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Pentecost 11
21/8/2022

Jeremiah 1.4-10
Hebrews 12.18-29

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

God, may my words be loving and true; and may those who listen discern what is unloving and untrue in my words. Amen.

The world ends every day.

It ends when a harried surgeon walks alone to a teary-eyed family telling them their mother didn’t make it.

It ends when a once hope-filled couple silently packs away the crib and nursery for a new life that never came home.

It ends when a phone call severs the last chance of reconciliation with an abusive father, who slipped away during the night.

It ends when abuse passes on to another child, and the trauma will have to wait one more generation to be cleared away.

The world ends every day.

Every day the world is shaken at its very core.

Over and over and over and over and over and over and over …

And our human fragility is left wandering the world as if in the wilderness. Is this the freedom from God?

Hebrews is a difficult text. I don’t really have the foggiest idea what’s going on. But part of what’s going on, clearly, is a contrast being made between the ancient story of Israel: the Jewish people freed from captivity in Egypt, and yet left wandering in the desert — and the story of Jesus Christ: who frees us from our captivity to the forces of sin and death, and yet here we find ourselves in worlds that end over, and over, and over again.

Part of what makes Hebrews such a difficult text is the seeming incompatibility between these two stories: the story of Israel, and the story of Christ.

Throughout Hebrews Jesus is spoken of as the great high priest of Heaven; and yet, if we follow the strictures of the Jewish Torah (the law) Jesus does not properly fit into the line of priests. After all, Jesus literally was not a priest, and was not from the line of priests, or even the priestly tribe.

Similarly, if we follow the story of the system of ritual sacrifice established by God in the wilderness of wandering, the sacrifice of Christ does not make sense. There is no call for human blood, nor a single sacrifice that disrupts the daily cycle of the cult in tabernacle or temple.

So it is, as is often the case, that we find ourselves at the centre of the encounter of two worlds. Today in our reading Hebrews welcomes us into the heavenly Jerusalem, into an angelical festal gathering. And yet, at the very same time, we are put on guard lest our refusal of this welcome home turn into the final shaking of the world, the final end that leads to consuming fire.

Hebrews leads us to sit in this tension. (I almost wonder if the baffling nature of this text is intentional: forcing us to really sit in the mood it evokes.)

We are in a world of sin and repeated death, which we must face up to. In this present world we remain enslaved to the constant cycle of world ending tragedy, death all around, our own failures and the failures of others … and so we are like the Israelites wandering in the wilderness, setting up altars wherever we rest for a while: constantly making amends, and beginning again, and trying in our fumbling, fragile ways to restore ourselves and our broken worlds. Over, and over, and over again.

And yet, and yet says Hebrews: “Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant … speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” (Heb. 12.24)

We must be on guard here against readings of this text that see us replacing the promises of God to the Jewish people: simply setting aside the old ways of Torah for something new. We cannot do this, because we hear the better word of Jesus precisely and because we too learn from journeys in the wilderness. We hear the better word of Jesus only because we come lately and join the journey of God’s promise and people.

And this is the better word …

The word that is better than the blood of Abel, the crying out of the tragic death of humanity
The word that is better than all the injustice that goes unanswered in the world
The word that is better than land stained with suffering, and robbed of life
The word that is better than shaken foundations, and worlds that end daily

This is the better word:

God has answered our echoing prayer, we have called out to God from the cycle of tragedy:

“Hosanna, Save us, we pray, you beyond all!”

And God has answered this call, entering into a world that is strange and ill-fitting of the divine. God has become the human one among us, feeling the loss of betrayal, suffering the persecutions of the powerful, beaten and bruised, murdered and pierced. The whole story of humanity is gathered in this human one, this Son of Man who comes on the clouds as if from Heaven itself: this one has come and gathered in all humanity and put God where the people die.

The cycle of our human frailty that separates us from God is broken by this one, by Jesus who speaks the word that is better than the blood of Abel crying from the land. This cycle is not broken because the world has no more tragedy; and we cannot accept the welcome into God’s presence without acknowledging that the foundations of worlds continue to shake. The promise of Christ’s presence breaks the cycle of our abandonment in the wilderness, because the living God has now entered fully into our journey.

