4. Jesus’ Prayer: Holy Name

With Christ in the School of Prayer

Dr. D. William McIvor

September 26, 2004

Presbyterian Church in Sudbury

Matthew 6.7-13 (NRSV)

    “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

    “Pray then in this way:

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.”

Our focus this morning is on the very first phrase of the prayer:

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”

Introduction

    The model prayer that Jesus taught is a prayer given by the Lord for the disciples of the Lord. Its words, in many tongues now, may be the most familiar words ever spoken on the face of this planet. Millions pray the prayer everyday both privately and publicly. Richard Foster says the prayer “is really a total prayer. Its concerns embrace the whole world, from the coming of the kingdom to daily bread. Large things and small things, spiritual things and material things, inward things and outward things … It is lifted up to God in every conceivable setting. It rises from the altars of the great cathedrals and from obscure shanties in unknown places. It is spoken by both children and kings. It is prayed at weddings and deathbeds alike. The rich and the poor, the intelligent and the illiterate, the simple and the wise — all speak forth this prayer.”[1]

    It begins as Jesus teaches us to pray, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Here are four thoughts to help us understand what this means.

ONE: Ultimate reality is personal

    It means, first of all, that ultimate reality is personal. Ultimate reality has a name — “Our Father” — to whom prayer allows us to speak as friend to friend, as daughter or son to our Heavenly Father. [We won’t talk today about male/female images of God; that’s another day’s sermon.]

    At the top of your bulletins this morning I printed a quote from Andrew Murray’s classic With Christ in the School of Prayer to the effect that only Jesus teaches us to pray to God as “Our Father.”[2] The ancient Hebrews did think at times of God as the father of their nation but they tended to not speak personally of God as Father. Jesus taught us to do that. Ultimate reality is personal.

    This means that one of the secrets of prayer is keeping it from becoming too “religious” because then it is removed from daily life. Christian theology can contribute to this problem. For example, the Westminster Confession of Faith, one of our denomination’s creeds written in England in the mid-1600s, says this about God: “There is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty; most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will, for his own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth … ”[3] That’s all one sentence and I didn’t read the whole of it!

    Now in its own way, such a description of God is theologically correct. But if that’s all we think about God, then we will probably keep such a god at arm’s distance. Such a god is too big, too perfect, too grand to get close to. I’m reminded of the story C. S. Lewis about a girl whose ‘higher thinking’ parents taught her to regard God as a ‘perfect substance’ so as to avoid any silly, primitive, or childish images and concepts of God. No doubt her parents thought they were honoring God by doing this. But later in life the girl came to realize that such guidance had actually led her to conceive of God as something like a “vast tapioca pudding.” To make matters worse, said Lewis, she disliked tapioca.[4]

    But Jesus teaches us to pray to God as “Our Father” which clears away the clutter of theological jargon and other clutter too. It means that the infinite, immutable, immense, invisible God has a name, an intimate name, which we may speak. Families often have intimate names with which they speak to each other. I call my daughter “Sweet Pie” sometimes and my son “Buddy.” No one else uses those names for them. Merrie and I have nicknames for each other. It’s the same name for each of us and I’m not going to say what it is. Hang around us enough and you’ll probably hear it. We can’t even remember how we got started with it but we’ve been speaking this name to each other for well over thirty years. In the intimacy of our family circle these names are how we speak to each other.

So we learn in Jesus’ prayer — our prayer — the intimate, family name of God: “Our Father.”   Ultimate reality is personal.

TWO: God is very near to us

    A second thing we learn when we pray “Our Father” is that God is very near to us. We would expect that with the intimacy of a family name yet too often we let God’s name be a religious name which means “far away.”

    Dallas Willard says that the old, standard formulation of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father who art in heaven,” on a practical level has come to mean “Our Father who is far away and much later.” This is why Willard has come to speak more literally and accurately of the kingdom of heaven as the kingdom under the heavens. Most of the time Jesus actually spoke of heaven in the plural and this is important. For “Our Father in heaven” tends to mean God is far from us. But “Our Father, the one in the heavens,” sees God present as “far out” as imaginable but also right down to the atmosphere around our heads which is, in the Bible’s view, the first of the heavens. In other words, to pray “Our Father in the heavens” means to pray “Our Father, who is always near us.”[5]

    Which may help us understand the simplicity of what prayer is. I like Willard’s definition: prayer is simply “talking to God about what we are doing together.” This focuses prayer not in religion but in our daily lives. It means that we will ask God for things — we’ll talk more about that in a couple of weeks. It means we will share with God our concerns and learn of his concerns for our lives. For God is concerned about our concerns and also cares that our concerns should coincide with his. This is our walk together. Out of it we pray.[6] Praying like this means praying because God is very near to us.

