"Lord, teach us to pray": A sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Gloria, Lord's Prayer, and Creed (plus alphabet!),
'Shaftesbury Psalter' (12th c., England)

Preached at St. Andrew's Anglican Church, Moscow, Russia, on 28 July 2013.  (In preparing this sermon, I was surprised to learn that the readings—Genesis 18:20-32; Psalm 138; Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19); Luke 11:1-13—were the same as those for one of the first sermons I preached as a seminarian [here]; the three year lectionary cycle has gone by quickly!)

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“Lord, teach us to pray.” — Luke 11:1

When the Lord Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray, he gives us a prayer that contains and patterns all other prayers.  It has been called “an epitome of the whole Gospel,”[1] a summary of the teaching of Jesus.  As “an epitome of the whole Gospel” the Lord’s Prayer shows us how to order our desires toward the love of God and neighbor.  In it our Lord teaches us what to ask for and what to desire.  To pray his prayer is to ask for what he wants us to ask, to seek what he wants us to seek.  Put differently, in the language of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, learning to pray the Lord’s Prayer is one of the ways in which we who have “received Christ Jesus as Lord” continue “to live in him” (Col. 2:6), because in praying this prayer we are drawn close to the heart of Jesus, close to the heart of God.  As we learn from the Lord Jesus how to pray, he makes us more like himself.  So this morning, I want to look with you at how our Lord teaches us to pray, in order to see what he would have us desire, what he would have us love.

To begin, Jesus teaches us to address God as “Father.”  He teaches us to become what we are in him by grace.  That is, by the grace of adoption in Christ, we are made worthy to name our Creator as Father.  As St. Paul says, “God sent his Son….so that we might receive adoption as children.  And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal. 4:4–6)  So when we say, “Our Father,” we remember the great love the Father has given us in adopting us as children, the love from which absolutely nothing can separate us.  So to pray, “Our Father,” is the greatest of gifts.

And it is also a great responsibility, for we show by our actions that we are God’s children.  “Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return,” Jesus teaches, “...and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Lk. 6:35).  To pray “Our Father,” then, is to ask to become like God.  St. Maximus the Confessor put it this way: to pray “Our Father” is to be “eager to set on our life the features of the one who gave us life.”[2] “To set on our life the features of the one who gave us life.” We most truly pray “Our Father” to the extent that our lives are conformed to the life of Jesus the Son, the perfect image of God.  Jesus teaches us to seek to become a people whose entire lives say, “Our Father.”

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Notes on preaching

Detail of historiated initial 'P', Paul preaching (13th c., France)

Thinking about preaching recently, I returned to a paper I wrote for preaching class in divinity school in which the assignment was to develop a theology of preaching.  I found the exercise clarifying, so I thought I would share it here, with the caveat that the course textbook, Richard Lischer's The Company of Preachers, largely determined the figures with whom I engaged.

What is preaching?  To answer this question with a normative, theological account of the practice of preaching, it is clarifying to first look at how we use the word and then to see what theological claims follow.  The word “preach” entered the English lexicon through Middle English, deriving ultimately from the Latin praedicare (“proclaim”), a compound of prae- (“before”) and dicare (“declare”).  In ecclesiastical Latin, praedicare means “preach” and can carry connotations of praise, commendation, foretelling, and warning.  In Greek, the words most often translated as “preach”—kēryssō (“herald, proclaim”) and euangelizō (“gospelize”, “announce good news”)—carry the same connotation.  Etymologically, to preach is to declare before, both in the sense of saying beforehand and in the sense of announcing before others: preaching is public and preparatory.  Furthermore, that “declare” derives from declarare, from the combination of de- (“thoroughly”) and clarare (“make clear”), suggests that preaching involves making lucid what was once unclear.  This sense is that of the commonplace response to preaching in African-American congregations: “Make it plain!”  To preach, then, is a public and preparatory speech act of making something plain.

What Christian preaching makes plain is the gospel, the good news that the One who called light out of darkness and brought Israel out of Egypt has raised Jesus Christ from the dead.  To preach is to clearly proclaim the good news of God’s saving works, preeminently in the person and work of Jesus the Christ.  It is difficult to improve upon Luther’s succinct summary of the gospel as “a discourse about Christ, that he is the Son of God and became man for us, that he died and was raised, that he has been established as a Lord over all things.” [1]  Preaching is proclaiming this gospel.  Put differently, the task of preaching is to steadily point to the risen Lord Jesus, and by so doing to point to the Triune Lord, to direct our gaze toward the only source of life and salvation.

