“Our Father”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, September 7, 2025
Reading: Matthew 6:7-13
A teacher of mine imagines being approached on campus by an academic from another field. A skeptic, someone for whom religion has no purpose at a university. He demands, “Explain God to me.” It would seem a reasonable request on campus. If something can’t be explained it can’t be studied, can it? My teacher imagines responding this way:
“I can’t. You’re far too corrupt. Here’s what you have to do first. Hold your hands like this. Good. Now bend your knees like that. Well done. And repeat after me, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven.’ Now, do that for a few years, a few thousand times, and your brain will eventually follow.”
A secular Muslim scholar I admire says secularism is “untutored bodies.” Secular people don’t know what to do with their bodies in the presence of God. Muslims know to bow like this, hold their hands like that, say the other. We also know to join in when we hear “Our Father, who art in heaven...”. Our tongue knows what to do, before we even think about it. That’s a tutored body.
Our preaching series this fall, beginning today, is on the Lord’s Prayer. We’ve been preaching through the book of Judges in summer, strange stories, mythical, outlandish, bloody, and weird. I loved it. But each story was so strange each week I felt like I needed to promise you: hey, don’t worry, we’ll do something more familiar soon. Hard to imagine something much more familiar than the Lord’s Prayer. We say it every time we gather. I say it before bed every night, I imagine you taught it to your kids, that you were taught it by your parents. Principals of schools used to say it over intercoms. These words are about as familiar as words can be.
But what do they mean? Why do we say them so often? We’ll spend the next two months figuring that out. Did you notice Jesus warns us don’t heap up empty phrases. Don’t just mumble these words without consideration. Guilty as charged. Hopefully this series will help us consider what we so often pray.
One of the most important prayers in Judaism is called the Kaddish. It’s the prayer our Jewish elders say when someone dies. If your spouse or parent or child dies, you’re encouraged to go to shul every day for a year to say the Kaddish. It goes like this:
May the great Name of God be exalted and sanctified, throughout the world, which he has created according to his will. May his Kingship be established in your lifetime and in your days, and in the lifetime of the entire household of Israel, swiftly and in the near future; and say, Amen.
It goes on. The prayer doesn’t mention death, doesn’t give voice to sorrow. The prayer is about God. At an open grave, filled too soon, you praise God and ask God to bring the kingdom in full. The prayer is so much like the Lord’s Prayer you could accuse either one of plagiarism. The whole Lord’s Prayer is about as Jewish as it can be. Where do you think Jesus learned it? Bouncing on Mary’s knee, learning the songs and sighs of Israel.
This sermon will focus on the first line, the next sermon on the next, and so on. For today, “Our Father.” First, our. In this prince of all prayers, the word “I” doesn’t appear once. Most of my faith is pretty focused on the “I,” it’s selfish, it’s about me. ‘I need this, Lord. Gimme that.’ But when Jesus teaches us to pray, he prays in the plural, not singular.
Robert Bellah was a great scholar of contemporary religion. He interviewed a woman named Sheila who expressed her spiritual but not religious faith this way:
I believe in God. I'm not a religious fanatic. I can't remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It's Sheilaism. Just my own little voice ... It's just, try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think He would want us to take care of each other.
That pretty well sums up the faith of most people I know whether we go to church or not. Do it yourself, feel-good, cafeteria style faith, take this, leave that, mold and shape faith to your liking. We probably all do that whether we realize it or not. I want you to notice Jesus’ “Our” is very, very different. He gives us this prayer. We don’t make it up, change it, suit it to our needs, no, it is handed down to us from across the ages. Entrusted to us, in hopes we’ll give it away also to generations yet unborn. And the “our” suggests it belongs to the whole church in space and time. Worship in any other language and you may be lost most of the time, but you can tell when they’re praying the Lord’s Prayer. When I’ve gotten to worship in Korean, Russian, Dinka, Portuguese, Cantonese, Kinyarwanda, dozens more, it doesn’t matter, I can tell when they’re on the Lord’s Prayer. It’s ours, all of ours.
