in from the garden to show him the little bun I made. When she got older she would have me do the kneading—she’d stand next to me and tell me what to do, and she’d toss flour onto the big table so the dough wouldn’t stick.
What I remember most about those days at my grandma’s house was the smell of the baking bread. It was strong—but if you were indoors for a long time it would seem to fade. But if you went outside for even a minute and came back into the house, it would seem just as strong as ever.
My grandmother died in 1995, and I haven’t made bread since. But every so often I go into someone’s house, or by a bakery, and I get that smell again, just as strong as ever. The aroma of baking bread reminds me of my Italian grandparents, but it also reminds me of what it was like to be filled in their presence—filled with food, loved unconditionally, and completely satisfied.
We’ve been talking about the Lord’s Prayer as the heart of our faith—it expresses what we believe about God and ourselves, and reminds us of the call on each of our lives to live according to the values of the Kingdom, of Christ’ reign over all things and all places and all people.
We’ve already prayed:
Our Father, the one that truly exists,
Your name is above all other names.
Bring your Kingdom,
Help us make this world the way you made it to be in the first place.
And so we come to the text for today: ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Sustain us for the journey. Feed all of us, O God. Show us how we can help.
In the reading from Exodus today we saw the way God provided manna to his people who were wandering in the desert for 40 years. It was like bread—it actually says later that it tasted like wafers made with honey, which sounds kind of nice. They were commanded to take some for everyone—even if they couldn’t get it themselves—but they were also commanded not to hoard it. God would provide their daily bread, if they would just trust him to do it.
It may seem like a strange time to talk about God’s provision for us. The financial crisis has hit many people in this room very hard. There are shrill, frightened voices coming out of our TVs and radios saying that a terrible recession is unavoidable.
It may seem like a strange time to talk about having faith in God’s care for us—in God’s concern for us—in the way God provides for our needs. Does God really care about us?
Now in this election year, and in honor of the last two presidents, I’m going to focus on a small word—actually the smallest word in our text this morning: Us.
‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Sustain us for the journey. Feed all of us, O God. Show us how we can help.
Who’s us? Which us is Jesus talking about—and asking us to pray about—in the Lord’s Prayer?
Instead of me laboring through some long, complicated response to that question, let me give you a hint about how simple the answer really is: ‘Us’ means everyone. That’s it, that’s as specific an interpretation of this passage as an honest preacher can give you. ‘Us’ means everyone. Uh-oh.
Take a minute to think about what a radical statement that is. Does God really care for us? Yes. It’s just that the ‘us’ God had in mind includes more people than we normally think about when we pray his prayer.
We’ve been saying that the Lord’s Prayer takes us in wherever we are—broken, wounded, depleted—that it takes us in and replenishes us—that it renews us and sends us out into service again. The point of that is that we are a part of the process—a part of the very blessing—that we are asking for in the prayer.
Because we know that there are people all over the world who don’t have enough to eat. We know that there are people in this city—maybe even at this church—who are wondering how they’ll provide for themselves—for their families—during these difficult times. It’s too easy to see hunger and deprivation as abstractions—as things that happen to ‘the other guy’—but if the economic forecasts are right, these issues of need and provision are about to get a lot more real to all of us. What do we do about that? What do we say?
‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Sustain us for the journey. Feed all of us, O God. Show us how we can help.
It’s important to read ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ as a two-way street.
First, it’s a recognition that in some mysterious way we rely on God to provide for our needs. We acknowledge that all good things come from him, and that we ought to remember him when things are good, rather that only when we’re facing some kind of disaster or suffering. People of faith used to call this Providence.
But the second part of this is what calls each one of us to action. Why? Because we all get our provisions in different measures. Some people get a lot, while others get very little—or nothing. Before we dive into that, we need to step back and review a crucial point of theology.
However it came about, Christians believe that God is the one who created the heavens and the earth and everyone and everything in it. We may wrestle or debate over the how and the when, but for people of faith the ‘who’ is not in question.
