Sermon from July 23, 2006
One of my favorite Bible verses is something Jesus said in Luke 12:6-7: Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God .... Don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

Two of my favorite Bible stories come from Mark five. The first is a story about a desperate woman. She had suffered with a disease for 12 years, and nothing had helped. As Jesus passed by in a surging crowd of admirers and thrill-seekers, she had managed to get in among the crowd and grab his garment for a moment.

The unthinkable happened. She felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Then, the second unthinkable happened. Jesus stopped, turned around in the crowd and asked who touched Him. Many people were touching Him, but He gave the impression that one touch differed from all the others.

The woman, to her credit, did not deny it. She came and fell down before Him and told Him the whole truth. The desperate woman's experience reminds us of something important. You don't lay a human being side by side with the diameter of the solar system and call that person an insignificant speck. That scrawny specimen would do well to rise up and shake his fist at the stars. He would do better to remember that the vastness of the Milky Way only magnifies the attention of our Great Savior to the details of our lives.

The second story in Mark five follows immediately. When he stopped to take care of the woman, Jesus was on his way to attend to a synagogue ruler's very sick daughter. While Jesus was talking to the woman, news came that the girl had died.

That did not deter Jesus. He told the synagogue ruler not to fear, just to believe. They came to the man's home, and Jesus put everyone outside except the girl's parents and three of His disciples. He took them all inside. He knelt down by the girl's side. He took her by the hand and said to her, "Talitha koum!" (which means, "Little girl, I say to you, get up!"). Immediately the girl stood up and walked around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.

That's astounding. You can't be more heavenly-minded than to raise someone from death. You can't be more earthly good than to give a hungry child something to eat. These verses and stories magnify the attention of our Great Savior to details and prepare us for the second half of the Lord's Prayer.

Pastor Mark took us through the first half of the Lord's Prayer last week. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. That is all large and glorious. It lifts our eyes to the eternal hills and the New Jerusalem.

The second half of the Lord's Prayer keeps our nose to the grindstone. It speaks of small and urgent matters like hunger, guilt and danger. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Let's make sure we know what we are praying for, when we use this prayer. Then, we can talk about how to use this prayer. Look with me at Matthew 6:11-15.

Daily Bread
Give us this day our daily bread. Bread! How much more basic can you get than bread? How much more basic can you get than hunger? We may feel bad and get grumpy, if we miss one meal. The discipline of fasting has power, because for a short time it requires us to deprive our body of daily bread in order to feed our soul with the word of God.

And it is our daily bread. Do you ever think how much our need for daily bread organizes the way we spend our time every day? It's hard to prepare, eat, and clean up after each meal in less than half an hour. That's an hour and a half every day. How much time does someone in your household spend buying groceries each week? It could easily be another hour and a half. And what does it cost to eat per week, including meals out? Can two people do it for $600-700 a month? How many hours does a wage-earner in your household have to work to earn that much?

We seldom think this way, do we? We just buy and eat. There's plenty to go around. We see signs in kitchens from time to time that say, "The kitchen is closed due to illness. I'm sick of cooking." But those are signs of plenty, not signs of hunger.

And it's right here that we encounter an obstacle to praying: Give us this day our daily bread. We take our plenty for granted. It was a mild shock last spring to walk into Trader Joe's and see many empty shelves. But that was because of the one-day strike by illegal aliens. It mattered very little. We could just go up to the road to Super G or Shop Rite or Super Fresh or Acme, or we could just wait a day, and Trader Joe's would be fully stocked again.

Does it make sense to ask God today for daily bread, when there's no apparent running out of daily bread? It does.

There's a statement in Deuteronomy 8:17-18 that leads me to pray that way without apology. Here's what it says. You may say to yourself, "My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth (or this plenty) for me." But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth.

By praying give us this day our daily bread we don't deny the splendid agricultural and distribution systems that bring food to our tables in such abundance. But we acknowledge that the ability to create these systems comes to us from the hand of God, as do the fertile plains and temperate climate of this land. Thanksgiving, not presumption, is becoming to this and every nation so blessed, and so we do well to say: Give us this day our daily bread.

Daily Debt
The next petition of the Lord's Prayer moves from a basic physical need to a basic spiritual need. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Or: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Or: Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.

Personally, I like to use the word debts. Trespass seems trivial. Sin is a good choice of words, but a lot of people think it applies only to really bad people. But we all understand what it means to owe somebody. Increasingly, more people understand what it means to owe somebody something they can't repay, as witnessed by the number of bankruptcies. It would feel so good, if someone removed the debt we cannot repay.

But the real power of this petition in the Lord's Prayer comes from the little joining word, as. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. In case anyone missed it, Jesus elaborates in verses 14-15.

