P.R.A.Y.: Rejoice

Matthew 6:9

January 31, 2021 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Nicolas Herman was born in eastern France during an extended time of war in Europe. His parents were poor, so his education was limited. Like most young men of his day, he served in the army, fighting in the war, until he was injured and discharged. One day, he found himself one day staring at a tree in winter, stripped bare of its leaves, and he began to think that he felt just like that tree. He would describe himself as “awkward” and someone “who broke everything.” Suddenly, as he looked at the tree, Nicolas remembered that even though the tree looked dead right then, in the spring it would burst forth into new life and that began to give him hope for his life as well. He always looked back on that experience as a deeply spiritual moment that shaped the rest of his life.

A few years after that experience, after going through some other trials and challenges, Nicolas went to the Carmelite Monastery in Paris and entered the order as a lay brother. He spent the rest of his life there doing mostly menial jobs. He began by fixing meals and working in the kitchen, and when he found it difficult to stand for a long time, he was assigned to make sandals. Yet, in those settings, Nicolas made up his mind that he would always be a worshipper. He once wrote this: “As often as I could, I placed myself as a worshipper before [God], fixing my mind upon his holy presence, recalling it when I found it wandering from him. This proved to be an exercise frequently painful, yet I persisted through all difficulties.” Nicolas Herman is better known today by the name he chose when he entered the monastery: Lawrence of the Resurrection, or more simply, Brother Lawrence, and his thoughts on worshipping, on rejoicing in any circumstance, have inspired believers for five hundred years. His book, The Practice of the Presence of God, gives the parameters for a Christian’s worship: “Is it not quicker and easier just to do our common business wholly for the love of him?…Even the smallest remembrance will always please him” (qtd. in Greig, How to Pray, pg. 68).

This morning, we’re continuing our series on “prayer for normal people,” using the acronym P.R.A.Y. Last Sunday, we discussed the prayer before the prayer—“p” which stands for “pause.” We pause so that we can focus on God as we pray. This morning, we’re going to turn to what we know as the Lord’s Prayer proper, this framework or scaffolding Jesus gave us that is meant to shape our own prayers (cf. Wright, Matthew For Everyone—Part One, pg. 58). There’s nothing wrong with repeating the prayer as he gave it to us—we do that often here—but as I read what Jesus says, I think he meant this prayer to be something more than just words we repeat. He certainly didn’t mean it as some sort of magic prayer, that if you say it so many times you will get what you’re asking for. No, Jesus gave this to the disciples and to us to teach us to pray. It’s a model for us to follow, so therefore, the place we should start at the end of our pausing is where Jesus started: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name” (6:9).

The first thing we ought to notice—though we usually don’t because we rush through it—is that prayer, the way Jesus envisioned it, is primarily communal. Even when we pray alone, we are praying with others, with brothers and sisters from around the world. God is not just “my Father,” he is “our Father.” “Our” reminds us that this faith we have does not just belong to “me, myself and I.” When we pray, we join our voices with all who claim the name of Jesus, with saints and pray-ers throughout the ages. God is “our” Father. (We’ll come back to this notion of community in a bit.) And then there’s that word “Father.” Today, people struggle with that image of God as Father. In the age of #MeToo and #ChurchToo, in an era where so much horrible abuse, sexual, mental and emotional, has been perpetrated by spiritual authorities and by earthly fathers, it’s easy to understand why thinking of God in those terms might not be comfortable or desirable. Here’s the problem, though: we judge God by the actions of the people we see around us, rather than the other way around. God is the standard, not our earthly fathers, pastors, priests or teachers. As a father, my character and ability should be judged against what God is like; God should not be measured by what I am like. I am not the standard for the word “father,” God is. Author and pastor Pete Greig suggests that if “you had no dad, or he was absent, abusive, or cold, then you, like Jesus who had no biological human father, can reserve for God alone the wonderful name Abba, Father” (God on Mute, pgs. 29-30).

