Some years ago, Ed Bradley interviewed a family on 60 Minutes. The family consisted of a religiously devout mother in her thirties, an almost painfully shy father, and their ten year-old daughter who was confined to a wheelchair by spina bifida. Each year of their child’s life, the family made a pilgrimage to Lourdes in France, a place renowned for the physical healing that has occurred there.
Bradley was giving the family a bit of hard time; clearly, he found them gullible and impressionable. At one point he turned to the girl and asked her, “When you pray, what do you pray for?” Without hesitation, she answered, “I pray that my father won’t be so shy. It makes him terribly lonely.” That stopped Bradley for a moment, but he quickly recovered and forged ahead, questioning the family’s priorities and their wisdom, suggesting that it was a bit ridiculous to pay thousands of dollars each year to go to Lourdes when they still had no miracle to show for it.
But the mother, looking at her beloved daughter, simply answered, “Oh, Mr. Bradley, don’t you get it? We already have our miracle.” (1)
What do you think Ed Bradley expected that family to pray for? What would we expect such a family to pray for? Was their prayer answered, even if the answer was that the whole family had an unshakeable faith and that a young girl who could have so easily focused only on her debilitating physical condition, instead had the deep love and insight to pray, not for herself, but for her father? Was not the miracle here a family praying the way they live—with faith and hope and love—and living the way they pray?
We live as we pray. Which begs the question for all of us: how do we pray? What do we pray for? What do we expect to happen when we pray? What does it look like to have our prayers answered?
Maybe it is a comfort to know that these questions which we find so difficult to answer were questions Jesus’ first followers struggled with too. In Luke chapter 11, the disciples have been watching Jesus with a growing sense of excitement and amazement. They have seen Jesus teach, heal, cast out demons, and calm raging storms. They have asked him questions and listened to the questions others asked him, but he never seems to give anyone a clear answer; instead he offers parables, which only leave them more confused.
But the disciples also observe that Jesus is a man of prayer. Before he chose the twelve disciples, he spent a whole night on a mountain in prayer; later he went up to pray on another mountain and while he was praying he transformed in front of them, becoming lit up from the inside so that his face and clothes glowed. Before meals. After them. At night. During the day. Clearly Jesus knows something about prayer, and the disciples could only hope that he might share it with them. And so they ask, throwing in a little peer pressure for good measure: “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”
And for once, Jesus gives them a simple, straightforward answer: “When you pray, say this:”
“Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sin,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.”
What a relief it must have been to the disciples to finally get crystal clear instructions from Jesus. And, compared to what faithful Jews were used to when it came to prayer, this prayer was a piece of cake. At that time, Jews prayed three times a day, at sunrise, at 3p.m., and at sunset. They prayed, not sitting down, but standing up, to demonstrate their reverence toward God. The prayers consisted of a series of the same eighteen prayers, always said in Hebrew, no matter the native language of the person praying. So this prayer Jesus offered his disciples was a breath of fresh air. Short, easy to remember, and in their own language!
But just when the disciples thought Jesus had offered them something they could get their heads around, something they could easily understand and share with others, they discovered, as they began to pray this prayer, that it was far from simple.
And no part of this prayer is more complicated, more challenging to get our minds around, than the very first phrase: “Father, hallowed be your name.” Or, as we typically pray it and as the gospel of Matthew records it: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name.” In this very sentence resides the paradox of the Christian faith, that our God—who has come to be one of us in an intimate, personal way—our God resides in heaven—and is the very essence of holiness.
This prayer Jesus offers his followers does nothing to solve the mystery of faith; instead it reveals that God is more mysterious than we ever imagined. To our question of whether God is our intimate, loving father or a deity entirely removed from us, residing in some heavenly realm, Jesus simply answers “yes.”
Literally, the word paradox means beyond thinking or beyond believing. A paradox is a statement that at first seems completely contradictory but upon further reflection contains a kernel of truth. The theologian Soren Kierkegaard believed that faith itself is a paradox, since faith is by definition believing in something we cannot see or prove. If we live as we pray, and we pray the prayer Jesus taught us as Jesus taught it, then we live into this paradox that God is both our Father—our intimate, personal, loving God—“who art in heaven”—who is completely removed, completely other.
In The Message, Eugene Peterson translates the opening phrase of the Lord’s prayer this way: “Our Father in heaven, reveal who you are.” “Our Father in heaven, reveal who you are.” And indeed, the closer we look at these opening words, the more we find that in them Jesus reveals something about the nature of God, something that the disciples had never imagined to be the nature of God. The word “father” was not a new way to refer to God. In fact “our father” is one of the ways God is addressed in the eighteen prayers said three times a day by Jews. But the word Jesus used for “father” was not the classical Hebrew word. Jesus chose a word from the Aramaic language, the native language of Jesus and his disciples, indicating that his followers could address God in their own language, with words that had deep, personal meaning for them. And the word Jesus used was abba, the Aramaic word used to refer to an earthly father.
