Part 1 – Setting the Stage

Part 2 – Beatitudes (1)

Part 3 – Beatitudes (2)

Part 4 – Salt & Light/Law

Part 5 – Murder/Adultery/Divorce

Part 6 – Oaths, Eyes & Enemies

Part 7 – Hiding In Plain Sight

Part 8 – The Lord’s Prayer (1)

Part 9 – The Lord’s Prayer (2)

Fasting was a practice that St. Francis and his followers were well acquainted with.  In part out of self-denial, in part out of repentance for their sins and in part because they gave what little they had to those in need, fasting was a very regular reality.  When Francis became better known, he would often be invited into the homes of wealthy merchants and nobleman.  When rich food was placed before him, the humble saint would slip ashes into his food to dull the taste.  Why would he do this?  What did Francis think this would accomplish?

“When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to men that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Matthew 6:16-18

Moments before stating these words, Jesus had said: “Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” (6:1)  He went on to explain three ways where this was critical to embrace- our generosity (giving to the poor), our prayer life (in contrast to actors & pagans) and then, here, in our fasting.

The Jews were very familiar with fasting.  In addition to the 3 required national fasts- on the Day of Atonement, at the New Year and for Tisha B’Av- many practiced personal, voluntary fasts twice a week (every Monday and Thursday).  These latter weekly fasts were commonly (and openly) practiced by the Pharisees.  Fasting was normal and expected.  Because Jesus said “When you fast…” it is clear that He is affirming the discipline, just as He did with giving and prayer.  While the latter two, for the most part, are familiar and commonly practiced by most Christians today, fasting remains a far more rare and unpracticed discipline.

True and acceptable fasting is a response to God, not an effort to increase our “spiritual status”, especially not for the recognition of others.  The outward act is necessary, but it is only acceptable insofar as is the genuine fruit of a changed heart.  It is a discipline of obedience and submission to God, making His Lordship central to practice.  When we fast (or do any act of Christian service or devotion), we must be mindful of our motivations and intentions.  We must put to death any desire for public affirmation, even if we fear they’ll assume we are impious for not seeing it.  Otherwise we are serving another master, defying the King to whom we are sworn to serve.  This theme is repeated again and again throughout the Sermon on the Mount.

When Jesus told them to put oil in their hair and wash their faces while fasting, He was going against a longer history and tradition (such as the use of sackcloth and ashes in certain kinds of penitent fasts).  He was not intending to reject or devalue these traditions, but was demonstrating how critical it was for His followers to fast in ways that were acceptable to God.  The rewarding life of the Beatitudes cannot be fulfilled otherwise.  The price is too high!  In this light, we see that Jesus in not simply placing a burden of strict obedience on his followers, but is lovingly warning them of what they risk should allow compromise.

Proper fasting will not kill us.  Yet, when we are faced with this discipline, our bodies resist in powerful ways.  It is uncomfortable and dis-empowering.  It reminds us in painfully real ways of the true discomfort and cost of true obedience to Christ.  As powerfully as our bodies resist this, so too our hearts and minds work over time to conceive of short-cuts, excuses or exemptions that would lighten the cost.  We are too busy, have other health concerns, are not bound by legalism- the list goes on.  In a culture of such indulgence and wealth, this discipline is essential precisely because it is so particularly painful to us.

It is at the table of our Lord, in communion, that fasting takes on its deepest meaning.  Christ alone is the Bread of Life, relieving the deepest of hungers.  The passing fulfillment of food, wealth and power can blind us of our absolute hunger for that true Bread.  Fasting strips us of the pretense that we what we have is enough, that it is even possessed apart from the grace and provision of God.  We need Him for life in every sense and in every way.

Christ, You are the Bread of Life.  None else can satisfy.

Lord, we take this moment of silence to consider anything & everything in our lives that has filled any cravings, longings or needs that are apart from you.  We name them to You, repent of them & carry them to the Cross.  Lord, have mercy.

Jesus Christ, by eating this Bread we declare that you are enough.  You alone can give satisfy all that we need.  We are Yours.

And so, as we eat this Bread, we do so in full submission to You.

