Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, July 25, 2010
Solemn Mass
By the Reverend Stephen Gerth 

Year C: Genesis 18:20-33; Psalm 138; Colossians 2:6-15; Luke 11:1-13
 

John and Jesus prayed, and their disciples wanted to pray like them. What John and his disciples prayed we do not know. But John prayed in such a way that his disciples wanted to share in that prayer. In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus’ disciples want to share in the prayer they observe in his life. 

There are two forms of the Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament, one in Matthew, and the shorter one in Luke -- no early text or commentary contains the familiar doxology.[1] That the two are different tell us some important things about how the first and second generations of Christians understood and used the oral and written traditions they knew as the gospel. 

Dom Gregory Dix in a meditation that begins to bring to a close his monumental 1945 work, The Shape of the Liturgy, remarks about the Eucharist that, “This very morning I did this [celebrating the Eucharist] with a set of texts which has not changed by more than a few syllables since Augustine used those very words at Canterbury on the third Sunday of Easter in the summer after he landed.”[2] I read those words before I went to seminary, and at some important level they have been one of the lenses through which I have studied and prayed the Eucharist ever since. The problem, of course, is Dix’s understanding wasn’t really complete – to be generous.[3]  Liturgical uniformity as we know it was simply impossible before the invention of the printing press and the spreading of literacy in the West with the beginning of the Renaissance. 

I’ve begun reading a new edition of Paul Bradshaw’s book Daily Prayer in the Early Church.[4] The book begins by looking at current research on the question of how Jews and Christians would have prayed before the end of the first century. It turns out, there practices were less uniform than both Jewish and Christian scholars concluded in the past. 

Jesus and his disciples grew up with some set forms of prayer and along with the set cultic rites of the Temple, but we know little beyond the outline of their worship. We just don’t have the records. 

It’s pretty much the same for the prayer of the first Christians. Jesus and his disciples prayed as Jews, but Jesus doing was something else that his disciples noticed. He was new. Even before the resurrection, Matthew and Luke agree that the disciples wanted to enter Jesus’ new prayer. Matthew puts the prayer in the first act of Jesus ministry – in the Sermon on the Mount.[5] In Luke, Jesus is already on his final journey to Jerusalem. The disciples have been with him for a while, and again, they want to share in his prayer. 

Joseph Fitzmyer translates the prayer this way. Luke’s version of the prayer this way: 

Whenever you pray, say:

“Father!

May your name be sanctified!

May your kingdom come!

Give us each day our bread for subsistence.

Forgive us our sins,

 for we forgive everyone

who does wrong to us.

And bring us not into temptation.”[6] 

I don’t appreciate any difference between plain “Father” and “Our Father” – the subject, of course, of much discussion. Jesus called God “Father” and taught his disciples to call God “Father.” There are Old Testament references to God as Father, but this use in prayer and in the teaching of Jesus is a new thing.[7] And it’s in all the gospels.

In Mark, as Jesus and his disciples leave Jerusalem and return to Bethany on the day he has cleansed the temple, Jesus says, “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against any one; so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”[8] In the garden of Gethsemane, Mark’s text preserves the Aramaic, “Abba, Father” as Jesus asks for the cup to be taken from him.[9] 

John places the cleansing of the temple at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. He says, “You shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”[10] In John’s community Jesus always knows who his Father is and he speaks easily of this relationship from the beginning to the end of his gospel. On the morning of resurrection he tells Mary Magdalene, “Go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”[11] 

It might be said, that in the same way the heart of the gospel is the death and resurrection of Jesus, the heart of Christian prayer is an awareness of the relationship of all believers as children of God – and our relationship to each other as sisters and brothers. 

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Copyright © 2010 The Society of the Free Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York, New York. 

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