Lord and Daddy of Us All
July 29, 2007
Luke 11:1-13
Context is everything. With that in mind, I read and reread our passage from Luke this morning trying to discern just why it is that the disciples pick this point in the story to ask Jesus about prayer. After all, wouldn’t you think that prayer, being such a central spiritual practice, might have been one of the first things that followers of a spiritual leader might ask about? Why here? Why now?
I also wondered a bit about placing this text in the middle of summer. Why now? Well, I reckon it’s always a good time to pray, so it’s probably not a bad time to reflect a bit on prayer itself.
Perhaps Luke’s narrative strategy has something to do with the beginning of the previous chapter, where we find these words:
“After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road” (Luke 10:1-4).
Perhaps the 12 are concerned about job security after Jesus sends out 70 others, or maybe they’re all a bit worried about the nature of the call to which they’ve responded – lambs in the midst of wolves; no purse or bag or sandals.
Their experience as Jesus’ followers has become increasingly intense; fear must have become a constant companion. They probably felt like they were in over their heads in a situation out of control. It probably just felt like a good time to pray.
What we often seek in prayer is control, and maybe that’s what the disciples wanted. But I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind when he invited his disciples into a practice of prayer that says, “Abba, your will be done here and now in our midst as if the household of belovedness were already realized among us.”
Such a practice of prayer does not seek to give voice to our will, but rather seeks silence in order to listen for and allow God’s will to speak to and through our lives and, moreover, to shape those lives according to that will.
You see, the way we pray reflects deeply the way we imagine God, no matter how or how well we imagine the divine. Thus, the way we pray says a great deal about who we think we are as well; even when – especially when – we are not in a prayerful point in our lives.
About a dozen years ago, when an old familiar tug at the edge of my awareness began agitating me with renewed vigor, I had a conversation with Dana Jones, a pastor who was on his way to becoming a mentor in my life. I told him about my long-standing wrestling match with the notion of being called into the ministry of word and sacrament and he responded by asking, “you know what Bonhoeffer said, don’t you?”
“Uh, no,” I answered.
“Bonhoeffer said that it was never a matter of faith but rather one of obedience.”
I can’t recall the rest of the conversation with Dana. That question stopped me.
First, it stopped me because at that point I only knew the outlines of Bonhoeffer’s life – sort of the back-of-the-baseball-card version: German Lutheran pastor who resisted the Nazis and was executed by them in a concentration camp. It was only after my conversation with Dana that I began to read Bonhoeffer profound theological reflections on call and vocation and the place of the community of faith in the world.
But secondly, Bonhoeffer’s then unfamiliar words stopped me because I disagreed with them. After all, hadn’t I been the one who, a decade earlier, when a friend had asked if I’d ever considered going into the ministry, responded, “yes, but I’ve got too many God questions of my own to pretend to help others with their God questions.”
It was as matter of faith for me – or so I thought. In any case, it was, I was convinced, a matter of belief and, at that point I did not have the resources to draw a careful and critical – indeed, decisive distinction between faith and belief. Belief, after all, is a matter of having the right words, the correct creed; faith, on the other hand, is about a relationship of trust.
Strange, though, how real life interrupts and blurs such distinctions, and comes to shape how we reconsider them.
A few years ago, as my father’s health began to decline and as I reflected on the changing roles and relationships that fact entailed, I found myself considering anew Bonhoeffer’s conviction about belief and obedience.
OK, I’ll confess that most people confronted by such life change might first consider long-term health care and housing for elderly parents and how the adult children are going to share the new responsibilities of the sandwich years. Me? I enter the sandwich years and think about Bonhoeffer!
Like many sons, I have always had a somewhat conflicted relationship with my father. This is not group therapy, so I’ll not drag you through the details of my own neuroses. Suffice it to say, in what will come as no surprise to you, that I have “authority issues.” As with many folks, a lot of that goes back to basic parent-child, and in particular, father-son dynamics.
As I’ve shared with you before, my father has struggled with serious mental illness through the second half of his life. His bipolar disorder became acute when I was 10 years old. While he has lived a rich, full and productive eight decades, the father I have known for the past 37 years was not the daddy I knew the first 10 years of my life. At some level, I have never forgiven him for that loss.
His illness placed an emotional distance between us – and, of course, between him and everyone else. That distance, that space, became the battleground of my adolescence and its inevitable rebellions and growth toward adulthood. Into the space between us I dumped every resistance to every authority.
Again, none of this is stunning or unique. Lots of folks live through such things and far worse ones. And those travails shape the way we work out the most important relationships in our lives – including, for better and for worse, our relationships with God.
