The Cost of Hapi-ness

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Numbers 11:1-24, 31-35

When we read this passage from Numbers 11, I’m quite sure many of us sigh heavily thinking, “Oh great, another story about God’s people acting spoiled and petty and then God quite narcissistically overreacting and angrily smiting and killing them with some sort of plaque.”  In Numbers 11 alone we have God sending the dreaded fire on the outskirts of the camp making the people anxious and what amounts to severe food poisoning from eating quail that had spoiled because the amount of quail that God provided was so ridiculously huge, to the point of being offensive huge, that they couldn’t properly store it.  Of course, it probably would have helped if their way of eating small fowl back then actually involved cooking it.  The ancient historian Herodotus says they ate it raw with lots of salt.  Don't everyone gag at once.  

Well, let’s not simply dismiss this story and others like it as if the Old Testament were a movie entitled “Legends of a Petty God”.  To do so would be to miss the invaluable lesson it contains with respect to us and God.  In this passage, there is a hidden message with respect to how we humans tend to go about seeking happiness.   Rather than approaching life with gratitude, with being thankful to God in all circumstances, we start looking for gods other than God to give us stuff we think we make us happy and it backfires on us.  

Yet we have to admit here that something just isn’t quite right in Numbers 11 in that it is riddled with excessive behaviours that don’t add up.  If I were to put myself in the place of the Israelites, I would be missing meat too; carnivore that I am.  But I don’t think I would be standing in my doorway weeping loudly and bitterly about it as if someone had died.  And then there’s Moses and his “it’s all about me” reaction to seeing and especially hearing this multitude of 600,000+ people wailing for a little “two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, tomatoes on a sesame seed bun”.  And the big question, why is the LORD so mad that he would literally bury his people in quail and give them a lethal dose of food poisoning?  With all these excesses in behaviour it seems there is more going on here than the Israelites simply complaining about the food.  It seems like something got lost in translation.  

So, maybe a different translation might be in order.  Take note: this will probably be the one and only time I will say the King James Version nailed it.  It reads: “And the mixt multitude that was among them fell a lusting: and the children of Israel also wept again, and said, ‘Who shall give us flesh to eat?  We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic: But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes’.”  Well, let me do a little verse by verse for a moment here and we’ll come to see that the Israelites are actually longing to worship and serve another god than the one who delivered them from slavery in Egypt.

Let’s start with the mixt multitude who fell a lusting.  The mixt multitude (or rabble as some translations have it) was a considerable number of non-Israelite people who left Egypt with them after having seen how the God of the Israelites had humiliated all the Egyptian gods by means of the Ten Plagues.  They wanted to worship and serve the one true God.  Well, it happens that the rabble gets a strong craving.  They “fell a lusting” as the KJV puts it because lust had something to do with it.  Almost all ancient religious festivals related to celebrating life and fertility and agriculture involved a drunken feast that turned into an orgy.  If you remember, this was what was happening at the Golden Calf incident when the Israelites “rose up to play”.  I am inclined to think here in Numbers 11 that it was festival time for one of the fertility gods back in Egypt and the rabble’s craving was indeed that they “fell a lusting” because it was time to rise up and play.  

Second, the Hebrew text does not say, “Oh that we had meat to eat.”  It quite literally reads, “who will cause us to eat meat?”  In the ancient world it was next to impossible to eat meat that was not in some way associated with the worship of a god.  The Israelites being poor lower-class slaves in Egypt didn’t get to eat much meat.  They mostly ate fish and root vegetables.  They said “Oh how we remember the fish we ate freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic.”  Meat and fish would have most likely come to the enslaved Israelites as charitable overflow from one of the Egyptian fertility festivals for which it was the responsibility of the god to provide the food abundantly and free of charge for all the people.  So, these folks asking “who shall give us meat to eat” reflects that they are looking for, longing for a god, a god other than their God the God who brought them out of slavery in Egypt, another god who will give them meat to eat.  By the other foods listed we can assume that other god to be associated with the Nile River and how it made agriculture possible in Egypt.  Those things in mind, I can see Moses and the LORD beginning to be a bit upset here because things are building up to another Golden Calf episode.  It wasn’t just a matter of complaining.

