Hans

“God, Creator, God in Heaven” Scriptures: Deuteronomy 32:1-6; 10-12, Matthew 6:7-13

The familiar version of the Prayer of Jesus begins with the phrase, “Our Father who art in heaven.” Generally speaking, the prayer of Jesus is meant to be a paradigm prayer for the gospel community; it gives us a pattern for prayer. As such, the prayer of Jesus is not meant to be idolized or to be seen as some untouchable formula that cannot be paraphrased or interpreted. Such institutionalization would be out of character with the teaching of Jesus. Jesus teaches with the constant use of metaphors, symbols and parables that cry out for elaboration and application. There is no reason why the prayer of Jesus should not be included as that sort of teaching. So Jesus begins the prayer by using a metaphor in addressing the Holy One. The prayer of Jesus is addressed, of course, to the God of ancient Judaism. This was the God who liberated the people of Israel from slavery, the God who called those people to live together as siblings who care for each other in a national family of tribal groups. Sometimes the God of Israel was considered to be a parent figure for the people. So we read in the ancient “Song of Moses": “God found Israel in a desert land, in the howling waste of the wilderness; God encircled and cared for the people, they were kept as the apple of God’s eye. Like an eagle watching her nest, hovering over her young, God spread out her wings to hold them, supporting them on her pinions.” (Deuteronomy 32:10,11) In this beautiful metaphor, God is seen as a mother eagle caring for her chicks, teaching them to fly, raising them to maturity. Elsewhere in this same song God is named as a father figure; the song asks, “Is not this your father, who gave you being, who made you, by whom you subsist?” (Deuteronomy 32:6b) Such scriptures indicate that the people of Israel were moved at times to picture God as a parent who had given birth to them and who looked after them.
The culture of Israel and subsequently Judaism, turned out to be strongly patriarchal, probably less so at the beginning, but certainly more so by the time we get to the days of Jesus. Therefore the parental role of God became almost entirely focused on the role of the father, even though the maternal dimensions of God had also been portrayed earlier in the tradition. Jesus speaks in the patriarchal language of his time when he begins the prayer by saying, “Our father in heaven.” The point of this statement is not to let us know the gender of God, but it is to focus attention on God’s role as parent. As far as that goes, we could just as well say, “Our mother in heaven.” In fact in today’s world, where many folk are growing up in families where fathers are either absent or abusive, it may not be particularly helpful to call on the metaphor of God as father. For some people, at least, a mother metaphor would be much more helpful. At any rate, Jesus sees God as a parent for us and so we are seen as God’s children. We are all children of human parents and we know what it means to be children. As children of human parents we are shaped by the genetic material and family influence of our parents. Sometimes we can identify character traits and attitudes that have been passed on to us by our parents. The idea of naming God as a parent in heaven is to affirm that we may also have character traits and attitudes that are shaped by God our creator in whose image we have been created. We often speak of God as a “person” with personal characteristics and attitudes. We acknowledge God’s love and compassion, we talk about God’s sense of justice and righteousness, we say that God is good and that God cares about us. This personality of God is as good as we can imagine any personality to be; in a sense too good for this world and therefore a heavenly personality. At the same time, because we are God’s children, we have inherited some of God’s heavenly personality, or at least the capacity to develop godly characteristics and attitudes of love and compassion, justice and goodness.
If we have trouble trying to understand what someone would be like with a character and personality inherited from our parent in heaven, we need only look at the person of Jesus to see what that is like. In fact, as followers of Jesus we claim that Jesus inherited God’s personality fully and completely. Not only was Jesus molded in God’s image like all the rest of us, Jesus also reflected and lived God’s image perfectly. Nowadays we might say that Jesus was a “clone” of God as far as the heavenly personality of Jesus is concerned. As such, Jesus exhibits God’s love and compassion, God’s goodness and righteousness. It is also interesting to note that Jesus exhibits the parental concern of the heavenly parent which is both fatherly and motherly. Jesus takes on the same parental metaphors that are used for God in the tradition of Israel such as the good shepherd and the mother hen. In one passage, Jesus looks at Jerusalem and says, “How many times have I wanted to put my arms round all your people, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” (Matthew 23:37) In the biblical parental metaphors, we see a strong focus on the use of the images of “wings” and “arms.” A chick is safe under the wings of mother eagle or hen. A child is safe in the arms of its parent. Human living has always been precarious. One wrong move can result in injury or death. We need guidance and protection - as children and also as adults. As children look to their parents for guidance and protection; in a broader sense we look to God for the same. We sense that when we follow God’s guidance we are on a path which provides a level of security and safety which otherwise eludes us. As Christians we find such safety in following Jesus, as we live in the Way of Christ. Then we are “safe in the arms of Jesus,” as an old hymn says.
At the same time, Jesus is both parent and child, identifying with God but also identifying with us. As our sibling, Jesus calls us to live the image of God within ourselves as well. We too have inherited a capacity for heavenly personality. We too can live that personality and we do so by putting that personality in action in our relationships with each other. That means of course that when we don't manage to live together in love with each other that we exclude ourselves from the family of God. Based on the teaching of Jesus, the New Testament claims that those who do not love their sisters and brothers are not God’s children. We can call God our “father in heaven” all we want, but if we do not live in love with our sibling children of God, it is all for naught. We cannot really know the personality of our heavenly parent unless we live that personality ourselves. When we are finally able to sense deep love for someone of whom we don’t approve one bit then we know what is in the heart of God. When we are finally able to respect the life of someone we had seen as worthless, then we know the mother-love of God for every human creature. When we are finally able to accept someone who has hurt us badly, then we understand the profound mercy of a good father in heaven. When we are finally able to make some major sacrifices of our wealth, our time, our very being, then we are living the image of God who freely gives to us all there is to give. So we need to be living together as sisters and brothers in Christian love before we can even begin to invoke the name of our mutual mother or father in heaven. Then, when we do begin to love and respect each other, we also grow into relationship and communion with God. When we start to work along with the Spirit of God to bring friendship and healing and peace to each other, then we grow close to our heavenly parent for whom these things are a matter of course. If my mother were a potter she could explain to me how to make pottery, but unless I get my hands into the clay and mold it on the wheel and feel the pot taking shape over and over again until it is just right, I will not know the working of her mind that enables her to do the pottery, and I would never be able to make a pot myself.   If my father were a sailor he could tell me stories about the sea but unless I sail with him, feel the swaying deck beneath my feet, feel the ocean wind in my face, I will never know the sailor within his person. With God it is even more important that we engage in godly living together with our heavenly parent, for we do not see God, we only get to know God’s personality as we live our lives as God would live if God were here with us. Fortunately we know what God would be like in the flesh with us for we have seen God in the flesh in Jesus. Put some potters together in a group and there is an instant rapport of mutual understanding about pottery. The same goes for sailors and sailing. And yes, it should also be so for the children of a mother or father in heaven. Therefore the prayer of Jesus says “our father in heaven,” not “my father” even though Jesus often uses that first person pronoun elsewhere. The heavenly parent belongs to all of us together and all of us who know what it is to live the love of God have the right to name our heavenly parent as we begin our prayers.
Just exactly how we name our parent in heaven will depend on the way we have come to know the personality of God as we ourselves have lived God’s love. That parental personality cannot be restricted to any one metaphor. It cannot be exclusively father or mother or good shepherd or mother hen, it might be none of these but something else, another metaphor that seems just right in naming the personality of God. Father, Mother, Maker, Creator, Life-giver, Lover, all of these and more have been used as good translations and paraphrases for the One who is addressed in the prayer of Jesus. Whatever word we use to name the One in whose image we are created, that metaphor will always affirm the close relationship in personality that we share with God and with each other. As followers of Jesus, we know that personality best in Christ. It is a personality of great compassion, exquisite goodness and perfect righteousness. It is the personality of the one who loves each one of us with unlimited compassion.  Whenever we begin to pray, when we make our connection with the source of our existence we name our heavenly parent as best we can: God; Creator; our Life-Giver in Heaven; Father and Mother of us all.

