Readings: Isaiah 6:1-8; Matthew 6:5-13
“Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread…” I suspect that most of us have said those words…a whole lot…of times in our lives. And I suspect that most of those whole lot of times we have said them just about as fast as I said them just now—and therefore just about as thoughtfully, which is to say not very. When a version of the Lord’s Prayer appeared in the reading for last Sunday, it occurred to me that it might be worthwhile to spend some time with it, consider it verse by verse, work our way through it in that way v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. So that’s what I’ll be doing at least through the month of August.
Today, it’s verse 1 and let’s start over and listen again just to that one verse. In fact let’s listen to several versions of just that one verse, not all of them translations but versions…words of prayer inspired by the Lord’s Prayer. The traditional version that most of us are used to, which comes from the King James Version of the Bible, says: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name.” Then there’s…
“Great Spirit, whose tepee is in the sky and whose hunting ground is on earth, hallowed be thy name.” (Council of American Indian Ministries)
Our Father, who art in this land, may we bless your name, even as we search incessantly for justice and peace.” (Nicaragua)
“O Most Compassionate Life-giver, may we honor and praise you…” Bill Wallace, New Zealand)
Our Father, who is in heaven between the gulls and the warplanes…our mother, who is in the fields and helps us carry water when we can’t go on…” (Ecuador)
“Life source and sustainer, beyond all yet close, you are father and mother. Life is sacred to us. We seek now to shape this your world as a home, to let it share in the mystery of your holy name.” (Bangalore, India)
“Love maker, Pain bearer, Life giver, source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all, Loving God in whom is heaven, the hallowing of your name echo through the universe!” (Maori, New Zealand)
“Our Father, Who is here on earth, Holy is your name in the hungry who share their bread and their song.” (Central America)
We’ve talked in the past, I have and others have too, about the thoughts that come up in connection with addressing God as father, gender inclusiveness in our language, the need not to imagine God exclusively as male, the need to extend our language and stretch our imaginations so as not to exclude God as father but to make that a small part of the much larger and richer ways we have of speaking about God. I don’t want to go back over that same ground again quite yet. Not that we’re done with it, but just that the “our Father” part is not what I wanted to focus on this morning. It occurred to me as I was gathering those various versions that I am also skipping over the “who art in heaven” part, which seemed to bother the people who produced many of the versions we just heard, since they made a point of commenting that God is here as well as there. But for better or worse I decided I also didn’t want to talk about heaven this morning and where God might reside. Besides, I could point out that in the version of the Lord’s Prayer we had last week, Luke skips over the heaven part too. Luke reports Jesus as saying just: “Our Father, hallowed be thy name.” So I don’t feel so bad skipping over it too. But then there’s the hallowed part, which is what I do want to say a few things about.
It’s not because I knew at the beginning exactly what I wanted to say about God’s name being hallowed, just that I wanted to talk about it, partly because I haven’t really given it too much thought—I’ve given a lot of thought to other parts of the Lord’s Prayer, forgiveness, for instance, but not so much to the part that says “hallowed be thy name”—and so I wanted to think about it so it would be a little less of a rote and meaningless thing for me, but also because it suggests to me a concern I have, or should have, every Sunday.
Every Sunday we gather here and do something that is really highly questionable. We get together and talk about God as though we could talk about God. OK, so mostly it’s not “we” who do this, it’s me who does it. But even if you don’t all talk about God as though you could talk about God, you listen to me do it, and on the whole act like it’s a perfectly normal thing to do. You are accomplices in this highly questionable activity. Those of you who don’t talk about God as though we could talk about God at least give aid and comfort to those of us who do. So I’m not going to let you get out of this.
What we do here in worship every Sunday is questionable if, that is, we really believe that God’s name is to be hallowed, which I take to mean treated with reverence, kept holy. We’ve got a lot of nerve just coming into this place and bandying God’s name around like it was nothing, like we were talking about…I don’t know, political conventions. (I pick an example of something that is clearly not holy, even when it is a Democratic political convention.)
If there is not a catch in the throat when we are talking about or to God, then there’s good reason to think that it is not God we are talking about or to. And if there is not a catch in the throat there is reason to question whether we should be saying God’s name, any of God’s names, at all.