And, moreover, they threw the word “remember” in there.  Remembering what your god had done for you and being thankful was an official component of worship way back when.  In the book of Numbers this incident happened not long after their first celebration of the Passover in the Wilderness.  So, they should have been satiated with remembering how the LORD their God brought them out of Egypt, out of slavery and poverty and was taking them to their own land to make them to be a great nation.  But no!  How soon they are “remembering” the free fish and the slaves' food the so-called gods of Egypt provided them.  And now, they've got the nerve to say that their very lives are withering away.  Then the clincher, like gods themselves they rather snobbishly proclaim that there has been nothing but "this manna" set before them.  

I hope you can feel the gravity of the insult they are offering up to the LORD.  They start by asking "who will give us meat to eat?" And then added to it a showy display of bitter weeping.  Then they finished with "There's nothing but this manna."  No wonder the LORD wants to bury them in quail.  

So, what other god is it that they were longing for?  Well, there's an ancient Egyptian god who fits the bill and coincidentally for us English speakers, his name was Hapi.  He was a fertility god who made the Nile flood every year to make the soil rich in nutrients for growing crops.  He was the god responsible for feeding Egypt not only with vegetables but with fish as well.  Hapi was very important.  He gave (pardon the pun) Hapi-ness to the people, abundant food and festival.  But Yahweh, the LORD God of Israel, on the other hand, he was just a great warrior god, who when it came to food all he seemed able to give was manna and manna, miracle provision that it was, just wasn't Hapi enough.  They wanted more than the LORD God's gracious provision for them, indeed miraculous provision for them.  So the LORD gave them quail, so much so that it ran out their noses.  They got sick, and some of them got sick to death.

I have a punny name for that longing the Israelites had – Hapi-ness.  It’s the grass is always greener syndrome.  Rather than being satisfied and thankful for where we are in life, we seem to believe that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.  Then when we get on the other side we find the grass is squishy because it’s a septic bed.  There are things that our culture says that we need to be happy that always seem to involve the concepts of and cravings for that which is bigger and more than we have at present and it almost always seems to result in debt.  

One thing that we so often do is let Hapi-ness distract us from what God is doing in our lives.  We tend to think that when we are blessed with health and wealth and comfort then God has indeed blessed us.  But, that’s not the lesson that God brought his people into the Wilderness to teach them.  The blessing was God’s presence with his people and his miraculous providing just enough in the midst of their not getting the things that they believed would make them Hapi.  They just needed to remember and be grateful.  

So it is for us, God’s presence with us and God’s providing just enough of what we really need is where we need to be centered.  But we have a particular challenge.  I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that for most to all of us, we have filled our lives with Hapi things, with bigger and more such that God seems so distant, something that we simply believe exists rather than someone we know.

In the next couple of weeks, our congregations in turn will be gathering around the table of the LORD celebrating World Communion Sunday.  Part of the spiritual disciple we exercise with that simple ort of a meal is to come remembering how the Triune God of grace has acted savingly in each of our lives, proving himself faithful.  We come remembering that Jesus, his very self, is the True Manna come down from heaven from the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit to be himself our abundance of enough.  We come remembering how Jesus has come into our lives and changed us, healed us, transformed us and made us know that we are not alone.  We come seeing and tasting that giving ourselves in unconditional, wasteful love in the practice of generosity, hospitality, forgiveness, patience, kindness, fidelity, and self-control is where happiness can be found if indeed it can in this broken, hurting world diseased with sin.  

We should also come knowing that we too suffer from Hapi-ness.  We are indeed inclined to want to find a power greater than ourselves who will give us “meat” to eat rather than manna because it is difficult for us to simply let Jesus, in his presence and his power be our enough.  That Supper Jesus gave us is himself.  He is enough, abundantly enough.  Amen.

A Prayer Poultice

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Luke 18:9-14

I’m sure many of you have horror stories of when you were a child and had a chest cold and sore throat and it was likely your grandmother who whipped up a mess of boiled potatoes mushed up with mustard and onions and a few other stinky goodies; an old family recipe.  She then smeared it all over your chest and throat and it smelled so bad that you didn’t want to breathe, but it worked.  I was lucky.  My mom just rubbed Mentholatum all over me.  

Since the onset of pharmaceutical solutions to colds, aches, and infections we don’t see too many people going the route of treating such things with a batwing and skunk carcass poultice. A poultice is a form of treatment where you apply a cooked-up paste of stinky goodies to an infected area to absorb the infection into itself and relieve the inflammation in the area.  There are all kinds of recipes for poultices and as many of them work as don’t.  Regardless, the idea is that they will draw out the infection in the affected area and relieve the pain of inflammation.  It gets rid of the sickness and hurts.

