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.”
But the fact of the matter is that Jesus did teach us to keep asking for what we want. In one of his parables, he said, "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people... there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, 'Grant me justice against my opponent.' For a while he refused; but later he said to him-self, 'Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'" And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? [Lk 18:2-7]
But on the other hand - Jesus doesn’t say that we will get whatever we ask. He says that we will get justice. God approves of justice. God invented justice, in fact. So Jesus hasn’t, in fact, taught us to keep nagging God like a teenager asking to borrow the car.
So why are we to persevere in prayer? That brings us to a third objection. If God only answers the prayers that are in keeping with his desires for us, and he already knows what we need, why don’t we just relax and trust him? Why do we keep saying and singing the same things over and over and over again?
There’s more than one answer to that question, too.
The first answer, and the simplest one, is that prayer is how we communicate with God. Prayer is how we build a relationship with God. Prayer forces us to get into the right attitude by acknowledging our dependence upon God. Prayer is how we learn to listen to God.
The second answer is that prayer changes us. And the Lord’s Prayer changes us not only because we are in God’s presence, but because of the particular words we are using. Of course God hears us no matter what words we use. Flowery words, King James English, spectacular eloquence don’t get us any closer to God than a simple one-word cry for help. But the particular words Jesus gave us have an additional function.
And all the words we say over and over again in our rituals, the prayer of confession, the affirmation of faith, the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving with which we greet the bread and wine, all of these words we say become part of us. They dig deep into our hearts and minds, helping to form in us habits of thought and action that honor God, that put God first.
And so when we say the Lord’s prayer, not only are we asking God to give us, to do for us, to accomplish certain things, we are also asking God to make us the kind of people who want those things. We are, in fact, asking God to make us the kind of peo-ple who can pray “in Jesus name” because we want what Jesus wants.
What does Jesus want us to want?
First of all, he wants us to relate to God as Father. Jesus wants us to trust him, to depend on him, to honor him, to obey him. Further, he wants us to understand that this Father is in heaven, not an earthly father. There are many people, more and more each year in our broken world, who either don’t have a father at all or have an abusive or neglectful or otherwise inadequate father. That’s not the father we’re talking about here. Jesus is telling us that this is the perfect father, one worthy of trust and honor and obedience. We are to believe that relationship to be possible, and to seek it.
Second, we are to want everyone everywhere to honor God, to acknowledge him for who he is. That is what “Hallowed be thy name” means. But you know what? Do any of us honor God as we ought? We’re asking God to give us a clearer view of his awesome holiness, as well as his loving fatherhood. That’s downright dangerous, if you stop and think about it. What happened to Isaiah when he saw God, lifted up high and holy? He fell flat on his face, and said “Woe is me, I am lost!” It is, as Jonathan Edwards said, a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
And when we ask for God’s kingdom to come, and for his will to be done, we are asking not only that everyone else be made obedient to God’s rule, but that we too become obedient. How big a change will that be for you? Are you willing to let God make those changes in you and for you? The people of the prophet’s day used to long for “the Day of the Lord” because they were confident that God would reward them just because they were Jews. But Amos said they were being overconfident: “Alas for you who desire the day of the LORD! Why do you want the day of the LORD? It is darkness, not light; [Amos 5:18]
Now, we who know Christ are assured of our salvation, but Paul says to be careful how we live, because “the work of each ... will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done.... If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but only as through fire.” [1 Cor 3:13,15] We, too, will be judged. Are we ready?
These are not light or small things that we ask for. We are asking for a radical shift in the entire nature of our world.
Now our attention moves from God to ourselves. And so we ask for what we need. But notice something interesting: We ask for our daily bread. Just enough for the day. We don’t want to be rich enough that we lose our dependence on God, nor yet poor enough that our physical needs overpower us. It reminds us of the Israelites in the wilderness, given food enough only for one day. If they collected too much, it was inedible by the next morning. God wants us to trust him enough not to have a back-up plan.
What comes next? We ask to be forgiven. We ask God to forget about what we owe him. Not only that, we ask to be forgiven only in proportion to how we have forgiven others. Jesus wants us to remember that others have as great a claim on God’s forgiveness - and ours - as we have. Jesus wants us to be the kind of people who don’t see ourselves as higher or more important than our neighbors - even the ones who have offended us in some way.
Jesus also wants us to be free of spiritual arrogance. We’re to have the humility to realize that, weak as we are, there are going to be some temptations we cannot withstand. And so we need God’s guidance. He calls us to be realistic about evil, to realize that the world is filled with spiritual danger., and to rely daily on God’s protection as well as his provision. We can’t fight Satan alone, either. “Deliver us from evil” can also be translated “deliver us from the evil one.”
And we close by claiming the power of God to make it all happen. We ask God for all these things because we know he can do it. We ask for this because we know there’s nothing higher or greater that we could ever aspire to, than that God grant us these things.
Is there anything else that you want, besides what is in this prayer? If there is, God knows all about it. But if these things do not come first, it’s time to follow Jesus more closely, and to repeat his words more carefully, more frequently, and more sincerely. Amen.