“Holy is Your Name” Scriptures: Exodus 3:13-15, Acts 3:1-6

In the prayer that Jesus taught us, we address God and then we say, “holy is your name.” There is something special about the name of God. God’s name is holy. The word holy means “set apart, beyond the ordinary, very special.” For the Jewish people, God’s name is so holy that it cannot be spoken out loud. In fact we have more or less forgotten what it sounds like. In the original Hebrew Scriptures we have only the consonants of God’s name. That would be as if your name was Elizabeth and we only had the L, the Z, the B and the TH. It would be anyone's guess how to pronounce your name once the original vowel sounds had been forgotten. There have been, of course, some guesses about the pronunciation of God’s name. A century or so ago some scholars came up with the pronunciation “Jehovah” but that was almost certainly incorrect and today’s scholars pretty well agree that the pronunciation should be more like “Yahweh.”
A name should tell something about a person. In many cultures names are given to describe a physical feature or an event that coincided with a person’s birth. There is a fellow in the bible called Esau, which means “Red;” he probably had red hair. We have more or less lost this custom in our culture and yet we often give people nicknames which describe their looks or character or place of origin. When I was a boy as a new immigrant from Holland, I came to be called “silver skates” from the book about my namesake Hans Brinker. Others had more mundane nicknames like “shorty” or “speedy” or “rusty.” We sensed that the nickname fit the person in some way. God’s name fits too of course. “Yahweh” comes from the Hebrew verb “to be.” Yahweh is the name of the divine being or force in the universe that simply is. When God was revealed to Moses in the burning bush Moses asked God, “But what is your name?” And God said, “I am who I am. I am called ‘I AM’ - ‘Yahweh.’ ”
When you know somebody’s name you can have a relationship with that person. When you call a person’s name that person responds. When you speak a person’s name you are aware of that person; the whole person comes to your mind. A name is more than a label; it is a symbol for the whole person. That’s why lovers like to carve their names inside a heart in a tree, or mark them in the sand. The joining of their names inside that symbolic heart signifies the intimate relationship those two persons have together. When puppy-love afflicts a teenager we find the name of the loved one written all over the school books. When a baby is born, the new parents speak the name over and over again to the baby. We speak a person’s name out loud in baptism thereby affirming who that person is: a unique and precious person; God’s beloved child, created in God’s image and given a name, a special name of their own so that we will know who that person is. We speak each other’s names to affirm our identity and we give names to God in order to acknowledge God’s identity. Calling on the name of God brings the person of God into our awareness and helps us know that God is there with us.               Some people will say, “That is all fine and dandy, but rather wishful thinking on the part of a believer.” And I must say, we human beings do set up for ourselves our false gods with wishful, fancy names. Think for a moment about the names that we give to some of our most important idols: Magic Wagon, Saturn, Solar, Regal, Supreme, Excel, Panasonic. I would rather buy a car or a television or a wristwatch with one of those magic names. Those magic names conjure up visions of pleasure and delight that is out of this world. Interestingly enough, as children of God in heaven we are much more down to earth in our naming of God. When we get right down to it, we simply call on God as a being, as Yahweh, the One who is there with us. Our God does not perform magic. Our God does not give us fancy thrills and exciting pleasures. Our God simply is, and that is enough for us. That has been enough for countless believers who have called on God’s name, recognizing that God would be with them in good times and bad. This is not wishful thinking but a matter of human experience; God has been there. God is there, a real presence of whom we are aware when we call God’s name.
For Christians, the most profound expression of God’s presence has come in and through the person of Jesus. Jesus embodied that which is of God: love, mercy, grace, wholeness, truth, compassion, goodness. The presence of God in Jesus brought life and health and well-being to broken people who came to know Jesus. Even after Jesus had gone, the presence lingered on, more powerful than before. In that lingering presence we have come to equate the presence of God with the person of Jesus. And again, we call that person by name, so that when we speak the name of Jesus we are calling on the presence of God. That is why we have trouble with people who use the name of Jesus flippantly. That is why we are shocked when someone uses the name of Jesus to express their anger and frustration. Surely we mock all that is sacred to us when we invoke the presence of God in moments of rage, disgust and violence. It is sad to think that people need to curse and swear in anger and bitterness when they could instead be calling on that same name of Jesus to relieve and save them from their misery. Most tragic of all is the seasoned veteran of profanity who tries to obliterate all faith in goodness and ignore all hope for wholeness by wallowing in a life of despair punctuated by repeated outbursts of the name of God and of Jesus Christ.
We are not all habitual cursers of course. But how much respect do we have for the name of Jesus? How does it compare with that of the disciples in the early Christian community? It seems that those folk found their entire source of strength and all of their resources for ministry in the name of Jesus. That’s how the book of Acts presents the story to us. In Acts chapter 3 we hear about Peter and John who met a person begging for money at the gate of the temple. Peter and John were poor themselves and didn’t have any money to give, so instead Peter said to the person, “I have no money at all, but I will give you what I have: in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, walk!” ( Acts 3:6) Later on in the chapter Peter explains to the astonished onlookers, “It was the power of the name that gave strength to this person. What you see and know was done by faith in the name of Jesus.” (Acts 3:16) So the story tells us that the power of the name of Jesus brought new life to someone who had not much of a life at all. There are aspects of this story that are difficult for us. We wonder about the faith-healing that appears to take place. We have heard too many stories about phony faith-healers and we have seen too many of our friends go through illness and death even when their faith was very strong. The details themselves of the story raise questions: If indeed God had wanted this person to be healed, why had Jesus not healed the man on one of many visits to the temple? The story says that the man had been ill all his life and that he was brought to the temple each day; so Jesus too must have passed by him many times.   Some interpreters explain the story on the basis of symbolism related to it. Often in the bible blindness is a symbol for ignorance and lameness is a symbol for weakness. There is a story about Jacob who struggles with the presence of God one night and is left lame as a result. Consequently, Jacob’s offspring, the people of Israel, are often called “the lame ones” who are to be rescued by God and gathered into a new community. The healing of the lame man may well be a symbolic story which is a sign to a new Israel that the new community has come into being. And so the granting of sight to the blind and strength to the lame means that people are now able to see God’s new community and to walk in the footsteps of Jesus with sufficient strength to overcome the obstacles in the way.
No matter how we interpret the story, it is essential that we see it in the larger context of the community of faith and the role that the name of Jesus played in that community. Although our story tells of healing in the name of Jesus, it is not a short course in faith-healing. This story is not meant to say that anyone can be healed of anything at all as long as they have enough faith and as long as they know the magic combination of words to use as they invoke the name of Jesus in just the right way. If we think we can find a magic formula for healing, just the right prayer, then we are really only dabbling in wizardry and witchcraft and we have strayed far from genuine faith in God. Instead, our story is one segment of a larger story that describes a community which finds its identity and its strength in the name of Jesus. The community of which Peter and John were a part had no resources except for one thing - the awareness of God’s presence through calling on the name of Jesus. They had no money, as our story says. They had no formal organization, no church structure as yet. They had no public authority. Their profile as a social group was insignificant and had to be kept very low because they were associated with someone who had been put to death as a criminal. They were seen as a disgraceful bunch with nothing at their disposal. They had nothing but the name of Jesus. And it wasn’t just that they experienced occasional healing in the name of Jesus but they began to live their whole lives in the name of Jesus. They greeted each other with signs of peace in the name of Jesus. They had meals together as a community in the name of Jesus. They baptized in the name of Jesus. They reached out to the poor and the sick in the name of Jesus. Even when they had nothing to give; no food, no money, no medicine, they still reached out with good-will and friendship and compassion in the name of Jesus because that’s what Jesus had done as God’s presence with them. So the main point of our story is to present the “life-style” of the community of the followers of Jesus. The fact that they had no material goods to give did not stop them from giving what they had to the world around them. And they had much to give: love and mercy, grace and wholeness, truth and compassion.
When we call on the name of Jesus we acknowledge the presence of God-with-us which Jesus represents. When we reach out to others in the name of Jesus we acknowledge in them the presence of God which Jesus represents. That is a powerful acknowledgement, an invocation that can transform us dramatically and reveal God’s presence and purposes in the world around us. So it is that in our praying, in our living, in our baptizing, in all of our ministry, we name our God in heaven with a name that is holy and precious to us; a name we Christians have come to know as the name of Jesus who is our Christ: the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