Reflecting back on my own loving but conflicted relationship with my father allowed me to see that, well, Bonhoeffer may have been on to something.
My many years of good, academic, philosophical resistance to the idea of God and to the call of God to a life of service to the community of faith were, to some indistinct but significant extent, simply one more instance of dumping an authority question into that emotional space in my life that opened up years ago.
It was not a matter of faith – nor even one of belief – but rather one of obedience. I was like the Unitarian who dies and sees a sign that says “turn right for heaven; turn left for a discussion of heaven” – and promptly turns left for the discussion. Some folks will put off commitment even to the next life.
My insistence on excruciatingly rigorous intellectual and philosophical honesty and accuracy in naming God for myself grew more out of power struggle than faith struggle. For sure, naming God accurately is important: the way we imagine God decisively shapes so much of the way we understand ourselves, the world and our place in it.
How we pray both shapes and reflects this understanding.
Nevertheless, in either case it can become a far too easy escape to insist more on the content of one’s statement of faith than on the character of one’s life – to insist, that is, on doctrinal precision more than on faithful living and thus to avoid deciding and committing. When faced with a deep sense of call to service, it is far easier to say, as I once did, “I have too many God question of my own” than it is to say, “here I am Lord, send me.”
To say that, to say, “here I am, Lord, send me,” requires more than intellectual ascent to a statement of belief. It requires far more than settling “God questions.”
It requires a trusting relationship. It requires intimacy. It requires an obedience that bridges the emotional gaps we construct out of the fear and brokenness of our own lives.
Standing on the brink of such sending is where the disciples find themselves at the moment they ask Jesus for guidance in prayer.
“Daddy in heaven,” begins the prayer of Jesus. The form of address – Abba, a diminutive best rendered as papa or daddy – tells us all we need to know about the kind of relationship Jesus sought with God and invited his disciples to have with God. When they ask him how to pray, he tells them, to begin with, “be intimate with God.”
In so doing, Jesus reminds us that no matter the mess we may have made of our own human relationships, we can ultimately and utterly trust God and enter a relationship of complete intimacy and honesty in which our obedience becomes simply the mark of this relationship of utter fidelity.
Ultimately, the prayer Jesus taught is about a radical trust. As James Carroll puts it in An American Requiem, “Trust in this life, this process, this history, wherever it takes you. Live without idols. As for religion, go about your eating and drinking and being together, and let that be the ligament binding you to God.”
No matter the marks of love and betrayal that you bear from family and kin and tribe – and we all bear such marks – trust this one life, this history you have been given.
Be bound to God, and be liberated from the scars. Be liberated from the patterns of relationships of domination and fear and healed in and through relationships of grace and hospitality and generosity. Even in – especially in your relationship with God.
Indeed, let go of fear. Let go of the fear of scarcity, and trust the promise of daily bread – a sure and certain indication of abundance, a sure and certain sign of the kingdom that the prayer invokes.
For in God’s kingdom, or better in this context, God’s household, in the community of the beloved, in the economy of grace, there is always more than more than enough.
We do not have to worry about who owes what to whom – the kind of struggle that marks and then scars so many human relationships. We don’t have to worry about who has power and control and who is endebted to whom for the sake of that power and control.
Against those all too human concerns, those all too human desires to control and to come out on top in the economy of debt – whether economic or emotional – against all of that, the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples works instead to form and shape us according to God’s will – which is simply that we live grace-filled lives marked by love.
In other words, it is a prayer of obedience – but obedience to a God who does not demand obedience but rather a God who offers grace. More than the Lord’s Prayer, perhaps these words should be known as the Disciples’ Prayer, for this prayer casts a vision of the Beloved Community into which we are called to live and work and die following Jesus more closely day by day. These words work to create in us an open and yearning place for God’s Spirit to dwell and work. Remember Jesus’ words? “How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
This is a Pentecost prayer – it opens our hearts to the Spirit of the living God and creates new space for the wind of God to work within our lives.
Still, I want to ask, right with the disciples, “Lord, teach us to pray.” God, I want to know, what happens when I am enveloped by silence and it falls as a darkness that no light will penetrate, as a veil that no wind will remove? In other words, how can I open myself to the working words of prayer?
Perhaps here we encounter the limits of Bonhoeffer’s distinction – as such. For in the silence of prayer as we are shaped in obedience to the will of a God in whose loving embrace we dwell and move and have our being we discover that faith and obedience become the same thing. We trust the one who calls us and sends us forth, and that trust deepens and envelops us even as we go forth in obedience. At that point, to remain within the language that Jesus used, we discover God as lord and daddy.