That preaching points to the risen Lord does not mean that every instance of preaching, every sermon or homily, needs to explicitly articulate the entirety of the gospel or to unpack every element of the mystery of faith: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”  However, every instance of preaching should fundamentally be about the Triune Lord.  Whatever else preaching does (e.g., encourage, convict, remind, lament) will be secondary to and derivative from what it says about God and God’s actions.  Preaching does all that it does by making plain God for us.  Luther made this point provocatively when he wrote, “…the preaching of the gospel is nothing else than Christ coming to us, or we being brought to him.” [2]  Carl Michalson offers a helpful gloss when he writes that in preaching, “time is telescoped in such a way as to make the event of God’s turning to us in Christ a reality of the present moment.” [3]  Of course, the preacher’s words are not sufficient in and of themselves to make present the risen Lord.  But this Lutheran, sacramental conception of preaching does underscore preaching’s fundamental task to bring home, to make tangible and concrete for us today, the significance of God coming to us in Christ Jesus.

More concretely, preaching seeks to make plain the Word of God, proclaimed in the public reading of the Scriptures.  Rowan Williams puts it very simply:  “When the leaders of the congregation deliver sermons, their main purpose is, or should be, to help believers understand the unity and harmony of the texts that have been read at an act of worship; and then to encourage them to live lives worthy of the good news that they have received." [4]   Preaching, then, necessarily involves exegesis of the biblical text.  Karl Barth described well the type of exegesis preaching calls for, when he wrote, 

We should not try to master the text.  The Bible will become more and more mysterious to real exegetes.  They will see all the depths and distances.  They will constantly run up against the mystery before which theology is like trying to drain the ocean with a spoon.  The True exegete will face the text like an astonished child in a wonderful garden, not like an advocate of God who has seen all his files. [5]

Preaching comes out of being mastered by the Word of God, and excellent preaching evinces the astonishment of a child at its wonders and depth.

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"Go and Do Likewise": Imitating the Good Samaritan, Imitating Christ

Detail of miniature, Good Samaritan, Rossano Gospels, Folio 7v, (6th c., Italy)

“[Jesus said], ‘Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise’.”  —Luke 10:36–37

Jesus uses the parable of the good Samaritan to show what it means to be a neighbor.  The parable shows that it was the Samaritan— “the one who did mercy”—who “was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers” (Lk. 10:36–37).  To be a neighbor is to do mercy, and the Lord commands us to “go and do likewise” (10:37).  

In calling us to imitate the good Samaritan, the Lord Jesus calls us to imitate himself.  He calls us to be like the one in whom the God of Israel has fulfilled his promise to do mercy (1:72), in whom “the tender mercy of our God” (1:78) has dawned upon us.  He asks us to be like the Samaritan who was filled with compassion (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη, lit. ‘moved from the bowels,’ 10:33) when he saw the half-dead man on the road to Jericho, just as Jesus had compassion (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη, 7:13, cf. 15:20) when he saw the mother of the dead man in Nain.  He commands us to, like the Samaritan, “love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return” (6:35).  In calling us to do like the Samaritan, he says effectively, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (6:36).

The good Samaritan, then, is a figure of Christ.  As the Venerable Bede puts it, “the Samaritan, giving a helping hand to the man found on the road and covered with wounds, is a figure of Jesus Christ, who, in a more worthy and sublime sense and with a special love, became our neighbor by taking upon himself our wounds to heal them.”*  Christ, who did not deny it when he was called “a Samaritan” (Jn. 8:48), comes to us, who are half-dead from sin, and heals us.  He bears us on his flesh to the inn, “the pandochium [πανδοχεῖον] —that is, the Church, which accepts everyone and denies its help to no one.”†  For our healing, he gives the “two denarii” of the love of God and the love of neighbor.‡  He cleanses us that we might produce good out of good hearts (Lk. 6:45), to become “tenderhearted” (Eph. 4:32), to share in the compassion of God.  “We love because he first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:19).

Christ is our neighbor:

“Let us, therefore, love him, for he is our Lord and God; let us love him as our neighbor, since, being our Head and we his members, he cannot be nearer to us. Let us also love those that follow him, and show that we love our neighbor as ourselves by giving them all spiritual and temporal help in our power.”§

* Bede the Venerable, Homily on Luke 10:23–27.  Bede draws on an ancient tradition of figural interpretation of the parable, reaching back through Augustine and Ambrose to Origen in the early third century.

† Origen, Homilies on Luke, 34.7.  The Greek word for “inn” (πανδοχεῖον) is compounded from the words “all” and “receiving.”

‡ Cf. Augustine, En. Ps. 126.11.

§ Bede the Venerable, op. cit.

