A model prayer – beautiful, balanced and brief

The sermon I've been sharing today at St Andrew’s and Holy Cross Basildon and St Peter’s Nevendon is adapted from Discovering Prayer by Andrew Knowles, published by Lion Publishing:

When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he responded with a model prayer – beautiful, balanced and brief (Luke 11: 1-13). It has come to be known as the Lord’s Prayer. In his book ‘Discovering Prayer’, Andrew Knowles, a former Canon Theologian of Chelmsford Cathedral, simply and succinctly takes us through the different sections of this prayer for life.

We begin with God - Jesus reminds us to whom we’re talking. We’re coming to Almighty God who is also our Father. We aren’t phoning through a big order to a supermarket store which sells everything. Nor are we practising some weird and wonderful thought-process guaranteed to release psychic powers. We’re coming simply, humbly into the presence of our Creator, having received the invitation to do so from Jesus himself.

It’s good to remember that God is ‘our Father’. We belong to a great, trans-national, cross-cultural family, some of whom have already died and some of whom are yet to be born. Wherever we are around the world, and at whatever point in time we live, we own God as our Father and Jesus as our Lord. So when we pray this prayer, we’re sharing with our Christian brothers and sisters, across every division of colour and class, of politics and economics, of time and eternity.

We say ‘yes to God’ - Not only do we begin with God, we also ask that all he wants to do in our lives and in our world may come about. We ask that all he wants to do in our lives and in our world may come about. We ask that men and women everywhere may realise who he is and humble themselves before him.

We ask that God’s kingdom may come - The kingdom of God exists wherever God is King. It isn’t located on a map, nor do we enter it by holding a passport! The exciting truth is that God is already King of millions of lives. He is already acknowledged as Lord in a vast number of situations. We see the effects of his rule when hate is turned to love, when bitterness is dismantled by forgiveness, when disease is overwhelmed by health, and when war gives way to peace.

But we must remember that God is a father and not a dictator. For this reason his kingdom can only come when individual people invite him into their lives and submit themselves to the changes he wants to make.

This phrase, ‘May your kingdom come’, more than any other in the Lord’s Prayer, has a tendency to rebound on the user. If we really want God’s kingdom to come, then we must open ourselves and our circumstances to God, whatever the cost.

And if we’re looking for the kind of changes in the world that only God can make, we may find that he promptly enlists us in his service! We may find ourselves doing anything from bathing an invalid to mailing a cheque for famine relief. We may even find ourselves called to lob in our whole life as the only fitting contribution we can make to the service of God’s kingdom in a particular situation.

We bring our needs to God - In the second half of the Lord’s Prayer we ask God to meet our basic human needs. We ask him for enough to live on, for forgiveness, and for protection.

‘Give us day by day the food we need’ has a strong echo of the days when the Israelites were supplied with manna in the desert. Every day they had ‘enough’, and the Lord’s Prayer asks that we may have the same experience of god’s faithful provision each day as it comes. In an age when many people are run raged by their desire for money and possessions, this is a wonderful promise from Jesus. All the same, we should notice that it is everything we need that God will provide, and not everything we want.

‘Forgive us our sins, for we forgive everyone who does us wrong.’ This reminds us that our standard of living is more than a roof over our head, food on the table and a shirt on our back. Our well-being is intimately tied up with personal relationships – within ourselves, between ourselves, and between ourselves and God. Our recurring need here is for forgiveness. We hurt people by our self-centredness, our anger and our prejudice. We hurt God by going our own way in defiance of his loving law, wilfully defiling all that he intended life in this world to be.

So we ask for forgiveness. We feel the need and we say the words. But it’s no easy matter for God to forgive us. It cost him the life of his only Son to show the reality and consequence of sin. As he died on the cross, Jesus took on himself the results of all our sin. This is the only way by which we can be forgiven and restored to spiritual life. This is the Christian Good News: that life with God – something we can never earn and certainly don’t deserve – is his free gift to us through the death of Jesus. Our sins are not only forgiven but forgotten, and if we mention them to God again he’ll wonder what we’re talking about.