The fullness of God has reached out and grasped
The fullness of God embraces us with love
The fullness of God has called us holy, and is making us holy

You are holy and loved by God
You are holy and loved by God

In the midst of all failure, all tragedy, all injustice:

You are holy and loved by God.

We have not come to a reconciled world that can be touched, we are not led by a pillar of blazing fire through our wilderness, and the tempest and the trumpet and the voice of God do not regularly sound aloud in our Assemblies …

And yet we are holy and loved by God, called to the deeper, invisible world which can no longer shake. Though the world ends over and repeatedly, we live for the world in which justice and mercy kiss.

The world in which the cry of the blood from the land — the cry of First Peoples — no longer has to call out, because justice is done.
The world in which all who were told their love made them unholy are told that they are holy and beloved.
The world in which the land sustains life, and the life of the land is sustained.
The world in which the pioneer and perfecter of peace causes all war to cease.

We live for the world beyond tragedy … the world through tragedy. The world without end. For this is the journey with God. Amen.

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Pentecost 10
14/8/2022

Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Psalm 82
Luke 12:49-56

In a sentence:
For all the good (and bad we do),
God remains hopelessly devoted to us

On Tuesday, I again turned to discover the top item in the day’s news feed, to serve as a launching place for today’s sermon. I found there what I’d heard that earlier morning: that Olivia Newton-John had died overnight. I then realised that a “Greatest Hits” collection of her songs was quietly playing away in the background in the café where I was reading about this. Perhaps a sign from God?

Newton-John was talented and gorgeous, seeming to be the kind of person many would be happy to have as daughter, friend or lover. Rising to prominence as she did in the 60s and 70s, her bright personal style seemed to reflect something of the country’s own developing self-perception, and she made big on the international scene just as Australia itself was becoming increasingly aware of its own international presence and possibilities; “our Olivia” singing and starring was another “goal” kicked for Australia. Later in life, Newton-John’s public struggle with cancer also became representative of similar hardships among her fans.

It is meaningful and right, then, to say that Newton-John was an “Australian icon”. The Greek word eikon is what the New Testament uses to speak of religious idols, and of Jesus as an “image” or icon of God (e.g. Colossians 1.15). An Australian icon is, then, properly an “image” of Australia, encapsulating something of our essence. At least in the first couple of decades of her career, Newton-John seemed to do just that.

When our icons die, we hear what they achieved and what they stood for, principally from those who loved them for it. In this way, we “eulogise” the dead, to borrow another Greek term which means “speaking good of”. We gather to remember, to mourn and to tell stories.

And this brings me to a connection we can draw between the eulogising of Newton-John and the not unreasonably expectation that most of us, too, will one day be eulogised. Because, for the most part, we are icons to those who love us, if on a smaller scale than our celebrities, and the dynamic of story-telling is not different whether we have lived loudly or quietly. What is the “good word” to be heard at our funerals when the time comes?!

Let’s take it as a starting point that a eulogy should tell the truth. What does this mean? Our icons invite us to be wholly affirmative as we tell their story, and there’s been plenty of that this week. It seems bad taste to darken death with accounts of the darker corners in our lives, and we fear being judged for presuming to judge others and tarnishing the image. Of course, we make a judgement already if we choose to speak only the good, laying fig leaves over any regrettable nakedness that might be exposed if we peeked behind.

And yet, we have a problem if we only bury saints who did no wrong and victors who always prevailed, because a funeral gathers a room full of sinners, victims and losers. What we hear about him who died and what made his life worthwhile is also being said about us sitting in the congregation, and it may not fit very well – they are too unlike us in all our good and bad realities. A good funeral service – and the Uniting Church has a pretty good basic funeral service – allows that the saint we gather to remember was also a sinner. We are each icons – images – of more (or less!) than just the best we allow to be seen or acknowledged. If we are saints – and the funeral service also declares this – it is despite the truth about lives as much as because of it.

