A Sermon
Presented by Rev. Merlin T. Batt
Intentional Interim Pastor
St. Matthew’s United Church of Christ
Maiden, North Carolina
Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
July 29, 2007

Scripture Lesson: Luke 11:1-13
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A four year-old girl was learning to say the Lord’s Prayer from memory. She was reciting it all by herself without help from her mother who was listening carefully and not a little proudly. As she neared the end of the prayer, having said it correctly thus far, the little girl continued, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us some e-mail.”

The Lord’s Prayer is one of those things children who grow up in a Christian home are expected to memorize. However, as I think about it personally, I learned the Lord’s Prayer neither at home, nor at church since my parents neither had much interest in such matters, nor took me to church. I learned to say the Lord’s Prayer at Tench Tilghman Elementary School in the inner city of Baltimore, where in the 1950’s the Lord’s Prayer was recited by all the children, Christian and otherwise, at opening exercises which typically consisted of a Bible reading, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Pledge of Allegiance. Some of you remember similar practices in the days when Protestantism was America’s unofficial established religion.

One of our lectionary readings this morning presents us with the version of the Lord’s Prayer found in St. Luke’s Gospel. Take a look at the bulletin insert on which I have listed several versions of the prayer. The one from Luke’s Gospel is listed last. Right from the first word, “Father” instead of “Our Father,” we realize this is not exactly the prayer we have memorized. “Who art in heaven” is missing” as is “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” “Give us this day our daily bread” becomes “Give us each day our daily bread.” And the part about forgiveness is quite different – “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” The familiar phrase, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” in Luke’s version is simply “And do not bring us to the time of trial.” And, finally, entirely missing from Luke’s as well as Matthew’s version is the familiar ending, the doxology or statement of praise, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. (or as some say, “for ever and ever”). Amen.”

As you can see by looking at this bulletin insert, there is no way to determine one authoritative version. Those who say they follow the Bible literally find themselves here and elsewhere in something of a bind. The Greek texts of Matthew and Luke, when compared with each other, are quite different, and both are different from the version most Bible literalists are accustomed to praying. Also, the words of the prayer in both of these Gospels haven’t got exact word-by-word English equivalents. What’s more, it is likely that Jesus taught the prayer to his disciples in Aramaic, and only later did the Gospel writers translate the Aramaic into Greek.

Aramaic was the common language for communication among Jews living in Palestine in the time of Jesus. Hebrew was the official language of the synagogue and Temple, Latin the language of government, and Greek, the lingua franca, the commonly spoken language all across the Roman Empire. It comes as something of a shock to people who should know better that Jesus did not speak English. He spoke Aramaic. He most probably knew Hebrew as a student of the Hebrew Bible, and he likely spoke some Greek in order to carry out the daily activities of life in the marketplace.

As I said a moment ago, what we call the “Lord’s Prayer” was most likely taught by Jesus to his disciples in Aramaic, a language which is a forerunner of Arabic. Years ago I learned to repeat the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, at least after a fashion. I learned to mimic the Aramaic sounds from a Middle Eastern Christian scholar named Dr. Kenneth Bailey. This is what I learned - roughly what the Lord’s Prayer sounds like in Aramaic as Jesus prayed it and taught it to his disciples:

Abba
  Our Father

da-biss-my-ya
  who is in heaven
Yit could-das sh’meck
  Let it be hallowed your name
Tee-tee mal-coo-teck
  Let come thy kingdom
Tee-hee sib-yo-nek
  Let thy will be done
Hake ma da-biss-my-ya, hake den dee-arr-der
  Just as in heaven, even so on earth
Lock-men da-mee-no
  Our bread without ceasing
Hab-lan yol-ma-den
  Give to us this day
Ous boke-a-la-ho-bane
  And forgive to us our debts
Hake dis back-na-la-hiya-been
  As we have forgiven our debtors
Walata a-lane-a la niss-yo-na
  And lead us not into temptation
Illa, passina, men-be-sha
  But deliver us from evil.