Jesus Christ, You are the Fountain of Life.  The terrible cost of your spilled blood quenches any & every thirst.  Any temptations, expectations & rights are empty apart from You.  In this moment of silence, we name them, repent of them & carry them to the Cross.  Christ, have mercy.

Jesus, by drinking from this Cup we declare that you are all we need.  Only You can quench the burning desires of our hearts.  We are Yours.

And so, as we drink from the Cup, we do so in full submission to You.

Thank you, Lord, for the undeserved gift of grace and love, in which we become the willing slaves of Your will, yet humbled to be called sons & daughters of God.

All this we do and pray in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.

Part 1 – Setting the Stage

Part 2 – Beatitudes (1)

Part 3 – Beatitudes (2)

Part 4 – Salt & Light/Law

Part 5 – Murder/Adultery/Divorce

Part 6 – Oaths, Eyes & Enemies

Part 7 – Hiding In Plain Sight

Part 8 – The Lord’s Prayer (1)

Having established that in prayer, as in life, the priorities of God must be first and foremost for all believers- even before the basic sustenance of life- we discover that God is both Lord and Father, wanting to provide for our every need.

“Give us today our daily bread”

This simple sentence has baffled Christians for centuries, largely due to the use of Greek word that seems to appear nowhere else in Scripture or other Greek texts.  The writer, it seems, coined a term (yes, pun intended).  While we cannot get into the fascinating debates around the word “daily”, the general topic of the debate is very telling.  Is Jesus teaching us to ask only for the “bread” we need for each day as we face it?  The bread for the day ahead?  Just enough to survive or enough to be comfortable?

What is interesting is that, in this prayer, the request for our bread is the only explicit request for material provision.  This led many early theologians to suggest that Jesus was not speaking of actual food, but rather the Bread of Life, Himself, a foreshadow to the broken bread of the Lord’s Table.  While this might be a secondary interpretation, the later references to God’s provision at the end of Matthew 6 suggest that Jesus was primarily responding to the provision of actual food.  This affirmation of our physical selves- its care and sustenance- is critical in our understanding of God’s provision for us.

Again, drawing from the rest of Matthew 6, Jesus seems to be suggesting that the provision He offers is day to day.  While perhaps not explicitly a 24 hour period, the deeper meaning is that Jesus wants us to trust His provision, freeing us focus on Him (as opposed to storing up for our own survival) and on generosity and hospitality to others (as opposed letting our needs excuse us from charity).  This is a practical affirmation and commitment to living our the Great Commandment to love God and love our neighbours.  We can embrace this trust because He is our loving Father (Matthew 7:11).

Jesus also teaches us to prayer for “our” bread.  As His Body, even as we ask for our basic provision, we ask for all.  As we learned in the previous post, this prayer transcended the loyalties of family and race.  Our new loyalty is primarily to God and those who we now call brother and sister through His adoption of us.  Even after placing God’s priorities first, we are still taught to put aside self-interest for the great good of God and His people.  Consider what this means to the money you make from your job.  Despite the work we do to earn it, we recognize that God is the provider of all things, therefore even that is subject to the teachings of this prayer.  How do we spend, save, give?

As a collective prayer for His provision, we also see that we are not to be ashamed of our need nor proud of our wealth.  We must live together in such a way that those in need can ask without shame and those with plenty take no pride or even ownership, for all they have is God’s provision to His people.  This cannot and should not be enforced, as this must be voluntary act of free will, inspired by genuine love and familial devotion, not moral, legal or social obligation.  However, it should be our ideal.  How do we do this without being taken advantage of?  What does it mean to affirm the ideal, correct mistakes, yet refuse to enforce?  These and other questions are difficult, often the very reason Christians drifted from this kind of commonality.  However, they must be explored, tested and tried.

“Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors…  For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

Then, like today, people understood the power and bondage the came with debt.  However, unlike today, the penalty for failing to pay your debts was much higher, often resulting in forced servitude and/or imprisonment.  This was further underlined by the fact that usury- lending with interest- was forbidden to the Jews.  Today, debt is a way of life, taught to be acceptable, normal, even expected.  Yet, such debt forces us to make choices that limit our ability to submit to the priorities of God and His Kingdom.

