Lord's Prayer:
Our Father in Heaven

Pastor Burcham’s Sermon

 Sunday, June 3, 2007

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

I don’t like the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosy” anymore. You know the one I’m talking about, right? It doesn’t seem to be as popular today but at least when I was a kid, the little kids would gather around in a circle, they’d all hold hands, and they’d walk around the circle and say, “Ring Around the Rosy, Pocket Full of Posies, Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down.” Then they’d all fall down to the ground giggling. I don’t like that nursery rhyme anymore. I stopped liking it the moment I found out what it meant because I was curious. “What do you mean ‘Ring around the Rosy, ashes, ashes, what’s all that about?’” Well, I found out. They trace it back to London in the 1600's and the Bubonic Plague. It seems that part of having the plague meant that one sign of it was you had a rosy red ring that would appear someplace on your body. And also when you were inflicted with the plague, you had kind of a stench about you so people would put sweetly smelling flowers or posies in their pockets or around them to try to mask the odor. And then once they fell victim to the disease, the bodies were then cremated because they didn’t want to spread the disease, thus, ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Do you understand why I don’t really like the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosy” much anymore? You see, each time I hear the words, I also think back to the meaning of the words.

Alright, a little bit more of a positive note here. Whenever I sing the hymn “Amazing Grace,” I can’t help but think about the author, John Newton, and the inspiration he got for that hymn. John Newton says he was inspired by that hymn and he can point to the date. May 10, 1748, when he was still an unbeliever and he was captaining his ship across the ocean, a violent storm came up and as he was battling the storm for his very life and the very lives of his crew on there, he says for the first time ever, he called out to the Lord. He says, “And that was the beginning of God working on his heart.” Later, after he became a believer and also then even a minister in God’s church, he wrote the song “Amazing Grace.” So now when I see the words “He saved a wretch like me,” John Newton first wrote those words about himself. You see, so now all of a sudden when I sing that hymn, its meaning is even richer for me. It’s even deeper for me.

So often, that’s the case when you find out something which is familiar, when you find out the history of it, it sort of taints your viewpoint of it, either in the positive or in the negative. Instead of just rotely saying the words or singing the hymn or reciting the Lord’s Prayer, when you know the depth behind it, the history behind it, the full meaning behind it, it could add a richness to it that wasn’t there before. That’s why for the next several weeks, we’re going to dig into the Lord’s Prayer and we want to accomplish two things here. The first thing we want to do is remember Jesus said when you pray, He says, “Pray like this.” He doesn’t say “Pray these words.” Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t pray the words of the Lord’s Prayer. We should. But He gave the prayer as a model. He said, “These are the elements of prayer. When you’re going to pray to God, these are the things to keep in mind.” So that’s the first thing we want to do is we dig into each section of the Lord’s Prayer because we want to say, “Okay, when I pray to God, these are some things to keep in mind.”

The second thing we want to do over these next few weeks is we want to dig into the prayer itself so when we say the prayer, here in service or at home or during a meeting, as the words come across our lips, in our mind there are memories of a deeper meaning, a richer meaning to the words Jesus taught us.

So we begin with how we address God. And there is a lot that’s packed into that little phrase, “Our Father who is in heaven.” If I had to pick one key word to summarize that, the word would be “relationship” because when we address God as our Father in heaven, we’re talking about a relationship we have with God and a certain kind of relationship. In fact, when Jesus first said those words, I’m sure He rocked the world of the crowd around Him to address God as “our Father in heaven.” Jesus is saying what God is looking for is a relationship with us. He’s not looking for, if you will, just ritual. He’s not looking for just repetition. In fact, that’s the very thing he warned against moments before He gave the teaching of the Lord’s Prayer. This is the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus says this, “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men.” So He says don’t be like the hypocrites who stand out and want to gather everyone’s attention, maybe with hands raised high and with eloquent speech and with lofty words, address God but they’re meaningless because they’re just words that are spoken. He goes on and He says, “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like the pagans for they think they will be heard because of their many words.” In other words, it’s not just a matter of repetition. It’s just not a matter of saying the words and saying the same thing over and over again and at some point in time, God does something magical there. You see, God isn’t interested, if you will, in religion where we do things out of obligation. He’s interested in a relationship with us where we do things because we have a desire to do them. So Jesus says, “When you approach God, approach God as your Father in heaven.”

