ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Sermon preached by Fr. Gerald Beauchamp at Solemn Evensong and Benediction on the Thirteenth Sunday of Trinity, 6th September 2009

Readings: Exodus 14. 5-end; Matthew 6. 1-18

The Lord's Prayer: the Lord's Prayer must be the most often prayed prayer in the world. There are over 2bn of us Christians praying it often. Whenever we say the Lord's Prayer other Christians are praying it with us somewhere on planet earth. We're never alone with the Lord's Prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven is almost Pavlovian. As soon as we hear those words we can't help but join in with hallowed be thy name. Whenever I offer guidance on prayer to people who are finding it hard to pray I encourage them to return to basics. The Lord's Prayer will suffice but we need to use it imaginatively. So let's ruminate on this great prayer that we heard in Matthew's Gospel this evening.

Our Father. Prayer depends partly on having a sense of to what or to whom we are praying. If God, for us looks like the headmaster then we'll pray in fear and trembling and that isn't going to help our prayer. But such a god doesn't resemble its biblical synonym - 'love'. God is love writes St John and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them (1 John 4. 16). John goes on to tell us that there is no fear in love (4. 18). That's why God is worthy of worship. This God, this God revealed in Christ is Love Itself and most importantly this God is ours: Our Father. Father - Abba. Paul writing to the churches in Rome (Romans 8. 15) and Galatia (Galatians 4. 6) tells us that we are sons and daughters of God and as such we cry out Abba, Father. Abba: so much warmer than the much more formal AramaicAbbi. Abbais a term of intimacy and endearment.

And where is this God, thisAbba? is in heaven.Here we need to keep our imagination reined-in. It's easy to be transported into Never Never Land. Informed by paintings of flights of angels and decorative saints we get trapped into the notion that 'heaven' is remote, a celestial place apart that's undermined by modern cosmology. But heaven is always closer than we think. The mystics tell us that. So George Herbert (1593 -1633) writes

"A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heaven espy."

The Qu'ran tells us that God is closer than your jugular vein (50. 16). But God isn't spying on us. He isn't shadowing us like some heavy-handed mentor. God loves us and loves us into life. And loving always means freedom. God isn't possessive. God is holy. He is whole, complete. As St James says God is the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change (James 1. 17). God doesn't 'need us' in the needy way that we can get with other people. God simply wants us to enter into relationship with him: to name him. In the Book Genesis, according to the second account of creation God gave Adam and Eve the power to name the creatures of the earth. To name is to be empowered and to be a co-creator with the divine in love. Our Father, who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name.

Love isn't needy but it does desire. Because God is love we desire what he seeks to create. Your kingdom come, we pray. Human empires come and go and Jesus lived at a time of one of the great empires - the Roman Empire. If you're my age or older you would have witnessed the end of the British Empire and we've all seenthe demise of the old Soviet Empire (although for how long remains to be seen). God's kingdom is a mixture of the tangible and the intangible. We can talk about what makes up this kingdom: things like justice and peace and we can see how their opposites (oppression and war) have no part in the kingdom. And we can get political and argue about what is the best policy to try and bring these about. But we'll always fail to realize the kingdom on earth totally because we're limited and flawed.

At the heyday of the British Empire many a missionary left these shores for the 'dark continent' taking with them the 'white man's burden'. Many sacrificed their lives and did sterling work but in hindsight some of what their work was based on (like notions of racial superiority) now makes us shudder. We've moved on just as those who will come after us will shudder at some of the things that we've taken for granted. Walking the tightrope of having here no abiding city believing that the kingdom can be touched and felt is part of the creative tension of being a Christian. It teaches us humility. It teaches us detachment. It teaches us to be wary of absolutes.

The Greek word for 'kingdom' isbasileiagives us the English word 'basilica'. Last week Ted Kennedy's funeral took place in a basilica in Boston. It's usually called The Mission Church. Apparently, the funeral couldn't take place in the cathedral because Ted Kennedy was known to be a supporter of abortion. It's ironic that Ted Kennedy was denied a funeral at the seat of ecclesiastical power but buried from a church that represents the kingdom.

This tension between creating empires and knowing that they never measure up means that we have to exercise our willpower. Talking about willpower isn't easy. Just snap out of it 't very helpful advice to someone who is clinically depressed or weighed down by alcoholism. Unseen forces have a hold over our lives. We know that willing things doesn't always mean they'll happen. In the 1930s the naked 'will to power' assumed terrifying shape in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

But abandoning any notion of the will is also unhelpful. We all have responsibilities and sometimes we have to engage our will in first gear. And it helps to know that the will, like prayer isn't something we do alone. It's about doing it with another, with God. Thy will be done: not mine, not my own will. Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith(Hebrews 12. 2) didn't just teach and preach and pray he also 'did'. Not my will but yours be done, he prayed in Gethsemane (Luke 22. 43). On the cross he put this into practice. There, paradoxically death yielded to life. On the cross the human will abandoned to the divine will lead not to human impoverishment but to human enrichment on earth: now.

So we desire. We desire the kingdom. We desire the kingdom of which we have been made a part. We desire the will of God to bring this about. And we desire a sign, some simple substance and sustenance that is an earnest of our faith, hope and love. We desire bread. Give us this day our daily bread. Here our desires are known and our needs are met. Here bread is offered over and over again: not as a drug or a means of control but as a gift and a grace.

And so we come to the final petition of the Lord's Prayer: and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Trespasses. Sins. In the praying of Jesus sin comes at the end not at the beginning. Many Christians put the emphasis the other way round. They put the cart before the horse. Sin looms so large that it stands at the front of the queue and blocks out the sun. But that's not how Jesus teaches us to pray. God, the kingdom, the will and the bread all come first. Trespasses are last.

Trespasses are last because they're small. We know that because sin makes us small. Sin makes us small-minded, petty and insignificant. We're only raised to greatness, set alongside the saints and the angels when we have drunk deeply from the draught of the Lord's own prayer. Faced with the vision of glory, sin slinks away forgiven. Like love, forgiveness is multiplied if it's given away. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And we add plaintivelyAnd lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.

Neither Matthew nor Luke record Jesus as saying the doxology with which we usually conclude the Lord's Prayer: for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory for ever and ever. Amen. ending first appears in a book that didn't get into the bible called the Didache (the Teaching or 'the Didactics' of the Apostles). From earliest times the response of those who used the Lord's Prayer was that it was triumphant even in the face even of death. So it was then. So be it now. Amen.