I bet you didn’t know it but there is a theological term for this process of drawing out infection and relieving inflammation.  The term is expiation.  If you must know, it comes from the Latin word expiatio.  Piatio means devout, pious, or simply clean.  Ex means “Out of”.  The dirtiness or disease is taken “out of” thus leaving the person clean.  Theologically speaking, expiation refers to removing the disease of sin and its ill-effects from a person leaving the person clean or devout or pious.  

This word is important for talking about the sacrifices practiced by the Israelites in Old Testament times as well as and more importantly for talking about Jesus’ death as sacrifice.  In the Old Testament some of the sacrifices they had were for the purpose of expiation, for drawing out the sickness we have which we call sin and the hurtful feelings of shame and guilt that we feel when we realize we have sinned against God and against others and have hurt them and we need the relationship with God and those we’ve hurt restored.  These sacrifices were for unintentional wrongs committed.  God gave no means of expiation for intentional wrongdoing.  When your wrongdoing was intentional, you had to find some way to live with what you had done which was difficult to do because the penalty for intentionally hurting another was death. 

In ancient Israel they had three sacrifices of expiation.  The big one was Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement which I won’t get into today.  We don’t have the time.  It was the day on which the nation of Israel as a whole was expiated. The other two are called the Sin Offering and the Guilt Offering

Just a little bit about how this sacrifice stuff worked.  The underlying belief is that the only way the disease of sin and its ill-effects can be healed or removed from us is death.  Something has to die.  The Sin Offering and the Guilt Offering provided a means for life to pass through death that we might be cleansed.  Israelites believed that the life of an animal is in the blood.  When the priest sacrificed an animal and took its blood for ritual use, that was in essence life that had passed through death.  The priests then did interesting things with the blood of the sacrificed animal to expiate one’s guilt and shame.

The sacrifices for the Sin and Guilt offerings were meant to heal things with God by getting the bad stuff out of us like a poultice.  For the sin offering a person would take an animal to a priest.  They would lay their hand on it and confess what they had done.  In a cathartic way this transferred the sin, guilt, and shame to the animal.  The priest would then slaughter it and take some of the blood in a bowl.  This blood was now life that had passed through death on behalf of the person who brought the animal and was now cleansed of the person’s sin, guilt, and shame.  The priest then sprinkled some of the blood on the ground before the curtain outside the room where the Ark of the Covenant was kept and where God was supposed to be.  This was to symbolically present that person’s life that had passed through death and was thus clean to God so that fellowship with God was restored - forgiveness.  They did the same thing for the guilt offering but with that one the priest would also put some blood on the person’s earlobe.  Applying this blood, this life that had passed through death, to the person’s earlobe was meant to cleanse and heal the ear so that the person could hear the commandments of God better and keep them.

When we speak of Jesus’ death as being a sacrifice we are talking about expiation.  Jesus, God the Son, became human and in so doing took the Sin of humanity not just symbolically but really upon himself by becoming one of us. By his death he removed Sin from us.  When God raised him, he became the life of humanity that had passed through death and by the gift of the Holy Spirit to indwell us we are united to God in him.  Jesus is humanity’s expiation of sin, once and for all.  Jesus gives us this new humanity, this new human life by the gift of the Holy Spirit who lives in us each and bonds us together as a new humanity.  

I haven’t said anything about our passage yet so just allow me a couple of more minutes.  We needed that background first.  This Pharisee in the parable was a devout, Law-abiding man and indeed more than a bit pompous about it.  Because of his efforts to abide by the Law of Moses he feels he has the right to stand before God, toot his horn, and look down on “sinners”.  “Sinner” was a derogatory term, as offensive as some of the racial slurs that get thrown around today.  We find him looking with condemnation on this tax collector who is standing far off in the temple and is quite afflicted by the brutal fact that he had hurt a lot of people in so many ways and done so intentionally.  Please remember that I said there was no sacrifice for intentional sin.  This tax collector is so full of shame and guilt that he wishes he was dead.  When somebody beats their own breast, they are symbolically driving a knife into their heart.  