One can only imagine the impact that had on the people gathered around Him. For us, we just pass it off. “Well, of course.” Because we address God as Father all the time. Not so in Jesus’ day. The people around Jesus wouldn’t have thought about addressing God in such a personal way. If you look in the entire Old Testament, God is referred to as Father only seven times. Often times, God is the great Yahweh. He’s the almighty God. He’s the all-knowing God. It’s the powerful right arm of God. That’s the message we hear in the Old Testament. That’s the teachings the people have grown up with so Jesus comes in with really something which is radical and He says, “When you approach God, approach Him as your Father in heaven.” You see, Jesus is saying God is a person, not a power. He’s not just some great power, some higher being. He’s a person, not a power. Well, that says a lot, doesn’t it? I can relate to a person. I can have a conversation with a person. I can develop a relationship with a person. I can get to know a person. And Jesus says God is a person. He is the Father in heaven. A few moments ago, Paul sort of added on to that and he says when we address God, because we’ve been adopted as His sons and daughters, we can cry out to Him, “Abba Father.” Abba’s an Aramaic word. In fact, if you grew up in an Aramaic-speaking home, the first word that usually came out of a baby’s mouth was Abba. Same thing in our lives in English, the first words a baby usually speaks is Dadda and then Momma. Right order, right, guys? Yeah, they know. It’s Dadda first. But think about the connotations of that. We’re to come to God, Abba Father, Dad, Daddy, Dadda. It brings up and conjures up a whole image, does it not of a relationship God is painting for us there?

I know in my experience with my daughters, I can usually tell when they’re going to come and ask me for something. And it’s especially true of the older ones. When the older ones refer back to “Daddy,” I know something’s coming, right? I know they’re going to ask for something. They don’t come up to me and say, “Oh, Father, great one of the Burcham clan, holder of the family finances,” no, that’s not going to get them anywhere. They come up and they say, “Hey, Dad.” And they say, “Hi, Daddy, how’s it going?” Because it says something about our relationship and the closeness between us. Jesus says that’s what God’s interested in. When you pray to our Father in heaven, that conjures up the whole relationship of this closeness between a parent and a child and the deep love that exists there and the freeness to be able to just talk to Him and relate to Him. So the first thing we learn about this introduction of addressing God is God wants a relationship.

The second point, which is equally important, God is a heavenly Father and the emphasis there is on “heavenly Father.” The reason I put the emphasis on the part that He’s a heavenly Father because for some of you, you haven’t had a great experience with an earthly father. Maybe you’re one of the 24 million Americans that grew up in a home that didn’t have a father in the home so when you talk about God as a father, you don’t really understand what that means because you really don’t know what it means to have a father. Maybe your father just wasn’t a stellar example. Maybe he was an abusive father. Maybe not physically. Maybe he was. Maybe it was verbal abuse. Maybe it was emotional abuse. Maybe you had a father who never had a good word to say to you, never any encouragement. Maybe you had a father who was distracted. Oh, he was there in person but he wasn’t really there. He was detached. He was unemotional. Maybe you had a father who never uttered the words, “I love you, Son,” or “I love you, Daughter.” The problem is if we concentrate on an earthy father and if you’ve had a bad experience, if you’ve had a poor earthly father, then you’ll transfer all that negative baggage onto God. And so every time you pray the Lord’s Prayer and you think about it and you say, “Our Father in heaven,” that doesn’t bring up positive images for you. That brings up all kinds of negative images for you. It’s heavenly Father. Huge difference. Huge difference.

And if you didn’t have a great father in your life, at some point you have to let go of that because your Father in heaven is vastly different. He’s the perfect father. For that matter, those of you who had a great father, maybe he was a wonderful man, a great example to you, always there for you, he was still a human father, which means he was imperfect, just as we are imperfect. I’m sure he let you down at times. I’m sure at times promises were broken, he wasn’t there when you needed him to be there. I mean, after all, he’s just a human being. He’s imperfect. He’s flawed just like all the rest of us but those are earthly fathers. Ever how great they may be, they’re not perfect.