“The Commonwealth of Love”    Scriptures: Micah 4:1-4, Luke 14:15-24

Every time we pray the prayer that Jesus taught us, we pray for the coming of God’s reign: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” All of that belongs together. The doing of God’s will on earth means that God’s reign is happening. Wherever God’s purposes are being accomplished, God’s reign has begun. Wherever human beings are living the gospel, the kingdom is arriving. Perhaps the word “kingdom” is not the best word to describe the reign of God. In the gospel community, the royal authority of God is distributed through the gifts of the Spirit among the citizens of the community. The One who reigns does so at a “grass-roots” level. From the point of view of gospel citizens such a community is as much a commonwealth as it is a kingdom. It is a common-wealth where the resources provided by God are shared in peace and harmony with a generous love. It is very much a “Commonwealth of Love” and that is what I like to call it. When we pray for the coming of God’s commonwealth, what sort of picture do we have in mind? “Thy kingdom come on earth”...? It may be a bit overwhelming to think of the total picture, so let us think of one aspect at a time. Think of one thing that would be a characteristic of the gospel commonwealth if God’s reign were here with us: Someone might suggest that in God’s commonwealth we would be able to trust people. There would be no worries about kidnappers, thieves, swindlers or cheating spouses. There would be no poison in the products we buy and no razor blades in the Halloween treats. We would be able to go out in the street at night without worrying about muggers or rapists. We could leave our doors unlocked. There would be no bombs, no arson, no violence. We would be able to trust people. Someone else may be thinking that in the gospel commonwealth we would be able to live without pain. If God’s will were really fulfilled here on earth, would not everyone be healthy and whole? There would be no headaches, stomachaches and toothaches, no aching muscles and joints, no infections, no diseases. We would live without pain. Another person may be thinking that in a commonwealth of love we would live without loneliness. We would know that there are others who care about us and understand us. Someone would be there to share in our times of anxiety and if we felt forsaken and desperate there would be someone who would listen and still respect us. In fact everyone would be respected and counted as an important human being. There would be no loneliness. Yet another person may be thinking that in God’s commonwealth things would go right more often. Murphy’s law would be struck from the books. No freak accidents would spoil our plans or ruin our lives. No foul moods would spoil our special occasions. No spilled soup would spoil the dinner. No nasty tempers would spoil the family atmosphere. No bad nerves would spoil the ceremony. Finally, for once everything would go just right.
No doubt we have larger, world-wide expectations as well. In a commonwealth of love there would be peace on earth. There would be no guns and missiles, no slaughter of young soldiers or innocent civilians; no threats of terrorism or nuclear holocaust hanging over us. In God’s commonwealth there is no hunger; everyone will have plenty to eat. Wealth and power will be shared equitably and used responsibly. There will be no discrimination but instead fair opportunity for everyone no matter what their race or nationality. We could think of many more details about the commonwealth of God. If only some of those details could be made real in our world, how much better things would be. The bible, of course, also gives us visions of the reign of God in human community. Our reading from the prophet Micah describes a picture where nations will never again go to war or prepare for battle. They hammer their swords into plows and each person lives in peace, without fear. There are plenty of such passages in the bible.
The vision for a commonwealth of God has been with us for thousands of years. It has been with us for a long time. Too long, perhaps: a lot of people have given up on it. Most people in today’s world hardly think about it. If you were to mention your longing for the reign of God to a friend or neighbour you will likely draw a blank look. And if we were to muster up enough courage to tell our children about our hope for a commonwealth of God they might laugh at us. “Get real,” they would say, “look at the world around us. Just look at the mess it is in. We hardly have much chance of living out our lives in this god-forsaken world. What chance do we have in the face of disease and pollution, climate change, terrorists wreaking havoc all over the place and the threat of nuclear annihilation? You can keep your hopes and dreams and stuff them. We’ll just try to make what we can out of what’s left to enjoy while we still have the chance.” Secretly, we ourselves may also be starting to think that way and our dreams for God’s reign are deteriorating into a fading hope for a bit of relief in the heavenly here-after. Yet we pray, every day, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” I would not stop praying this prayer if I were you. As long as we still have some vision of what a commonwealth of God might be like; as long as we still believe in goodness and love, wholeness and truth, we should keep on praying that prayer. When we pray, we are trying to get in touch with God, we are trying to get on God’s wavelength. When we pray we are joining ourselves to God’s purposes; we are making ourselves at one with God’s will, at one with what is best for God’s world and God’s creatures. When we pray with all our hearts and minds and strength, we may just concentrate hard enough and apply ourselves thoroughly enough to become one with God’s will. And when that happens we will understand the secret of God’s kingdom; which is that the Reign of God is within us. The gospel of Luke sums up the teaching about the commonwealth of God in chapter 17 verse 20 where someone asks Jesus when the reign of God would come. Jesus answers: “The reign of God does not come in such a way as to be seen. No one will say ‘Look, here it is’ or ‘there it is!’ because the reign of God is within you.”
So it may be that in spite of all our longing for God’s commonwealth to come and make things better for us, that actually, it is already here! It has already come in such a way as cannot be seen. Jesus teaches this in many parables, such as the one we read in Luke 14:15-24. One day while Jesus was talking about the reign of God someone said, “How happy are those who will sit down at the great feast in God’s commonwealth.” That person was thinking that it sure would be nice when God’s reign finally arrived. It would be like a long awaited party where you would finally sit down to enjoy yourself, relieved of all your worries, ready to bite into the ultimate of pleasures, the highly touted pie in the sky. But Jesus said, “Let me tell you a story about someone who gave a party and invited a lot of people. When the feast was ready no one showed up. They were all too busy with their own affairs. As far as they were concerned there was no feast worth going to. That’s what the reign of God is like, it is being held right now and you don’t recognize it, here among you. It is here, but you don’t seem to see it.”
Why are we so seeing impaired? Why don’t we have eyes to see the reign of God? We have that commonwealth right here in the midst of us and yet we don’t see it. Our eyes and our thoughts are elsewhere, our vision is on other things. Those other things are what we see on the surface. We look at our church and we see first of all the externals: the building, the work of committees, the order of service in worship. Too much focus on these structures of the church can make us insensitive to God’s purposes. The structures themselves can lead us astray: our sanctuary, our liturgy, our hymns can become objects of idolatry rather than vehicles for our connection with God. Are these structures, then, the focus of our attention? Are we so busy dealing with such external concerns that we miss God’s invitation to the feast?   The feast has begun, the commonwealth is here. “Open your eyes,” says Jesus, “open your minds, open your hearts, expand your vision, expand your faith. The possibilities for God’s reign are enormous, the opportunities of the commonwealth are countless.” Sure, we can still bemoan the fact that our world is full of problems. We can’t trust people. There is so much pain and loneliness. Things are always going wrong. There is little peace on earth. There is hunger and disease, oppression and injustice. Even the church is going down the tubes. The list seems endless and the problems are overwhelming. And yet, over against this list of troubles and woes we have before us an invitation. It is an invitation to a feast, to a commonwealth of love, to a community which can turn the tide of despair.
I don’t know what the ultimate heavenly feast in eternity will be like, but I am convinced that it will be celebrated by persons who have found the joy of God’s commonwealth in this world. They are the people who know the joy of building relationships of trust in a world where there is much dishonesty. They know the joy of sharing burdens of pain often almost unbearable. They know the joy of learning to understand and care for each other, breaking down walls of despair and loneliness. They know the joy of finding forgiveness and healing after things have gone wrong once again. They know the joy of making peace after a conflict and finding reconciliation after bitterness and hatred. They know the joy of the struggle against hunger and injustice here at home and around the world. All of these joys can be found right here and right now in our own lives, in our own church family, in our own gospel community. And the only thing we need to enter these joys is a prayer in our heart: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” When will that commonwealth be here? The reign of God does not come in such a way as to be seen. No one will say, “Look here it is,” or “there it is,” for the reign of God is within us.