Because I believe that—because I believe that God is the origin of every thing and every person on this earth—I can say this: God didn’t go to the trouble of making anyone who was doomed to starve to death. If he did then we should all go home and get an early start on our Sunday afternoon plans.
God didn’t make anyone to starve to death. The problem is not production—the problem is distribution. Does that make sense? The problem is not production—the problem is distribution.
Military organizations give an enormous amount of thought to their supply lines or logistics. The five principles of logistics accepted by NATO are foresight, economy, flexibility, simplicity, and co-operation. That’s a good definition for our role in this verse from the Lord’s Prayer.
So what are we called to do? Give us this day our daily bread could just as easily mean: ‘Give all of us—give everyone their bread—even if you give it through me.’ Help me to serve with ‘foresight, economy, flexibility, simplicity, and co-operation.’
In the end we shouldn’t need the government to share the wealth. What we need is people who pray the Lord’s Prayer—and mean it—to share the wealth.
We come to the Table this morning in need of the life sustaining nourishment that God promises. But it’s not just our own hunger we ask for—we come to the Table to be restored, replenished, and renewed for service. We come to experience this blessing in the way God intended it: so that we would turn right around and become a blessing to all the nations—a blessing to the rest of what we mean by ‘us’.
And so our stewardship theme continues. You heard about some of our fellowship ministries last week, and today we remember the way our music programs lead and inspire our worship together. Don’t miss next Sunday, as we talk about what this church hopes to accomplish in Christ’s name for the needy in this area. Don’t miss it. Bring friends. Come ready to be inspired.
For today we come to the table as people who are thankful for God’s Providence, and eager to share that blessing with others. That’s what the Lord’s Prayer is all about. Let’s stand and pray the prayer together as we prepare our hearts for Communion.
Matthew 6:9-13
I love bread. I like all kinds of bread, from French baguettes to Italian focaccia—from really good California sourdough to a nice slice of Wonder bread. The worst thing that ever happened to my enjoyment of bread was the Atkins diet—the low-carb diet. The last thing I ever needed was to have a hint of guilt to spoil my enjoyment of a good cinnamon twist or some Rye toast.
My love for bread goes back to my childhood. My Italian grandmother used to make bread every week. When I was little she used to let me help—I had a little single-serving bread pan, and she would give me a lump of dough to make my own mini-loaf of bread. When it came out she would make a fuss over it like I had done this amazing thing. She’d hide the 6 large loaves she made and call my grandfather in from the garden to show him the little bun I made. When she got older she would have me do the kneading—she’d stand next to me and tell me what to do, and she’d toss flour onto the big table so the dough wouldn’t stick.
What I remember most about those days at my grandma’s house was the smell of the baking bread. It was strong—but if you were indoors for a long time it would seem to fade. But if you went outside for even a minute and came back into the house, it would seem just as strong as ever.
My grandmother died in 1995, and I haven’t made bread since. But every so often I go into someone’s house, or by a bakery, and I get that smell again, just as strong as ever. The aroma of baking bread reminds me of my Italian grandparents, but it also reminds me of what it was like to be filled in their presence—filled with food, loved unconditionally, and completely satisfied.
We’ve been talking about the Lord’s Prayer as the heart of our faith—it expresses what we believe about God and ourselves, and reminds us of the call on each of our lives to live according to the values of the Kingdom, of Christ’ reign over all things and all places and all people.
We’ve already prayed:
Our Father, the one that truly exists,
Your name is above all other names.
Bring your Kingdom,
Help us make this world the way you made it to be in the first place.
And so we come to the text for today: ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Sustain us for the journey. Feed all of us, O God. Show us how we can help.
In the reading from Exodus today we saw the way God provided manna to his people who were wandering in the desert for 40 years. It was like bread—it actually says later that it tasted like wafers made with honey, which sounds kind of nice. They were commanded to take some for everyone—even if they couldn’t get it themselves—but they were also commanded not to hoard it. God would provide their daily bread, if they would just trust him to do it.
It may seem like a strange time to talk about God’s provision for us. The financial crisis has hit many people in this room very hard. There are shrill, frightened voices coming out of our TVs and radios saying that a terrible recession is unavoidable.
