“The Lord’s Prayer - Your Kingdom Come” Luke 11: 2-4

A decade ago, I had the opportunity to travel to France to a place of retreat known as Taize. Taize is this beautiful place where young people from around the world come to pray by the thousands each week and reflect on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Several times a day, bells chime, ushering everyone into the chapel, where folks scatter around, sitting on the floor. And you pray. Yes, sometimes you pray silently. But other times you pray by singing songs together in a variety of different languages. Each song is simple but powerful, and is repeated over and over and over again until it sinks into your heart. Here’s one of those songs, “The kingdom of god is justice and peace. And joy in the Holy Spirit. Come, Lord and open in us the gates of your kingdom.”

“Your Kingdom come.” Simple words to say, but perhaps the hardest to pray in Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. Why? Because when we are saying “God’s Kingdom come” by necessity that means that it is not our Kingdom. God’s will. God’s way. God’s Kingdom. Not ours.

Perhaps there was no greater struggle for the early disciples than thinking about the Kingdom of God. Mostly because they had an image of what the Kingdom of God and the Messiah coming to usher it in when supposed to be like and here comes Jesus teaching them all sorts of other things about the Kingdom. 

If we are honest, we still do the same thing today as the Church. I get a little uncomfortable whenever folks tell me that they know all about God or the Kingdom of God. Why? Because none of us know everything about anything relating to God. Instead, we each catch a glimpse. A small part.

We all have favorite scripture verses or stories. Things that we return to again and again. On of my colleagues has an answer to “what is your favorite verse or passage?” That’s a little different than most folks. 1 Corinthians 13:12. Doesn’t strike a bell? That’s because what we remember about 1 Corinthians 13 is all of the beautiful stuff about what love looks like the body of Christ, but here is verse 12: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” In other words, I only know a little bit now, but I will more fully know in God’s prefect timing. 

We only know part about the Kingdom now. Why? Because here and now we believe that the Kingdom of God is present, but is yet to come as well. We only catch glimpses of the Kingdom in our present time, but we know that it will be more fully revealed by God when the time is right. 

Most of you have a ring of some sort that you wear. Do me a favor and take it off for a moment. Is there any way that you can envision hold that ring where you see every single part of it at once? If you have a ring with a stone or gem, as you rotate it around you can only see pieces of it at a time. If you look down on the stone you can only see the top and not the bottom. If you have a band - you won’t see the part that your finger is holding. If you place it in your palm, you will only see the part facing you, not the portion that is lying down. Does that mean you don’t know that it’s a ring? Of course not. But you have to trust that all of it is held together, even when you can’t specifically see certain sections.

So it is with the Kingdom of God being both present and not yet. We only see glimpses of it here and there, but we trust and believe that God is at work and that God’s reign is present and will be made known to all of creation.

But here’s the trick. We need to be cautious that we do not make the pieces that we cannot see, that which we do not fully understand in our image, instead of in God’s. I’ll say that again - We need to be cautious that we do not make the pieces that we cannot see, that which we do not fully understand in our image, instead of in God’s.

When we don’t understand something, we have a tendency like those first disciples to substitute in what we think or wish or sometimes even believe, even if it doesn’t match up with God’s vision. Why did those first disciples think that the Messiah was going to be a conquering hero who comes to usher in peace through military might? Because they looked at some of the words of the prophets and extrapolated it out. It made sense to them in their reading of scripture. 

Sometimes we do the same thing.

Other times we don’t even think about God’s Word when we come up with our own vision of what the Kingdom of God is going to be like. For example, let’s go back to the words from that song of prayer from the beginning of our time. “The kingdom of god is justice and peace.” Let’s break it down further. Peace. What is the Biblical understanding of peace? Shalom - wholeness. Isaiah says that the lion will lie down with the lamb. Isaiah also says that they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Yet, is that the first thing that comes to our mind when we think about peace? Maybe. Maybe not. 

When we pray “your Kingdom come” we are essentially saying, God I don’t fully understand this, but I want to be a part of it. I want to be a part of what you are doing. I trust you. 