Within our Uniting Church funeral service are elements which make explicit that even if we gather to bury one of our icons, she is not much different from us. And so we pray,

In strength and in weakness, in achievement and failure, in the brightness of joy and the darkness of despair, we remember her as one of us…

We are also encouraged to pray,

…we confess that we have not always lived as your grateful children; we have not loved as Christ loved us…forgive us if there have been times when we failed her.

Then, scandalously to some ears, we also pray,

Enable us by your grace to forgive anything that was hurtful to us.

These little prayers are not much in the whole sweep of what is said in a funeral, but they mark the vision of human being in the service. We are one of each other: able to hurt and be hurt, and in need of forgiveness and reconciliation, as well as able to be the good which others will one day miss. This is very often difficult to acknowledge around the time of death: that the life our loved ones have lived – even if it has seemed to be a good one – has not been complete or whole, and neither yet is our own.

In our reading from the letter to the Hebrews this morning, there is a strange twist. Great Old Testament icons of the faith are recalled, who variously were

“…stoned to death…were sawn in two…killed by the sword…they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented…”.

In this, for the writer, they were terrifyingly exemplary. Yet faith icons though they are, the writer goes on to say that even they “did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.” Those who seemed to have achieved so much are yet incomplete. They – in some way – need us. The dead depend somehow on the living. Or, more precisely, the truth of the dead depends on the truth of the living.

What is the truth of the living? The writer goes on: the dead look to us as we look to Jesus, whom the writer calls the “pioneer and perfector” of our faith, the pioneer and perfector of our very lives. With this, the letter reminds us that there is a second story to be considered alongside our own: our story is told within the encapsulating story of Jesus, pioneer and perfector, beginning and end.

And so, a Christian funeral tells these two stories and not just one. There is, of course, our story: what we did and what was done to us. And there is Christ’s story, within which our story is placed. This second story is widely overlooked. Even in Christian funerals, it is often reduced to serve as an extension of our story, becoming a comforting religious bit to help with the mess of hearts and minds death leaves behind.

The overgrown eulogising which dominates in many funerals today is a sign that we don’t know any other story to tell, and so we tell only that of the deceased – as much of it as we dare. And so the death of one who lived life badly, or whose life was cut far too short, leaves us speechless. If they have not yet done anything or did nothing good, what can we say?

To tell just the one story is to misunderstand the funeral as being only about the deceased. Rather, funerals are about the living, not the dead. The second story about Jesus – the pioneer and perfector, the beginning and the end – is told to catch us all up together, the image-icon we gather to remember and us who saw ourselves in the icon we have lost.

We are, of course, entirely dedicated to knowing just how good we are and how good or bad others might be. We make these judgements not only in eulogies but in other assessments of ourselves and others along the way. Yet Christian faith shifts the focus: not only what we do but also what God gives and does: this is the whole of us. There is a pioneer from whom we spring and a perfector who fills us to completion.

Hearing this is not just the work of the funeral. Sunday’s services share in the same logic: a naming that we are less, and more, than we know. If we are doing it properly, Sunday worship should address us in such a way as to want to turn away from self-fascination and self-judgement towards an openness to a life which springs from and is completed by others. Sunday’s word is that we do not start ourselves and we do not finish ourselves: we are pioneered and perfected as much despite what we do as because of it.

There is freedom and peace in this: we are not measured, assessed or tested by God, even if we do this to each other. And we need not do this to ourselves or each other – proving or testing whether we and they are worthy of good words, of rich eulogising. If the wholeness of Jesus himself encapsulates us as pioneer and perfector, we are not under scrutiny: we have been well started and will be well finished. We can, then, be honest about ourselves without fear of judgement.

A life well-lived is one freely received and expressed in this light: now in strength and now in weakness, now in achievement and now in failure, now knowing the brightness of joy and, now, the darkness of despair. Such a good-and-bad life is finally worthy of a good word because it rests in a goodness greater than our own. Jesus is the pioneer and perfector of our lives. This means that, in our best works and in our worst, God’s word to us is, “I’m hopelessly devoted to you”. Every love song is on its way to becoming a psalm.