Tax collectors back then were Jews who collected taxes for the Romans and were therefore considered to be traitors.  They always inflated the amount of tax owed so they could skim off the top to the detriment of many poor people.  They would also have poor Israelites beaten and imprisoned for not paying up.  They got very wealthy and were very hated.  They were indeed “sinners” guilty of intentionally hurting God’s people for their own personal gain.  Most tax collectors truly were deserving of death.

Well, this tax collector is standing far off, staring at the ground, beating his breast, and desperately praying, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  He is so full of shame and guilt from having realized what he has intentionally done to God’s people to make himself rich.  He is sick to death with himself and he has got no way to get the shame and guilt out of his system because the expiation sacrifices were only for unintentional sins.  I don’t know if you’ve ever been sick of yourself for the shit you’ve done (sorry to use that word but it’s fitting) and felt the helplessness of there being no way to make right for it. I’ve been there.  All you can do is hope God can heal things.  This broken man certainly was there.

The tax collector’s prayer is interesting.  In our translation it seems he’s begging for mercy, or forgiveness from a judge.  But, the word in Greek isn’t the word they would have used for mercy.  It is the word they used for a sacrifice of expiation.  Literally, he is prayerfully begging, “God, be the sacrifice of expiation for me, a sinner.”  And…that is what God himself did in, through, and as Jesus by his death and resurrection and has applied it to us with the gift of his very self, the Holy Spirit.  He was, is, and one day for good drawing out humanity's infection of sin and healing the inflammation...like a poultice.

If you have ever been or are mired in the shame and guilt of the crap you have done intentionally or unintentionally, there is healing for that.  Come as you are into the midst of the people of God where dwells God in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit and start crying, start letting it out.  God will come to you and bear it away.  God will let you know you are His beloved child, beloved and forgiven.  And we the people of God won’t judge you.  We will hold you just as you are in the arms of the unconditional love of our Father in heaven to reinforce the love he has for you.  Just come.  

The Eastern Orthodox traditions have a prayer that they like to pray that is based on this tax collector’s prayer.  They call it the Jesus Prayer or the Prayer of the Heart.  It’s simply, “O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  Many in those traditions strive to pray this prayer continuously.  The past few weeks I’ve mentioned praying the Lord’s Prayer continuously.  So, this is another option particularly if you are carrying a burden of shame, guilt, and regret.  There is healing in this prayer.  Just go online and look up the Jesus Prayer.  The stories, the personal testimonies from people who have been healed, changed by praying it.  How situations in their lives, relationships have changed in the wake of praying this prayer.  Most importantly, how they have grown closer to God, their relationship with God and the sense of his presence deepening.  If you want a deeper relationship with God, pray this prayer, the Jesus Prayer, “O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  Amen.

 

Persistant Prayer

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Luke 18:1-8

When I was a child I spent many weekends at my best friend Ronnie’s house.  As he lived across town, it was too far for a kid to walk on his own.  I needed a ride to get there.  As my parents worked on Saturday, I would often have to wait for Ronnie and someone from his house to come and get me.  Ronnie would arrange that on his end.  We’d be on the phone and he would say “Pops says he can come get you.  We’ll be there in a few.”  The assumption was a few minutes.  I would stand at the living room window watching and waiting.  An hour would pass, an hour and a half.  I’d call again wondering where they were.  “He says we’ll leave in ten minutes.”  Another hour or so would pass while I stood staring out the window, watching and waiting.  I’d call again.  “We’re on our way.”  Another hour or so goes by.  I’m not exaggerating.  I spent many Saturdays, morning and afternoon, staring out that window waiting.  I’d call again.  “Are you coming.”  “Let me go check what’s up.”  I’d hear them bicker a bit in the background.  He’d come back to the phone. “Leaving now.”  A half hour later, he would show up with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend to get me.  Watching and waiting.  I wonder if I would have ever made it to his house if I had not kept calling.  I have no idea.  I don’t know what was going on Ronnie’s end of things.  Was his dad forgetful or had something more important going on. I don’t know.