So what’s our role in all of this as the people of God? Beyond trusting in God and God’s Kingdom, what are we to be doing now to proclaim it? We as the Church are to be a foretaste of the Kingdom of God. 

Once upon a time Sarah Lee (the baking company most known for being in the freezer isle) had these wonderfully delicious treats they sold called cheesecake bites. Just small pieces of cheesecake, often dipped in some type of chocolate that you were to eat one of. The idea of the cheesecake bite was just to get a little taste. Not to have a whole piece. Just a taste of. 

Or one of my professors described foretaste this way - when you go through Sam’s Club on a Saturday when all of those samples are out. They just give you a little taste in hopes that you will want more. 

We do not have to have every piece figured out about the Kingdom in order to be a foretaste of it. In order to be the ones that point to the Kingdom of God and helping folks want more of the fullness of what is to come. When we live as the people of God, which is radically different than the kingdom of this world, then we are being a foretaste. When we pray and truly mean, not my will God, but yours - we are being a foretaste. When we live for God’s Kingdom, even when it means setting aside our own desires - we are being a foretaste. When we are people who love God and love our neighbor well - we are being a foretaste. When we come around the communion table and proclaim “until you come and we feast at your Heavenly banquet” - we are being a foretaste.

Church, “Your Kingdom come” are powerful words. When we pray then, may we let them wash over us and change us. Not so we can have every little thing figured out, but so we can be a foretaste of what is to come. Amen. 

The Lord’s Prayer - Hallowed Be Your Name - Luke 11: 2-4

The Lord’s Prayer is a powerful prayer that churches around the globe pray Sunday after Sunday. In fact, one of my favorite times in worship in seminary would be when we would pray this pray together in the language that was most natural for people and English would mix with Korean and Spanish and a host of other languages from around the world, as a reminder of just how important this prayer is to our spiritual life together. 

Yet, if you ask many people where you find the Lord’s Prayer in scripture they would immediately cite the Gospel of Matthew, which is certainly true. But there is another version, a version that we are not as familiar with, that we find in the Gospel of Luke. 

We are going to spend the next several weeks dwelling in this Gospel text together because it is so vital to our lives together. To our faith journey. What we miss, however, is what is happening right before and after this prayer as well. 

Jesus found himself off praying in a certain place and when he was finished, one of the disciples asked that he would teach them to pray. He went out to explain that John had taught his disciples how to pray - so can’t Jesus teach them. 

I want you to take a moment and let the gravity of what this unnamed disciple is saying sink in for a moment. The folks that Jesus called, they were Jewish. They may have had different ways that they went about their daily lives, some being Zealots, others tax collectors, and still others fisherman, just to name a few, but they were tied together by the central, core identity of being children of Israel. They were also all men, meaning that they at least went to basic religious schooling. And yet, here are these folks who are now asking Jesus how to pray to God. 

Yet, we often find ourselves in the same place as well, don’t we? Usually someone had to teach us how to pray. Whether we learned it from watching our grandparents at their knees, or hearing our parents pray over the kitchen table before a meal, or with a patient Sunday school teacher or friend, we learned how to pray somewhere. 

Maybe for some of us, its been so long since we learned how to pray that we forgot who first taught us. I have the opportunity to watch little children grow up right before my eyes. Most Sunday evening my brother and his family, as well as my grandparents gather around my mom’s kitchen table as we share a meal together. More often than not, we will ask my niece, Gracie, if she would like to pray. And she does. Friends, she is 4. She learned to pray from her parents and her wonderful Sunday school teachers and around that kitchen table. We, as a family, are teaching her how to pray. 

Do I think the disciples did not know how to pray at all? No. They grew up going to synagogue. But they saw something about how Jesus was praying, how Jesus was coming before God is this posture of relationship and trust and they are essentially saying - I want that. Teach us how to approach God. 

And Jesus does. In the Gospel of Luke, he keeps it so simple. Saying when you pray say: 

Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our sin, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to a time of trial. 

Five sentences that started out with this bold statement, “Father, hallowed be your name.”

It seems so natural to us, coming together and praying this prayer, every week that we miss the radical nature of what Jesus is saying. 

