Sermon by Garrett - Lord's Prayer - July 24

“Lord teach us to pray.”

I cannot think about this passage without thinking about a parishioner from the church I attended in college, Glen. If Christians are people who are in, as commentators point out, the School of Prayer, with Jesus as their teacher, then Glen was surely the class clown. For a mental image, Glen was like a heavier set version of John Belushi - he was a walking talking Animal House. Glen would always sit behind me in church, and make his presence felt. He had a commentary on the sermon always running, and my! did he love to sing. But only a few verses. If the song went on too long, he’d let you know, usually by accompanying the organ by mumbling “this is the song that never ends” or whatever Rolling Stone lyrics were on his mind. Another thing about Glen: he called God ol’ Howard. “Glen, what in the world, why Howard?” you’d ask him. He loved to tell you about when he was little he thought the Lord’s Prayer went, “Our Father who art in Heaven, Howard be your name.”

Most of us grow out of the jokes we learned when we were kids. No Glen, he remained a child to the end. And he helped the rest of us be a little more childlike.

Needless to say, Glen was never one who scored very high in subjects of Reverence and Piety, but he did get one thing very right. Prayer, for him, was a dialogue. It’s a conversation with a person.

“Very near the heart of Christian prayer,” writes one commentator, “is getting over the idea that God is somewhere a very, very long way off.” Sometimes I sense that we have made prayer into a spiritual analogue of the movie Contact. One of the most mediocre films of all time. But it’s about Jodie Foster, a scientist, who tries and establish contact with extraterrestrial life 26 million light years away. I think if we are honest we can all admit to one degree or another thinking of prayer like this – perhaps this is why it is so hard and unnatural?

But this prayer is hard for other reasons. I mean are we seriously going to call God “Father?” Remember our Jewish ancestors couldn’t say the name of God. It was so holy, so sacred, you might die if the “Y” word slipped out of your lips. You better watch it. This is the one before whom creation trembles and covers it face. We are wise to feel the shock of this: in one sense, church is like the child who walks into the high King’s inner circle itself and says, “Hi dad.” (Wright, Lord's Prayer, chapter 1)

Lord, are you sure about this? Jesus, our elder brother, throws his arm around us, and says, “It’s okay, you can go in there. He is your Father too.”

No wonder we lead into the prayer with “Now as our Savior has taught us we are bold to say.”

Glen, as you gathered, was a man who did Church loud. He was fully okay being the impudent child. Singing Rolling Stones, and praying to Howard you thought he just didn’t get it. But things changed for me one Sunday when I noticed that there was one line in the service that Glen didn’t do loud. He dropped out during the Lord’s Prayer. “Thy Kingdom Come - - - on earth as it is in heaven.” We talked about it afterwards, and he told me that he struggled to pray that line some Sundays. “I’m not sure I am ready for God’s will to be done,” he said, “What if it collides with my will?” I was struck by his childlike honesty.

Praying to our heavenly Father is a bold dialogue. We are asking for his Kingdom, his Power, His government to shine though in us. We are telling God that we are ready for his revolution. And I suppose this is risky for another reason. Our dialogue with the Father places us in dialogue with the brokenness of the world. As we bow to say the Our Father, we also bow into the very pain of the world.

Glen passed unexpectedly last year, and I had the immense privilege of going down to celebrate his life. The Church was packed to the gills. The class clown had been such a kind and generous upperclassmen to so many of us in the school of prayer. He had showed us around the halls of childlikeness and trust as few others had. As you may have suspected, during that celebration, God had a name. He was Howard.

I thought about Glen this past week as Katie and I were moving out of our apartment. There is a great deal of overlap between lifting and moving boxes, and prayer. Few things will make you more spiritual than this. There are some Psalms known as Cursing Psalms – the ones where Israel calls down fire on the rest of the universe. These were my spiritual companions this past week. Box after box after box. Tape shut, lift, curse, move to truck, repeat. Tape shut, lift, curse…and on and on. Prayer is kind of like this isn’t it. You are taking those things that are most valuable to you, and you are moving them to another piece of property. Things that are heavy, things you fear may be useless and you wish you could just get rid of: whether it's a parking space or an aging parent - it's all got to be carried out. And its all gotta be done one by one. Box after box. Tape shut, lift, curse… I felt like Israel in the Wilderness. Why are we doing this again, I would ask Katie about every 8 seconds.

Which by the way, I have decided that moving is the perfect antidote for any couple here who thinks they have this marriage thing figured out.

We were all packed up. And we were both crotchety and zonked. A lovely combination. I was well past the point of my Cursing Psalms – I was nearing full blown atheism. But we were finished. Oh shoot, except for the curtains. It was starting to get a little dark in the den, the sun was setting – packing took most of the day. I drew the short straw and climbed up on the ladder to take down the last piece of the apartment. As the curtains came down, I saw one thing that we had forgotten. Sitting there in widow sill was a little clay tie-die cross that a group of friends from my old church in Birmingham had made for me when I moved to Pittsburgh. One of those friends was Glen.

With all the boxes packed up, with all the prayers prayed, with the rooms finally emptied out,