Looking at our reading, this continual and persistent praying seems to be what faithfulness is and it almost seems like hope.  Jesus asked his disciples that rhetorical question, “When the Son of Man comes will he find faithfulness on the earth?”  That question comes at the end of a parable in which he was teaching them about their need to pray persistently so that they do not lose hope in God and fall away.  Jesus knew that being his faithful disciples in this world that crucifies its hope was going to get tough for them.  It was going to be quite difficult to live faithfully, which is to live according to hope by showing unconditional and forgiving love and steadfast commitment to Christian fellowship.  He likened this task to the hopeless impossibility of a falsely accused widow seeking vindication for her tarnished honour by going to a crooked judge who just likes to see people put to shame.  You ask and you wait.  You ask and you wait.  You ask and you wait.  You ask and you wait.  You keep at it until you’ve gotten on the judge’s (God’s) nerves enough that he grants your request.  That getting on God’s nerves part is probably Jesus showing a sense of humour, but we get the point.  We can relate to that widow.  So often when we pray, we do so wondering what it's going to take to get some action out of God, but then in time, God does act.

Praying continually and persistently is necessary to having faith and being faithful.  Apart from it, Jesus warns his disciples that they would fall into what we translate rather weakly as discouragement or a loss of heart. I’m going to get your Greek lesson out of the way quickly this morning.  The word Jesus uses quite literally means “in evil doing.”  The word is enkakeo (Those who like playing with Spanish homonyms think en caca.) and there are two senses in the way it gets used.  It can be either “to treat others badly or evilly” or “to wrongly cease doing something” meaning to quit on people or to leave fellowship for wrong reasons.  So, without this habit of continual, persistent prayer Jesus’ disciples will fall into the evil of a discouraged heart that leads them away from Christian fellowship or even to turn on it and treat it badly.

For time’s sake, instead of tracing this parable out in depth I’ll just go straight to the point and say that there is a correlation between Jesus’ disciples learning to pray continuously, persistently and the continuance of Christian community on earth.  Without this discipline, the habit of continual prayer among the disciples of Jesus, the church perishes.  It is in prayer that the personal faith, hope, and love that are the seeds of Christian community take root and sprout.  In prayer by the working of the Holy Spirit God changes us, transforms us to be in the nature of his children, Christ-like as Jesus is his Son.  As children trust their parents for everything, so prayer makes us look to our Father in heaven and trust him for everything. 

So, what is continual, persistent prayer?  Well, what goes on in our heads anyway? All of us worry.  We worry instinctively.  Apart from worry, we usually just let our minds go on in their own little worlds of imaginary conversations around emotions we can’t quite name.  Sometimes we get ideas.  A few of us can actually sit and think and sort things out.  Mostly, we just let our minds get preoccupied with whatever.  Continual, persistent prayer is taking control of our thought world with prayer, focusing on the things of God rather than the things of me. It’s how we turn over to the things in life that most concern us…again and again until God sorts it out.  Let me give you some other suggestions for continual, persistent prayer.  

First, there is finding a specific prayer to pray over and over in those times when we’re just letting our minds graze the green pastures of nattering, persistent, intrusive thoughts.  I like the Lord’s Prayer for this.  “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…” and so on.  I pray this prayer and think about what it means quite a lot, especially “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”  If I wake up in the middle of the night, I wait and listen if anyone in particular comes to mind then after that I just keep saying the Lord’s Prayer over and over in my head until I fall asleep.   When I’m exercising or cooking dinner or working in the yard or driving or grocery shopping, I pray the Lord’s Prayer over and over.  In fact, if I were laid up in the hospital or lying on my deathbed, praying the Lord’s Prayer over and over would likely be where my mind would be.

A more mission-oriented way of doing continual, persistent prayer would be to walk around our neighbourhoods praying for everyone.  Figure out when people are most active and get out there so you can actually see them and hear them.  There’s also actually talking to our neighbours and finding out what’s going on in their lives and keeping it in mind and praying about it.  If they are worried about something, bear that worry with them through prayer.  If they are okay with it, pray with them.  When we’re out and about we can take notice of the people around us and pray inwardly, “Lord, bless that person.”  If we see a young family walking a baby carriage up the street, if you’ve had kids you know what they’re going through, pray for them.

 We can make our homes prayer hubs.  Anybody that comes into our homes does not leave without us having first prayed for them.  This is especially so for our children and grandchildren.  If you start a ministry like that, be prepared for in time people will start coming to you. 

Some of you might be thinking “that’s what ministers are supposed to do.”  No, it’s what we do.  We pray.  That’s faith, faithfulness, loyalty, fidelity.  Prayer is the inroad of the Kingdom of Heaven coming to earth.  When people in churches take up this habit, this ministry of continual, persistent prayer, churches change because God begins to change the people in them.  If we are to take Jesus seriously in this passage, it is when we, his followers, depart from praying continually and persistently that churches become social clubs, or go into survival mode and die.  