First and foremost, God is Father to Jesus. In other words, the basis of this prayer, of all prayer, is the relationship we have with God. And Jesus is inviting his disciples to also call God Father. To also have a relationship with this God whom they can approach at any time and in any place through prayer. 

Now to our ears, Father may seem a super formal way to address someone. But remember, folks aren’t going around teaching people to call God Father. God is God. Or called Jehovah. Or the Lord. Often it is tied to attributes of who God is - like Jehovah Jirah, the great provider. Instead, Jesus is telling his disciples to tie their prayer life not to what God can do, though God can do great things, but to a deep and abiding relationship. 

But God is not just Father. God is holy. Hallowed be your name is really formal language once again to our ears that means, holy is your name. Or I honor your name. 

What does it exactly mean to honor someone? It means that they have a special place in our lives. That we want to treat them with special regard. To respect them. So how do we honor God? By how we live our lives. And how we live our lives out there in the world, has a whole lot to do with our relationship with God in here, in our hearts. 

The way we live our lives should be a witness in the world that we honor the name of God. And for those who identify themselves as Christians, how we live our lives bears witness to Christ’s name as well. 

God’s name is holy because God is holy. Yet, even as folks who stumble into sin and fail to honor God as we should, we still are called God’s children. We still seek to get up each day and honor God with our lips and our lives. And by approaching God this way, first, as we pray, it is a reminder to us of how we are to approach God and how we are live our lives for his glory in the world. 

Friends, there are many ways to pray. We can sing our prayers. Pray them silently. Pray them out loud. Pray them as we work. Pray them as we create. Pray them any time of the day. For some it means praying at the same time each day and for others its whispering to God at moments throughout the day. When we remember that prayer is a way to communicate to the holy God we have relationship with, there is no wrong way to pray. 

In fact, we will never reach the depth and breadth of prayer. There will always be more ways to grow in our relationship with God. Always more to listen to. 

So as we approach this sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer I have a few challenges for you: First, take time to remember who taught you to pray. If they are still with us on this earth - say thank you. If they are not, thank God for them. They taught you about this God who loves you and who wants to spend time with you in prayer. Second, take time to teach someone how to pray. Whatever that may look like in your life. Teach someone what it means to pray to our holy God. Third, take time to pray. Pray for one another. But also pray to have a quiet heart that can also listen to the God who loves spending time with you. “Our Father, hallowed is your name.” Amen. 

“Generosity” 2 Cor 8: 1-15

When I was in college, most of the group of friends that I hung out with were MK’s - missionary kids. I had friends that lived all over the globe, many of whom left their families in other places to travel back to the United States for college. Some of those friends are now serving as missionaries themselves. 

There is so much that inspired me about the service and call of these families. They often went years without seeing family members besides those who lived with them. Many were in dangerous situations. And all were dependent upon the generosity of individuals and churches who would never see their ministry in person, but believed the work of God was being done. 

The apostle Paul has had some difficulties with the Corinthians. If you read 1 Corinthians you know that they struggled in Paul’s absence to live into what it meant to be the body of Christ. They were treating each other poorly. Excluding folks from the agape meal dinner table based on their status. They were trying to one-up one another when it came to spiritual gifts. They were a mess.

Now Paul is coming to them in 2 Corinthians and talking to them about how being the body of Christ expands well beyond the folks you see week after week. Being the body of Christ means helping out other brothers and sisters who you may never be able to meet. 

Paul talks about other churches - like that in Macedonia - who struggled with poverty but gave what they could, and often above their means, so that other churches could continue to spread the Good News. The question is are the Corinthians willing to be generous as well?

I think generosity is a word that scares us. The first thing lots of folks think when there is a call to be generous is about how they can’t do that. There simply isn’t enough. Or that was back in Bible times, but today we have bills to pay. And I get it. It is hard to be generous. And that word can carry a lot of baggage. 

And yet, on the other hand, I think of my friends who are missionaries, and without people being generous there is no way that they could live into their call from God.