What should be significant here is that Jesus uses such an intimate word to address the eternal creator of the universe. In the Greek text, the word is pater, the usual word for “father,” but Jesus and his disciples didn’t speak Greek as their primary language. They would have spoken Aramaic, and so behind this text is the word Hebrews used to talk to their earthly fathers, the word Abba. In the synagogue prayers that both Jesus and the disciples would have been familiar with (as would have many in the crowd), God was addressed in a lot of different ways. “Holy One,” “Builder of Jerusalem,” “Redeemer of Israel,” and, very commonly, “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Abba was just another one of many ways the rabbis addressed God. But to me it’s fascinating that, out of all those choices Jesus had to begin his model prayer, he chooses Abba. He chooses a word that little Jewish and Arabic children used (and still use) to talk to their Daddies. He chooses a word that a student would use to talk to their teachers. And even more than that, he chooses a word that is universal; it’s not tied to the Jewish culture. It’s a word everyone can use to talk to God. “Our Father” is an inclusive beginning. This prayer is for everyone, and it’s a prayer everyone can say (cf. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, pgs. 96-97).

So what does that have to do with our theme word this morning, “rejoice”? Again, I believe we rush past the beginning of this prayer so quickly that we miss it, so let me say it as clearly as I can: when we call God “Our Father,” we are confessing that we are his children. For a lot of people a lot of the time, God is seen as a scowling judge. We think of him as “perpetually disapproving, invariably disappointed and needing to be placated or persuaded in prayer” (Greig 53). And if that’s how we see God, if that’s what we’ve somehow been taught to believe about God, then it’s no wonder we don’t rejoice at the thought of coming into his presence. But Jesus, in this prayer and elsewhere in the Gospels, reminds us that God is our Abba. He is our Father, our Daddy. “Father, for Jesus, means the one who loves, forgives, and knows how to give good gifts to his children” (Boring, “The Gospel of Matthew,” New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. VIII, pg. 203). “He is lovingly attentive to your needs, always pleased to see you, predisposed to answer the cries of your heart” (Greig 53). He longs to have a close, intimate relationship with us. God is on our side and we are his dearly loved children. The should make us want to rejoice because there is no other god in human history who longs to be that close to his creation. Most gods we imagine are distant, far off, vengeful. The God who made the universe is a Father. He’s Abba; we can rejoice.

Then there’s this second phrase Jesus uses in the opening to the prayer. I find it interesting that the NIV retains the word “hallowed” in this verse, because that’s not really a word we use anymore. I’m guessing it’s because that’s what we’re used to hearing: “Hallowed be your name” (6:9). “Hallowed” means to set apart, to honor. It means, in some sense, “holy.” Another modern translation puts all that together in this way: “Your name be honored as holy” (CSB). This is not a request, by the way. We’re not asking God to somehow make his name holy or honored. God’s name is already holy; when we pray this, we’re just acknowledging who God is. We’re admitting or recognizing what is true about this Abba we are talking to. It is, in some sense, the fruit of our pausing. We’ve remembered who we are and who God is, and now we’re acknowledging God’s reality, his goodness, his holiness. It’s really setting the stage for everything else to come in the prayer. The context for the whole prayer is "who God is.”

Now, at this point, it’s easy to nod your head and give approval to all that. “Yes, of course, God is holy. I’ve heard that, sung that, taught that, believed that all my life. God is holy, got it.” But do we really? Do we really “have it”? Do we truly understand that God is absolutely other than we are? That he’s not a “buddy” who wants to go on a fishing trip with us? That he’s not a childhood friend who we share secrets with? God is holy, which means he is absolutely other than you or me. Author Annie Dillard gets at this when she talks about how we treat God with overfamiliarity: “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews” (qtd. in Greig 56). That imagery might bring about a smile, but she’s right. We treat God so lightly. We don’t want to hear about “the fear of the Lord” or “the wrath of God.” We don’t like to talk about the God who cannot be in the presence of sin, who burns with anger against the brokenness of the world. We much prefer the God of compassion, the God of kindness, the nice God who just taps us on the shoulder and says, “There, there.” But God’s very name is holy, which is why the book of Hebrews says, “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31).

And yet…the God who is absolutely other is also incredibly close, closer than your very breath. The God whose name is hallowed also invites us into his family, to come near to him. Or, as my Old Testament professor, Dr. John Oswalt, often put it: “The God who could fry you loves you.” And that is a reason to rejoice. That is a reason for worship. Not just because God is holy, though that would be enough reason to worship him, but because the God who is holy also calls us, who are often so un-holy, to come near to him. The God whose name is hallowed is also Father, and we are invited into the family. You know what it’s like to be invited to something special, and you probably know what it’s like to not be invited to something you wanted to go to. In God’s economy, the invitation is always extended to us, even though he doesn’t have to include us, even though he doesn’t have to do anything for us. He is holy, we are not, and yet he welcomes us in. Is that not a reason to rejoice, to worship?