The good word about God – God’s own eulogy – is the beginning and the end of the good word to be said about us.

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Pentecost 9
7/8/2022

Hebrews 11:1-11
Psalm 33
Luke 12:32-40

In a sentence:
People are never (properly) means to ends, but are an end in themselves.

This week a feature story in our newspapers was the apology of the Adelaide Crows football club to Eddie Betts and other players who were made to participate in a team training camp in early 2018. The occasion for the apology was a new autobiography by Betts, in which he describes the physical and psychological duress applied to the players in what was something like a military boot camp intended to turn the team into more effective sportsfield warriors.

Many important but mundane things about the camp could be observed, including the inappropriateness of subjecting what were, in some cases, little more than boys to such treatment, and how personal identity and confidential information were weaponised against individuals, and elements of indigenous culture were misused. The account of the camp is quite ghastly – or at least this seems to be what we are to conclude from the way in which it has been reported. “What were they thinking?” is a reasonable question to put to the club and the camp organisers, and the club’s apology reflects recognition of the problem.

Yet, if the reports do horrify us, they ought not surprise us, for there is nothing new here. By this, I don’t mean that the camp was an instance of similar things that occasionally happen. Rather, the unsurprising thing is the motivation for the camp. The methods used at the camp reflected the pervasive mindset that ends can justify means. In this case, winning was worth the risk to the hearts and minds of those who attended the camp: human beings were to be employed for ends other than those people themselves. De-humanising through abusive language and other psychological and physical methods was intended to re-cast in the players’ minds that their single purpose was winning the competition.

We trivialise what is at stake here if we judge the methods of the camp by dismissing football as “only a game” – that it was too much given what could be gained. This misses the point because the implication is that, were it not “only a game”, the methods might be justifiable. Here we can broaden what is at play in how we connect means and ends by observing that the camp was run that way because such methods actually work – or, at least, we hold that they do in certain contexts. We are familiar – as individuals, as a society and even as a church – with a justifying of means by ends, even if the means are a great human cost.

The quasi-military nature of the Crows’ training camp is significant here. In war, the hearts and bodies of soldiers are employed as a means to an end – winning the war. As a society, we celebrate the sacrifice these men and women make; that sacrifice is surely great, whether the soldiers make it willingly or unwillingly. But in this, we overlook that the nation also expects this sacrifice – that it effectively sacrifices those hearts and bodies. The human cost of war is the means to the end of winning the war. Not many months back, then Minister for Defence, Peter Dutton, warned that Australia needed to shift to a war footing, given growing tensions around the Pacific. At the same time, a recent survey reported the general unwillingness of young Australians to commit themselves to fighting a war. This prompted Prime Minister Morrison to express his disappointment in our younger generations on that issue and to write an opinion piece explaining how the nation’s defence depended upon people willing to enlist. Around all this has been a wider conversation about the reintroduction of national service – although seemingly only for young people. In a war, a nation consumes its young – apparently a justifiable means to the end of national security.

We know, of course, that the cost is horrific even if we are willing to pay it, and so annual remembrance services are sombre affairs. But it is the assumption that the cost of war must be paid which is the heart of the matter – the assumption that the end is important enough to justify means, whether the battlefield is the Adelaide Oval or the South China Sea.

We do distinguish between a footy match and geopolitical conflicts. This is principally in terms of scale: the Grand Final seems pretty trivial in contrast to national security. But we are a little confused here, because both seek to preserve a present or create a future and so both are about ends and means. And in both cases, the human means are clearly distinguishable from the end created, be it the Premiership or unassailed borders. Those human hearts and bodies matter less than the desired end. Footy is “only a game”, and so the methods of the Crows’ training camp seem excessive. Yet we still hold to the sacrificial principle in other seemingly necessary contexts.

We want then, two contradictory truths to be true at the same time: on the one hand, that human hearts and bodies are not means to anyone’s ends and, on the other hand, that sometimes we have to pile up a few bodies to divert history’s juggernauts. This is a kind of hypocrisy – a “sincere” hypocrisy, perhaps, but no less hypocritical. We don’t want to see that sometimes we agree that our hopes for history need to be lubricated by blood.