"They desire a better country": On "Independence Day" as a Holy Day (A Polemic)

Christ Pantocrator icon. St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai (6th c., Egypt)

When the bishops, clergy and laity of the Episcopal Church, in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, established “Independence Day” as a Major Feast and adopted what I will not dignify with the name of “collect” for the same, they showed some residue of wisdom in choosing propers that expose the theological incoherence of making a civic holiday a Holy Day of the church. —As for what is claimed in the “collect”, its historical falsity is patently obvious: it is simply not true that “the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us” in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (as its grammar suggests).  And the claim that the founders “lit the torch of freedom for nations then unborn” is not only an ill-conceived flight of rhetorical fancy, but also a display of such willful blindness to contradictory aspects of the history of the United States (I need only mention slavery) that it looks like self-deception at best, and, at worst, a blatant lie.— Now, because I am preparing “to engage to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of The Episcopal Church,” it seems to me a matter of obedience that I submit to the church’s decision to observe “Independence Day,” for to refuse altogether to do so would be to display a prideful contempt for the authority of the church.  Happily, by confining myself to the appointed propers from Holy Scripture I can both observe the day and seek to clarify what is confused by its very observance as a Major Feast.

What is confused by observing the day “these American states became independent with respect to civil government”* as a Major Feast (i.e., a Holy Day whose observance is not optional)?  Simply put, it confuses the distinction between the people of the United States and the people of God to place “Independence Day”—the feast of the founders of the United States—on the same footing as the feasts of the Apostles and Evangelists, of Saint Joseph and Saint Mary the Virgin, of Saint Stephen and the Holy Innocents.  It threatens to confuse the liberties granted (unevenly and belatedly) to (some) people of this land with “the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21), to obfuscate the difference between the freedom for which “Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5:1)—the perfect freedom of serving the Lord of all—with the sham freedom proffered by the state, which “looks like freedom, but feels like death.”**

Now to the appointed lessons from Scripture.  The psalm displays the proper activity of the people of God, the people who confess God as King, who sing together, “I will exalt you, O God my God,” simply because the Lord is great “and greatly to be praised” (Ps. 145:1, 3).  They praise God in his “faithful servants” whose lives have shown forth the glory of God’s “everlasting kingdom” (vv. 10–12), but they say nothing of those who pledge allegiance to any of the kingdoms of this world.

Accordingly, the epistle remembers God’s faithful servant Abraham, who obeyed God’s call because he considered God faithful.  Abraham lived in tents because “he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God,” the city prepared by God for those who “confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth” since they “desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Heb. 11:10, 13, 16).  Those who, like Abraham, are assured of God’s faithfulness endure sufferings for the sake of the better country, the kingdom of God.  The author of the letter to the Hebrews exhorts them to gain confidence above all from the example of Jesus, “who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (12:3); indeed, the knowledge that they “possessed something better and more lasting” has already enabled them to endure persecution, to have “compassion on those who were in prison,” and to cheerfully accept the loss of their possessions (10:32–34).  Living in the freedom of faith, they go to Jesus and share in his sufferings, offering through him praise to God and sharing what they have with others, “for here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (13:13–16).  Only in that city is there true liberty and justice for all.

All those who “belong to Christ” (Gal. 2:29)—both Jew and Gentile—are citizens of that city, heirs of the kingdom.  As such, all those who belong to Christ share in the vocation of Israel, described so concisely in the passage from Deuteronomy.  Chosen by God’s love “out of all the peoples,” the people of Israel are to demonstrate that everything in creation belongs to the Lord precisely by giving themselves entirely to the Lord (Dt. 10:14–15).  They are called to imitate the Lord their God who brought them out of Egypt:  

“the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.  You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Dt. 10:17–19)

'Tsar of Glory' icon. 14th cent. Bulgarian. (Tretyakov Gallery). 

Israel exists to love and serve the Lord with their whole being, to praise the Lord “who has done for you these great and awesome things” (v. 21) in bringing Israel out of Egypt.  God takes a people for his possession so that they might “proclaim the mighty acts of him who called [them] out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pt. 2:9); those mighty acts, that is, made known to us in creation, in Israel, and, above all, in Christ Jesus.  These acts are constitutive of the identity of the people of God, including that part found in the Episcopal Church; these are the “wondrous acts” (Ps. 145:6) of the Lord the church is called to proclaim—not the independence of the United States (although even this did not happen apart from God’s providence).

The church is the people who acknowledge Jesus as the Lord, and who pray “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.”  The church lives in obedience to her Lord, who says “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  The Lord of the church commands, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” and calls her to imitate God’s perfection (Mt. 5:44, 48).  The church is to become like Christ Jesus, who “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death” (Phil. 2:8) and in whom is her unity (Gal. 3:28).  How then can it not be detrimental to her identity to observe as a Holy Day the civic holiday of the nation that idolatrously claims to make one out of many (E pluribus unum)?

* Preface to the BCP.

** A lyric from Leonard Cohen’s song, “Closing Time.”