sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 10/14/2012
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
Matthew 6 :9-13
Mystically Wired, page 5-6 (Our Brains Are Itching to Pray)...
When Jesus teaches his followers how to pray he tells them to start like this:
Our Father who is in heaven...
Our Father who is in heaven is here and he is now. Near, as close as our next breath. Even now, his arms encircling our sinful selves in loving embrace. And he's a Father, in the best sense of the word. A dad who couldn't be happier that we are his kids, a dad will stop at nothing to ensure we experience and are shaped by and become competent at love, a dad who moves heaven and earth for us and is moved at his core by us.
But for us, this text is loaded with all sorts of landmines that could distort Jesus' meaning; both about fathers and about heaven. For starters, 34% of children live absent their biological father, and 50% of those have never set foot in their father's home. And our conceptions about heaven are more often shaped by Hollywood movies than by the Holy scriptures.
First, let’s tackle the original wording of the text, and then consider what Jesus might be trying to teach us about this Father, and how to approach him.
πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς
PAH-tair | hay-MOHN | ha | en | tois | oo-rah-NOICE
father of us the [one] in the heavens
The classic translation, Our Father, who art in heaven, doesn't help us very much. It's like we're talking about a distant Father, one who is way out there. In our most common religious imagination, heaven is mainly a place we go after we die. In other words, although there’s nothing to rule out the ‘now-ness’ of the place (after all, we all know people who’ve already died, and figure they must be someplace), we tend to think of it as a future place. A later place. A down the road sort of place. Assuming the road we're on leads there, of course.
Wolfram Alpha query: Where is heaven? Result: Heaven is a metaphysical place people with certain virtues go in their afterlives according to various religions and spiritual philosophies.
But that's not what Jesus is talking about here. Thank God.
A little background might help.
οὐρανοῖς Nearly always a plural word. Generally referring to places inhabited and ruled by God. All Hebrews had at least 3 conceptions of heaven (some Rabbi’s 7, thus ‘7th Heaven’)
The third heaven: the domain of God that is spiritual but nonetheless a definite place. God’s home. The place angels call home. The place where Jesus said he was going to prepare a home for us. A place that is meaningfully different than this earth; it is God soaked, God glistening, reverberating with worship, trembling with power, glorious.
The second heaven: what we might call outer space. A place where God’s presence and majesty are evident in the wondrous stars and planets and moons. A place orchestrated by and bearing witness to God.
The first heaven: what we might call the earth’s atmosphere, from the exosphere, to the thermosphere, the mesosphere, stratosphere, troposphere. The air that holds the clouds, that moves the leaves of the trees, that ruffles our hair, that carries the sound of my voice, that fills our lungs when we draw breath. Everything that we think of as empty, the Hebrews thought of as filled with God. A heaven infused with God’s living presence, in which he moves, from which he listens, and out of which he speaks.
When Jesus instructs us to pray to our Father, the one in the heavens, he's saying prayer begins by coming to our heavenly Father - not a distant Father in a land of harps and thrones, but the divine Father who is as close to us our next breath, surrounding the whole of our bodies, sensitive to every word that passes through our lips, even the faintest whisper.
[spin out the implications of a Father “in the heavens”… in the place of power, in the farthest reaches, and all around us.]
However, one of the challenges we have with Jesus' prayer is that many of our associations with the word “Father” are negative, not positive.
[Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone clip]
How difficult would it make it to pray if when we think of praying to "our Father" we imagine a papa like the one in the song?
Absentee. Someone who cares more about himself than about his kids. Someone undependable.
Or maybe, a strict disciplinarian. Emotionally distant. Someone who has the highest expectations for your life and the lowest tolerance for failure. Someone who’s pegged you as a no-good good-for-nothing.
Or maybe, someone who only cares how you make him look. Someone who will only be pleased when you’ve got a haircut and a new job. Someone who just doesn’t get you, who wants you to fit his mold.
[Donald Miller story, from Father Fiction, pg. 9-10...]
That's not the kind of Father Jesus is inviting us to come to in prayer.
He's talking about YHWH God, the one who met Moses at a burning bush when the Hebrew people were in slavery, and told Moses that he had a message for him to deliver to the Pharaoh, the god-man who was enslaving the Israelites:
And you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus said the Lord: My son, my firstborn, is Israel. And I said to you, Send off my son that he may worship Me, and you refused to send him off, and, look, I am about to kill your son, your firstborn.
Exodus 4:22-23
Now, that's a dad, isn't it? Hey you, Pharaoh. Yeah, you. Hands off that one. Why, you ask? He's my boy. His name's Israel, and he may have gotten mixed up with you for a while, but enough's enough. He called me and said he wants to come home. So that's it. Let him go. I'm telling you, keep messing with Israel, and I'll mess with you.
Setting theological implications aside for another conversation, isn't that the kind of dad you want when you're in trouble?
First, he's a dad who claims you as his own, no matter what kind of situation you're in.
When Jesus tells his followers to start prayer saying, "Our Father, the one in the heavens..." he's telling us that that same dad who rescued Israel from Pharaoh is our dad, too. And it's because God has chosen to call us his son, not for any other reason. That's what the good news is all about.