The author Ken Bailey was once teaching the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic to a group of women in the Lebanese mountains. He described abba as an Aramaic word used two thousand years ago, and when he did he noticed that the class began to get restless. Finally he stopped and asked the women if they had any comments. One woman raised her hand and quietly said, “Dr. Bailey, abba is the very first word we teach our children.” (2)
And so Bailey discovered the word abba was and still is a word with deep significance and meaning in the Middle East. It is used to address a superior, to show respect, but it also indicates a profound personal relationship between the one speaking and the one being addressed as abba. This is the word Jesus told his disciples to use when praying to God, not to suggest that God is a man or that God is simply like a parent, but to show that God’s name is the first word we learn to speak, that God is the first to care for us and provide for us and know us completely.
When I was in seminary, I once attended a church with a few of my classmates. This church had no pews and no organ. The praise songs were accompanied by a band with guitars and drummers and lead singers on microphones. Although that worship experience touched all of us deeply, one of my classmates took issue with the lyrics to the praise songs. “They make it seem like we are all so comfortable with God, like God is our best friend. Something about that just doesn’t seem right.”
It is possible to take comfortable familiarity with God to extremes when we think of God only as our Father, our abba. We live as we pray, and if we only pray abba, father, then we risk becoming too focused on the God who reaches out to us and who longs to establish a personal relationship with each of us, forgetting that this God is also entirely other, that God is holy is ways we can never be.
To help us understand and correctly use this word abba for God, Jesus then tells us we are to affirm God’s holiness, God’s otherness. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” This phrase reminds us that the God who created and loves and provides for us cannot be reduced to something we can carry in our pocket and pull out when we have need. The God of the universe is truly beyond our comprehension, and we affirm this in our prayer.
Of course, it’s also possible to take the holiness of God to extremes. Martin Luther, a monk in the 16th century, felt the Roman Catholic Church had done just that. At that time, the Bible and all church services were in Latin, not in the language of the people, and salvation was mediated by priests, who were considered closer to God than lay people. Among many other acts that were a significant part of the Protestant Reformation, Luther translated the Bible into the language of the people and argued for the priesthood of all believers rather than a hierarchy of holiness. Luther certainly acknowledged the awesome holiness of God, but he also helped Christians remember that God is Father, abba, to every human being God has created, and that God is not closer to some than others.
So: is God our intimate, loving father or is God so holy that God is entirely removed from us? In the first sentence of this prayer, Jesus answers, “Yes.”
Ken Bailey once met a young Christian woman who had grown up in the communist Soviet Union, which had indoctrinated young people in atheism. He asked this woman how she came to faith.
“Was there a church in your village?”
“No, the communists closed all of them,” she replied.
“Did some saintly grandmother instruct you in the ways of God?”
“No. All the members of my family were atheists.”
“Did you have secret home Bible studies or an underground church?”
“No, none of that,” she answered.
“So, what happened?”
She told him that at funerals they were allowed to recite the Lord’s Prayer, having no idea what the words meant or who they were talking to. When freedom finally came, she had the chance to search for their meaning. “When you are in total darkness, the tiniest point of light is very bright. For me the Lord’s Prayer was that point of light.” (3)
As I drove to church this morning, I heard an interview on the radio with the Reverend Billy Kyles who was on the balcony of the Memphis hotel with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when King was assassinated. Reverend Kyles told a wonderful story about Robert Louis Stevenson as a young boy, that he used to sit in his room looking out the window. One evening his mother asked him, “Robert, what are you doing?” He replied, “I’m watching the man knock holes in the darkness.” “What are you talking about?” his nurse asked. She came to the window and saw that a man outside was going from lamppost to lamppost, lighting them with his torch. When he lit the lamppost, it looked to the young boy that he was “knocking holes in the darkness.” (4)
We live as we pray. And as we are bombarded with horrific images from Haiti that break our hearts, as we prepare to celebrate the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday tomorrow in a country where so many people still do not know freedom from poverty and racism and bigotry, we pray this prayer that Jesus taught us, trusting that as we pray, we shall also live, reaching out to our fellow human beings in need just as God our holy, heavenly father has reached out to us. It is our way of knocking holes in the darkness, even if, for those who are suffering, those holes look like little more than tiny pinpoints of light. We pray, and we live as we pray, trusting that in the darkness, even the tiniest point of light is very bright. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. from the book Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott, as retold by the Rev. Mark Ramsey in his sermon “Belonging,” published in Journal for Preachers, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, p. 20.
2. Bailey, Ken, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes. InterVarsity Press, 2008, p. 97.
3. Bailey, Ken, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes. InterVarsity Press, 2008, p. 91.
4. Here is a link to the interview.
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