There was an exhibit at the ROM on Auschwitz recently. Not exactly an upper, light entertainment, but really important. More than a million Jews and gypsies and gay people and political prisoners of the Nazis were murdered there, yet there were also more survivors of Auschwitz than any other death camp, because it was just so big, so we know a lot about it. A great Canadian named Rudolf Vrba escaped and exposed Auschwitz’s activities, saved some 150,000 Hungarian Jews. That’s a good day at the office. I was moved to hear of Jews going to their deaths who still prayed. People stuffed into cattle cars with one bucket for a toilet, nevertheless someone produced candles, lit them, and prayed to welcome in the sabbath bride. Others in the gas chambers choking to death still prayed Shema Israel Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad. From Deuteronomy 6:5: Hear oh Israel the Lord your God the Lord is One. The Lord’s Prayer is like that. It won’t leave you. At the worst moments, it is a prayer that does not fail. Our Father. Not mine or yours, but everybody’s.
Our father, perhaps a bit more controversial now. Feminists point out that if we speak of God as male, we can start to value men more than women, some charging that religion causes misogyny. I feel the weight of that criticism. Some want to change gendered terminology. I’ve been in churches that address this prayer to God as our Mother-Father, which sounds to me like a cuss word. Their heart is in the right place. It is good also sometimes to speak of God in feminine terms. The Bible does. Jesus speaks of himself as longing to gather Jerusalem like a mother hen does her chicks. Paul says he is mother and father to his churches. Isaiah imagines God as a nursing mom. The Bible has feminist moments, and we got female images for God aplenty.
This shocked me to learn. Speaking of God as Father is rare in the Old Testament. Maybe a dozen or so times God gets spoken of in male terms, about as many as female terms. You know who refers to God as Father 100s of times? Jesus of Nazareth. This address of God as Father comes straight from Jesus, it’s his innovation, he takes Israel’s minor key of speaking of God as father, and multiplies it, makes it a major theme of his prayer. If you want to pray like Jesus then speak to God as your Father, with the intimacy and respect that implies at its best.
Not because fatherhood is somehow better than motherhood. It’s not hard to find stories of terrible fathers, absent and uncaring or abusive or mean. Some of you have those stories and they leave a mark. My lifelong wound is from my mother, so I can sympathize. I had a good dad, so I’m not allergic to dad-speak. I do think this prayer is good medicine for us who’ve had bad fathers. Where human fathers fail, God brings healing right where it hurts. I’ve found in the church the sort of mothering I wished I’d had. I hope others find here the sort of fathering they wish they had. For God is the best of all our humanity, minus the harm, and unimaginably better.
The word Father has other problems. Our Muslim cousins are not fans of our teaching about the Trinity. They think we take the word father quite literally. The Koran charges that Christians think God had a child with the Virgin Mary who is God’s son. No wonder they call this blasphemy. We don’t think that. We never did. It’s a garbled misunderstanding. Whatever we mean by the word Father, this reminds us that it’s a metaphor, and like all language it can mislead. We don’t mean that God is older or more powerful or more divine than the Son is. There is no mother involved, no sexual generation, unlike the meaning of the word among creatures. So, what do we mean? Something like this: whatever God the Father is, the Son also is. And whatever the Son is, the Father also is. Squirrel parents have squirrel children, llama’s birth fellow llamas. Parents and children are the same genus and species. That’s what we mean by Father. Jesus his Son is what he is. We don’t know what God is. But whatever God is, Father and Son and Spirit are that unknown mystery.