But as we ask God to forgive us, we must check if there is anyone who in turn needs our forgiveness. How do we feel about our worst enemy? Is there any member of the family, or anybody at work, against whom we’re nursing anger, bitterness or resentment? Only as we forgive others can we enter fully into the wonderful experience of God’s forgiveness of us. This is not just a nice idea. It’s a condition for our own forgiveness. Elsewhere Jesus warns that if we don’t forgive, then we in turn shall not be forgiven. This teaching alone, if we take it seriously, will completely change our lives.

‘And do not bring us to hard testing.’ Sometimes this is translated, ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ and we may well wonder when, why and how God could possibly want us to be tempted. And we would be right – he doesn’t. But while God will never lure us into evil, he will sometimes allow us to be tested. Just as we will put ourselves through all kinds of discomfort to get fit or lose weight, so God will allow pressure on us to strengthen our faith or increase our insight.

In the face of this testing, Jesus includes a very human plea that God won’t go over the top in his efforts to refine us. It is encouraging to hear Jesus say this, because he was tempted over a longer period and with greater intensity than we’ll ever know. Enticed by Satan, or daunted by God, we often given in at a very early stage. Our Christian integrity disintegrates and snatches at hypocrisy to cover our shame. But while we often capitulate, Jesus never did so.

The Lord’s Prayer recognises that temptation is an integral part of our daily life. We’ll never lose it, so we must learn to use it. If we can use the force of temptations to push us closer to the Lord, rather than sweeping us away from him, then we’ll be harnessing their power for our benefit.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Marvin Gaye - The Lord's Prayer.

Meaning, significance, shape and purpose

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Andrew’s Wickford this morning:

Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who is best known for creating a hierarchy of needs. ‘This is a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization.’ At the bottom of the hierarchy are the basic needs of human beings; needs for food, water, sleep and sex. Maslow’s model works as a hierarchy because a pressing need must be mostly satisfied before someone will give their attention to the next highest need, which includes our need for our lives to be given meaning and significance.

The stories of the feeding of the four thousand and the five thousand (Matthew 15:29-37) are stories of Jesus meeting the basic needs of the people with him but are also stories about that action having a deeper level of meaning and significance.

The people who were with Jesus had been with him in the wilderness for three days without any significant supplies of food. While some may have brought small supplies of food with them, in essence they had been fasting for much of the time Jesus had been teaching them and, for those of you who have visited the Holy Land, you will know that the Wilderness is unforgiving terrain in which to be without sustenance.

Jesus is concerned for these people and, out of compassion, meets their basic need for food in that testing environment but, just as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs suggests that once our basic needs have been met then our needs for meaning and significance come into play, Jesus’ actions here also have a deeper level of meaning, if we and they are alert to it.

We can see this if we think for a moment about the outline of this story and the extent to which it reminds us of another story. A group of Israelites are in the wilderness and are hungry because they have too little to eat. In response God provides them with bread to eat. That is the outline of the feeding of the four thousand but it is also, in essence, the story of God providing manna in the wilderness to the Israelites when Moses led them from Egypt to the Promised Land. The similarity is deliberate, whether on the part of Jesus or Mark, because through this action Jesus is seen as the new Moses for the people of Israel.

Following the parallels between these two stories through means that the people of Israel are to be seen as being in slavery once again – whether that meant the political oppression of their Roman conquerors or, as St Paul suggests, under the bondage of sin. The Exodus – the salvation of the people of Israel - began with the death of firstborn sons and, in the story of Jesus, our salvation comes through the death of God’s only Son. Jesus leads his people through water – in the original Exodus that was the path through the Red Sea, but, for Jesus’ followers, it is the rite of baptism. They go on a journey through the wilderness – where, as we have seen, they are fed and provided for – and end their journey when they enter the Promised Land – which Jesus spoke about as being the kingdom of God that he initiated but which is still to come in full.