One goal, one hope, of every worship service ought to be to put us in a place of wonder in relation to God, to take us to some place of holiness. I am aware of that every week. I am aware of the impossibility of doing what we come here to do. I want, in my more thoughtful moments, to make my language and the worship service a testimony to the holiness of God, the hallowedness of God. But although I know inside that that is my task, our task, I don’t always do it. It is easier said than done, for one thing. It is also the case that I am not always in a place of wonder or reverence myself, either when I’m working on the service or preparing the sermon, or when I’m standing here in front of you. I am often in other places, places of anger or sadness about what’s going on in the world or things closer to home, places of worry about this person or that, places of feeling guilty about things I haven’t done or trying to remember what I need to do, places where I am just trying to cope with some small but large hurdle that has just reared up in my life (you know what those things are—broken cars, a billing problem that’s going to keep you on the phone for hours, a toothache, things that in the big scheme of things are very small, but that take up a lot of space in your life), or places that are just plain ordinary where what we are immersed in is not particularly burdensome, but also not particularly joyful, and certainly not filled with wonder.
There are lots of places to be that are not just saturated with holiness and I am in those places much of the time, as I presume we all are, and when I am in those places it is not conducive to producing worship materials that are put us in touch with a god whose name is hallowed. And when any of us come to worship sort of locked in to those unholy places in our lives, where most of us are most of the time, then it probably won’t matter much what words are in the bulletin or spoken by me or anyone else, that sense of holiness, the hallowedness of God’s name, just won’t magically happen. Besides it is not something that is totally within our power, where by the manipulation of words or atmosphere we can bring the hallowedness of God into our lives or make it more real.
So as I think about it just a little bit, hallowed be thy name is not just a throwaway phrase. To pray for God’s name to be hallowed is not really to ask anything of God, but to ask something of ourselves: if not to actually create that sense of wonder, at least not to shut ourselves off from it. Kathleen Norris, well-known writer on spiritual matters, comments that she has been to far too many worship services where the language used has little to do with holiness. She gives as an example a service that began with the prayer, “Lord, use this hour to put our lives in order and set our priorities straight.” It may be that we have some things we need to get in order, and it is always true that we need to work at getting our priorities straight, but whether this is God’s business or ours is another matter. And whether we have any right to direct God to use this particular hour in that way is another matter. And whether invoking the holy name of God or coming in even a small way into the presence of one whose being is holy, whether that can be expected to produce order in our lives is still another matter. More likely it will produce disorder. More likely it will unsettle us. More likely it will challenge our assumptions. More likely it will remind us that we are not in control. More likely it will ask us to set out on voyages to unknown destinations. Another writer in a phrase that I love says that we too often use the name of God to try to tie down the flapping edges of the universe. (Barbara Brown Taylor, The Silence of God) But that is our need, not necessarily God’s, to tie down the flapping edges of the universe, make things understandable and under control and safe.
And of course we do use the name of God in all sorts of ways. We use the name of God to justify unholy wars. We use the name of God to cloak ourselves in goodness. We use the name of God to endorse our causes. And when we use the name of God in these ways, when the name of God is something we use for our own purposes, then it becomes just another word in a culture where words are used to persuade and manipulate and sell us things we wouldn’t otherwise want and make promises that can’t be kept, where words are used to spin and mislead and hide the truth rather than to tell the truth.
In this context “hallowed be thy name” may express not just a nice sentiment but a desperate need—to rescue God’s name from being just another word that is used, sometimes cynically and sometimes just thoughtlessly and casually, but used by human beings rather than thought or spoken with wonder and with fear and trembling. I’m not sure we can totally do this, rescue God’s name from being used cynically or casually. In fact, I’m sure we can’t. I’m sure we will continue to speak God’s name in ways that are not appropriate to the holiness of God. We will not be filled with wonder every time we think or write or speak the name of God. But we can be a little more aware of the ways we fail to express the inexpressible, of the ways we sometimes shut God out even as we are speaking God’s name. But other than to fall into complete silence we don’t really have a choice but to keep on trying, and failing, to speak of God in ways that hold that name to be holy.
But then again it’s not really God or God’s name that I’m worried about. It’s me, it’s us that need the hallowing. So maybe after all we are praying for ourselves when we say “hallowed be thy name”. Maybe we are praying that when we pray or say the name of God, it will carve out a place of holiness within us. Maybe we are hoping that there be reserved in us—alongside the worries about the broken cars and inspection reports, alongside the bill paying and the grocery shopping—that there be a place that is reserved for nothing but wonder and for God.
As we walk about in the daylight, there in the shadows is God, the holy God, knocking at the edges of our well-known lives, not fully present to us, but nevertheless a presence, not easily heard but still trying to whisper something, not clearly visible but we can tell there is something moving there. There is a holiness that follows me wherever I go. Holy is the name of God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 1, 2004