Lord's Prayer (2) - God Reigns

LORD’S PRAYER

(2)GOD REIGNS

In his book Teach us how to Pray Louis Evely writes, "We march into Church, notifying God of what we want, and leave without bothering to listen to him or taking him into account, without time to act, to answer, to change us........."

That is so true, isn't it?

We live in an eternal rush focused upon me, myself and I.

We leave home for church at the last minute and - surprise, surprise - we find cannot find a parking space close to the church. We park down the lane and rush up the hill, down the path hoping we will make it just before the Churchwardens give their word of welcome.

We pick up the pew leaflet, try and find our seat only to find someone else is sitting in it. How dare they! We then panic as the organ music is about to stop. We get to another seat and lean forward, put our head in our hand, and hear the words "Good morning, welcome to this Sung Eucharist". No, they are not the words of God to us in prayer but of Churchwarden David or Peter to the assembled congregation.

It is too late to pray; the service is starting and before we know where we are, the first hymn is being sung and we are still getting our gloves off, reaching for our glasses and looking for a hymn book. With a bit of luck, we might be able to join in the last verse.

I assure you I am not looking at anyone in particular. You don't need me to spell it out. Ronald Knox once said that we are quite happy to spend five minutes on a railway platform waiting for a train but are unwilling to spend that amount of time in church before the opening of a service!

I was taught as a child by my parish priest that lateness was an insult to God since it shows he does not really matter. After all, if we were invited to meet the Queen, we would certainly ensure that we were not late. Surely meeting with God for worship is far more important!

It is a well-known maxim that you only get out of anything what you are prepared to put into it and that includes worship. That is why three minutes before the service, a time indicated by the commencement of organ music, I suggest we should sit quietly and ponder about what we are about to do, in order to focus our attention.

After all we have come to focus our attention upon God and not upon ourselves.

And that is why the Lord's Prayer starts with the words "Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name". As I pointed out last week, we come to worship and pray to a God whom we address with those intimate childlike trusting words of "Abba, Father". Yet a God who is so great that he is beyond human comprehension. A God who, whilst immanent is also transcendent

A God to whom we pray that "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" and not my Kingdom come, my will be done!

What do these words mean which so easily fall from our lips in a rush to get back home as soon as the service is ended?

There can be no doubt that the idea of kingdom was central to the teaching of Jesus. The phrase "the kingdom of heaven" is used 49 times in the gospel of St. Matthew, written primarily for a Jewish audience, and the "Kingdom of God" is used 16 times in St. Mark's gospel and 38 times in St. Luke's, both written for a non-Jewish audience.

When we use the word "kingdom" nowadays, we usually mean a certain territory or an area of land such as the Kingdom of Belgium or the Kingdom of Holland or the Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But when the New Testament writers used the word Kingdom, it does not refer to a territory, but rather to the reign of God.

However, despite these many references to the "Kingdom of Heaven," or "Kingdom of God" in the New Testament, there is no clear definition of the word. Rather, the kingdom is described through the use of pictures or analogies and its demands and effects.

In order to arrive at a definition, it is important to remember that the Hebrew literary style is marked by a continuous use of parallelism. In other words, Hebrew practice tends to say everything twice, with the second line reinstating or amplifying the first.

Let me give you an illustration. In Psalm 46 verse 7 the psalmist writes:

"The Lord of hosts is with us,

The God of Jacob is our refuge".

Or Psalm 121 verse 5:

"The Lord is my keeper:

The Lord is thy shade on thy right hand".

Now when we apply this principle to the Lord's Prayer, we find the same principle is being applied to the clause which we are considering today:

"Thy Kingdom come;

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven".

In other words, we can say that the Kingdom of God is the society upon earth in which God's will is as perfectly done, as it is in heaven. Or to put it another way, to do the will of God and to be in the Kingdom is one and the same thing.

And obviously, nowhere is the will of God more perfectly displayed in human form than in Jesus. Jesus is the Kingdom of God enfleshed.