The parallels are plenteous and very close as the people of Jesus’ day were intended to view him as the new Moses. At this deeper level of meaning and significance it is possible, from this one action, to understand the whole of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

God is also at work in our lives to bring and to reveal meaning, purpose, shape and significance to our lives too, if we are alert to this deeper level of life and our not solely focused on the meeting of our basic needs. We all have a need and a desire for there to be more to our lives than simply the survival of the fittest; the scramble to meet our basic needs. As Maslow’s hierarchy of needs recognises, when we are in genuine need and poverty, it is very difficult to think about anything else other than survival. But, when we are in the fortunate position of having our basic needs met, we have the time and space and inclination to look around us to see the way in which God can bring meaning, significance and purpose into our lives; with that purpose including the development of a compassion, like that of Jesus, which sees the needs of those whose basic needs are not being met and responds to that by sharing at least some of what we have.

Your life is not simply about having enough to survive; the meeting of your basic needs. God wants you to see a deeper level of meaning, significance, shape and purpose to your life. Are you open to see the meaning and significance that he brings or does a focus of getting prevent you from seeing and receiving what he is already giving?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Neal Morse - The Temple Of The Living God.

Start:Stop - Water into wine

Bible reading

“… standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. (John 2. 6 – 11)

Meditation

Water is essential to life. The human body is 75% water and needs a constant supply of water to function. The average person can only survive for about three days without any water at all. So, water is a basic need for all of us and speaks to us of the basic needs that we all need to be fulfilled in order that we can live and live comfortably. This is why we pray, in the Lord’s Prayer, give us this day our daily bread. This is a prayer for our basic needs.

But God wants something better for us than a life based just on the meeting of our basic needs and the turning of water into wine gives us a clue as to what that better thing is. Wine reminds us of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross; that moment when, out of love for all people, he lays down his own life in order to save us from all that is wrong with our lives and our world. So, wine is a reminder to us of the fact that the greatest love is shown through sacrifice.

This is the transformation that Jesus seeks to bring to human life. It is a change from human existence to human life; a change from the selfish experience of meeting our own basic needs to the spiritual experience of sharing what we have will others; a change from the evolutionary imperative of the survival of the fittest to the Christian imperative of sacrificial love.

We all have a need and a desire for there to be more to our lives than simply the survival of the fittest; the scramble to meet our basic needs. Yet when we are in genuine need and poverty, it is very difficult to think about anything else other than survival. But, then, when we are in the fortunate position of having our basic needs met, we have the time and space and (hopefully) inclination to look around us to develop a compassion, like that of Jesus, which sees the needs of those whose basic needs are not being met and responds to that by sharing at least some of what we have.

This transformation is symbolised in the pouring out of the wine from the water jars. It may even be that this is the moment of transformation. Just as what is drawn from the water jars to be shared with others is wine, so as we give to others we are transformed from selfish to sacrificial. It may be that it is in the act of giving that our transformation comes.

Prayer

Dear God, give us this day our basic needs; all that we need to be fulfilled in order that we live and live comfortably. We pray this, though, that we have the time and space and inclination to look around us to develop a compassion, like that of Jesus, which sees the needs of those whose basic needs are not being met and responds to that by sharing at least some of what we have.

Give us this day our daily bread, then use our lives in giving to others.

Dear God, You promise in Psalm 23 to be close beside us and protect us even as we walk through the darkest valley. We claim this promise for those who trek to get water for their families. Stay close to them, strengthen them, and protect them. We thank You for an end to drought in places such as the Horn of Africa. We pray that families in West Africa and elsewhere will have enough rain to grow food crops.

Give us this day our daily bread, then use our lives in giving to others.

Dear God, remind us of Your command to love our neighbours as we love ourselves. Don't let us rest until we know we have done everything we can to meet the basic needs of others, particularly for clean water. Give wisdom to Your people in relief agencies as they seek to bring clean water and other lifesaving interventions to millions more families around the globe. Thank You for equipping those who love You as they bring new health and opportunities to the world's most vulnerable people.

Give us this day our daily bread, then use our lives in giving to others.

Blessing

Meeting our basic needs, developing a compassion like that of Jesus, equipping us to bring health and opportunities to the world’s most vulnerable. May those blessings of almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be with us and rest upon us, now and always. Amen.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Oh My Lord.