THREE: God liberates us

    A third insight from praying “Our Father” is that God liberates us from all that keeps us captive in life. “Our Father” is a liberating word.

    As I said a moment ago, what Andrew Murray says is true: Jesus is the first to teach us to pray as individuals to God our Father. Yet in his book, The Lord and His Prayer, New Testament scholar N. T. Wright points out that even though “Our Father” is a word of intimacy, the real import of the idea of God as Father is to be found in an earlier reference. He writes, “The first occurrence in the Hebrew Bible of the idea of God as the Father comes when Moses marches in boldly to stand before Pharaoh, and says: “Thus says YHWH: Israel is my son, my firstborn; let my people go, that they may serve me’ (Exodus 4:22-23). For Israel to call God ‘Father,’ then, was to hold on to the hope of liberty … The very first words of the Lord’s Prayer, therefore … contain not just intimacy, but revolution.”[7]

    To pray “Our Father” is to desire to be free from all the ideas and habits and powers and addictions and sufferings that hold us captive. To pray “Our Father” means that we will clean out the clutter that chokes our souls and keeps us from daily walking with God. Do we want to be free from our captivity to culture, comfort, convenience, or convention? Are we willing to be set free or, to use Wright’s analogy, do we prefer to slave away in the house of the Pharaoh rather than embrace the implications of praying “Our Father”?[8] Sometimes we do choose slavery. But the “Our Father” can liberate us. For Jesus teaches us to pray not to be sweetly religious but to be wonderfully, gloriously free as the children of God.

FOUR: Life is properly ordered

    Fourth and finally, to prayer “Our Father” means that life is properly ordered. “Our Father in the heavens, hallowed be your name.” We no longer know very well what it means to hallow something. Most people might associate hallow only with Halloween.[9] But when Jesus teaches us to hallow the name of God, he wants us to let God’s name be uniquely respected. God’s name should be treasured and loved more than any other.

    Back when I coached my son in soccer, he bought me a t-shirt that said “World’s Greatest Father.” I liked that but I didn’t wear it too much because I didn’t want the other boys on the team to not think their fathers were the world’s greatest. Dr. Willard says a young child’s heart is wounded to hear its parents, mother or father, dishonored or to see them attacked. Such attacks shake the very foundations of a child’s existence, for the parents are its world. That confidence in the parent that makes a child think its parents are “the greatest” is really essential to a young child’s well-being.[10]

So too the well-being of all the human family. Only when God is truly God, can we be truly human. Life is properly ordered when we hallow, when we honor uniquely the name of “Our Father” in the heavens.

Conclusion

    There is so much more to say but I’ll finish today with a scene from “Shadowlands,” a film from several years ago based on the life of C. S. Lewis. Lewis has just returned to Oxford from London, where he has just been married to Joy Gresham, an American woman, in a private Episcopal ceremony performed at her hospital bedside. She is dying from cancer, and, through struggle with her illness, she and Lewis have been discovering the depth of their love for each other. As Lewis arrives at the college where he teaches, he is met by Harry Harrington, an Episcopal priest, who asks what news there is. Lewis hesitates; then, deciding to speak of the marriage and not the cancer, he says, “Ah, good news, I think, Harry. Yes, good news.”

    But Harrington, unaware of the marriage and thinking that Lewis is referring to Joy’s medical situation, replies, “I know how hard you’ve been praying … Now, God is answering your prayer.”

Lewis replied, “That’s not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God; it changes me.”

    “It doesn’t change God; it changes me.” I think prayer may change God more than Lewis knew. But I agree with Tom Long, who used to teach preaching at Princeton Seminary, when he says, “Prayer is not a message scribbled on a note, jammed into a bottle and tossed into the sea in hopes that it will wash up some day on God’s shoreline. Prayer is communion with God. We speak to God, but God touches, embraces, shapes, and changes us. Whether we pray for rain or pray for sunshine, our prayer is answered, because in the act of praying we receive the gift we really seek — intimacy with God.”[11]

    Friends, pray to God in this intimacy. Pray “Our Father” for ultimate reality is personal and God is very near. Pray “Our Father” because God frees us from all tyrannies, whether they be tyrannies of cancer, the state, addictions, or whatever. And pray “Our Father” to let God’s name be the most intimate and sacred word spoken by your lips and heart.

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