Luke 11:1-13
Context is everything. With that in mind, I read and reread our passage from Luke this morning trying to discern just why it is that the disciples pick this point in the story to ask Jesus about prayer. After all, wouldn’t you think that prayer, being such a central spiritual practice, might have been one of the first things that followers of a spiritual leader might ask about? Why here? Why now?
I also wondered a bit about placing this text in the middle of summer. Why now? Well, I reckon it’s always a good time to pray, so it’s probably not a bad time to reflect a bit on prayer itself.
Perhaps Luke’s narrative strategy has something to do with the beginning of the previous chapter, where we find these words:
“After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road” (Luke 10:1-4).
Perhaps the 12 are concerned about job security after Jesus sends out 70 others, or maybe they’re all a bit worried about the nature of the call to which they’ve responded – lambs in the midst of wolves; no purse or bag or sandals.
Their experience as Jesus’ followers has become increasingly intense; fear must have become a constant companion. They probably felt like they were in over their heads in a situation out of control. It probably just felt like a good time to pray.
What we often seek in prayer is control, and maybe that’s what the disciples wanted. But I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind when he invited his disciples into a practice of prayer that says, “Abba, your will be done here and now in our midst as if the household of belovedness were already realized among us.”
Such a practice of prayer does not seek to give voice to our will, but rather seeks silence in order to listen for and allow God’s will to speak to and through our lives and, moreover, to shape those lives according to that will.
You see, the way we pray reflects deeply the way we imagine God, no matter how or how well we imagine the divine. Thus, the way we pray says a great deal about who we think we are as well; even when – especially when – we are not in a prayerful point in our lives.
About a dozen years ago, when an old familiar tug at the edge of my awareness began agitating me with renewed vigor, I had a conversation with Dana Jones, a pastor who was on his way to becoming a mentor in my life. I told him about my long-standing wrestling match with the notion of being called into the ministry of word and sacrament and he responded by asking, “you know what Bonhoeffer said, don’t you?”
“Uh, no,” I answered.
“Bonhoeffer said that it was never a matter of faith but rather one of obedience.”
I can’t recall the rest of the conversation with Dana. That question stopped me.
First, it stopped me because at that point I only knew the outlines of Bonhoeffer’s life – sort of the back-of-the-baseball-card version: German Lutheran pastor who resisted the Nazis and was executed by them in a concentration camp. It was only after my conversation with Dana that I began to read Bonhoeffer profound theological reflections on call and vocation and the place of the community of faith in the world.
But secondly, Bonhoeffer’s then unfamiliar words stopped me because I disagreed with them. After all, hadn’t I been the one who, a decade earlier, when a friend had asked if I’d ever considered going into the ministry, responded, “yes, but I’ve got too many God questions of my own to pretend to help others with their God questions.”
It was as matter of faith for me – or so I thought. In any case, it was, I was convinced, a matter of belief and, at that point I did not have the resources to draw a careful and critical – indeed, decisive distinction between faith and belief. Belief, after all, is a matter of having the right words, the correct creed; faith, on the other hand, is about a relationship of trust.
Strange, though, how real life interrupts and blurs such distinctions, and comes to shape how we reconsider them.
A few years ago, as my father’s health began to decline and as I reflected on the changing roles and relationships that fact entailed, I found myself considering anew Bonhoeffer’s conviction about belief and obedience.
OK, I’ll confess that most people confronted by such life change might first consider long-term health care and housing for elderly parents and how the adult children are going to share the new responsibilities of the sandwich years. Me? I enter the sandwich years and think about Bonhoeffer!
Like many sons, I have always had a somewhat conflicted relationship with my father. This is not group therapy, so I’ll not drag you through the details of my own neuroses. Suffice it to say, in what will come as no surprise to you, that I have “authority issues.” As with many folks, a lot of that goes back to basic parent-child, and in particular, father-son dynamics.
As I’ve shared with you before, my father has struggled with serious mental illness through the second half of his life. His bipolar disorder became acute when I was 10 years old. While he has lived a rich, full and productive eight decades, the father I have known for the past 37 years was not the daddy I knew the first 10 years of my life. At some level, I have never forgiven him for that loss.
His illness placed an emotional distance between us – and, of course, between him and everyone else. That distance, that space, became the battleground of my adolescence and its inevitable rebellions and growth toward adulthood. Into the space between us I dumped every resistance to every authority.
Again, none of this is stunning or unique. Lots of folks live through such things and far worse ones. And those travails shape the way we work out the most important relationships in our lives – including, for better and for worse, our relationships with God.