“Our Daily Bread”    Scriptures: Genesis 4:1-16, Matthew 25:31-40

This part of the prayer of Jesus probably doesn’t immediately resonate with us. “Give us this day our daily bread,” That prayer may not mean very much to the average Canadian in the 21st century. I don’t think we feel very dependent on God for our daily food. We look after ourselves in that department. We have jobs so that we can earn money to go to the grocery store. We generally manage to find enough money to get our groceries and if for some unfortunate reason we lose our source of income we can turn to the government for social assistance. We don’t go to our God in heaven. So we may not really know what it is like to pray for our daily bread and perhaps that also means that we don’t really know what it is like to pray for anything else. Praying for daily bread is symbolic of praying for all sorts of things. Theologically speaking, all of our needs are supplied by God; not by our own “bread-winning” skills or by the government. But we have lost sight of the wonder of God’s providence. We have lost sight of our dependence on the Creator. We are losing our compulsion to pray for most anything and perhaps we don’t really want to pray anymore. We have become independent and self-sufficient. It is very nice for people like ourselves, in affluent countries, to be so independent but for a substantial segment of our world’s population, things are very different. There are plenty of people on our planet who can do nothing other than to pray for a bit of daily bread. I don’t intend to harass you today with a lecture about starving people in poverty stricken countries. However, I do have stories to tell you from my own experience living in rural Africa and my involvement in global ministries like the Canadian Foodgrains Bank and Oikocredit. I am struck with the fact that our prayer says, “Give us this day our daily bread.”   I have to see that “us” not just as my own family, or any one church congregation, or Christian people in Canada, but that “us” has to be all of the children of our God in heaven. “Give us this day our daily bread.” It would also seem that some of “us” don’t get enough food to eat because others of us prevent the bounties of God’s providence from reaching all of those who need their daily bread. So we’re in this together; all of us in the global community.
“Give us this day our daily bread.” What is it really like to pray that prayer? I believe that I can tell you a bit of what it is like. Again, there will be no lecture, just a story; a story that comes from my own experience of working in African famine relief. This story goes back a number of years, of course, to the early days of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. In those days we actually shipped food from Canada to places of hunger around the world. During the time of the so-called “Ethiopian Famine” I spent three months on an assignment with the Canadian Foodgrains Bank to monitor a food shipment of corn and beans from south western Ontario into a drought stricken area of East Africa.
Because of my immersion in biblical studies, my own experience often seems to merge with the stories of the bible. So when I tell the story of hunger in Africa it is for me intimately related to the story of Cain and Abel in the fourth chapter of Genesis. This story of Cain and Abel begins with a human being who feels dissatisfied. Cain feels that there is something incomplete about himself and his daily life. Something is missing. He wants more than what he has. He senses the problem deep within his spirit. The fruits of his labour are inadequate. Even his offering to God, the token fruit of his work and of his very being, is not acceptable. The scripture tells us, “And God had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering, God had no regard.” We really cannot know why Cain’s offering was unacceptable. Later reflections in Jewish theology and also in the Christian scriptures suggest that Abel was the more genuine, the more faithful in his religious duties and therefore the more acceptable. But the story itself makes no mention of the brothers’ relative faithfulness and piety. In fact both brothers seem to have performed their religious duties with equal responsibility as far as we can tell. And yet, Cain felt inadequate, something was wrong, he did not measure up. Surely even God must find him deficient.
If we are honest with ourselves, we can sense a link with Cain, we too know that feeling of dissatisfaction and inadequacy. We too have known jealousy, bitterness and hatred over against those who seem to be better off somehow or more at peace than we are. We also know what it is like to ignore someone else’s misfortune, especially if we have some responsibility for that misfortune and then shrug it off like Cain who asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” On the other hand of course, as good Christians we do care about others’ misfortune. That’s what our works of charity are all about. Isn’t that what the work of our Canadian churches’ Foodgrains Bank is all about? Still, that sense of caring was not the essence of my experience in Africa. Much of the time I felt like Cain who says to his brother, “Let us go out to the field.” Of all the words in the story, that phrase stands out for me. I don’t believe that Cain actually intended to kill his brother out there in the field. He felt inadequate and inferior as we have already observed. Perhaps he wanted to prove himself to Abel, perhaps even help him in some way or share something clever with him. Perhaps he had some knowledge, some expertise, something to show Abel that he, Cain, was not a failure after all. But he did not mean to kill him. I don’t think we intend to cause the deaths of our sisters and brothers. So we find ourselves out in the field with Cain and Abel; in the fields of Africa, where the age old sibling relationship is developing on centre stage:
“Come, let us go out into the field,” says Cain, “and I will show you some clever new ways to make use of the land. You can grow cash crops; coffee and tea, cotton and hemp. Never mind that these will use up your valuable food producing acres, I will give you money for these crops and money can buy you anything. “Let us go into the field and I will show you where to build runways of concrete and tar. Just think how impressed your neighbours will be when my silver birds touch down on your soil bringing important visitors to your land. My fighter jets will also come to sleep in your airfields and protect your country. “Let us go into the field and I will lend you money to build oil refineries where you can produce fuel for my thirsty airplanes and for the fancy vehicles I need to drive around your country. I will lend you money to build tourist lodges of international five star standards where my wealthy friends can go to relax! You, of course, will find employment in these establishments, you will get some salary, every month. “Let us go into the field, and if we happen to find that there isn’t any food anymore for you to eat; never mind, I will send you food, millions of bushels from my own fields of plenty. I will not let you starve because I need you as a market for my own industrial products.” And Cain rose up against his brother Abel... and killed him.
One day, there in Africa, I caught a glimpse of Cain. I was staying in a comfortable church guest house run by a North American mission in Nairobi. I had a nice room. There was a full-length mirror. And staring out at me from that mirror, there stood Cain. His face was white, in a world where most are black. He was well dressed, in a world where many wear rags. He was well fed, in a world where many are hungry. And in his pocket he had an airplane ticket, back to the land of Nod, where he was doomed to live a fugitive and a wanderer, a prisoner of his own failures.
But this is not the end of my story. There was a sound in the air, there in Africa; a noise; a howling, unpleasant noise. I came to realize what it was, that noise. It was the voice of my brother’s blood crying to God from the ground. When I began to hear that noise and realize its consequences and implications, I joined my thoughts again with those of Cain who exclaims, “My punishment is greater that I can bear.” It was not only the blood of Abel that was crying from the ground. There was more blood crying even louder. The sound of the blood spilled in the African holocaust merged with the sound of the blood spilled nearly 2000 years ago in a crucifixion at Golgotha. Then when the noise and the din became truly unbearable I heard a voice, and the voice said, “My God, forgive them for they know not what they do.” And at that moment my sense of identity with Cain vanished. I became one with Abel. I felt the presence of death, of hunger, of suffering. I no longer cared about the injustice of it all. There was no justification for anything anymore. I only knew that I was hungry. We, the people of Africa were hungry. We suffered and we waited. And we waited one hell of a long time... all the while praying, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Finally, food arrived. Corn and beans from Canada. But it was not food from Canada. It came straight from above as far as we were concerned. It was manna in the desert. It did not appear as a result of the well-meaning charitable efforts of some good Christian folks in Canada. It was an act of God; a merciful and miraculous response to our unceasing prayers for daily bread. We had been fed, and the food was providentially and therefore rightfully ours. At the same time we realized that we should never have been hungry. There had always been plenty in God’s providence for our daily bread. Thank God for that food from Canada, but our food did not have to come from Canada! God would provide daily bread from our own doorsteps if we could only pray together, all of us right around the world, “Give us this day our daily bread.” People who understand and live this prayer will share their food with those who are hungry; but more than simply sharing they will do all they can to prevent Abel from being killed by starvation. No one needs to starve in our world of plenty.   Good God in heaven, give us this day our daily bread.

“Forgive Us Our Trespasses”   Scriptures:   Deuteronomy 15:1-11, Matthew 18:21-35

