Our Father

Our Father May 24 (Matthew 6:5-15) So what is that we do when we fold our hands and bow our heads together or alone for prayer? What is happening in that time? When does prayer begin and when does it end? We know full well of the sort of prayer that occurs when we are in trouble. When we have exhausted our own resources and some threat still looms too large we cry out for deliverance. This cycle has been repeated from the earliest expressions in the Bible up until today. The contemporary writer Anne Lamott said that there are really only two prayers, help me, help me, help me and thank-you, thank-you, thank-you. Is that all? For much of my life can tend to offer little more. In meeting with a spiritual director some time ago I struggled and mourned what I felt was a very poor prayer life. We talked a little about my journey with prayer and about life as it was for me. We talked about where prayer could find its place. The conversations turned towards my mornings and somewhere along the way I mentioned that breakfast was an important time for me, that I simply could not really start my day without a decent breakfast. If I missed breakfast I knew the day would not begin well. My director encouraged me to consider that in time my prayer life could feel just that way. I made no real concerted effort to ‘make breakfast a priority’. At some point I simply began doing it and it became indispensable for healthy and ordered day. That time and that act became life giving for the rest of my day. This is my prayer for us as we explore prayer in our lives. In Luke’s account of the Lord’s Prayer in chapter 11, which was not read this morning, the disciples see Jesus praying and when he is finished they approach him and ask, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” Commentators suggest that what the disciples were asking for was something to define their beliefs and their particular community. As John’s disciplines were give their particular prayers and practices so too these disciples looked to represent and be shaped in a particular school of prayer. And so Jesus begins, Our Father. We have been fortunate in the last number of decades to have our thinking re-tuned into how significant these two words are for understanding the Lord’s Prayer. God is indeed perceived as a father in the Old Testament and in Judaism at the time of Jesus. The father is creative, sustaining and compassionate (as are conceptions of God as a mother it should be noted). There is, however, essentially no precedent in Judaism to pray and speak directly to God in the intimate and familiar terms of ‘dad.’ The word, like da and dada, come from the child’s earliest coos and playful attempts at naming the ones who are most intimate and immediate to him or her. And even as adults most of us still understand the difference between saying dad or saying father or even sir. This prayer invites unto a particular relationship. And the term relationship is of the utmost importance to keep in mind. The Lord’s Prayer quickly rose to an exalted position in the Christian community and today it can still be heard recited in some schools, pasted on any number of materials and alluded to throughout our culture. But this was not always so. As the prayer began in Luke this was a sort of initiation for the disciples. This was the prayer of those who were following Jesus. Jesus said that to those who are not following him he would speak in parables but those who follow he will speak more clearly. It appears that one of the

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things the disciples gained access to was this picture of God not simply as majestic and all-powerful but as intimate and caring. Arthur Paul Boers reminds us that even in the early church it was only baptized disciples who were taught the Lord’s Prayer. This was privileged material that assumed a certain responsibility and commitment. What we do then in prayer, specifically in Christian prayer, is turn toward and enter into the presence our father in heaven. Prayer then, somewhat like the meals we eat, shapes our ability to interact with the world around us. We know that when we are insecure and scared, when fear guides how we are interacting with the world, we often turn to God in prayer. So what would it mean for our stability and security if we daily and hourly turned to God in prayer? In one of the earliest Christian texts after the New Testament Christians are encouraged to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times daily. I don’t want too move too quickly from the first two words of this prayer, our Father. I want to encourage us as we are looking this section to bracket out, for the moment anyway, certain conversations and agendas about gender and the meaning of the word ‘father.’ The Bible holds unequivocally that creating God in the image of male, or female for that matter, is idolatry. The Bible is also clear that all humanity, male and female, are the bearers of God’s image in their lives. There is plenty of room for discussion on what it means to translate the Bible in relationship to contemporary gender issues and understandings. This morning I hope that we can allow this text sit with us, as it is, so that we may gain from this language as opposed to quickly offering it uncritical embrace or rejection. We know that with nearly every child that has ever lived a feminine figure, usually the mother, has played the primary role in at least the first six months to a year of the child’s life. This of course has been a clear function and result of our biological structure as we men lack the functional plumbing required to sustain life. In that crucial year both mother and child cannot go long without intimate contact and this does not even take into account the unity and intimacy they shared as the mother carried the child in her womb. For the sake of convenience I will speak of the child as a male and the mother of course as a female. In the first six months to a year of life the child develops both an emerging sense of himself as well as of the world around him. With basic expressions of care and attentiveness the mother gives the child first a sense not of the world and reality but actually offers the child a sort of mirror for him to understand himself. Her thoughtful expressions reflect back to the child what he is feeling. A mother typically gives the child what he needs and protects the child from what he cannot handle or what would be destructive. This is necessary and usually natural for mother and child in the first stage of life. In time the baby begins to take certain things for granted namely the basic life sustaining care and nurture given by the mother. If these basic blocks of life cannot be reasonably taken for granted then life emerges as a constant threat, nothing can be explored or enjoyed or related to appropriately because there always hangs over him the instability and threat that at any moment destruction will overtake him. Look ahead for a moment to Jesus’s words just a few paragraphs later. Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. This is only possible or can only become possible when we have been nurtured in a motherly context of