Paul is asking the Corinthians to be generous in order to help the poor through the church in Jerusalem. While Paul traveled around the region on three missionary journeys and would end up back in Jerusalem from time to time, the people in the church in Corinth may never meet those in the church in Jerusalem. Remember that the Corinthians were gentiles, so they weren’t traveling in and out of Jerusalem for religious ceremonies the same way that Jewish believers would have been. They simply had to trust Paul that there was a need. And trust what it means to be the body of Christ. 

And maybe that’s our biggest struggle with generosity. It is a complete and utter act of trust. It’s trusting God to provide. It’s trusting that we are better together when we pull our resources for a cause. It’s trusting that the resources we give sacrafically will be used to bring honor and glory to God. 

Paul knows that generosity, because it is an act of trust, cannot be commanded or compelled. Have you ever tried to make someone trust you? It generally does not work by demanding it. In fact, that often can have the opposite result. Instead, trust is built over time, and it is only within that foundation that people can give of their very selves. 

Just as generosity cannot be compelled, neither can gratitude. One of the traps that we can fall into is thinking that if we give, that other’s must be enthusiastic about our gift. In other words, we want to regulate another person’s response and gratitude, in order to make our gift worth giving. 

But as Paul reminds us, we don’t give in order to get praise from other people. We give because of what Christ has first given us. And because of the love of Christ that we have in our hearts, we have a desire to be generous. 

For Paul, the specific call that he is issuing is to be the body of Christ. To actually be the One Church. Whenever we get together and pray for the catholic, small c, church in the apostles creed, that is what we are praying for. The universal church, all together under the lordship of Jesus. It doesn’t matter what denomination you are, we are the church together. It doesn’t matter where you are located - here or half way around the world, we are the church together. And we are called to support one another any way that we can, trusting that we have been a call in our specific location in order to be witnesses to the Gospel. 

One of the things that I deeply appreciate about being the United Methodist Church is that we try to live this out. It’s part of what it means when we say that we are connectional. When we give, we help support the education of pastors. We support African University and the black college fund. We help Neighborhood Center and the United Methodist Home for Children. We help set up new places of worship for new people, and so much more. What we give, we give together to people we may never meet, all so that the Good News can be shared far and wide.

Why do we give? Because God has been generous to us. Why do we give? To be an example throughout the body of Christ. 

But here’s the thing about generosity - it has to be genuine. It has to be between you and God. This isn’t about anyone else telling you what to give. Paul writes that there should be a fair balance in giving - its not about each person giving the exact same dollar amount. It’s about giving in proportion to what you have received. But its also not just about giving a little something extra either - its about giving knowing that we all give together because we are in this work of God together. 

When we are generous church, its not just about being generous with our money - even if that is directly what Paul is addressing in this particular passage. It’s about being generous with our very selves - our time, our talent, our treasure. It’s about truly being the body of Christ that cares for one another and cares for the world. 

When we start to think about generosity as more than a discussion of scarcity and abundance, and open it up to being a discussion about what it means to be the body of Christ, we start to see that what we give is about hearts and lives being changed. It’s about making disciples and transforming the world. Even parts of the world that we may never see. So why do we give, why are we generous? We give because in the words of Jesus, my friends, the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Amen. 

Walk by Faith, Not Sight - 2 Cor 5: 1-21

Jeremy Camp is a popular Christian singer and songwriter. In 2002 he released a song entitled Walk by Faith in which was this chorus: “I will walk by faith, even when I cannot see. Well because this broken road, prepares your will for me.”

While this song skyrocketed to number 1 when it was released, I wonder if we could truly say the same thing in our life here and now. Are we truly walking by faith?

Months ago in a Bible Study at Grace, we were discussing how many of the prophets were calling Israel to an attitude of repentance because they had stayed by worshipping other Gods or profaning the alters of Yahweh by making images. Why were folks doing that? Because if we are honest, sometimes we want to see. Sometimes its hard to walk by faith, so we create images to direct our worship of God at, all the while not realizing what we are doing.

In Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth, the folks he is writing to are struggling with this question of what it looks like to walk by faith as well. Especially what it looks like to walk by faith when we are here on earth at home, but not yet in our heavenly home. Because of that we are only seeing glimpses of the hope we have in Christ, and that is what we need to cling to in order to keep going. 

Jeremy Camp knew what it meant to groan in this earthly body and how important was to cling to the hope of God even when we don’t understand and can’t see. In October of 2000, Camp married is wife Melissa. In February of 2001, she died from ovarian cancer. That song Walk by Faith, was written during their honeymoon, while neither of them fully knew what laid ahead. A movie based on his experience is coming out later this year entitled I Still Believe. 

For Paul, walking by faith is all about trusting God. The problem is that sometimes it seems like it is a lot easier to trust what we can see.

Growing up my brothers and I like do the Highlight Magazine picture searches. We would sit on a couch together at my babysitters until we found all of the pictures. How many of you remember those pictures in the magazine? Down at the bottom there would be a list of the pictures of the items you were to be looking for. Now what if I told you that you were to look at the picture but didn’t give you the key? Didn’t tell you what you were to find? 

That’s what it feels like to walk by faith and not by sight sometimes. It feels like we are trying to go through this world perceiving the movement of the Spirit, but also knowing that we many not recognize or understand everything. 

But even if we can’t fully see, it does not mean that we cannot trust. For Paul, the entire reason that we can trust God is because we have a relationship with him. Because we know God personally. God through that relationship has proven himself to be worthy of our trust again and again and again. So even in the moments when we feel like we are stumbling through the dark or are moving through this world and aren’t exactly sure what we should be seeing - God is still there.

That’s all we can do in these earthly bodies - walk by faith - walk in trust. 

Or maybe that isn’t all we can do. Because once we do catch those glimpses of the spirit - we want to share them. When we receive the gift of God, we want to share it. Even if this earth is not our final destination, we want folks to come to know the saving love of Jesus Christ. 

The prophet Jeremiah wrote at a time of captivity and he had the hard task of telling folks who were longing to get back to Jerusalem to hunker down, because it was going to be a while. In fact this what he wrote in the 29th chapter, But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. If the Israelites were to seek the welfare of the place were they were in captivity, should we not be seeking to share the Good News and bless folks here and now? 

Does that mean that everyone will accept what we have to say? No. But we keep going. Because it is the love of Christ that empowers us to share. It’s the love of Christ that holds us together. It’s the love of Christ that urges us on. 

Notice that I said that it is the love of Christ that empowers us to share. Christ does not compel us to walk by faith. Nor does Christ force us to share. Rather it is something that we want to do as we grow in our love for our Savior. 

So how do we get to this place of love and surrender? Well, it requires a death. A death to our own way and desires. Meister Eckhart, a spiritual writer, puts it this way: “The spiritual life is not a process of addition, but rather of subtraction”. We need to have subtracted from us those things that fill us and prevent us from trusting Christ fully - things like ambition, addiction and unforgiveness. We need to die to ourselves and ask instead that we be transformed by Christ. 

Part of the mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world, but friends before we get to the transforming the world part, in order to be a disciple we ourselves need to be transformed. To have Christ enter into our hearts and start stripping away the parts of us that keep Christ from being the center of our lives. Is that the transformation we really want?

For Paul, he is trying to encourage the church in Corinth to also strip away their dependance on the law - to the point where they thought that salvation could come through the law. Instead, he wanted them to accept and trust in that gift of faith. 

But here is the thing about faith - that’s not about us. It’s not about what we’ve accomplished on our own. It’s not about our own goodness. It’s all about the one we trust. The one we follow. The one we proclaim. The one who transforms us. 

So where are you at this morning? Can you join the apostle Paul in saying that you walk by faith, not by sight. Can you join our brother in Christ, Jeremy Camp, in singing “I will walk by faith, even when I cannot see. Well because this broken road, prepares your will for me.”

If you aren’t quite there yet, what is one step you can take this week to walk by faith? What is one way you can lean into the arms of God and trust him?

Because that’s what faith is, dear Church. That is what it truly means to walk by faith - to go forward with God step, after step, after step - one step at a time. Amen.