Reflecting back on my own loving but conflicted relationship with my father allowed me to see that, well, Bonhoeffer may have been on to something.
My many years of good, academic, philosophical resistance to the idea of God and to the call of God to a life of service to the community of faith were, to some indistinct but significant extent, simply one more instance of dumping an authority question into that emotional space in my life that opened up years ago.
It was not a matter of faith – nor even one of belief – but rather one of obedience. I was like the Unitarian who dies and sees a sign that says “turn right for heaven; turn left for a discussion of heaven” – and promptly turns left for the discussion. Some folks will put off commitment even to the next life.
My insistence on excruciatingly rigorous intellectual and philosophical honesty and accuracy in naming God for myself grew more out of power struggle than faith struggle. For sure, naming God accurately is important: the way we imagine God decisively shapes so much of the way we understand ourselves, the world and our place in it.
How we pray both shapes and reflects this understanding.
Nevertheless, in either case it can become a far too easy escape to insist more on the content of one’s statement of faith than on the character of one’s life – to insist, that is, on doctrinal precision more than on faithful living and thus to avoid deciding and committing. When faced with a deep sense of call to service, it is far easier to say, as I once did, “I have too many God question of my own” than it is to say, “here I am Lord, send me.”
To say that, to say, “here I am, Lord, send me,” requires more than intellectual ascent to a statement of belief. It requires far more than settling “God questions.”
It requires a trusting relationship. It requires intimacy. It requires an obedience that bridges the emotional gaps we construct out of the fear and brokenness of our own lives.
Standing on the brink of such sending is where the disciples find themselves at the moment they ask Jesus for guidance in prayer.
“Daddy in heaven,” begins the prayer of Jesus. The form of address – Abba, a diminutive best rendered as papa or daddy – tells us all we need to know about the kind of relationship Jesus sought with God and invited his disciples to have with God. When they ask him how to pray, he tells them, to begin with, “be intimate with God.”
In so doing, Jesus reminds us that no matter the mess we may have made of our own human relationships, we can ultimately and utterly trust God and enter a relationship of complete intimacy and honesty in which our obedience becomes simply the mark of this relationship of utter fidelity.
Ultimately, the prayer Jesus taught is about a radical trust. As James Carroll puts it in An American Requiem, “Trust in this life, this process, this history, wherever it takes you. Live without idols. As for religion, go about your eating and drinking and being together, and let that be the ligament binding you to God.”
No matter the marks of love and betrayal that you bear from family and kin and tribe – and we all bear such marks – trust this one life, this history you have been given.
Be bound to God, and be liberated from the scars. Be liberated from the patterns of relationships of domination and fear and healed in and through relationships of grace and hospitality and generosity. Even in – especially in your relationship with God.
Indeed, let go of fear. Let go of the fear of scarcity, and trust the promise of daily bread – a sure and certain indication of abundance, a sure and certain sign of the kingdom that the prayer invokes.
For in God’s kingdom, or better in this context, God’s household, in the community of the beloved, in the economy of grace, there is always more than more than enough.
We do not have to worry about who owes what to whom – the kind of struggle that marks and then scars so many human relationships. We don’t have to worry about who has power and control and who is endebted to whom for the sake of that power and control.
Against those all too human concerns, those all too human desires to control and to come out on top in the economy of debt – whether economic or emotional – against all of that, the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples works instead to form and shape us according to God’s will – which is simply that we live grace-filled lives marked by love.
In other words, it is a prayer of obedience – but obedience to a God who does not demand obedience but rather a God who offers grace. More than the Lord’s Prayer, perhaps these words should be known as the Disciples’ Prayer, for this prayer casts a vision of the Beloved Community into which we are called to live and work and die following Jesus more closely day by day. These words work to create in us an open and yearning place for God’s Spirit to dwell and work. Remember Jesus’ words? “How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
This is a Pentecost prayer – it opens our hearts to the Spirit of the living God and creates new space for the wind of God to work within our lives.
Still, I want to ask, right with the disciples, “Lord, teach us to pray.” God, I want to know, what happens when I am enveloped by silence and it falls as a darkness that no light will penetrate, as a veil that no wind will remove? In other words, how can I open myself to the working words of prayer?
Perhaps here we encounter the limits of Bonhoeffer’s distinction – as such. For in the silence of prayer as we are shaped in obedience to the will of a God in whose loving embrace we dwell and move and have our being we discover that faith and obedience become the same thing. We trust the one who calls us and sends us forth, and that trust deepens and envelops us even as we go forth in obedience. At that point, to remain within the language that Jesus used, we discover God as lord and daddy.
posted by David Ensign at
1:17 PM
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