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

First Sermon on the Lord’s Prayer

Easter II; April 23, 2006

Exodus 3:1-15

Today we begin a series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer, which will take us through the season of Easter. I will make a few general comments about the Lord’s Prayer before starting on the first part of the prayer today.

The Lord’s Prayer appears in Matthew (6:9-13) and Luke (11:2-4) as part of Jesus’ instructions to his disciples on how to pray. Some people claim that it is intended to be a guide, an outline of the sorts of things our prayers ought to contain. Others contend that Jesus intended for us to say it just as he taught it. So the truth is probably both of these things. That is how I treat it: as a prayer that we say together nearly every time we worship and that I say myself as part of my daily personal prayers, and as an outline for the sorts of things our prayers ought to contain.

In these sermons I will especially reflect on the second of those things, because I take it for granted that we will say the Lord’s Prayer together when we worship. It has not always been thus, nor in every place. A friend did an exchange program with a minister in Scotland, and he told me that he went to a church that had run off its former pastor because the pastor thought the people ought to say the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday. They could not have that! Since you have been saying it, probably for longer than any of you can remember, I don’t need to convince you of the appropriateness of saying it whenever we worship.

The form of the Lord’s Prayer has, of course, changed over the centuries as our language has changed. I’ll reserve talking about the whole “trespasses/debts/sins” thing until we get to that phrase in the prayer. Most of us learned the Lord’s Prayer in a form somewhat modified from the King James Version of the Bible, but it is a mistake if you call it the “original” version. The original version is, of course, in Aramaic; the earliest version we have available to us is in Greek. If you want to say it in Greek, I’m sure I can oblige you.

The earliest English versions would be as unrecognizable to us as the Greek is to you; I looked at them, thinking I might try to read one to you, but I didn’t know what sounds those old symbols represent! So the versions most of us know are not the earliest English versions, just the ones in longest use. For the sake of these sermons, I’m going to work from a more modern version, the one adopted by the International Consultation on English Texts. You will notice that it uses “you” instead of “thou,” and there will be other differences later on.

The Lord’s Prayer begins with an address to God; today’s sermon is about that address and the first petition that follows it. We say a lot about how we think of God by how we address God. When you say your prayers, how do you address God? I doubt that you start your prayers, “Hey, you!” or even “To Whom it may concern.” Perhaps, in your weaker or more honest moments, you might start out, “Is there anyone out there listening?” I have moments like that.

Jesus invites us to address God as “Our Father.” I will repeat something I said when I preached on the Apostles’ Creed affirmation of “God the Father Almighty:” this should not be construed as evidence that God is male. The Bible includes a lot of other forms of addressing God, and a lot of other images of God, including God as Mother. You may choose from a long list of possibilities when you speak to God; if you have listened carefully, you may have noticed that when I say the pastoral prayer on Sundays I vary how I address God at the beginning. And I know that I am barely scratching the surface of possibilities.

In this outline for prayer Jesus suggests we call God our Father. Not merely “Father,” but “our Father.” God is to be thought of as Father to all of us, not just some of us. The image of Father in Jesus’ culture conjures up a picture of one who not only begets the children, but one who provides for them and for their mother, who looks out for their welfare, who is responsible for their security, and attends to their maturity. At the Passover Seder, the Father is the one who presides over the ritual, just as the Mother is the one who lights the candles to set apart the time as sacred. Calling God our Father suggests that we look to God for our needs, for our well-being and for our security.

And God is “our” Father. God is not closer to the minister than to everyone else; God is not kept in reserve in the Church building. God is present to everyone at every time and in every place, and constantly ready to be in communion with you, every one of you. Yet God is not the private possession of any one of us; God does not belong more to Irving than to Bea, is not at Linda’s beck-and-call while ignoring Charley. God is, among other things, “our Father in heaven.”

The first petition is that God’s name be hallowed. When we say the prayer Jesus taught us, the first thing we ask for is the hallowing of God’s name. “Hallow” is one of those words we haven’t been able to replace with a more modern word, so it causes confusion. You have probably heard of the child who thought God’s first name was Harold – “Our Father in heaven, Harold be your name.”

To hallow something is to hold it as sacred. We have hallowed traditions and hallowed halls – usually on university campuses. In some families the china may be hallowed, or Grandmother herself may be. Most of us approach the water of Baptism and the bread and wine of the Holy Table as stuff that is hallowed.

Jesus instructs us to pray that God’s name be hallowed. So, what sort of attitude do you anticipate having as you approach God? When you pray, when you sing (whether in church or in the shower), when you think about the sermon or talk about the latest issues in the life of the Church, when you argue with your friends about federal policy, when you talk to your children or have dinner with your parents, and especially when you come in these doors to have an hour or so in the presence of God with the people of God: do you hallow the name of God? Do you want God’s name to be hallowed?

When you approach the Burning Bush, what is your attitude? Are you trembling, like Moses, touching lightly upon the ground because the very earth where God’s name is spoken is holy? Or do you stride forward, telling God to make things happen as we want them to? The story – and it’s such a good story, I hope it’s true – is that Albert Einstein was talking with Niels Bohr. Bohr is the physicist who made sense of quantum mechanics, as much as anyone can make sense of quantum mechanics. Einstein objected to quantum mechanics from beginning to end, because its premise is that at the basis of reality is probability, not certainty. Events at the quantum level are not certain, but probable. So Einstein said, “I cannot accept that God plays dice with the world,” to which Bohr replied, “Don’t tell God what to do, Albert.” If even Einstein is insufficient to tell God what to do, then who are you and I?

I would like to think – my confession to you this morning is I may be mistaken about this – that my attitudes about worship and the choices I make about worship are based on the desire to hallow the name of God, rather than treat God casually, as “our buddy” rather than “our Father.” I plan and lead worship with the intention that we treat God with reverence, not as another product to be sold on daytime television. That attitude has been true of Presbyterians traditionally; one of the reasons our churches have never had the raging popularity of some is we are more concerned with hallowing the name of God than with making ourselves feel better.

A last word: Jesus was teaching us to pray when he taught us this phrase. We can work at hallowing the name of God, but the prayer is for God’s name “to be hallowed,” presumably by the whole creation. We generally assume that the bulk of creation hallows the name of God by doing as it is supposed to do: planets orbit their suns, birds sing, earthworms burrow in the soil, tulips blossom, leaves change color and fall, and are renewed in the spring. All of these things do just as they should do. Human beings have a harder time doing as we should do, and the prayer that God’s name be hallowed expresses our yearning that the human world would so faithful to God as the rest of creation is.

Let us keep praying that the name of our Father in heaven be hallowed by the whole creation. Let us also keep praying that God will give us the Spirit to hallow the name of God in our praying and in our living.

Let us pray. Heavenly Father, our provider and our security, may your name be hallowed by your Church and by the entire creation. By your Holy Spirit, make us faithful and joyful in the praise of your name. Through Jesus Christ, the name above every name, amen.

Robert A. Keefer

Westminster Presbyterian Church

Clarinda, Iowa