The theme of forgiveness springs from the very heart of the gospel. Anyone who doesn’t understand forgiveness cannot understand the gospel. Without forgiveness there can be no reconciliation, no peace, no relationship with other people and no relationship with God. Forgiveness is a two-sided experience. It includes the understanding of what it means to forgive but also what it means to be forgiven. According to Matthew’s gospel, the whole point of praying the prayer of Jesus boils down to living forgiveness. Immediately after teaching the prayer, Jesus says, “For if you forgive others the wrongs they have done to you, God in heaven will also forgive you.” (Matthew 6:14) Then, later in the gospel, Matthew presents the parable we have heard today, a parable which draws attention to the challenge of forgiving others. It is difficult to forgive. It is not something we do very readily. It often goes against our sense of fairness and consequently our social system plays down the importance of forgiveness. After all, fair is fair. If someone does something wrong, they have to pay for it. We have to pay for the consequences of our mistakes. We can’t let people get away with murder, or with robbery and treachery. How is it possible to forgive someone who has hurt me or betrayed me? How can things be made right with such a person? And surely there are some things that simply cannot be forgiven. What about the crimes of serial killers or ruthless terrorists who torture their captives and cut off their heads?
Generally speaking, one of the reasons we find it hard to forgive people is because we tend to identify a person with that person’s behaviour. A psychiatrist will tell you that it is a mistake to see a person and that person’s behaviour as one and the same thing. A good theologian would agree with the psychiatrist. Such a theologian once told me that God loves and accepts me as a person even though God does not often approve of my behaviour. I have thought a lot about that over the years and I have continued to realize how important that statement is even as I continue to realize how difficult it is to apply it to others. When a child behaves badly, I say to myself and unfortunately sometimes to the child, “you rotten kid.” I neglect to differentiate between the person and the behaviour. When I see the bad behaviour, I tend to write off the person; the person is then no good.    It works the other way around too. When somebody disapproves of something I have done, I figure they think I am no good, that I as a person am a nobody. This tendency to write off persons as nobodies stands at the root of our inability to forgive. When someone is a nobody in our eyes, we have no respect for that person and we cannot readily forgive someone for whom we have no respect. Therefore the first step in forgiveness is to acknowledge the other person as a genuinely respectable human being in spite of their behaviour or even their crime. We brand criminals according to their crimes. We call them murderers and thieves and liars instead of persons who have committed murder and theft and treachery. This doesn’t make the crimes any less serious, but it makes all the difference in how we can begin to relate to those persons. They are persons, just like ourselves. Actually there is nothing intrinsically better about me as a person than there is about that other one who has committed a crime; even though I don’t have a criminal record; even though I am a God-fearing Christian; even though I am an ordained minister. I have used murder and robbery as criminal examples of personal behaviour but we don’t have to go as far as that. In fact we find it hard to accept anyone who exhibits behaviour of which we do not approve. When we see strange behaviour we think to ourselves, “there must be something wrong with that person.” Sometimes behaviour is wrong and needs to be corrected but at other times there is nothing wrong with a behaviour that we consider to be strange. Sometimes, it is merely a matter of the appearance of a person, let alone their behaviour. Although piercings and tattoos are more acceptable today than they were a generation ago, we are still a bit suspicious of people with lots of tattoos. And all those foreigners from Africa and Asia with their strange features and weird customs, surely they have missed the mark somewhere along the way; maybe they were left behind a bit in the evolutionary process! So we tend to judge a person on appearances and what we can see of their behaviour. Every culture creates standards of beauty and ugliness and then the beautiful people are seen to be good and the ugly people are bad. We try to meet the ideal standards as best we can. If we look beautiful and act properly we think we are good people. Then, if the overall impression is favourable, we can forgive one or two flaws. Such forgiveness is a process of weighing the “pros” and “cons,” the good points and the flaws. If the overall impression is above average then I pass inspection. If I drop a few percentage points, I look for a way to make it up to you. I bring you some flowers or a box of chocolates. Then all is forgiven.