As a whole, the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic sounded something like this…

This is only an approximation of what Jesus said and of how it sounded when he responded to his disciples’ question, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” You see, countless times the disciples had seen Jesus go off by himself to pray. They went with him to synagogue on the Sabbath and to the Temple in Jerusalem. They sensed rightly that Jesus’ praying was the source of his identity, his power, and his wisdom, the bottomless well from which he drew the compassion, patience, and courage to minister to people’s needs and to announce the in-breaking kingdom of God passionately and fearlessly.

These disciples, thoroughly Jewish to a man, were used to praying the Shema Prayer twice every day, as faithful Jews do even to this day. They prayed it in the morning upon awakening and at night before sleep, as well as at other times of worship. The opening sentence of the prayer is found in Deuteronomy 6:4. In Hebrew it begins, “Shema Yisrael Adonai eloheinu Adonai ehad” (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”). The prayer continues, “Blessed be the name of his glorious kingdom for ever and ever. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might….” And so on. So, accustomed to praying daily a prayer of the Jewish people, the disciples asked Jesus to give them a prayer they might offer to God as an expression of being Jesus’ people.

The prayer Jesus taught them, as Tom Wright says in the little book, Simply Christian, which some of us are studying this summer, is a simple prayer, a prayer about God’s honor and glory, a prayer about God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, a prayer for bread (that is, for meeting the needs of every day), a prayer for forgiveness, and a prayer for rescue from evil.

Bishop Tom points out that this prayer Jesus taught them is not a generic prayer, nor even a typically Jewish one; rather it’s a Jesus-specific prayer. In its few simple sentences, the prayer summarizes what Jesus went around Galilee and Judea doing: (1) saying it was time for the Father’s name to be honored, (2) for his kingdom to come on earth as in heaven; (3) feeding the crowds with bread in the desert; (4) forgiving sinners and telling his followers to do the same; and (5) walking clear-eyed into the “time of trial,”…so that by taking its full force on himself others might be spared it. You might say, then, that the Lord’s Prayer reflected what Jesus did and gave his followers words by which they could be about the same thing with God’s help.

But, like anything we say or do regularly, the Lord’s Prayer is in danger of being said without thinking very much what we’re saying and praying. It too easily becomes an un-thinking speech habit rather than a life-specific prayer to God. As such it has a religious “feel” to it, but no specific content related to our everyday lives and prayer concerns. In this regard, someone has called the Lord’s Prayer a “Protestant icon” – an important religious expression, one we wouldn’t even think of omitting from our liturgy on Sunday morning, but not a vibrant, personal, life-soaked prayer to God.

That reminds me of the true story of the minister who was about to begin the Sunday service. He was having trouble with his microphone, and not realizing that it was “on” he muttered under his breath in frustration, “There’s something wrong with this microphone.” The congregation was used to the service opening in the same way every week – with the minister saying, “The Lord be with you” and they responding, “And also with you.” So when they heard the minister’s frustrated, mumbled words this one Sunday, “There’s something wrong with this microphone,” the congregation un-thinking-ly responded, “And also with you.”

We do get into habits even in worship. So every once in a while it’s important to pause and reflect on what we’re saying when we offer the Lord’s Prayer, and this is one of those occasions. Human nature being what it is, we’ll need to be reminded soon again, so that the prayer is really a prayer to God from the heart, and not just a mindless, habitual religious expression.

Try this on for size. Again, it comes from Bishop Tom’s book:

The (Lord’s) prayer says (to God):

I want to be part of (Jesus’) kingdom-movement.
I find myself drawn into his heaven-on-earth way of living.
I want to be part of his bread-for-the-world agenda, for myself and for others.
I need forgiveness for myself – from sin, from debt, from every weight around my neck – and I intend to live with forgiveness in my heart in my own dealings with others…
And because I live in the real world, where evil is still powerful, I need protecting and rescuing.
And, in and through it all, I acknowledge and celebrate the Father’s kingdom, power, and glory.

Would you say it now after me…

Amen.