Jesus is obviously talking about more than just monetary debt, likening sin and its bondage to that of debt.  Yet He also uses this word, I think, in order to demonstrate that sin is as tangible as debt (and may actually include actual debt), forcing us to look past private moral failings and examine the whole of our lives.  Without question, debt itself is seriously critiqued in this phrase and should therefore be among the first of the things we examine as Christians as we seek to truly and actively repent of the debts of sin.

It is also very telling to note the sequence of action in this sentence.  We ask for forgiveness, having already extended the same forgiveness to those in our debt.  Does this mean that God’s forgiveness is conditional?  It is not that God is offering a transaction to us- that if we forgive others, He will forgive us.  Rather, He is saying that to be forgiven by God requires genuine repentance and the truly repentant would not- could not withhold the grace that they themselves expected or received.  Not only that, but just as Christian died for us while we were still in our sin, so to must we learn to extend forgiveness to others even before they ask for it.

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”

Does God willfully or negligently lead us into temptation?  Since Scripture teaches that God will never cause us temptation, why would we pray for something already promised to us?  Some suggest that we should never take for granted the promises of God and therefore, even when we know He will not do this, we should still ask.  Others believe that rather than temptation, it is times of intentional testing that we are being asked to be spared from.  Both of these seem unlikely, given that the sentence goes on to ask for deliverance from our the evil one, who is Satan.

Rather, Jesus is teaching us to acknowledge our inability to stand against the enemy on our own strength or righteousness.  The enemy cannot be defeated without the intervention of the God on whom we are fully dependent.  The provision of that deliverance can take many forms, including the intervention of His people.  We must therefore look to those things in our lives that we are seeking to overcome alone and bring them to God and His people with trust and humility.

This prayer cannot be prayed without looking at the way we live our lives, individually and together as the Church.  The lines of this prayer presuppose a level of commitment and change already in place.  Jesus, therefore, is cautioning us against insincerity and hypocrisy in our prayers, especially in this most wonderful and demanding prayer.

Lord God in whom we are united as one Body, one family, sister & brother,
May Your name be made holy by Your Word & by the witness of us, Your people.
May Your Kingdom be established here and now,
May Your will be our first & most immediate priority, just as it is to the angels above.
Provide for us the essentials for life together and obedience to You.
Let the gift of Your undeserved grace for us overflow from us onto those who have wronged us.
Lead us on Your path, away from the empty promises & hidden snares of temptation.
Rescue us from every scheme of sin & darkness which would take us from that path.
For you are King, this is Your Kingdom and we are Your citizens & servants.
All we are, all we have & all we will do is by Your power and for Your glory alone,
In the past, in the present and in the future.
Amen+

Part 1 – Setting the Stage

Part 2 – Beatitudes (1)

Part 3 – Beatitudes (2)

Part 4 – Salt & Light/Law

Part 5 – Murder/Adultery/Divorce

Part 6 – Oaths, Eyes & Enemies

Part 7 – Hiding In Plain Sight

With the Advent and Christmas season behind us, Little Flowers Community is returning to our study on the Sermon on the Mount (SOTM).  The next two Sundays has us exploring the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:5-10).  As I began to prepare my notes for the first Sunday it became immediately clear that two weeks does not allow even a fraction of the time needed to dive into the powerful text.  As a community, we may return to it in more detail later this year.  This week we are looking at only part of the prayer.

“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. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

While the word “hypocrite” is meaningful for us today, when Jesus used the word, it would have had a more immediate connection to its root meaning- that is the Greek actors of the day.  Jesus was making it clear that the “quality” of ones prayers were not measured by the eloquence or sophistication.  We should not pray in ways that we think people want us to pray, nor is the depth of our faith measured by the theological words one uses.  Rather, prayer was genuine insofar as it was sincerely about God alone.

If God the Father already knows what we need, why then should we pray at all?  Clearly we are not informing God or even coercing God.  Instead, prayer is a declaration of our dependence on Him, an act of submission to the Lordship of Christ.  Further, it is the exercise of the authority given to us by God, authority in heaven and on earth.  Do our prayers move God?  I believe they do, but the complexities of what that means & how that works is topic enough for another time.  Ultimately, prayer is not about convincing God that our priorities are right, but rather that we must be orienting our hearts and lives around His priorities.  This is made clear in how Jesus goes on to teach us to pray:

“This, then, is how you should pray: ” ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

While this prayer is in many ways very (and importantly) unique, Jesus is not creating this prayer out of thin air.  The Jewish people of His day prayed regularly several times throughout the day, most often using formal prayers, both privately and collectively.  The prayer Jesus teaches us here uses many of the same phrases and emphases as these other prayers.  This is important to note because Jesus was not rejecting the traditions and liturgies of His people, but reorienting them to their intended focus.  In many ways, Jesus is significantly celebrating the learned, shared and formal prayers of His Jewish heritage.

