Today we close our sermon series by reflecting on what theologians consider to be “Christianity’s greatest prayer.”[1] In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus teaches the Lord’s Prayer to a community of disciples who were seeking a new spiritual home. After the arrest of John the Baptist,[2] Jesus began to share the good news of God’s Kingdom, telling the people “Change your hearts and lives! Here comes the kingdom of heaven!” These words may sound familiar because early in the Gospel of Matthew, John the Baptist calls the crowds to do the same.[3] John the Baptist, like Jesus, understood that realities that surrounded his world were not in sync with the will of God. So, they invited others to see and live in a new way. This was an invitation to find home not on the things of earth but the realities of heaven—realities of love, justice, and peace for all people.

All of us—regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, income, place of origin, or whatever else—live our lives between two realities. One is a reality that we see, with all the joys and challenges that it holds. Another is a reality that often seems to lay beyond our grasp—a reality of things that could be. The great author and educator Parker Palmer calls this place of duality, “the tragic gap.” Palmer means that this is a place where we are especially aware of harsh realities seen all around us but need not be for there is a better way. As Palmer describes it, there is a better way “not because we wish it were so, but because we’ve seen it with our own eyes.”[4] Theologians call this the “already and not yet”: the truth that the Kingdom of God is already present among us, but not yet fully realized. This prayer of Jesus, a prayer you may have heard and said hundreds of times, invites us to stand in the “tragic gap” and work so the supreme and good will of our Creator will be fully materialized on earth as it is in heaven.

But, we must come to this prayer acknowledging the truth spoken by the poet, Kathleen Norris, who said, “Prayer is not doing, but being. It is not words but the beyond-words experience of coming into the presence of something much greater than oneself…. [Prayer] is ordinary experience lived with gratitude and wonder, a wonder that makes us know the smallness of oneself in an enormous and various universe.”[5] Norris reminds us that prayer is mystery. It is a mystery that moves us beyond the smallness of our world and places us before the Great One who’s loving care embraces all people. Prayer is an invitation to relationship with the One who knows our hearts, understands our needs, and calls us to enter the work of the New Creation.

It is not an accident that Jesus opens his prayer by saying the now very familiar words “Our Father who is in heaven.” Jesus here reminds us that God is not our personal possession, but a loving parent to all created in the divine image. These words, “Our” and “Father,” cannot be separated from one another. We cannot embrace the love of God, our Father, while spurning fellowship with God’s children. As 1 John 4:20 reminds us, “those who don’t love their brothers or sisters whom they have seen can hardly love God whom they have not seen!” (CEB). But these words of Jesus are about more than just intimacy and relationship. The disciples who heard Jesus speak these words would have known that the first time the Hebrew Scriptures refer to God as Father and Israel as God’s children happened when Moses stood before Pharaoh and said, “This is what the LORD says: Israel is my oldest son. I said to you, “Let my son go so he could worship me.”[6] Those who heard Jesus would have remembered the salvific events of the Exodus when God with great power and might liberated the people from bondage. This, therefore, is a deep and powerful prayer that calls us to embrace the hope and mystery that makes intimacy with God, fellowship with others, and liberation for all a present reality.

But as I have said, this prayer is an invitation to find home not on