A well known story tells of a little boy, who, while trying to learn the Lord’s Prayer, decides that God’s name is really Arfur Wishart. I suspect he may have come from somewhere in the East End because when he heard the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer he thought the grown-ups were addressing God as ‘Arfur Wishart in ‘eaven.’
Parents and God Parents undertake in Baptism to teach their children to pray – and the Lord’s Prayer is normally assumed to be the prayer we should teach our children. So we use it in our little pre-school service for the Holy Hamsters. But so far they’ve only learnt to say ‘Amen,’ though they can say that quite loudly.
So perhaps instead of learning the whole prayer children should learn little bits of it, learning not only the words but the meaning too. We should treat this prayer as the blue print, or route map for all our prayers. St Luke’s version of the Lord’s prayer which we’ve just heard is shorter and simpler than the one in Matthew’s gospel so it may help us more easily to discover the outline of this prayer map.
To call God Father is to say two very important things about God and about ourselves. First of all it says that we are not accidental people in an accidental world; we are dependent on a creating power for our lives and each of us is loved by the one who gives us life, as a father loves his child. And because God is the father of the whole human family we are all equally loved by God, we are all related to one another as human beings created by the same heavenly father. All men and women are as brothers and sisters to us, our Father’s children.
To pray that God’s name be hallowed is to pray that we may make sure this relationship we have with God is kept holy and blessed. To hallow God’s name is to work at the relationship we have with him, to keep that relationship alive in us, to trust it and depend upon it. To hallow God’s name is to praise God and be thankful for all that comes to us through him.
And one way of showing our dependence on God is to bring our needs to him. Give us each day our daily bread; give us each day the things that sustain life, the things that are essential to the flourishing of our humanity; give us time and space, love and laughter, courage and patience. If our relationship with God is a truthful and open one, we might ask ourselves what is it that God knows about me that no-one else knows. For what is known only to God is likely to be our greatest need from God, as great as our need for daily bread.
And so as we build this sense of trust and intimacy with our father God, we can also bring to him the things we do wrong or fail to do, the things we regret and which weigh heavily upon our conscience. To bring our sins to God is to take responsibility for who we are; and in that moment of acknowledging our sin so God lifts the burden of what we have done; God carries it for us and forgives us, enabling us then to have large enough hearts to forgive others. The person who is unable to forgive is the person who has never asked to be forgiven.
And so finally we come to that odd phrase, ‘lead us not into temptation’ as though God would ever deliberately put temptation in our path. In our reading this was translated as ‘Do not bring us to the time of trial’, which is perhaps a better translation. What does it mean, not wanting God to bring us to the time of trial? The phrase imagines the world as a place where evil is always present, even if in our comfortable lives we do not see it except on The News; and yet we live in an unbalanced world where our comfort is balanced by those millions who have no comfort, food, water, security or peace. In such a conflicted world we live on thin ice, and from time to time financial, or ecological disaster or the activities of terrorists show us how thin the ice actually is. How would we react if our security was taken away from us? What would happen to our faith if it was tested by disaster? How would our faith stand up to repeated testing? This final phrase of the Lord’s prayer is a humble acknowledgment of our fragility and dependence on the providence and protection of God. We pray that the time may not come in which we might be tested or tempted to abandon faith and close the door on God.
And yet even if we do give up faith, God remains on the other side of the door waiting for our prayer; So Jesus goes on to say ‘Seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened for you.’ In Baptism a door is being opened for Maxx and his family. On the other side of that door is a life time of faith, a life time of seeking for the things which will reveal God to us through loving relationships, study, courageous standing up for truth and justice, and the quiet refreshment of prayer. In baptism the door is opened but it is the responsibility of all those who love Maxx to lead him through that door and introduce him to the world of Arfur Wishart in ‘eaven. Amen.