Repeat After Me Series

Who has been watching the Olympics this week? There was a lot of excitement around the newest event, snow-board-cross. We do like new things, don’t we. Even the winter Olympics themselves are, in a way, new. The Ancient Greeks didn’t ski, or ice skate. In fact, the first 13 Olympiads featured only one event, the footrace. But the fact that the history of the Olympic games goes back thousands of years is one of the reasons they’re the biggest sporting event in the world. Something old, something new. Which is more important?

And for the athletes themselves, that mix of old and new is even more intense. Every one of them have been practicing for years, even decades. They go over the same moves, over and over again. Constant repetition is the name of the game - and still every competition is brand new. The weather, the competition, even your own state of mind combine to make each time they step out onto the rink or off the top of the mountain a completely unique experience.

There are a couple of very important lessons here.

The first is that newness is a state of mind, an attitude, an expectation. Newness, freshness, excitement comes more from the inside, not the outside. Our culture is always telling us that new is better, but that’s just a way of getting us to buy things in the vain hope that this - something - will be the magic solution to all our unfulfilled hun-gers. We’re always looking for the new, improved model of everything. In every political campaign people clamor for “change” without ever wondering if all change is for the good. “Going back” is a bad thing, “going forward’ is a good thing. We believe in progress, in newness, in breaking the mold, in being different.

The second lesson is that just because something is old and familiar doesn’t mean that we don’t have to pay attention to it.

We began our worship with “Sing a New Song” because, like God’s mercies, our own praise needs to be new every morning. But at the same time we are looking at the Lord’s Prayer, which has been central to Christian worship for 2000 years. How many of you know it by heart? When is the last time you really sat down and thought about what it is you are actually asking for when you say these words?

I could spend an entire sermon series on these 9 verses. But I’m going to focus on a single question, which is, “Why did Jesus give us this prayer?” And it’s not just because his disciples asked him to. Jesus always had a reason for what he said and did that went beyond the simple need of the moment.

Now, you may recall that when the apostles asked Jesus how to pray, he told them not to repeat empty words as the Gentiles - by that he meant pagans - do. And when we say the same things so many times, aren’t we doing what Jesus told us not to do?

Furthermore, if God knows what we need before we even ask him, why do we bother to pray at all, much less pray and say and do the same things over and over and over again?

The first obstacle to understanding this prayer is the high value that our culture places on newness. You may wonder why I’m even bothering to address the question, because a major point of being church, of seeking to know and follow God, is to be-come attached to eternal realities, to the things that don’t change. But many church experts tell us that the church has to change its packaging, at least, in order to attract a changing world; if we want to reach the younger generation we should move toward more contemporary music, exchange the organ for a praise band, get rid of some of the old-fashioned liturgy.

You may have noticed that we here have done some of those things - but at the same time we haven’t abandoned the old music and liturgical forms. Old and new are NOT incompatible. But what is the reason to repeat the same things over and over again, since Jesus said not to do it?

Well, the pagans believed that the oftener you repeated the magic words, the more power they had to affect the gods’ decisions. Does anyone here really think that by badgering God we can get him to do something he doesn’t want to do? The old Testament seems to say so; how many times did Moses or Abraham or Isaiah get God to apparently changing his mind by a combination of nagging and pleading? And we joke about “being careful what you pray for - you may get it.”