But nothing is forgiven if I am merely catering to some standard of what is considered to be favourable appearance or behaviour. It is the person behind the behaviour that needs to be accepted and loved. In the prayer of Jesus we ask God to forgive us as we forgive others. We pray to be immersed in God’s grace, immersed in the realization that God accepts us and respects us as the genuine persons we are in spite of our trespasses; in spite of those things that are offensive to the divine being who represents all that is good. But to apprehend such acceptance from God is at the same time to embrace the ability to accept and respect others as the persons they are in spite of things about them that seem offensive to us. Whether those things in others are really offensive or not is almost beside the point. Whether it was actual criminal behaviour or just a perceived flaw, in a sense it is all the same. To forgive is to set our perceptions aside and to see the other person with genuine understanding; or as the bible would say with genuine love. When we reach the point where we truly accept another person in spite of their behaviour and appearances then we understand God’s forgiveness because we will then have some idea what it is like to love a person who doesn’t quite measure up to our own standards. Deep down, we know that we ourselves also fail to be true to our own standards. One way to cope with that knowledge is to push those standards onto ourselves and others with an iron fist. That is what fascists do. The Nazis, for example, wanted to rid the world of anyone who didn’t have fair skin and Aryan racial features. They wanted to rid the world of diseased and disabled people. They wanted to rid the world of homosexual and Jewish people. “Kill them all” was their policy and they managed to kill millions. But of course, their insanity stemmed from a severe sense of inadequacy which they disguised as their pseudo-superiority. They could not accept themselves “warts and all.” They knew nothing about forgiveness. They had no true concept of a loving parent in heaven even though many of them claimed to be Christians. And they committed severe atrocities; the gravest sins this world has ever seen. Their ideal society was nothing like the commonwealth of love that the gospel proclaims.
There is a place in God’s commonwealth for me because there is room for my sister or brother whom I have come to love and respect in spite of any apparent flaws or offensive behaviour or even crimes committed against me. I come to understand God’s forgiveness only when I am able to see beyond my neighbour’s offensive behaviour and accept that person as a sibling human being. That is how forgiveness works and that is why we pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”               At the same time, forgiveness is much more than just “forgive and forget.” Forgiveness also requires restoration. When we start to see each other as genuine and full-fledged sibling human beings we want to see healing and reconciliation and a setting right of the wrongs that happen among us. Jesus talks about forgiveness from within a very specific context. In the bible, forgiveness is often literally a forgiveness of material debts as in the parable we read today and even as in the prayer of Jesus. The old translation which says “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” is a very accurate translation. In our reading from Deuteronomy we are reminded of an ancient custom in Israel which called for the erasing of debts every seven years. If you owed me some money, I would have to cancel the debt in the sabbatical year. If you had become my slave, I would have to set you free. The concept in these regulations was to restore balance in society and to restore each person’s dignity as a full-fledged child of God in the community. When we forgive each other, we should also strive to restore the balance that has been destroyed by our debts or trespasses. There should be a balance of dignity as well as a balance of material wealth in the gospel community. In working at forgiveness, I can’t just say “I forgive you” unless I am willing to work with you to restore your dignity in my eyes and you are willing to work with me to restore my dignity in your eyes. It is important to reach the point where we both realize that something was wrong between us and we are now willing to work hard to make it right. Notice that this is not simply a matter of a “bad guy” paying for a crime, but rather both parties working towards restoration and reconciliation. Often it is extremely difficult to do the work of restoration that forgiveness requires.
There is not much evidence that sabbatical regulations were actually put into practice in ancient Israel and it is hard to imagine how the balance of and dignity can ever be restored between a perpetrator of rape and the victim let alone one who murders and the one who has been killed. So sometimes, in this world, forgiveness cannot be accomplished. Sometimes, the work of forgiveness and restoration is virtually impossible. And yet forgiveness is the only cure for broken relationships and broken community. We need forgiveness as a constant resource as we learn to live with each other in gospel community. Our relationships are fragile, we often step on each other’s toes, we are quick to take offense, and at times we cause each other harm. Then we are called to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Ideally, we learn to forgive others as we acknowledge our own flaws and offenses over against God who challenges us with a presence that is absolute goodness itself. In Jesus, God’s absolute goodness reached out to people as Jesus made friends with all sorts of folk, even with criminals - that is with persons who had committed a crime. In the gospel community God’s goodness is affirmed as we maintain healthy friendships with each other and extend our desire for reconciliation into the world around us. So we experience God’s forgiveness as we forgive each other. We grow in communion with the One who is love and goodness as we grow in healthy friendships with one another in the gospel community.