I hope you notice how bold this is. To take Jesus’ address of God and make it ours. St. Paul explains:
15 You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs: heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.
The word “abba” means daddy. I got to visit a Coptic Orthodox church in Markham recently and heard all these beautiful Arab Canadian kids addressing their priest as abuna. Dad. Being a Christian is being adopted into God’s own family. We address God the way Jesus our elder brother does: daddy, pops. We are made sisters and brothers to one another. We’re heirs to the family name, fortune, and destiny. I know it’s common to speak of every human being as a child of God, and that’s true in a sense. But in Christianity childhood and kinship language is reserved for those baptized into Jesus’ own family, those enfolded into the life of the Trinity.
A dramatic example. A teacher of mine and Jaylynn’s was a Methodist bishop in Apartheid South Africa named Peter Storey. He was close friends with Desmond Tutu and was a chaplain to Nelson Mandela in prison on Robben Island. He and bishop Tutu were driving in the townships once and were carjacked, held up at gunpoint, by four kids with guns. Hands up. Tutu and Storey did the math, okay, this much of South Africa is Anglican, this much Methodist, four kids, one or more of them is going to be a member of one of our churches, you don’t want to kill your bishop do you? And one kid put his gun down, whispered to the others, my grandma would never speak to me again, and the boys slinked off. Hopefully they rethought their ways and held up no one ever again. Bishop Storey’s quick thinking was this: we’re likely to be kin, bishop, abuna, to you or your family. So, it is with all the baptized, every follower of Jesus, we’re kin, adopted into Jesus’ family relationship with God by the Spirit.
The Lord’s Prayer starts out life very similar to other Jewish prayers, like the Kaddish that our elder siblings still pray today. But Jesus transfigures it into a prayer to be wrapped up into the triune life of God as adoptees, so that God is our Father not less than he is Jesus’ Father. In a way baptism, is a change of family status. You go from having this human mother, this human father, to having God as abba, Christ as elder brother, the whole church as family. That will take a lifetime to unpack. We’d better fold the hands, bow the knees, no way our head is getting around it otherwise.
And if you’re blessed enough to be adopted, you’re way farther along in understanding Christian faith than the rest of us.
The great English poet TS Elliott speaks of a church this way. A church is a place “where prayer has been valid.” Now, prayer can be valid anywhere! In the car, the washroom, the classroom, the death bed, the sports bar, anywhere, there is no place where Christ does not reign. But a church is a place where prayer has been valid. Others have prayed here before strong and sturdy prayers that will not buckle under pressure, they will support you. We don’t pray here because this place is better than any other. It’s just a place where God’s people have prayed and been heard, where others before us have been folded into the life of the Trinity, given a new family, a new daddy, God, a new mum, church, and been changed. Perhaps you know the line from the hymn “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee”: “God our Father, Christ our brother, all who live in love are thine.” That’s the Lord’s Prayer at work.
One last thing about the Our Father for today. The address of God as Father is rare in Israel’s scripture but where it turns up, it’s really important. Right before God delivers Israel from slavery, he calls Israel “my son.”
Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the Lord: Israel is my firstborn son. 23 I said to you, “Let my son go that he may serve me.”
And God calls Solomon, his greatest king, “my son.”
He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. 14 I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me.
To call God our Father is to address God as Israel does: we’re freed slaves, nobodies become somebody. NT Wright points out in his book The Lord and his Prayer that most sons for most of history were apprenticed into professions by their father. So, to name God as father is to ask to be apprenticed. Discipled. To learn God’s ways, to take up God’s job of repairing the world.
I hope you’re getting a sense of how radical the Lord is, how radical his prayer is. When I introduce the Lord’s Prayer during communion I usually do so this way: ‘and now for a prayer so bold we couldn’t pray it if Jesus hadn’t commanded us. Our Father’ ... These are the words of desperate people. People in trouble. The prayer says this: fear not. Others have gone this way before. They have found this prayer helpful. We have found ourselves in praying it.
I was going through security in a somewhat dodgy middle eastern airport once. I’d picked up a card with the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic on it, the very language Jesus spoke, like the one on your bulletin cover. The security people whisked it away for further examination, a prelude to whisking me away. I called out after them: yeah, that prayer is dangerous. Just not the way you think. Amen