Jesus says, “Our heavenly Father.” That means He’s a perfect father. He defines what it is to be a father. If you will, he has the ABC’s of fatherhood down. What I mean by that is He is a father who is available. He is a father who is benevolent. He is a father who is caring towards His children. Everything a father should be, that’s what we have in our heavenly Father. When we think about it, our Father is always available to us anytime, any day, any place. Speaking to the prophet, Jeremiah, He says this after He says to His people that “I have plans for you, plans to prosper you, plans for you to grow, plans for you to succeed.” Then He says this, “Then you will call upon me and you will come and pray to me and I will listen to you.” How much meaning is there in that? I will listen to you. How important is it to you to have somebody actually listen to you? You’ve all been ignored at one time or another. It’s not very pleasant. Or have somebody sitting there but you know they’re not really comprehending what you’re saying. How important is it to you to know somebody’s actually deeply listening to you? God, our Father, is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, millennium upon millennium. He said, “Call upon me. Pray to me and I will listen to you.” God never says, “Take a number. Get in line. Don’t bother me today. Come back tomorrow.” Contrast that, if you will, Parents, to sometimes your relationship with your kids. I can’t count how many times I’ve put my children off. They want to show me something from school. They want to show me something in the backyard or they want to show me something on the computer and I’ll say, “Hold that thought. Just a minute,” because I’m dashing out the door to pick up one of the other kids or I’m off to a meeting or maybe I’m trying to gather them up with my wife to take them off to a soccer game. “Just hold on, wait, and then we can talk about it.” God, our Father in heaven, never says those words. He never says, “Wait.” He never says, “Hold on.” He never says He’s too busy. Anytime. Any day. Any place. He said, “Call upon me and I will listen to you.”

We have a benevolent Father. That is, we have a Father who knows exactly what to give us. And maybe more importantly, what not to give us. Jesus talking about prayer, again, in the gospel of Matthew, different context this time, this is where He says, “Ask, seek, knock, you’ll find the door will be open,” all of that. He concludes that by saying these words, “Which of you if his son asks for bread will give him a stone or if he asks for a fish will give him a snake? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask Him?” If we at least have a hint of an idea of knowing what to give our children and what not to give them, how much more does our heavenly Father know what to give us and I say more importantly what not to give us. I always turn Jesus’ example around and that is what happens when your son or daughter asks for a snake instead of a fish? What I mean by that what happens when your children ask for something, desperately want something that you believe is not good for them? Or the really difficult part is discerning, discerning when to say yes and when to say no. It’s easy to say yes to your children, isn’t it? You become the hero. “Thanks, Dad.” It’s hard to say no and to discern when to say no.

When we pray to God, we have the confidence that we have a heavenly Father who knows exactly when to say yes and He knows exactly when to say no. We have a Father in heaven who has all of history mapped out in front of Him. He has all of the plans He has for us mapped out in front of Him so when we come to Him and we make a request of Him, he has absolutely no problem saying no to us. If it’s something that’s going to be harmful, something that’s going to be detrimental to us, God will say no even if we get upset, even if we go off in a corner and pout. God says no because He wants the best for us and we have a Father in heaven who is perfectly able and willing to offer His blessings to us of the things we do need. We have a benevolent Father and we have a caring Father. Often times, when we think about God, we sit in awe of Him. We think of the power and the majesty of God, the strength of God, the knowledge of God and at times we should. We should sit in awe and in humbleness, in meekness to the greatness of our God. But not at the expense of forgetting that He is a compassionate God, that He’s a caring God.

Peter spoke about that in his second letter. He said this, “Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you.” I know it sounds like simple words but how important is it that somebody cares for you? Jesus later on in the gospel of Matthew says, “Your Father in heaven actually has the number of hairs on your head counted.” He has them all there. He knows you that intimately. He has that kind of detail about you because that’s how much He cares about you. He wants to know every aspect of your life. He wants to know what has been going on this past week, this past day, this past month. He wants to know your ups, your downs and everything in between because He cares for you.

He demonstrated just how much He cared for us when He sent His heavenly Son into our world. We have a heavenly Father and the heavenly Father has a heavenly Son and He sent His heavenly Son to come and to dwell and to live among us. Why? Because God cared enough about us, God wanted a relationship with us so desperately that He was willing to sacrifice His heavenly Son so you and I could become, once again, His sons and daughters. You see, our relationship with God was severed. It was broken. It was broken by Adam and Eve when sin entered into the world and that sin is a barrier between us and our heavenly Father and each time you and I sin, each time you and I don’t live up to the commandments God has given to us, the way of life God wants us to lead, that’s like a barrier between us and God. So He cared enough about us that He sent His heavenly Son into the world. And Jesus came and He lived among us and He lived the life we couldn’t. And then He paid the debt of all of our sin, all of our misconduct, all the things that separated between our Father in heaven. Through His blood on the cross, He removed that barrier so we could have access to the Father.

Jesus Himself said in the gospel of John, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father,” how? “Except through me,” Jesus says. Through our faith in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we have once again become sons and daughters of our Father in heaven. The relationship’s been restored. Each time we approach God in any prayer, we approach Him from a relational standpoint of a Father who’s available, who’s benevolent, who’s caring and loving. And we can talk to Him and have a relationship with Him.

Each time you pray the Lord’s Prayer and you address God, “Our Father in heaven,” think relationship. Amen.

Copyright 2007 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church