For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. He can't mean that. Apparently, He does. I can identify at least four other passages in Matthew, Mark, and Luke where Jesus Himself said it again.

Once this realization penetrates our defenses, I think it will be hard for us to pray this part of the prayer without being forced to ask ourselves, "Whom do I need to forgive?" It is an entirely salutary process of self-inspection. And of course, it may not stop there. If I need to forgive you, and I do it before God, it probably makes sense that I also need to tell you; and that can be awkward - and rewarding.

The black hole that threatens us in this petition is that if we don't forgive, we can't count on God's forgiveness. If you are anything like me, that idea raises all kinds of objections and theological questions. And you know what? Those objections and questions are not theoretical.

Personal offenses hurt. That's why it's hard to forgive the people that hurt us. The idea that Jesus would say God might not forgive us hurts too. Praying this petition may land us in a world of hurt. The pain is a measure of the importance of the forgiveness. We should never stop praying this prayer and striving to forgive. Too much is at stake to stop.

Daily Danger
The final petition of the Lord's Prayer moves us on from daily bread and daily debts to daily danger. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. I understand the second part - deliver us from evil - but the first part raises an inevitable question: lead us not into temptation.

The biblically astute among us will say that God doesn't do that and will quote James 1:13: When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.

That makes a lot of sense, and I run the risk of clouding the issue, if I ask: "But isn't there a difference between God's tempting me and God's leading me into temptation?" The only excuse I can make for this hair-splitting is to point to something that happened early in Jesus' public ministry. Matthew 4:1: Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.

James was right: God doesn't tempt us; the devil tempts us. But in the case of Jesus, God led Him into a situation where He was vulnerable to the devil's temptations. If God would do that to Jesus, do you think He might do it to us? The final petition of the Lord's Prayer says He would and asks Him not to do it.

What would it be like to be led into temptation? We might ask that even more fervently, if we could hear the pronoun in the petition: lead us not into temptation. Out of our individualism comes the habit of saying that but meaning, "Lead me not." But God does at times lead His people en masse into temptation. We have seen that happen to the Church under the totalitarian regimes of earth during our lifetime. This final petition is a plea for an entire Christian community.

We do not of course live under a totalitarian regime. Does that mean that God has not led us into temptation? Why are we so sure He has not? Think about it for a minute: even the devil's temptation of Christ did not threaten to inflict pain so much as it made promises of pleasure and power. Suppose that God, contrary to all our expectations, has led the Church in the United States into temptation. How long would it be before we recognized what He was doing?

This sermon proceeds on the belief that God has led the Church in the United States into temptation, much as He led Jesus into the wilderness temptation. Ours is the temptation of unparalleled personal liberty and unprincipled personal pleasure. I would state the temptation this way: "Can you Christians be people of integrity in a world where you are free to do anything you can get away with?" The fire for American Christians is staying true to our Lord when all around one allurement after another entices us away from Christ.

The final petition of the Lord's Prayer now sounds like this: And lead us not into temptation, but, now that you have, deliver us from evil.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
So, how do we use the Lord's Prayer? Well, we say it word for word, when we pray to God. Not only do congregations do this, but individuals do it in their private prayers. For many people, it has been the last prayer they prayed in this world. They instinctively turned to this prayer, as they saw the end of their lives rapidly approacing.

Second, teach your children this prayer. Along with the 23rd Psalm and John 3:16 and some other central biblical verses, this prayer belongs in the ready-to-use part of your child's heart and soul.

Right here, we should stop and face a difficulty that attends the use of the Lord's Prayer. When I grew up, the Lord's Prayer was part of the public worship of our church every Sunday. I won't say that people got bored with it. It's too short to bore people. But it became stale and routine, and we could say the words and never mean a word of it. That happens to anything we do over and over. Repetition wears the treads off your tires, and it wears the treads off great ideas.

So, what do we do about that? The best thing we can do is to take a phrase from the Lord's Payer and stop and think about its meaning and then turn that meaning into an extended prayer. Let me give you an example from the last half of the prayer.

Give us this day our daily bread. Lord, I have to work to earn the bread I eat. No, Lord, that's not quite right, is it? I work to earn the money I need to support the people who make bread available to my family. But the seeds that wheat and corn and rice come from are your gift. And so are the people who farm it and harvest it and bake it and wrap it and truck it and stock it. Our daily bread is truly your gift. Thank you.

You could do a dozen meditations on that one petition of the Lord's Prayer. It's good at times to stop at each of the petitions in the prayer and do that sort of thing. You won't remember everything you say in your meditations, but your soul will remember the next time you just say the Lord's Prayer. The simple words will stand out with new luster and meaning, because in your meditations you have tasted the depth, which these words carry. It has become part of you. It will renew your mind as you do it through the years.