Sermon by Simon Oxley on the radicality of Christians praying the Lord's prayer togehter

The following sermon on the Lord's prayer was preached by Rev. Simon Oxley in Geneva on March 10th 2008.


Considering all the things that divide the churches, the Lord's Prayer has caused us very little trouble compared, say, the Creeds and the Eucharist. But should the churches be more scared of people saying the Lord's Prayer than joining in the creeds or participating in the Eucharist together?

Let's have a look at Luke's account of Jesus giving the Lord's prayer.

Reading Luke 11.1-4
Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples." He said to them, "When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial."

In Luke, Jesus offers what we now call the Lord's Prayer in response to a specific request. Matthew includes it in a cut and paste collection of teachings, probably drawn from different times and places in Jesus’ ministry.

I have changed my mind about the Lord's Prayer. I had always understood it to be a pattern prayer. In other words, it showed as how we should create our prayers. In terms of intention, rhythm, style and content. This meant that saying the Lord's Prayer itself, word for word, was not so important. However, I now think that Jesus was doing what other teachers of his time did for their disciples. There’s a clue in the request – ‘as John taught his disciples’. A unique and specific prayer was a sign of belonging to the community that gathered around the teacher – the learners, the disciples. If you like, in today’s terms, a prayer came as part of the membership pack, together with the membership card, poster, t-shirt etc.

Not surprisingly, being the prayer that marks people out as being members of the group, the language is our and us – not the usual religious language of I and me. This contrasts with the ‘I believe …’ (even though the words and maybe the concepts are not ours) and the tendency for an individualised reception of bread and wine as being about my relationship with Christ. The prayer is not offered by or about you and me – it’s offered by us but not just for us.

Note the nature of the prayer. It is not just for the interests of the group of disciples, nor indeed for the institutions that we now know as churches. You might expect a prayer in a ‘membership pack’ to be focussed on the group, community or association – for its success, for the achievement of its objectives for its members. Such an interest would be only natural but this is not the way of God, the father of our lord Jesus Christ. The prayer is for the coming of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven. Whether we now like the term kingdom or not, it stands for something beyond our narrow understandings and practice of community, association, council, church or nation. It breaks us out of the narrow confines and self-serving intentions of our institutions and organisations – even the churches and their ways which are precious to us.

In introducing the gospel reading, I contrasted the Lord's Prayer with the creeds and the Eucharist. To offer some challenging caricatures, we could say that the creeds are the radical God confined in sets of words resulting from human political and theological conflict and the eucharist as the radical grace of God being confined in our patterns, processes and interpretations. The Lord’s Prayer is an opening of ourselves up to God – not confining God to our personal or institutional limitations. To pray that God’s kingdom may come is to open ourselves to the possibility that all that we cherish, all that we have built up will be transformed – to be open to the new.

In my academic researches have been reading through issues of the Ecumenical Review. I was struck by early issues, which reflected the enthusiasm and purpose of the ecumenical movement, as embodied in the World Council of Churches.

In the Editorial of the first issue of the Ecumenical Review in 1948, the WCC General Secretary, Visser’t Hooft, wrote about the opening up of ecumenical conversation between the churches in the newly formed WCC. The conversation was:
not merely in order to learn more about each other, but in order to learn more about their common Lord and about His will for the Church.
The whole enterprise was:
a common spiritual adventure, leading to unexpected and surprising discoveries.
The strength of the ecumenical movement:
lies in the fact that it is essentially a humble movement … of those who stretch out their hands to receive from God a fuller knowledge of His truth and for the manifestation of His Church.
In other words, in these early days the ecumenical movement and the WCC were not seen as merely a means of rapprochement between the churches - leading to better relationships and mutual understanding but leaving the churches basically unchanged within their traditions. It was a way of discovering together the new that broke out of the confines of the old. The fact that we have not succeeded and somehow institutionalised denominationalism should not deter us but make us more determined to fulfil these original purposes of ecumenism.

But why did we have the reading from Ezekiel this morning? The Old Testament reading appointed for Sunday in the Revised Common Lectionary which many of you will have heard in church. The reading asks the question of the religious establishment, will these dry bones live? One answer given by the Lectionary is to tell the story of the raising of Lazarus from John's gospel. Another answer, which I suggest to you this morning is that saying the Lord's Prayer with its request, for God's kingdom to come, and God's will to be done opens the way for the wind of the spirit to rush through us, transforming our dry bones.

Saying the Lord's Prayer together, if we do so with the intention of and the openness for the radical transformation that God offers to us, is a foundation for the renewal of the ecumenical movement. It breaks us out of the controlling instincts for self-preservation, or even for self-aggrandisement, of the churches into the freedom to which God calls us. Praying for God’s kingdom to come is the most daring and dangerous thing we can do in our worship.
Amen

Copyright WCC/Simon Oxley