We're not like puppies in the pet store, hoping someone will adopt us. We come into prayer to a Dad who has already chosen us, for reasons that have nothing to do with our cuteness, or the tricks we can do, or how well we heel, or how housebroken we are.
And we're not a burden to him, not an inconvenience. Our Dad - the one in the heavens - longs to be our Dad, no matter what it costs him.
It’s just a fundamental fact of your reality, Jesus is saying. It’s not up for grabs based on your most recent behavior... Every student of Jesus comes into prayer with the privilege of a beloved son or daughter of Papa in the heavens. We begin our prayer, us frail, fragile, fickle human beings, declaring and depending on the one unchanging fact of our existence. God is our Father. Period.
Secondly, when we call God Father, we’re talking to the father who moves heaven and earth to take care of his kids. When we enter the place of prayer, Our Father is already acting on our behalf.
Since ancient times no one has heard,
No ear has perceived,
No eye has seen any God besides you,
Who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.
Isaiah 64:4
We don’t have to wake God up, rouse him to action. We’re coming to the Father who unleashed his wrath against his kids’ enemies. The Father who softened the hardest of hearts so that his kids could go free. The Father who split the sea to make a way out of exile for his kids. The Father who brought water out of a rock so his kids’ thirst would be satisfied in a dry land.
And, as the resurrection of the beloved son Jesus reveals, we come to a Papa who, far from being a rollin’ stone, is rollin’ stones away.
“From then on, to call on God as ‘Father’ was to invoke the God of the Exodus, the liberation God, the God whose kingdom was coming, bringing bread for the hungry, forgiveness for the sinner, and deliverance from the powers of darkness…The ‘Lord’s Prayer’ as many call it, is therefore not just a loosely connected string of petitions. It is a prayer for people who are following Jesus on the kingdom-journey.” -Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone
Prayer is relational before it is functional. No doubt about it. But prayer is not relational instead of functional. The two go hand in hand. Our Father is letting us in on the action. The relationship with God in which we are involved is one in which he is inviting us into his purposes: for our lives, for the lives of others, for the whole world.
When we step into the place of prayer, in the way Jesus teaches us, we are intimately intertwined with a Father who is transforming us from people who have lived as slaves into free people who have an inheritance in the promised land. A Father who has liberating designs on every life, in every corner of the world, for every corner of the world.
Dallas Willard describes Jesus-style prayer as “talking about what we are doing together”. This cooperation is implicit in the idea that we come to God as a child comes to her Father. We are not simply overwhelmed by God’s activity, while our own will, desires, personality are rendered irrelevant.
Let's dispel the classical idea of God as the “unmoved mover....” Our prayer matters. God is moved by us, by our prayer. God actually responds; it’s not a charade.
The universe responds to desire & will, the nature of the Trinitarian universe, founded on personal relationship. God is strong enough not to be moved, should he choose not to be, but he allows himself to be moved by his children. That is true greatness. He has a greatness so great that he can be moved and still accomplish his purposes. The Father Jesus invites us to come to in prayer might be called, in truth, the “most moved mover”.
[flexibility continuum, allowing kids to move us...]
Finally, the truth is, this Father / child thing that happens in prayer predates us. Our Father has always been a father. God was a Father before we were his kids. Jesus is just inviting us into something he's been experiencing since before the dawn of time.
To call God “Our Father” is to join ourselves with Jesus in his relationship with the Father. On our own, few of us would have any confidence to call God Father. Sure, God called Israel his son. But none of us, at least not on our own, is Israel. Few of us are even in the line of Abraham. We always come into the place of prayer with Jesus, brothers of his because of the good news and our response to it; we are never there without him. “Our” Father.
He in his resurrection body fully inhabiting the material world, and the material world inhabiting the heavens. Us, through faith, in him, together with him sons and daughters of our Father in the heavens. That's how prayer begins. Not a bad start, eh?
Practical tips:
1. WRITE & BURN. Write down what comes to mind when you think of a father. Read it out loud in the place you pray, and then burn it. Let the smoke make visible the air around you in which your heavenly Father is present. Invite him to show you what a true father is all about - to receive and heal your perceptions that have been formed badly, to receive and shine light on and amplify the perceptions that have been given to you as gifts.
2. PICTURE THE LOVE. To use a previously adapted phrase from my dad, there’s already “good vibrations” going on in the place of prayer. Jesus and the Father loving one another. The Holy Spirit, capital ‘L’ Love, the proper, personal noun Love, emanating from them.
Helpful to picture that as prayer begins. Me and Jesus and the Father and the Holy Spirit. [‘Being in a room exercise’ experience]
3. SAY IT OUT LOUD. Love flourishes in an atmosphere of confident trust. Take a risk, let the syllables slip off your tongue, tumble over your lips. Papa. Daddy. Father. Simply saying the word to God will be a cooperation with the Spirit of Jesus that the Father has given you, the Spirit of Sonship that calls out “Abba”, Father.
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