“Lead Us Not Into Temptation” Scriptures: Genesis 3:1-8, Matthew 4:1-11

“Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” The parallelism of the poetry in this line of the prayer of Jesus gives us two sides of the same thought. Avoiding temptation entails deliverance from evil and vice versa. Much of what we find in the bible on this theme places the focus on temptation and so it is this aspect of the phrase that we will focus on as well. Our scripture readings today also help us to gather our thoughts in particular ways. The reading from Genesis helps us raise questions about the nature of temptation and the reading from Matthew helps us define some categories of temptation. Let us begin with some thoughts about the Genesis passage.
The story of the eating of the forbidden fruit introduces one of the common themes of the bible, that life in this world can be a testing experience. We humans are faced with all kinds of challenges and testing, presumably so that we might discover what is good for us. Through trial and error we discover God’s purposes; we come to know wholeness and salvation. Ironically, part of the testing process seems to be that we are continually faced with tempting alternatives to real salvation. We discover genuine human wholeness by testing and rejecting the phony alternatives, no matter how tempting they seem to be. Life then is an experience that contains a lot of testing. The bible doesn’t tell us exactly why life is like that. It simply presents us with this reality: “Life is like that and it has been so from the start.” When Adam and Eve, the prototypical humans, arrive on the scene in the bible they are presented to us as living in a condition of wholeness and happiness. Life couldn’t be any better than it is for them. But then they are tempted with the idea that something else could be even better. This temptation is symbolized by the presence of a forbidden fruit in their lovely little world. They start to think that a taste of the forbidden fruit might make their lives even better and that they could be more than what they were created to be. They would become super-human. They would be like God. Of course they ate the fruit only to discover that their happiness did not lie in becoming something other than what they were. The pursuit of that deceptive dream resulted in misery and they found themselves worse off than they were before. It was as if God had said to them, “Get a life folks. Find your happiness in the life that you have been given, you won’t find it in a phony dream that has nothing to do with reality.”
The story of Adam and Eve who eat the forbidden fruit is the story of us all. We are constantly challenged to test the limits in our quest to discover who we are. Often that testing is the hard testing of what the bible calls temptation. We are faced with this testing in big ways and little ways in every aspect of our lives. In order to be healthy and happy and whole we need to know our limitations. But these limitations are learned by trial and error, often by breaking limits in the pursuit of some temptation.    We all know that we would be most healthy and therefore ultimately most happy, if we limit ourselves to a certain intake of calories each day. But where does the limit lie? And what of all those goodies that tempt us to exceed the limit? Temptation is our constant companion. When we see a delicious piece of cake within easy reach, it seems that we would be so much happier if that piece of cake were melting in our mouth, even if it is coming to be the third helping. When we smell the aroma of freshly brewed coffee it seems that we would be wonderfully satisfied if another cup could be placed to our lips, even if we have already had several that morning. Then we end up with a stomach-ache and bad nerves and a miserable disposition. We want to overstep our limits not just in eating but also in the speed we travel on the highways, in our accumulation of wealth, in our power over other people. But when we do overstep our limits we put ourselves and others in danger; we throw away our health, our happiness and sometimes our very lives. There are countless people in our world suffering and dying because they went beyond the limits. Some folk are too fast or reckless on the highway and end up in accidents. Some consume too much alcohol resulting in a ruined life. Some have indiscriminate sex with multiple partners resulting in diseased bodies and broken personalities. There are countless little things that you and I are doing to ourselves to bring destruction into our lives. There are so many temptations that we cannot ignore, temptations that can lead to destruction but are at the same time necessary to help us learn the limits and find our happiness within those limits.
The collective wisdom of human experience warns of destruction on the other side of temptation and the collective wisdom of Christian experience tells us to be pro-active in dealing with evil. So Jesus teaches us to pray: “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. According to Jesus, staying in touch with the Spirit of God will make the testing easier, or at least less dangerous. When we are in touch with God’s presence and purposes, we will have a better handle on the hollow promises of every-day temptation. Staying connected with the will of God has the effect of leading us away from temptation rather than into it. Being in touch with God is easier said than done, of course. However, as followers of Jesus we have some further guidance on the subject of temptation. A first step for a Christian is to see how Jesus resists evil by overcoming temptation. So we turn to the story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. In his wilderness experience, Jesus faced temptations that are much like the hard testing we face in our daily lives. These temptations held hollow promises filled with alternatives that looked good on the surface but would wreak havoc in the end:
“If you are God’s son, order these stones to turn to bread.” Here we have the hollow promise of a quick-fix solution which ignores deeper needs as well as the consequences of its own magic “fix.” Give a hungry person a fish instead of sharing the secrets of fishing; give an unhappy person a bottle of bubbly, or a face-lift; win the lottery, find yourself a playmate on the internet. But turning those stones into bread is not going to solve anything in the end. Learning abundant life, learning wholeness, learning salvation is more than trying to land yourself a free lunch.
“If you are God's son, throw yourself down from the highest point of the temple.” Here we have the hollow promise of a phony image. “Make yourself larger than life. Bolster yourself up with a fine suit of clothes, plenty of make-up and jewelry, a special title in front of your name, an appearance on television; perform some magic for the crowd; they will love it and they will like you. You will have them eating out of your hand and doing whatever you want them to do.” But we see that Jesus stays away from fancy clothes and special titles and magic tricks. When the disciples start to think that Jesus might be the Messiah, Jesus says, “Don’t tell anyone.” When someone is healed in the presence of Jesus they are told, “keep this quiet.” Jesus makes no pretentious claims. Jesus does not give the impression of being larger than life. Jesus does not “put God to the test” as the story says. (Notice the interesting irony in the concept of “putting God to the test” as we fall into temptation. It is, of course, the image of God within us with which we are messing around.)
Then the tempter took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in all their greatness. “All this I will give you,” the tempter said, “if you kneel down and worship me.” Here we have the hollow promise of a shortcut to success; the easy path to power; “how to win friends and influence people.” There are lots of quick ways to the top in this world, but always at the expense of others. I can bully my way into being kingpin in my family or in my church or in my place of employment by manipulating the others around me. If I do that I have opted for the way of the devil. Jesus could have “had it all” so to speak. He had the smarts and the personal resources to make it to the top. Yet he chose the way of love and justice in egalitarian community. In that choice, Jesus overcame temptation, resisted evil and ultimately at great personal cost brought upon humanity a renewed experience of salvation. Jesus gives us a renewed sense of what it means to be whole as human beings and what it is to make real the image of God within us.
Ironically, whenever we begin to sense the image of God within us it seems that the spirit casts us into a desert of temptation. Evidently it has to be that way. There is no faith without doubt and no security without the challenge of temptation. To find real peace, real security, real wholeness, I first need to face and resist the temptation of looking for fulfillment and security in the quick satisfaction of my whims and urges, in relying on a phony image of myself and in accumulating power over other people. Unless I deal with these temptations and reject them I will never find real peace, real security, real happiness.
The salvation that we seek in deliverance from evil is an elusive commodity and we have good reason to fear the temptations that stand in the way. We confess that fear when we pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” We need to confess that fear daily for then we remember that temptation is with us all the time. Yet we know that in solidarity with Jesus we can face the temptation without falling into it and thereby resist the forces of evil as Jesus did. Jesus overcame temptation by accepting an essential human self and rejecting a phony self-image built on false self-satisfaction and the abuse of others. A genuine human self was enough for Jesus because that self entails the image of God within, which Jesus embraced and lived out in all its fullness. Hence we acknowledge Jesus as both human and divine. We want to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. We will not manage as well as Jesus did. We are not God incarnate as Jesus was. And yet we too carry the image of God within us and the fact that Jesus lived a perfect life by deliberately staying within the limitations of being human - that fact gives immense hope to us. Living into this hope means salvation for us, it means deliverance from evil, which is our fervent prayer. Good God, lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.

