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The Sixth Sunday After The Epiphany
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A Sermon by
Fr. Spurlock
✛
Our Father, who art in heaven
When we pray to God, we sometimes go about it as if God were a target a long way off. We lob our prayers at this target like artillerymen laying down a barrage. When we pray alone we hope that our prayer wings its way to our target and strikes home. If we are bold or desperate, we enlist the prayers of everyone we can think of in the hopes that if enough of us lob the same prayer in the general direction of God, he will be overwhelmed and capitulate.
Taken at face value, the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t do much to dispel this notion that God is a far away target: Our Father who art in heaven. God has said that “heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool.”[i] So, whether it be just out of sight above the clouds, comprises one or more levels of the upper atmosphere, or exists somewhere just beyond the edge of our expanding universe, heaven seems a very far off place. And if heaven is the dwelling place of God, then God must be far off too.
But, scripture also records that God sits and dwells in all sorts of places that don’t seem all that heavenly or far away. God has walked in an earthly garden of his own making.[ii] He has lived in a tent on the outskirts of a camp.[iii] Solomon built God a house in the middle of Jerusalem and for a time God lived there.[iv] He moved out of that house before it was destroyed,[v] but later, when it was rebuilt, he moved back in.[vi] When God became flesh, he lived for a time inside a virgin’s womb,[vii] he slept in a stable,[viii] he lived in Egypt,[ix] moved to a village called Nazareth,[x] and for thirty years wandered all over the countryside, sitting in our houses, walking through our markets, teaching in our churches, visiting our sick, healing our diseases until he died and then for three days he lived in a grave,[xi] and while there paid a visit to hell.[xii] So it seems there is truth in Solomon’s declaration about God: “behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee.”[xiii]
But Jesus taught us to pray to our Father who art in heaven. So what gives? Well, Jesus also told his disciples that when they were ministering to others in his name, that they should say to them that the kingdom of God has come near to you[xiv] and that the Kingdom of heaven is at hand.[xv] Heaven is at hand. (Extending hand) Now this is as far away as I can get from my own hand. Is Jesus teaching us that heaven is at least arm’s length away from us? If we take him at face value, that does put God considerably closer than we might have imagined. But do we think God is satisfied being at arms length from where we are?
Jesus brings God even closer. When the Pharisees demanded that Jesus tell them “when the Kingdom of God should come, he answered and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo, here! or, lo, there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”[xvi] Saint Paul testifies to the nearness of God: “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you.”[xvii] It doesn’t seem right that we should think that God and heaven are very far off.
But, once upon I time I was given a lesson as I witnessed a sad scene play out in a restaurant. A man and his wife sat across from one another over dinner and never exchanged so much as a glance or a word, but ate in absolute silence and looked only at their plates. That scene taught me that proximity does not signify intimacy.
The signifier of intimacy in the Lord’s prayer doesn’t come from us declaring that God is in his heaven and heaven in us. Intimacy is signified by the words Our and Father. Those two words do more to encourage and confirm an intimacy with God than the notion of an indwelled heaven.
When we pray Our Father, we speak of a familial love that exists between us and God: Saint Cyprian says that “The new man, born again and restored to God through grace, can say ‘Father’ for he has now begun to be a son.”[xviii] Jesus is a son by nature, we are sons and daughters by adoption. Saint Paul speaks to this relationship in his letter to the Romans, “ye have received the spirit of adoption whereby we cry Abba, Father.”[xix]
But we are not sons and daughters in the singular, but rather sons and daughters in the plural. Jesus, being a master of unity did not teach us to pray “My Father who art in heaven. Give me this day my daily bread, forgive me my sins.” We pray to the Father of all for the needs of all. God is not a private Father, but a common Father to the whole world, whether the whole world acknowledges him as such or not. God’s fatherhood is not dependent upon anyone’s belief in it. But it is for us to give voice to it in our prayer. We who know what it is to be sons and daughters of the living God give voice to God’s patriarchy to the whole world and our Father’s provision for it. And it is important that we give voice to this truth and we give voice to it with charity.
It is wrong for us to ever despise those who, in their ignorance, reject God’s fatherhood. Something very ugly happens when we do. When you despise another that does not confess this relationship with God, you despise him or her who might come to know and love our Father for want of your prayer. Looking down on others mocks the unity Christ seeks to build in the prayer he teaches us. We must perceive a communion between all of us; so that when I pray the Lord’s Prayer, I don’t pray for myself alone, but for all of you, and when you pray, I feel myself prayed for. This should be a great comfort to us all and a sign to the world: that we are disciples of Christ, “if ye have love one to another.”[xx]
A sixteenth century bishop, preaching on the Lord’s Prayer quoted a common saying of his day: “Whosoever loveth me, loveth my hound.’ So, whosoever loveth God, will love his neighbor, which is made after the image of God.”[xxi] This is why we must always take care to not despise or look down on any man, whether they are rich or poor, crude or refined, Christian or heathen. When you despise another person, you despise another person who calls God Father just like you do or might by grace come to do so.
And when our Lord teaches us to pray Our Father, it is not just to show us our love for one another or for God, but he also teaches us to understand the fatherly affection that God has for us. This is why we do boldly say, establish your kingdom here on earth, give us food in due season, forgive our sins, spare us from temptations and deliver us from the snares of the enemy. We who are so much less good than God know that when our children ask us for bread and forgiveness, we don’t give them serpents and the rod, then how much more will our Father hear our prayers and answer them. So, dispel any notion that your prayers must travel great distances or fall like bombs on the deaf ears of a remote sovereign. Your father is very near to you and will hear your prayers even if they are but sighs too deep for words.[xxii]
◄previous sermon in the series
[i] Isa 66.1
[ii] Gn 3.8
[iii] Ex 25.8ff.
[iv] 1 Kgs 10.8ff.
[v] Ezek 10.4ff.
[vi] Ezek 43.4-7
[vii] Mt 1.23; Lk 1.35
[viii] Lk 2.7
[ix] Mt 2.13
[x] Mt 2.23
[xi] Mk 15.46
[xii] 1 Pt 3.19-20
[xiii] 1 Kgs 8.27
[xiv] Lk 10.9
[xv] Mt 10.7
[xvi] Lk 17.21
[xvii] 1 Co 6.19
[xviii] Treatise 4.ix
[xix] Ro 8.15
[xx] Jn 13.35
[xxi] Hugh Latimer, First Sermon on the Lord’s Prayer
[xxii] Ro 8.26