So, if Jesus were to return today and come to this church would he find faith?  Would he find us praying?  Let us not forget that our God is not an unjust judge.  Our God deals in things like healing, hope, restoration, reconciliation, forgiveness, and even resurrection.  Let us not fall into the evil of disheartenment that destroys Christian fellowship.  Take up the work of continual, persistent prayer. Amen.

 

Thine Is the Kingdom, Power, and Glory

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Matthew 6:5-13

This past little while we’ve been working through the Lord’s Prayer and I would like to wind it all up and highlight a few things as a matter of summation just so they are in writing for posterity’s sake.  So, the Lord’s Prayer.  Jesus gave it to his disciples to pray when they pray, not if they pray. It occurs in two places in the Bible: Matthew’s Gospel and Luke’s Gospel.  Oddly, you will notice they are different from each other just as you will notice that the Lord’s Prayer, we pray on Sunday morning is different than either of those.  Matthew and Luke aren’t all that different so I’ll let that sleeping dog lie.  But it is important to note why the Prayer as we pray it is different from what it is in the Bible.

The Prayer as we pray it today is the product of a church that had become established.  In the 300’s and 400’s persecution of Christians by the state had ceased making it so that the Lord’s Prayer wasn’t so much a prayer for bringing in the Kingdom of God.  But rather, the “atmosphere” of the Prayer became daily life.

Jesus gave this prayer to his disciples under the expectation that they would be persecuted for their loyalty to him.  They lived in a world oppressively governed by arguably insane Roman Emperors who lived in a faraway place called Rome and thought themselves to be gods.  They loved being called Lord, Saviour, and Son of God.  The coinage minted during their reigns to be circulated all over the empire bore pictures of themselves and those titles; little pocket idols.  They extended their rule along with a system of taxation throughout the Empire by means of corrupt political leaders who wielded the power of the most brutal and efficient military the world had ever known.   

The early Christians went forth into the world to spread the Kingdom of God embodied in the fellowship of the Church.  They proclaimed the message that Jesus, the Messiah of the Jews, was the world’s true Lord and Saviour and really was the Son of God.  He was crucified but God raised him from the dead.  His death was for the forgiveness of sins and by his resurrection death, sin, evil, and the Evil One had all been defeated.  Jesus ascended into heaven to be crowned Lord of all creation and took his place at the right hand of God, his Father, awaiting the Day that the Father says “Enough” and sends him back to establish God’s kingdom on earth once and for all.  God’s kingdom will be known not for oppression, corruption, military thugs, and taxation but for justice, peace, economic equality, unconditional love, and forgiveness.  On that Day, there will be Recreation and Resurrection.  There will be a great feast, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, as well as a great judgement from which no one is excluded.  Loyalty to Jesus and the extent to which we have loved and forgiven others will be factors in how that process goes for each of us.

The first Christians also believed that behind the scenes of the reality that we can see, there is another one full of principalities and powers that have sway in what happens in our reality.  There are angels and there are demons.  In the unseen realm, God gets his way unhindered.  But it also needs to be said that what goes on in the unseen reality has to take into account what we do here in the seen reality.  God in love for us has given us free will and that, dear friends, complicates things with respect to the appearance of whether or not God is really in control.  For, too often it appears as though that dastardly enemy, Satan, the Evil One is in control even though he was defeated by Jesus by means of his death and resurrection.  Yet, the Evil One still hangs around because of us and our free will and God’s respecting of that.  But it won’t go on forever. The early Christians believed their true struggle was against the behind-the-scenes powers that Satan was using to influence every individual person as the line between good and evil runs through each of us.  As they went throughout the world proclaiming the Gospel, the Church spread and Christians were persecuted for it.

Well, that’s about the best I can do to paint the Biblical worldview of the early church.  That was the context in which they lived and in accordance with it Jesus taught them to pray to God, his Father as our Father in heaven – a very unusual way of addressing God.  No other god would tolerate that kind of familiarity.  God, our Father, his name is hallowed meaning holy which means different from all the others.  A name is a reputation gained from the way one has exercised their power.  Our Father, unlike anything or anyone else we might make into a god to worship and serve, actually loves us.  He is for us.  He gives life.  He heals, renews, restores, reconciles, forgives, even resurrects.  He listens and answers.  He even gives us his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, as a deposit on the Good that is to come when Jesus returns.  Anything else we could make into a god – money, power, celebrity, sex, a substance, work, even family – will only take life from us.