However, the prayer also significantly unique.  Unlike the typical prayers of the Jews, it did not identify God as the God of Israel (i.e. “God of Abraham, Isaac…), but rather He taught us to address God as “Our Father”.  The word Jesus used was the Aramaic equivalent of our “Daddy” or “Papa”.  While still a title of authority and respect, it was one of intimacy and love.  Further, it did not limit His Fatherhood to just the Jews, but made it universal.  This was further reinforced by the use of Aramaic in the prayer.  For the Jews, Hebrew was the sacred language, thus used for prayer.  By calling God Abba (expanding the focus for Israel to all peoples) and using Aramaic (ultimately saying that there was no longer a sacred language or that all languages were ultimately sacred), Jesus was shifting prayer into the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant that His people would be a blessing to all nations.  This is a foreshadow of Pentecost!

As an important aside, it is also in this universal understanding of God’s Fatherhood over all people that we must then orient our lives in relationship to each other.  No longer do religious, traditional or even familial loyalties take priority in how we live.  Now all women and men are our sisters and brothers.  Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when He said He would set families against each other (Matthew 10)? Or when He said “Who is my mother?  Brothers?” (Matthew 12).  Is it that now, our primary loyal is to our Father, then to His children?  And so, whenever our other loyalties conflict with this, it is to our heavenly Father’s family that we must give privilege?  These are important and difficult questions to ask.

The opening lines of this prayer are by no means semantic embellishment, designed to butter God up until we got to the important things, such as our needs.  Far from it!  Rather, the order reflects where our priorities must be in prayer and all of life.  It is with God first and foremost that our priorities lie.  “Our Father, who is in heaven” is not a declaration of His location, but a powerfully contrasting statement of His authority.  He is both our loving, intimate Abba, yet also the powerful and unequaled King.  “Hallowed be Your name” would better be translated, “May your name be made holy”, which every Jew listening knew (in part) came about by how they, His chosen people, reflected His holiness in their lives.  “Your Kingdom come” demands an active submission to His Lordship, working through the power and direction of the Holy Spirit to establish that Kingdom.  “Your will be done” is a declaration of our duty to discern and obey, individually and collectively, His will (which, with the prior reference to the Kingdom is clearly more than just living moral lives).  And finally, “on earth as it is in heaven” is a foreshadow of the completion of His work, when the new heavens and the new earth come together in the great Resurrection of all Creation for His glory.

It is only then, after such powerful and all consuming submission is declared, that our other needs for sustenance, forgiveness and deliverance are made.  To be a Christians, sharing in the death and resurrection of Christ, completely and unwaveringly submitted to His Lordship, means that His holiness, His Kingdom and His will must be, without even one exception, the priority of our lives.  All else MUST be secondary.  And there is not reason to do otherwise, for as our Father, He will meet all our needs.  Jesus reinforces this emphasis later in Matthew 6:33, calling us to seek first His Kingdom and righteousness, knowing that all the other things will be given to us by Him when (and if) they are needed.

Teach us to pray, Lord Jesus.

Lord God in whom we are united as one Body, one family, sister & brother,
May Your name be made holy by Your Word & by the witness of us, Your people.
May Your Kingdom be established here and now,
May Your will be our first & most immediate priority, just as it is to the angels above.
Provide for us the essentials for life together and obedience to You.
Let the gift of Your undeserved grace for us overflow from us onto those who have wronged us.
Lead us on Your path, away from the empty promises & hidden snares of temptation.
Rescue us from every scheme of sin & darkness which would take us from that path.
For you are King, this is Your Kingdom and we are Your citizens & servants.
All we are, all we have & all we will do is by Your power and for Your glory alone,
In the past, in the present and in the future.
Amen+