“The Power and the Glory” Scriptures: Isaiah 60:19-22, Acts 12:20-23

At the end of the prayer of Jesus we say, “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory for ever and ever.” There is some doubt about whether this phrase belongs with the prayer. Many bibles don’t include it although a footnote often explains that words to this effect can be found in some ancient texts which are deemed to be relatively unreliable. Apart from the fact that these words are in doubt from a textual point of view, they might also seem uncharacteristic on the lips of Jesus. Jesus speaks of simple things like seeds and sowers and daily bread; of sheep and coins and people in debt. It is unlikely that Jesus was much of a fan of power and glory.
Power and glory are dangerous commodities to be handled with great care in the gospel community. Jesus often directed attention away from the quest for power and the desire for glory. When James and John fantasize about holding prestigious positions in the realm where Jesus reigns, Jesus warns them that “you do not know what you are asking.” (Matt 20:22) In the gospel community, greatness comes through serving others not through “lording it over them” in positions of power. (cf Matt 20:25ff) The New Testament as a whole condemns those folk who claim power and glory for themselves. King Herod is described as such a person and as we read in Acts 12, his death is attributed to his self- glorification. Herod took the glory for himself, he did not give the glory to God. (Acts 12:23) Of course the point of the last phrase of the prayer of Jesus is to do exactly what King Herod failed to do, that is to give the glory to God. “For thine (God) is the power and the glory for ever.”
“For thine is the power and the glory.” The early gospel community soon realized that this has to be a constant theme in the life of its members lest they fall into the idolatry of glorifying their institutions or certain individuals in the community.    Our tendency to glorify our institutions or important people is very strong. The persons and institutions of royalty have been given power and glory throughout the ages. Along with King Herod, we can find all sorts of figures in the bible that lay claim to power and glory. They are even glorified with phrases much like the one we are reflecting on here. In the book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar is described as the one who has the kingdom, the power and the glory. (Daniel 2:37) And although Nebuchadnezzar is hard to identify as an actual figure from history, the kings of Babylon were indeed persons with awesome power and glory. Even in the church after the time of Jesus, the power and the glory of the clergy increased with a vengeance. In the medieval church the clergy at the top held tremendous power and lived in opulent glory. (And don’t think that the people did not admire them!) The church as an institution has often become the object of glorification as well. Some of the most glorious real estate in the world is owned by the church. Powerful customs and church laws have had immense influence and control over the lives of countless human beings.
At times, the church has misused its power. People have suffered at the hands of the church. Human beings have been abused and even murdered, God’s children have been oppressed and enslaved by the church. That’s what happens when the church as an institution gets the dominion and the power and the glory. Jesus spoke about this, in one of the core sayings of the gospel: “Human beings were not made for the Sabbath” Jesus said, “but the Sabbath for human beings.” (Mark 2:27) The Sabbath as a glorified institution could have oppressive power over people and the same has often been true for the church. Jesus had a profound understanding of the dangerous consequences of glorifying persons and institutions. That’s why Jesus refused to bear the title “Messiah.” When Peter named Jesus with that title, Peter was told “Get behind me Satan!” (Mark 8:33) Jesus did not want power and glory and surely Jesus did not want the gospel community to be a church of power and glory!
So, what did Jesus want? As far as I can tell, Jesus wanted to call a community into being which would fulfill God’s purposes for God’s people. This gospel community was not meant to be Christian or Jewish or any other particular religious culture. It was simply meant to be a community of human beings that honoured the essence of the vision of Shalom spelled out by the prophets of Israel. As we have seen in our analysis of the prayer of Jesus, the gospel community is to be a commonwealth as much as a kingdom where everyone has their fair share of the community’s resources be they spiritual, material, or political.
The prophets of Israel did not categorize the resources of the community into separate categories. The fair distribution of material resources went hand in hand with spirituality and politics. In Isaiah 60:19-22, the peoples’ righteousness is equated with a fair possession of the land and within such Shalom, God is glorified. According to the gospel, God is glorified when things are right in the community. God is glorified when debts are forgiven. God is glorified when people get their daily bread,. God is glorified when evil is resisted. God is glorified when the reign of God is claimed and put into practice in the gospel community. God is glorified when reconciliation takes place.   According to the New Testament, particularly in John’s gospel, the greatest glorification of God happened in the crucifixion of Jesus. Not in the resurrection, not in the ascension, not in the birth of the church, but in the crucifixion, in the bleakest moment of the entire gospel story. This is so because only the crucifixion can shock us into a genuine awareness of the utter evil and ultimate impotence of abusive power and false glory.   When we claim Christ and Christ crucified, as the apostle Paul would say, we acknowledge the ultimate abuse of power in the killing of Jesus and we sense very quickly and clearly that our own abuse of power in various ways, big and small, undermines the glory of God as well. In that realization (when we claim Christ crucified) there comes a deep yearning for making things right, a compulsive drive for reconciliation with those whom we have wronged and therefore also with God. The crucifixion of Jesus has this effect on us and as such it brings about the glorification of God, along with a subsequent understanding and celebration of resurrection. Then, in the words of the New Creed, “We proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen.”
Power and glory are given to God when they are distributed fairly in the gospel community and in all creation. Wherever power is abused and glory corralled by an elite, there is no reign of God. Hierarchy and patriarchy have been hallmarks of the church but they are not gospel structures; they undermine the reign of God and steal God’s power and glory. It is no accident that children were abused in residential schools run by the church. It is no accident that women have been ignored and exploited and sometimes destroyed by the church.    It is no accident that people come in to the doors of our churches and after a taste of hard-line religion - never come back. We say, often enough in our prayers, “Yours, O God, is dominion and power and glory,” and then without thinking, give the power and the glory to the clergy and the church; to the organ and the stained glass windows. Somehow we equate these things with God. After all, heaven is full of stained glass and organ pipes is it not? And it is kind of nice to see the minister wearing a beard and a long robe; that’s what Jesus wore, right? Then when the time comes to sell our church buildings and amalgamate our congregations into one gospel community - we can’t do it. Our beloved institutions and church architecture have all the power. And if the minister refuses to hear concerns of a women’s group or a gay couple in the congregation - well, so be it, the minister has the last word, right? That’s how the Kingdom works! But that’s not how the reign of God - the commonwealth of love - works in the gospel community. In the gospel community everyone has a voice and no elite calls all the shots. When a guest comes in the door, the gospel community seizes the chance to welcome that person into the church family. Here is a chance to affirm the reign of God in sharing resources with someone new. Here is a fine opportunity to give power and glory to God.
Ultimately, it is fitting that we end the prayer of Jesus with an ascription of glory to God. The kingdom, the power, the glory, these do belong to God and when we understand truly what it means to ascribe power and glory to God, this ascription brings comfort and joy to gospel people who know that the presence of God and the reign of God exist and live among and within them.   It is with a profound yearning for the assignment of power and glory where they truly belong that we pray the prayer of Jesus. So may we pray the prayer in true solidarity with Jesus, in faithful acknowledgment of Christ crucified and in the strong conviction that the reign of God is truly within us. So to God be all power, dominion and glory; for ever and ever. Amen

Hans van Nie