Sermon Tone Analysis
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Thank you so much Amanda.
It is truly an honor for me
to be with you all this morning to bring this sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer to close,
and to lead you later in the communion liturgy of the Anglican Church of North America.
I don’t know about you but I’ve had a pretty volatile relationship with prayer throughout my life.
Prayer has been
a regular and rich practice,
it has been a formality,
it has been my cosmic fire alarm,
it has been something I’ve had no interest in doing,
and it has been something I couldn’t do.
It’s something I’ve seen all my life but not something I’ve understood well.
So I can appreciate Jesus’s followers asking him to teach them to pray.
And I wonder can you relate to this at all?
What is prayer?
Is it a duty?
Is it a formula that pins God to act in our behalf?
Is it a supernatural begging session,
a divine Grub Hub or Door Dash order?
Does it do anything?
Does it work?
How many times have you prayed and not received an answer?
If God knows what we need before we ask, why does he ask us to pray at all?
Have you ever been here before?
Well just to set the expectations, I’m not necessarily going to answer all these questions to your satisfaction,
but want to hit on a couple points from the last line of the Lord‘s prayer as it relates to the whole prayer.
“for yours as the kingdom, and the power, the glory forever and never.”
The first thing is we end the prayer where we began, focused on God.
And in some way or another every one of our speakers has addressed significant assumptions made in each line of this prayer.
I wonder if you’ve noticed these.
Dylan began by observing that we are addressing God as father.
This suggests God exists,
has some relationship with humans,
stands in some relationship to us as father,
and that we have the privilege of addressing him.
And as he encouraged us realize, God is parenting redemption in our lives.
Salvation is not just a past event or even some thing that will happen to us in the future,
it is some thing that is happening right now.
Friends, God seeks to birth new life in our ordinary and messy lives.
Prayer, has something important to do with this.
The good news Branches is that God invites us to participate in bringing his kingdom here and now through prayer.
Justin used his fancy word, penumbra, to highlight the tension we feel between our redeemed status and the fact that we don’t always live under the authority or reality of the kingdom of God.
The assumption here is that God‘s kingdom is possible in our ordinary and messy lives.
It also suggests that we have some role in whether or not God‘s kingdom will be made manifest in our midst.
Imagine any given family feud, scuffle with a coworker,
or disagreement with a close friend, spouse, sibling or neighbor.
What would happen if one of the people involved asked for God‘s kingdom to come here on earth as it is in heaven?
What if two or three or four people did that?
Amanda challenged us to see that whether rich or poor, we are invited to trust God by asking for our daily bread.
The assumption here is that we are not in control of our livelihood to the extent that we believe.
Or it challenges us to see that perhaps the livelihood we are pursuing
or the way in which we are pursuing it is not the one God desires for us.
It assumes that we need daily bread.
We live in dependence upon God and that he has the ability to provide for our needs.
How often do you struggle with yourself and others for this provision?
Our entire financial system and economy are designed around this.
David totally distracted us, I mean instructed us by his cheeseburger metaphor.
We need every part of this Lords prayer in our lives.
He reminded us that
whether literally or figuratively we are all punched in the face and punch others in the face
and that forgiveness fully names evil for what it is while offering a new way of being and a new way forward.
The assumption here is that we can live in a way that promotes brokenness and evil just as we can be affected by it.
BUT we can also live in a way that counters evil and we can experience that new life as well.
Finally this past Sunday Amanda reminded us that because Jesus went where we never could,
God is with us in the midst of temptation and testing.
We are not hopeless to be overcome by evil or the evil one.
The assumption here is that evil exists,
that we encounter evil in the world,
that we are unable to deliver ourselves and that God desires to deliver us.
The good news, again, Branches is that God invites us to participate in bringing his kingdom here and now through prayer.
Returning again to the last line why do we pray these things?
Because his is the only kingdom worth living and dying for.
Only he has the power to transform us,
and there is no other glory worth expending our lives for.
Now this is very important for you to see,
if you’ve wandered off I need you to come back to hear this.
Jesus is not just giving his disciples and us a formula,
he is asking us to do some hard work.
We cooperate with the father
not resist him.
We must exercise our creativity and attentiveness
that we might invite his kingdom in the ordinary moments of life.
We have to examine the ways we trust in our own strength and possessions.
We name evil for what it is specifically
even as we forgive those who wrong us
and seek forgiveness of those we wrong.
Places of temptation and testing include less obvious things
like communication issues with your spouse, roommate, coworker, or sibling,
as well as s systemic forms of evil in society or in the church.
In all the ordinary places of life,
this prayer invites us to explore how God‘s kingdom can come instead of our own,
how his power might do in us amazing things,
and where his glory needs to outshine our own.
This is just plain hard work.
And I hope that you are starting to see some answers to the original questions I posed at the beginning.
Prayer is not a formula
but rather a posture.
It isn’t a secret code to force God to act,
but a means by which we align ourselves to what God is up to in our lives.
Prayer doesn’t work,
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