We’ve got to get this right, though, this thing of who it is we pray to. Andrew Murray, a nineteenth-century writer from South Africa, put it this way: “The power of prayer depends almost entirely upon our apprehension of who it is with whom we speak” (qtd. in Greig, God on Mute, pg. 29). If we think of God as a great cosmic vending machine, we will endlessly be asking for things that we think we need, things we think we want, blessings for ourselves and our loved ones. But is that really the purpose of prayer? Just to get “stuff”? When we remember and acknowledge who it is we pray to, it changes the way we pray. I’m not saying (and Jesus does not say) we shouldn’t or can’t ask for things. In fact, our word for next week is “Ask.” But the way we approach God will change the way we ask. God is more interested in who we become than in what we want. He is Abba, his name is hallowed, and so prayer begins with rejoicing.

So how do we practice rejoicing or worship? Most often, I think, at least for modern American Christians, when we hear the word “worship,” we think of music. I had someone many years ago let me know that they’d like to get rid of the sermon and “just worship” on Sunday mornings. We think of worship as the goose bumps or the good feelings we get with certain songs, and if the songs don’t connect with us, we think we haven’t worshipped. What if I told you worship has nothing to do with our feelings? Worship has nothing to do with goose bumps. Worship has nothing to do even with whether we “get anything” out of our worship service here on Sunday mornings. In fact, worship isn’t a Sunday morning thing—or, I should say, it isn’t just a Sunday morning thing. Worship is really about our whole life giving honor to the one whose name is hallowed. We’re going to talk more about that later this year, about how we can live a life of worship. But for our purposes this morning, we can indeed think about music as one part of worship and rejoicing. It certainly was in the Scriptures. The psalms, as I think I mentioned last Sunday, were originally worship songs. They are musical prayers preserved because they were used in Israel’s worship. Some have called Psalms the “hymnbook of the Bible.” So if we want to know how to rejoice in God, read the psalms. Sing the psalms. Memorize the psalms.

The psalms are songs of worship for every situation in life. And I mean “every.” In fact, the psalms seem to major on worshipping God even when life is difficult. “Depending on which commentary you pick up, you’ll read that one-third to over one-half of the psalms are laments.” Lament is the prayer of a broken heart; some call them “complaints,” and in these prayers, the singer is often busy telling God what is wrong with the world or what is wrong with their lives. “With the exception of one psalm (88), each lament turns eventually to praise, revealing an important truth that has been lost: lament is one of the most direct paths to the true praise we know we have lost. In fact, lament is not a path to worship, but the path of worship” (Card, A Sacred Sorrow, pg. 21). In the last twenty years or so, there has been an explosion of popular worship music, and most of the airwaves of Christian radio stations and church services (including ours) are filled with what one radio chain calls “positive, uplifting” music. We want worship music that is happy, and I get why. As a friend of mine said, he had a man in his congregation come to him and tell him he gets enough of the news and the bad stuff every other day of the week. He told my friend, “I just need you to tell me about Jesus, Pastor.” I get it. But if the psalms are realistic enough to lament somewhere around half the time, and if lament is a path of worship, why are we so afraid of it? Why do we come to church and insist that “everything’s great”? Can we rejoice even when life is hard? Can we worship even when it seems as if the world has gone mad?

Haven’t we had to learn this in the last year? A year ago, we had no idea what was coming. We didn’t know phrases like “shelter in place” or “positivity rate” and we didn’t think about wearing a mask when we went out in public. We couldn’t have imagined that our favorite restaurants would be closed for a while or that we wouldn’t continue to gather here each and every week. A year ago, most of us didn’t know lament quite so personally. And then the pandemic hit. And George Floyd was killed, as were several others. And a tumultuous election took place, crescendoing in an unimaginable attack on our Capitol building. And because of the ways we behaved on social media, and sometimes in person, friends were lost, families were fractured and churches were threatened. We’ve learned that lament is necessary, but the part we’ve missed is God. We know all too well how to complain, how to shake our fists at the things we don’t think should be happening. We’re good at yelling at each other, but in almost every Biblical lament, the singer or the writer eventually remembers, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”