The Kingdom of God then is nothing to do with territorial claims but with human beings and the way they respond to God in their lives. Hence the famous Chinese Christian wisely prayed "Lord, revive thy Church, beginning with me" and when we pray "Thy Kingdom come" we are really saying "Lord help me to do your will", which is far removed from the shopping list of personal wants which we so often bring to God in our prayers.

Hence the Lord's Prayer in the fourth century, as Cyril of Jerusalem points out, was said prior to receiving communion at the Eucharist. It was prayed only by those who had accepted the invitation of God to attend the heavenly banquet of the kingdom and who, as a consequence had repented of their past by a change of mind, whereby they had turned from a life dominated by self-interest to one dominated by God interest.

And so in the Lord's Prayer we surrender our self-will to God so that we may become channels of his effective reign in the world of today. Hence Louis Evely, who I quoted at the beginning, expresses concern that we "march into church, notifying God of what we want, and leave without bothering to listen to him or taking him into account".

True prayer involves the surrender of ourselves to God so that we may be the means whereby he is able to establish his reign on earth as it is in heaven.

As I have said many times before, there is an awful danger that having prayed for something to happen we think we can leave the rest to God. Whereas the answer to the prayer which we have prayed is very much in our own hands.

Father Corbishley says "when, for example, we say these words 'thy kingdom come', we surely do not mean to suggest that God should somehow assert his authority by force; that he should terrify us into submission. God is not that sort of thing....we are not puppets on a string.......God has made us responsible for the well-being of his creation, that he accepts our dignity as free agents. God's kingdom will come only when, and to the extent, that men freely choose to obey his commands". And he concludes "this particular phrase in the Lord's Prayer implies a personal commitment to play our part in bringing about the state of affairs that I am praying for".

This helps us to understand why prayers sometimes appear to go answered or the answer is deferred. It is not that God is deaf or has other things on his mind, but rather he chooses to make himself dependent upon our fullest cooperation. It’s no good asking God to stir people’s hearts to give of their time to the service of the church whilst we sit with our feet up in front of the telly. Likewise, it is no good praying that we may give sacrificially of our wealth, whilst we choose to keep our hands and our money in the pockets. We are back to the Chinese prayer "Lord, revive your church, beginning with me".

But let me return briefly to the words "Thy will be done”.

What do we mean by God's will? Some people seek to identify God's will with whatever happens in the world, whether it be good or bad. This is the Stoic's approach which sees perfection in living according to nature. Man is compared to a dog tied to a cart. If the dog struggles against the motion of the cart, it only makes things worse for itself, without achieving anything. Therefore the only sensible thing is not to struggle against fate but to accept it "stoically".

But there are many things which happen in the world which, whilst it may be easy to blame God, deep down we know that by his very nature, as revealed through Jesus Christ, he cannot and does not will. What then are we to make of these tragic happenings including the death of his own son, Jesus Christ?

Father Corbishley suggests to distinguish between the "absolute" will of God and what we might call the "permissive" will of God.

Whereas the Jews tended to ascribe to God everything that happened because of his omnipotence, Christian theology, whilst not denying his omnipotence - his all-powerfulness - sees things slightly differently. We believe that he has delegated to humankind the responsibility for developing the resources of the earth. What happens in the world, happens because of man’s choice which God respects. At the same time he has given us the knowledge and ability to make right choices. When we make right choices, we are carrying out God's will in the sense that we are doing what he would have us do.

Alas, all too often, sometimes due to stupidity or selfishness, through greed or passion or insensitivity, we do something amiss. When we do this we are doing our will, not God's will.

God cannot, therefore, be held responsible for our failure to live up to the ideals which we could achieve if only we so willed. But since God chooses not to overrule our decision, and that freedom is such a reality, the choices which we make are tolerated or permitted by God who, like a parent, recognises that a valuable psychological development will only come about by the exercise of genuine responsibility.

When we pray then that his will be done, we are really praying for his absolute purpose to be realised. The extent to which that is realised is dependent upon the extent you and I are prepared to surrender our self-will to the influence of his divine will.

And so the clause "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" is a prayer whereby we choose to surrender our lives to the reign of God so that we may become human channels of his influence in the life of the world today.

Next week we shall consider that difficult clause, "Give us today our daily bread".