It may seem like a strange time to talk about having faith in God’s care for us—in God’s concern for us—in the way God provides for our needs. Does God really care about us?
Now in this election year, and in honor of the last two presidents, I’m going to focus on a small word—actually the smallest word in our text this morning: Us.
‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Sustain us for the journey. Feed all of us, O God. Show us how we can help.
Who’s us? Which us is Jesus talking about—and asking us to pray about—in the Lord’s Prayer?
Instead of me laboring through some long, complicated response to that question, let me give you a hint about how simple the answer really is: ‘Us’ means everyone. That’s it, that’s as specific an interpretation of this passage as an honest preacher can give you. ‘Us’ means everyone. Uh-oh.
Take a minute to think about what a radical statement that is. Does God really care for us? Yes. It’s just that the ‘us’ God had in mind includes more people than we normally think about when we pray his prayer.
We’ve been saying that the Lord’s Prayer takes us in wherever we are—broken, wounded, depleted—that it takes us in and replenishes us—that it renews us and sends us out into service again. The point of that is that we are a part of the process—a part of the very blessing—that we are asking for in the prayer.
Because we know that there are people all over the world who don’t have enough to eat. We know that there are people in this city—maybe even at this church—who are wondering how they’ll provide for themselves—for their families—during these difficult times. It’s too easy to see hunger and deprivation as abstractions—as things that happen to ‘the other guy’—but if the economic forecasts are right, these issues of need and provision are about to get a lot more real to all of us. What do we do about that? What do we say?
‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Sustain us for the journey. Feed all of us, O God. Show us how we can help.
It’s important to read ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ as a two-way street.
First, it’s a recognition that in some mysterious way we rely on God to provide for our needs. We acknowledge that all good things come from him, and that we ought to remember him when things are good, rather that only when we’re facing some kind of disaster or suffering. People of faith used to call this Providence.
But the second part of this is what calls each one of us to action. Why? Because we all get our provisions in different measures. Some people get a lot, while others get very little—or nothing. Before we dive into that, we need to step back and review a crucial point of theology.
However it came about, Christians believe that God is the one who created the heavens and the earth and everyone and everything in it. We may wrestle or debate over the how and the when, but for people of faith the ‘who’ is not in question.
Because I believe that—because I believe that God is the origin of every thing and every person on this earth—I can say this: God didn’t go to the trouble of making anyone who was doomed to starve to death. If he did then we should all go home and get an early start on our Sunday afternoon plans.
God didn’t make anyone to starve to death. The problem is not production—the problem is distribution. Does that make sense? The problem is not production—the problem is distribution.
Military organizations give an enormous amount of thought to their supply lines or logistics. The five principles of logistics accepted by NATO are foresight, economy, flexibility, simplicity, and co-operation. That’s a good definition for our role in this verse from the Lord’s Prayer.
So what are we called to do? Give us this day our daily bread could just as easily mean: ‘Give all of us—give everyone their bread—even if you give it through me.’ Help me to serve with ‘foresight, economy, flexibility, simplicity, and co-operation.’
In the end we shouldn’t need the government to share the wealth. What we need is people who pray the Lord’s Prayer—and mean it—to share the wealth.
We come to the Table this morning in need of the life sustaining nourishment that God promises. But it’s not just our own hunger we ask for—we come to the Table to be restored, replenished, and renewed for service. We come to experience this blessing in the way God intended it: so that we would turn right around and become a blessing to all the nations—a blessing to the rest of what we mean by ‘us’.
And so our stewardship theme continues. You heard about some of our fellowship ministries last week, and today we remember the way our music programs lead and inspire our worship together. Don’t miss next Sunday, as we talk about what this church hopes to accomplish in Christ’s name for the needy in this area. Don’t miss it. Bring friends. Come ready to be inspired.
For today we come to the table as people who are thankful for God’s Providence, and eager to share that blessing with others. That’s what the Lord’s Prayer is all about. Let’s stand and pray the prayer together as we prepare our hearts for Communion.
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