Now, we’ve not yet come to our gospel text of interest today(!), from which I’ll pull just one line: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”. If the treasure is “winning” at any cost, this is where our heart will be found, and not in the well-being of the other hearts which might be crushed in achieving that end. We might lament the great cost but we will nonetheless pay it because we treasure the end more than the human coin to be paid for it.

Yet, Christian faith declares that pain, suffering and death are never means to an end with God. God does not kill or oppress for some higher cause. God can use such suffering in a world which constantly generates it – this is part of the meaning of the church’s talk of incarnation. The cross of Jesus is not God’s plan or work but our own, even if God uses it to reveal grace and hope.

The problem with the Crows’ training camp was not merely that it happened but that it could have been thought to be worth trying in the first place, brutalising human hearts towards some inhuman end: “winning”. God does not treasure the end which can be achieved by what God can do with or to us. Human beings are not means to ends – even God’s own ends. God treasures not the end but us: we are the end and the means, and so we – treasured and nurtured – are paramount in all things.

In our reading from Hebrews this morning, we heard of those whose faith was a desire for “a better country”. This is a country in which hearts don’t so much treasure things but are the treasured thing, a country in which hearts, souls and bodies are ends and means – heart begetting heart. Heart is God’s end, and so also God’s means.

If we are to treasure what God treasures, we do not climb over each other to reach up to heaven. We have no vision of the future which requires that others don’t get there but are merely the means by which we get there. Rather, we reach down and pull the other up a little higher. For we do not climb to heaven but are drawn there. When a heaven like this comes, it captures us all because, drawing each other up, we are holding hands, so that catching one of us catches us all.

Let us then, with those faithful ones in Hebrews, desire such a country as this: a world in which we seek the peace we so earnestly desire by the means of peace – the treasuring of hearts – that it might be peace not just for us but for all.

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Pentecost 8
31/7/2022

Colossians 3:1-10
Psalm 49
Luke 12:13-21

In a sentence:
Heaven is not a place of mere rest but a life in which work and rest are properly related to each other; heaven, then, is a possibility here and now.

Why is it that a great number of us, a great deal of the time, are “ready for a holiday” – ready to leave work, whatever “work” might be for us?

It probably has something to do with the way we work. There’s the distance we might have to travel to work – maybe even moving house, interstate, or even internationally. There are the hours we might have to work. There are the people we have to deal with – whether our colleagues or our employers. Perhaps there’s the sheer difficulty of what we do, or the state of boredom it lulls us into. To acknowledge all this is to say that work can hurt, and so we much prefer to be away from it – relaxing, eating, drinking and being merry, perhaps.

I suspect that most of us have a picture in our heads of heaven being not only a place where birds are twittering incessantly and all our friends and family (or at least the ones we like) are around us, but also being a place where we’re on constant holiday! – kind of a heavenly “idle rich” way of being! This seems to have been the plan of our barn-building friend in Jesus’ parable today – we’ll call him Barney. In the story, God calls Barney a fool. Perhaps it’s part of his foolishness that he thought he’d finally found heaven on earth: the ability to withdraw from the world of work. Heaven is no longer having to work.

Those who know their Old Testament will remember that at the end of the story of Adam, Eve and the apple, God lays curses on the labours of Adam and Eve. The woman’s labour – understood here as giving birth – will become a matter of great pain, and the man’s labour – tilling the soil – would become an ongoing battle with the earth to produce what they needed. The important point is not whether we buy into this particular explanation of why labour is so difficult, or whether we have different types of work today. The important thing is that the work itself is not the punishment. In the Paradise of Eden, Adam and Eve already had work to do – working the soil and raising families – and this was so even before the apple-munching episode. Work is part of the perfect human condition, if such a condition is what life in Eden is supposed to represent. God creates Adam and puts him in the Garden to till it and keep it.

