7 Pentecost, Cp12, July 28, 2019
Gen. 18:20-33 Ps.85:7-13
Col. 2:6-15 Luke 11:1-13
Today we read one of the versions of the prayer misnamed as the Lord's Prayer. It should be called the "Disciples Prayer," or simply the Our Father.
It perhaps is the most famous prayer in Christianity. It is based upon what the early church believed that Jesus taught regarding relationship with God.
In light of the freedom conditions which prevail in our world, it can be said that in uneven ways, each person experiences the basic weal and woes of life, coupled with lots of what might just be called benign drudgery.
So what does the Paternoster propose? The Our Father assumes that we are children of the divine parent. The prayer assumes that there are parallel worlds of heaven and earth, which in our lives might be seen as the interior world and the exterior world.
The most interior of our inner world might be called the world of the invisible spirit. It is the connecting place with heaven. And experiencing that connection with heaven within us, involves the art of contemplation and prayer. It becomes the life vocation to convince all of the outer realms to live toward and for what is heavenly, or what is God's will.
And we want this heavenly realm to be irresistibly accessible, obvious and evident to us and everyone, because it is how we believe that God's will could be attained "on earth," in the outer realms. And so we ask that the highest possibilities of goodness become actual in our world. We ask that love and justice come to actual situations.
The "Our Father" and the teaching context in Luke's Gospel reveals something else. It reveals the obvious fact that God's will does not seem to be prevailing on earth as in heaven. We experience the ambiguity of the clash of the heavenly and earthly realms. The result of this is the uneven and intermittent experience of God's will being experienced as apparent or non-apparent.
How do we relate to the non-apparent will of God occurring in our life? How did Jesus respond to the "non-apparent" will of God in his life? From the cross, He cried out, "My God, why have you forsaken me!" The state of the "non-apparent" will of God is the state of forsakenness, during which we can only honestly cry out about the sense of being forsaken. All of us live in a world where people experience in various and uneven ways of what it seems like to be forsaken in what our logical thinking cannot call the loving will of a loving God. We find ourselves asking always for good things and apparently we get the opposite, a snake instead of fish, a scorpion instead of an egg. And we can live being totally frustrated by the intermittent play of an apparent God or a non-apparent God.
The words of the "Our Father," and the context for the same in Luke's Gospel, is an invitation to a prayerful faith of adjusting to the negative outcomes in a free world without becoming proponents of Murphy's law, or God-haters or misanthropic persons totally disillusioned with other people.
With the prayerful faith of the "Our Father" we are invited to the absolute will of God which is always done, which is the absolute condition of freedom. Freedom is the always everywhere will of God. We participate in that freedom by choosing how we want to decide to bring what is good to actual life, even when the results of the freedom of evil are confronting us and tempting us to respond with bad choices.
The life of praying the "Our Father," is the life of living with the ambiguous interaction of good and bad within the great arena of a Higher Freedom. We want to survive the effects of the negative outcomes of freedom, even as we do not want to perpetuate the goals of what is bad and evil.
The best way to honor the nature of God, which is Freedom, is to use the degree of that Freedom given to us to choose to do good, to love and to do justice and walk humbly as a child of the Heavenly Parent.
May God help us to live the "Our Father," being realistic about the situations when God may seem apparent or not. May we in our prayer lives become those who are actively making God's will on earth actual, because we are learning the habits and the repetitions of choosing to do good, as Jesus did. Amen.
It perhaps is the most famous prayer in Christianity. It is based upon what the early church believed that Jesus taught regarding relationship with God.
In light of the freedom conditions which prevail in our world, it can be said that in uneven ways, each person experiences the basic weal and woes of life, coupled with lots of what might just be called benign drudgery.
So what does the Paternoster propose? The Our Father assumes that we are children of the divine parent. The prayer assumes that there are parallel worlds of heaven and earth, which in our lives might be seen as the interior world and the exterior world.
The most interior of our inner world might be called the world of the invisible spirit. It is the connecting place with heaven. And experiencing that connection with heaven within us, involves the art of contemplation and prayer. It becomes the life vocation to convince all of the outer realms to live toward and for what is heavenly, or what is God's will.
And we want this heavenly realm to be irresistibly accessible, obvious and evident to us and everyone, because it is how we believe that God's will could be attained "on earth," in the outer realms. And so we ask that the highest possibilities of goodness become actual in our world. We ask that love and justice come to actual situations.
The "Our Father" and the teaching context in Luke's Gospel reveals something else. It reveals the obvious fact that God's will does not seem to be prevailing on earth as in heaven. We experience the ambiguity of the clash of the heavenly and earthly realms. The result of this is the uneven and intermittent experience of God's will being experienced as apparent or non-apparent.
How do we relate to the non-apparent will of God occurring in our life? How did Jesus respond to the "non-apparent" will of God in his life? From the cross, He cried out, "My God, why have you forsaken me!" The state of the "non-apparent" will of God is the state of forsakenness, during which we can only honestly cry out about the sense of being forsaken. All of us live in a world where people experience in various and uneven ways of what it seems like to be forsaken in what our logical thinking cannot call the loving will of a loving God. We find ourselves asking always for good things and apparently we get the opposite, a snake instead of fish, a scorpion instead of an egg. And we can live being totally frustrated by the intermittent play of an apparent God or a non-apparent God.
The words of the "Our Father," and the context for the same in Luke's Gospel, is an invitation to a prayerful faith of adjusting to the negative outcomes in a free world without becoming proponents of Murphy's law, or God-haters or misanthropic persons totally disillusioned with other people.
With the prayerful faith of the "Our Father" we are invited to the absolute will of God which is always done, which is the absolute condition of freedom. Freedom is the always everywhere will of God. We participate in that freedom by choosing how we want to decide to bring what is good to actual life, even when the results of the freedom of evil are confronting us and tempting us to respond with bad choices.
The life of praying the "Our Father," is the life of living with the ambiguous interaction of good and bad within the great arena of a Higher Freedom. We want to survive the effects of the negative outcomes of freedom, even as we do not want to perpetuate the goals of what is bad and evil.
The best way to honor the nature of God, which is Freedom, is to use the degree of that Freedom given to us to choose to do good, to love and to do justice and walk humbly as a child of the Heavenly Parent.
May God help us to live the "Our Father," being realistic about the situations when God may seem apparent or not. May we in our prayer lives become those who are actively making God's will on earth actual, because we are learning the habits and the repetitions of choosing to do good, as Jesus did. Amen.
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