I mean, let’s be honest, there are a lot of times we don’t feel like worshipping. Or at least there are a lot of times I don’t feel like it. Sometimes I feel like the man I heard about who told his wife he was not going to church and she couldn’t make him. He gave all sorts of reasons why not, and finally his wife said, “But you have to go. You’re the pastor!” There are times where our feelings aren’t centered toward worship, so what do we do then? Worship anyway! John Wesley used to tell his preachers, “Preach faith until you have it, then preach faith!” We might adapt that to say, “Worship until you feel it, then worship!” 

And that’s why it’s important to gather with others for public worship. There is something spiritual that happens in community that does not happen in isolation. Of course, these days are difficult, and for many, worshipping by ourselves has been the only option. But if we allow that to be our only option to worship for good, after all this is over, we’re missing out on an aspect of rejoicing that can strengthen our souls. There is something to coming together, that if I am struggling that day, your faith can encourage mine, and hopefully vice versa. It’s not without reason that the psalmist says, “I rejoiced when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord’” (Psalm 122:1). There is something that happens when we come together. I love the imagery in Psalm 73, which you’ll read this week in the Scripture readings, but it describes a man who is really struggling to believe that God is good. He says at the outset that he knows God is good to Israel. “But as for me,” he writes, “my feet had almost slipped” (Psalm 73:1-2). And there is a long litany of the ways evil people seem to be winning in the world, and a long complaint against the way God is running the world, and he says, like maybe many of us say, “When I tried to understand all this, it troubled me deeply” (73:16). When you read people who walk away from the Christian faith today, many of them say it’s because they don’t think God is doing what God ought to be doing. He’s not done away with all the evil and hardship in the world. This ancient writer is saying just that, but the difference between him and today’s writers is what he does next: “Till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny” (73:17). He went to worship. He rejoiced, he worshipped, and he began to see things from God’s perspective. That’s why the writer to the Hebrews urges us to not give up “meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25).

There’s much more I could say about that, but I also want to mention (briefly) a few other ways we can rejoice. Some people keep what might be called a “gratitude journal.” I read about one lady who kept it open in her kitchen so that anytime something happened or she noticed something she was thankful for, she could quickly write it down. Others keep a prayer journal, writing down prayer requests and then going back to write down how that prayer was answered. In both of those cases, the path to rejoicing is going back some time later, maybe a year later, and reviewing what you wrote. It’s being reminded of the things you were (and are) thankful for, and of the ways in which God has worked over the past year. Sometimes we get so narrowly focused that we forget what God has done. Our Leadership Council is soon sending out a letter to help us remember how God has worked in the life of our church over the last year, and the ways God is still moving. That’s important, especially after a year like we’ve had in 2020, because it’s far too easy to focus on the “bad” stuff or the difficult stuff rather than on the ways we saw God continue to show up. When that letter comes to your mailbox, think of it as our church’s gratitude journal. Sit down, take some time to read through it, and rejoice. Listing our blessings, remembering God’s goodness, walking in nature and celebrating the creation—all of these things help move us closer to being able to rejoice in the God who made it all, who blesses us beyond measure, whose name is hallowed.

We also have to be wary of believing that the only time we can worship is when we’re here; that’s simply not true. Worship is something that we can and should do every day in every way; worship is a lifestyle. Pete Greig says we should learn to “worship with our own weirdness.” Here’s how he puts it: “The psalmist exhorts us on four separate occasions to ‘sing to the Lord a new song’ because he wants us to worship spontaneously, creatively and from the heart. You are a new song that God has given to the world, a song that no one else can sing. The way you think, they way you see life, and the way you worship are utterly unique! Isn’t it time you stepped out into the street, threw back your head, and gave the world the weirdest, most wonderful rendition of you?” (How to Pray 66).

So, with that in mind, you probably noticed we didn’t sing that much when we began the worship service this morning. Of course that was on purpose, because I thought if we’re talking about rejoicing, adoration, worship this morning, maybe we ought to respond by doing some of that. So I’m going to pray and then we’re going to worship in song to close the service today. But remember—that is only the beginning of your worship as you head into the week—to pause and rejoice. Let’s pray.