Work, then, is a part of true created human being. If that seems depressing to you, it gets worse if we imagine “getting to” heaven to be like a return to the Paradise of Eden: there’ll be work to do in heaven, too! That is perhaps not the most comforting thing the tired and weary have heard from a pulpit! We usually talk about having to work as if it were a burden rather than because it is part of what God has given us. Our man Barney didn’t “have to” work anymore. He used his possessions to protect himself from the need to work, and perhaps that was part of his problem. Perhaps Barney’s foolishness was not merely that he set himself up for a secure future without thought for others around him, but that he thereby also cut himself off from what he was created for – work. And perhaps most of us are still thinking that we’re with him!

My point here is not that work should be easy, but only that it is, in itself, good. Barney and most of the rest of us get work out of perspective. We get work out of perspective in that we work hard for futures we might not actually have. The terrifying word in Barney’s ears is that “Tonight your very life will be required of you”; essentially, he hears that, for all of his work, he will not enter into any rest. Barney doesn’t get his day off, and it scarcely helps to say that now he “rests in peace”!

What good is retirement if you drop dead the day after you stop work, or the year after? More to the point, what good was your life if your work-life was only oriented towards the “rest-life” in retirement, but all you finally do is leave a barn-sized super-payout to your estate? Our Barney has not been short-changed in death but in life. We can’t rest properly if we don’t work properly. If we work for the wrong reasons – towards the wrong end – we will rest for the wrong reasons, in the wrong way. Rest becomes escape from work, and work becomes the possibility of rest. In this way, we divide ourselves into being just one part of the whole God has made us to be; we might recall here the division we saw between work and rest in Martha and Mary a couple of weeks ago.

Perhaps Barney said to himself, “I’ve earned my retirement,” with a strong emphasis on the “earned”. The problem here is that God gives us rest – as symbolized by the Sabbath – for nothing, quite unearned. God actually commands, Observe the Sabbath: stop working once in a while, for Christ’s sake (literally, for Christ’s sake! God asks us to do everything for the sake of Christ!). If we go to work with the idea of earning our break or retirement, who do we imagine is the task-master we will off, and who will owe us our rest at holiday time, or when we turn 55 or 60 or 65? It is not the God who commands that we rest. Who, then, have we been serving, if we’ve been lucky enough to have work to do?

We share Barney’s desire to relax, eat, drink and be merry! But such things are properly a part of life and not a stage in life. If they were only a stage of life, and even the best stage, then the rest of life is just a warm up to what we might not actually get to.

“Tonight your very life will be required of you” are words we’ll all hear one day, so to speak. Perhaps the difference for a Christian ought to be that such words don’t catch us by surprise or disappoint us because we haven’t actually started living yet.

By God’s grace, may we not be caught by surprise but be found to have lived a life of work and rest, labour and love, and be found to have been satisfied with that.

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Pentecost 7
24/7/2022

Psalm 85
Luke 11:1-13

In a sentence:
Fundamental to the Lord’s Prayer is not the word but that it is prayed in and through Jesus: Jesus himself is our prayer

Do we not know the Lord’s prayer very, very well?

And yet that very familiarity itself can be a problem. Having received so comprehensively this teaching on prayer, we might miss the force of the request the disciples put to Jesus: Lord, teach us to pray. For this is a surprising – even startling – request. The disciples are people of a worshipping community. Since they were children, they were taught to pray – how to stand or to sit, what to do with their hands, what words to say, when to say them.

And yet they ask Jesus, “Teach us to pray.” And so Jesus gives them what we now have as “the Lord’s Prayer”. Does this mean that we, now having these words, know how to pray? Are the words of the Lord’s Prayer the answer to any question we might have about prayer? Most likely, all of us have had the experience of saying the Lord’s Prayer and yet getting to the end “automatically”, without having done anything other than parroting, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name…”. Just saying the right words isn’t what it means to know how to pray. If this were so, prayer would be nothing different from a magic spell – the right words said with the right intonation in the right place at the right time. (“Open Sesame” gets you into the robbers’ cave regardless of how “sincerely” or “meaningfully” you say it!). Whatever prayer is, it is not this!