As the early church went into the world to proclaim the Gospel that this good God was saving the world through the Lordship of Jesus the Christ made evident in Christian community, they prayed “Your Kingdom come. Your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.”  God’s Kingdom comes through prayer and prayerful people just as we sing in that old hymn, “Thy kingdom come on bended knee.”  Praying for the coming of the Kingdom and for God’s will to be done helps us to focus on it, desire it, and realize it when Kingdom things happen.

We pray for a taste now of that feast to come – the joy, the new life, the fellowship of Love.  “Give us today the Bread of the Day.”  The bread of that Day is Jesus himself, the new life he has to give through the gift of the Holy Spirit.  The Presence of God with us is that small taste now of the good feast we will have in his kingdom.

The way of Jesus and his kingdom is most poignantly felt and displayed when we forgive those who have hurt us, even those we would call enemies.  Forgiving is so important that Jesus tells us to pray that God forgive us in accordance with how we forgive others.  The alternative is bearing a grudge and we know that if you bear a grudge long enough, it will eat at you like a cancer.  Forgive!

Jesus then tells us to pray that our Father not lead us or bring us to the time of trial: not temptation as we know the prayer, but trial.  A trial is something that happens that is bad enough and undeserved enough that it could make us walk away from Jesus and our loyalty to him.  These trials are orchestrated by the Evil One and carried out in ways personal to us…our worst fears, our weakest moments…and yes, God lets them happen as he did in the story of Job.  But God wouldn’t let them happen to us if he didn’t have faith in us.  Moreover, our awareness of God’s Presence with us and his strengthening sees us through.  

The last line of the Lord’s Prayer as we pray it on Sunday is actually not in the Biblical Prayer.  It’s a doxology, a praise – For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever and ever.  It was customary back then for prayers, especially prayers in the Bible, to end with a doxology and it would seem odd that Jesus didn’t include one.  So, as this doxology isn’t biblical, so to speak, I guess I have license to say what I will about it.  So, take what I say with a grain of salt.

I see this doxology, this moment of praise at the end of the Lord’s Prayer as a sort of reminder.  First, it is a reminder to us that no matter what, come what may, throughout it all things are in God’s hands and at the end of the day God will be praised.  Second, it is a reminder as well as a snub to Satan to pray this prayer and say this doxology while in the midst of the trials he has orchestrated in an attempt to destroy our faith in God, our loyalty to Jesus.  

I have lived through trials, through nightmares in my life from which I could not wake up.  Nightmares that only God can end.  I have learned that in the midst of these trials it is best to just keep praying.  When my thoughts get buried in rumination, dwelling on the hurt, carrying on silent conversations in my head directed at those who hurt me, pointing blame, wondering where God is, I stop myself by praying the Lord’s Prayer over and over and over and over.  Pray without ceasing Paul tells us.  I make myself ruminate on how God in his hallowed-ness has been faithful in love towards me and made his kingdom and will arise in my life time and again and will do so again and again even when all Hell has broken loose.  I sit still in the peacefulness of his Presence knowing that God is God, knowing that I am his beloved child.  I pray for the strength to forgive those who have hurt me and pray that God will bless them.  I pray for God to strengthen me through the trial reminding myself that ultimately it is Satan just trying to beat me and we can beat him because Jesus already has. 

And now the final reminder that arises from the doxology.  I know that the kingdom and the power and the glory belong to our Father in heaven.  I know I am God’s beloved child.  But when you’re in the middle of a trial, living a nightmare that you can’t wake up from, a nightmare only God can end, a nightmare you don’t understand, you just know it’s not deserved, and it hurts…in the midst of a trial you just want God, whose truly is the kingdom and the power and the glory,…you just want God to step up and be God.  Like the disciples on the Seas of Galilee in a violent windstorm in the swamping boat with Jesus sleeping on pillows in the stern, you want your Father to wake up and do the God thing.  To pray “For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory” can be for us a way of reminding God of who he is and it’s okay to do that.  Moses did it.  Many of the Psalmists and prophets did it.  It’s okay to be angry with God.  But remember, he will in the end prove himself faithful to you.  You will yet again praise him.  His power is made perfect in weakness. God’s Presence will be with you.  He will strengthen you to the end…and it will end.  Amen.