the lord’s prayer: come on god, show yourself!
Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
February 16, 2003
Matthew 6: 7-13
I want to share with you again the classic fable told by Ramakrishna, the great Hindu saint of the 19th century. He told about a motherless tiger cub that was adopted by goats and brought up by them to speak their language, emulate their ways, eat their food, and in general to believe that he was a goat himself. Then one day a king tiger came along. All the goats scattered in fear, leaving the young tiger alone to face him. The king tiger couldn’t believe his eyes. He asked the young tiger what he meant by this unseemly masquerade, but all the young tiger could do was to bleat nervously in response and continue nibbling at the grass. So the large tiger carried him to a pool where he forced him to look at their two reflections side by side and draw his own conclusions. Still the young tiger didn’t get it. So the king tiger offered him some meat. At first the young tiger recoiled from the unfamiliar taste of it, but then as he ate more and more and began to feel it warming his blood, the truth gradually became clear to him. Lashing his tail and digging his claws into the ground, the young tiger raised his head high and the jungle trembled at the sound of his exultant roar. Are we ready to claim our identity as tigers?
Our Father in heaven, hallowed by your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done.
On earth as it is in heaven.
New Testament professor, Thomas Long, says that these petitions of the Lord’s prayer are nothing less than petitions for God’s victory: “God, make your name holy, make your salvation visible in our hurting and sinful world, roll back all the forces that enslave us….not in some future time or some high and holy place, but here, now, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Notice how Jesus moves the focus of the prayer from heaven to earth. “Your will be done on earth.” In the words of Long, “The prayer which ascended to the holy heights of heaven, has now brought us firmly back to where we live, to the pew where we sit, to the shop where we work, to the relationships where we struggle to be responsible…It is God’s heavenly will that is to be done, but it is on earth that it is to be accomplished. Built into the language of the prayer is the intrinsic connection between God’s work and ours.”
To pray these familiar words, as we do week after week, is really to pray for nothing less than the redemption of the world. It is to see the world with the same love as its Creator, and to see it with the deep grief of the Creator, grief for the battered and battle-scarred state in which the world finds itself today. It is to pray for nothing less than the radical defeat and uprooting of all evil, all suffering, all human pain; to pray for heaven and earth to be in harmony at last; for God to be all and in all. And, if we pray this way, we of course must be prepared to live this way. In the words of theologian, James Whitehead, “We are called to participate in God’s imagination – to see ourselves, our neighbors, our church, our world through God’s eyes, full of possibility, full of promise, full of life and hope, ready to be transformed at any moment.” It’s a prayer for conversion – for God to come and us to be changed. Are we prepared for this? Are we really ready to live this way? In spite of all our fine words, are we prepared for God’s love to invade our time and place?
The novelist, Walker Percy, once said that God is dead for most of us because we dread for God to be alive. Dr. Thomas More is the protagonist in Percy’s Love in the Ruins. He is a man deeply embittered by life, a self confessed “bad Catholic,” lost in grief over the death of his daughter, Samantha, from cancer. He remembers why he did not take her to the healing waters of Lourdes as she was dying. Says More, “I was afraid she might be cured. Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?”
Reflecting on More’s dilemma, Ralph Wood of Wake Forest University writes, “For God to have miraculously healed Samantha would have been too spiritually exacting for Dr. More. Such salvation would have robbed him of what he called his sweet remorse…of any excuse for his anger and cynicism, his drinking and lusting and hating.”
But More has a point. We pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done.” But what if it happens? Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes. Suppose you ask for God to show up, to make a difference, and God actually does! How do you live the rest of your life?
Which brings me, at long last, back to the tiger who thought he was a goat. How easy it is, how comforting, to remain a goat; to just accept things the way they are, to get along by going along, to adjust to the world, to make its standards our standards. Besides, what can just one person do anyway? I think of Snoopy, lying on the top of his doghouse. He is in a reflective mood. “Yesterday I was a dog. Today I’m a dog. Tomorrow I’ll probably be a dog. (he sighs) There is so little room for advancement.” It’s certainly easy to think that way. In fact, this is precisely the way the principalities and powers of the world want us to think. Don’t question too much, don’t think too much, don’t dream too much. Just buy your duct-tape and plastic and let us think for you. Yesterday you were a goat, today you are a goat, tomorrow you will be a goat. It’s the way things were meant to be.
But then we have the audacity to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done.” “In the juvenescence of the year,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “comes Christ the tiger. ” He comes and essentially shatters all the categories by which we, in our goat world, manage, control, and administer our lives. He comes as the power of life in a world bent on death. He comes among us goats and dares us to claim our identity as tigers. And deep in our souls, no matter what we have been told, no matter how badly we have been beaten down, we know we weren’t created to be goats. In the words of Frederick Buechner, “If the tiger who thinks he is a goat could really be a goat, then he would not have a problem. But, fortunately or unfortunately, there is still enough of the tiger in us to make us discontented with our goathood. We eat grass but it never really fills us. We bleat well enough, but deep down there is the suspicion that we were really made for roaring.”
And so we pray that familiar prayer, a prayer which becomes a radical plea for subversion and conversion, a prayer which boldly asks for God to come and make a difference, a prayer which asks for the kingdom to come…in us. It is nothing less than a plea for God to make us bearers of the kingdom, an orchestra to play the kingdom music until the world finally takes up the song; it is a prayer for God to help us claim our true identity as tigers in a world of goats.
“Your kingdom come, your will be done.” It is God’s kingdom, not ours. Finally, only God can make it happen. And God works in God’s own time. As we look out on a world seemingly bent on violence and self-destruction, it is easy to wonder if God has fallen asleep at the switch. As we said in our Call to Worship, the movement of the kingdom seems so very slow.
No, we can’t, on our own, make the kingdom happen. But we can keep praying the prayer...and we will. And in the face of war and injustice, poverty and alienation, we can continue to affirm that God has not quit and that God will have God’s way. Trusting in this God, we can announce our intention to turn away from madness, cruelty, shallowness, blindness; our intention to turn toward tolerance, sanity, compassion, hope, justice – which is our true identity as tigers, as sons and daughters of God.
“Your kingdom come, your will be done.” Finally, it is a prayer that God’s way just might have a chance in a violent, nameless, faceless world, a world made all the more violent by its namelessness and facelessness. It was Lyndon Johnson, of all people, who once said, “War is sending one mother’s son to kill another mother’s son.” But the kingdom we pray for, you see, is a kingdom where God loves us and we love each other, face-to-face, one at a time, with a risky particularity: every face we meet – precious; every city – precious; even this world of ours – precious.
In the words of Paul Tillich, “’Love never ends,’” said the Apostle. Love is the power of the new in every person and in all history. It cannot age; it removes guilt and curse. It is working even today toward new creation. It is hidden in the darkness of our souls and of our history. But it is not completely hidden to those who are grasped by its reality.”
Friends, God is on the move in more ways than we can understand. “Your kingdom come; your will be done.”