And so it appears that, even though we have Jesus’ response to his disciples’ request, we are ourselves not yet able to pray; the words are not enough. Having been taught to put our hands together, bow our heads and close our eyes – and even say the Lord’s Prayer – we are not necessarily able to pray. Prayer – at least Christian prayer – is not set patterns, words, or actions, although it does involve all these things.

That being said, the temptation is now strong to rush in with the solution that it’s not the words that matter but our sincerity, our intention, our earnestness, our focus. This seems necessary because we now imagine that effectiveness in holy things is always about us and what we do. “If only I believe hard enough, pray hard enough, empty myself enough, or…” … whatever. But in response to the disciples’ request, Jesus does not say – “All that matters is that you really mean it, and then you’ll be OK”. What Jesus gives the disciples looks more like a formula or a rule for prayer, as if that were a sufficient response to the request.

It seems, then, that the Lord’s Prayer is both just what we need – for Jesus gave it to us in answer to the “how to pray” request – and still not enough, for God is not impressed by our simply knowing the right words and getting our religious practice and prayer right (cf. Psalm 51.16; Isaiah 1.11).

How can this be so? How can the Lord’s Prayer be both enough, and yet not enough?

We tell ourselves – or tell our children – that prayer is “simply talking to God”? How we talk, however, depends upon which God (god) we are talking to, and it’s here that the nature of the Lord’s Prayer as Christian prayer becomes clear. Approaching prayer as if what matters is getting the words or that attitude right is to operate with just another form of what we know as “justification by works”. St Paul contrasts justification by works of the law with justification by grace through faith. Not the work we do but the work which Jesus has done, which we might receive as our own through faith – this is what sets us right before God.

The gospel presents Jesus as the means by which we stand right before God. If we seek to pray “right” before God, it is again through Jesus that this is possible. But this is not because Jesus gives us the words to pray, so that we are now “independent” pray‑ers. We’ve already seen that the words don’t do it. To pray “right” before God through Jesus is to let Jesus himself be our prayer. Prayer may well be “talking to God”, but it also has to do with God’s talking to us. And the simplest and clearest thing God has said to us is “Jesus of Nazareth” – God’s “word” made flesh. To pray is to speak back to God what he has spoken to us; and when God speaks Jesus happens.

(We might note in passing that this has importance for what we do when we come together for worship. We gather not to generate emotion or sincerity or even right doctrine, but to hear and to speak to God of the one God has already sent – Jesus himself – and to be be made that one in the process: we receive what we are, to become what we receive: the Body of Christ).

The prayer of the church, then, is not the mere words of the Lord’s prayer but Jesus himself. It is in this sense that we can say that God knows what we need before we pray – not because God “knows everything”, but because what we need is what Jesus had and is. We need to know ourselves and to know God as Jesus did. We need to be supported and to have the freedom Jesus had. We need to be loved and to love as he did. Jesus – crucified and risen – is the prayer of the church; if we utter only “Jesus is the Christ”, then we have prayed as we should.

“When you pray”, Jesus said, “say, our Father in heaven…” – and just so we should pray. Yet in that prayer we ask, Father,

your kingdom – Jesus Christ – come;

your will – lives such as Jesus’ own – be done;

give us this day what Jesus trusted you for;

give us, and make of us, the forgiveness which is Jesus-the-Christ;

rescue us in the end from evil – as you raised the Christ from the death of the crucified.

In all things – not least the decisions we might make today about our future together – we say, Lord, “Let us see, become and testify to Jesus”. To pray is as difficult – and as easy – as it is to believe ourselves to be made whole in him. If we can rest in the grace of God which is Jesus Christ, if Jesus is Lord, then we have prayer “covered”, and the only “angle” on life we need.

And so we may trust that whoever asks will be given what they ask, whoever seeks will find, whoever knocks will have the door opened, for our Father in heaven is faithful, and gives the Spirit to all who ask, that God’s people may know themselves in and as the Body of Christ. When this happens, the work of prayer, and life, has been done.