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reliability and consistency. God is pictured in the Bible in just this way at various times and places. In Isaiah there are all sorts of mothering images of God because of the people’s experience in exile. As we read close to the end of the Isaiah, As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you. We never loose this motherly aspect of God. So hopefully a child forms an intimate, secure, and reliable relationship with his mother. While this is foundational and extremely healthy this relationship cannot continue the same way for long. Over time a mother cannot and actually should not be able to respond perfectly to the child’s wants and needs. If this were so then the mother when remain just another appendage or limb of the child able to function at his will. There must begin to be some slippage in this relationship so that the child sees that this person, his mother, is actually not just a part of himself. And this is good because in this short time the child has learned that he does not need to worry about what he will eat and drink and what he will wear. He begins to learn that there is a trustworthiness to the life around him. At this point a vitally important step can take place in a child’s development. A child learns to be alone, even if this means that the mother is still in the room watching. Up until that point there can be great anxiety on the part of a child if his mother is not there when he wants him. After being nurtured in a stable relationship though the child is okay to be by himself and begin to explore the world. This then sets the stage for healthy decisions and relationships. Listen again to how Jesus leads up to the Lord’s Prayer. When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Jesus sees that prayer can be something that establishes your identity among others. Prayer was not only a private act but also public and social act. Perhaps in a less dramatic fashion we still hope that our prayer will secure us and most often we want to be secured by our place among our peers and community. Jesus says in response to the hypocrites that they have already received their reward. They sought to be seen by others. They thought their prayers could establish their place and security in the world. And so whatever the world will give them is already their reward. On the one hand I am saying that a healthy pattern of motherly security for an infant is necessary but it must change as the child develops. On the other hand Jesus is saying then that you cannot then charge out into the world chasing after that same sort of direct and affirming feedback from the world around you. Your mother is not meant to sustain your life as you were when you were a child and the world around you certainly will not do this. But still we distort the caring and patient eyes of our mother and try to multiply them in drawing attention to ourselves through pride or false modesty. Or else we turn and run and hide from these eyes in shame or fear. In time every mother must allow and nurture their child to be alone but not quite alone. Jesus says, when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. You have grown. You can no longer engage with God as a mother who, early in life, is a direct physical extension of your needs and desires. You must learn to exist and to thrive apart from how this first relationship functioned. In this transition we can either rush outward to try and grasp, capture and control the approval or attention of other people. Or we can slowly and perhaps with some fear enter into solitude and then in that closed room we can realize that in fact we are not alone. Indeed the one who bore us and raised us is still with us.

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There is some disagreement among psychologists around how and when this ability to be securely alone comes about in children. Some say it is in relationship with the mother who is able to still be physically present while allowing some distance for the child to be alone. Others see this aloneness and distinctness beginning with the rising role of the father as time goes on. I don’t have enough knowledge to wade through these discussions but perhaps there is some merit to speak not so much about the gender of the father but of the role of the father as a distinct and abiding presence that allows the child to move away from a more secure and directly dependent relationship to a secure, independent and creative relationship with the world. Both mother and father or any consistent significant caregiver of course plays a role in this shift but perhaps acknowledging the presence of this third person helps us to see the shift that needs to happen. We know that in real life family situations are never quite this clear and both parents or a single parent or an extended family or a foster home or adoptive family function in these ways at different times but maybe this image of father as nurturing maturity and shifting relationship can help us understand at least in part or in a new way what it means to pray of our Father which then brings significance to the next line, who is in heaven. Our heavenly parent is not a security blanket or a thumb to suck. Our relationship with God is not that of a magical extension of our physical needs. Our heavenly father offers an abiding relationship that creates space, grounded in love, for us to live and move and have our being. I may be venturing too far out on a limb here but I do see quite clearly in the text that prayer involves a movement of being secured not simply as a helpless baby and not as an insecure person seeking attention and approval. At least some part of prayer is the process of entering our hearts and our minds, our communities and worlds with the knowledge that there is one who is with us. There is one who knew us in our mother’s womb. There is one we can trust and so in turn we can be trusting in the world (give us this day our daily bread). There is one who is forgiving so that we might also forgive (forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us). There is one who knows the dangers of this world and so we can follow courageously (lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil). Rather than remaining in the closed door and locked room our aloneness with God creates courage and creativity to engage with the world around us. Our prayer is to God who has created and nurtured us as a mother. This love and care never leaves but it changes. But our prayer is also weaning. We do not go from our mothering relationship and try to form another one by latching on in dependency to the world distorted resources. No our heavenly parent steps back as a father and says with us but at a distance, “You are my child who I love in you I am well pleased.” Go now into the world confidant that above you and beneath you and around you and within you is my Kingdom in which is all power and glory forever and ever. Amen.

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