Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
Well, I am now two months away from retiring and you are two months away from having a new senior pastor. I am eager for you to get to know Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli. I am also eager for Ginger to get to know you.
So I want to remind you, if you have not done so already, to make sure your picture is in our church data base. You can go directly to the Foundry website and click on Member Login and upload a picture, or you can email a picture to Foundry or you can drop one off at the office. When I came to Foundry 12 years ago, we had something called a pictorial directory and it was immensely helpful to me. This is our 2014 version of a pictorial directory and I am sure it will be very helpful to Ginger.
We are going to spend the next month thinking and talking about the Lord’s Prayer and hopefully praying it. My challenge to you is to make it a practice between now and June 1st to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day.
In our hymnals we have a Lord’s Prayer card with a number of different version and paraphrases of the Lord’s Prayer. This sheet is available on the Foundry website if this is a helpful tool to you.
The Lord’s Prayer is a glimpse into the heart of Jesus and the community he left behind. It is a glimpse into the way they thought and what they most hoped for and longed for in their lives.
It is an expression of our core focus and longing as disciples of Jesus Christ and we want to ground ourselves in it for a month as a way of strengthening our core.
I want to start this morning by talking about the very first words of the Lord’s Prayer.
There are two versions of the Lord’s Prayer in the Bible, one in Matthew and one in Luke, and they are not totally identical and they are not the same as the version of the Lord’s Prayer many of us learned growing up.
Matthew’s version begins, literally in the Greek, “Father of us.” Which we reasonably translate as “Our Father. “ Luke’s version begins with the single word, “Father.”
The Lord’s Prayer begins with the assumption and affirmation that God has the heart of a parent.
Now I want to acknowledge that not everyone who is a parent manages to be a perfect parent. And some of us have perhaps experienced dreadful parents who were and are abusive or rejecting or violent or emotionally distant.
But we all know what a parent is supposed to be like. A parent’s job is to be a protector, a provider, a teacher, a role-model. We are wired to love and care for our children. Sometimes the writing doesn’t work right, but it is the most natural thing in the world for a parent to love and want to protect their child and to provide for them and to want them to be safe and happy.
Jesus begins his prayer with the assumption and conviction that God has a parent’s heart. That god wants to protect us and to provide for us and to teach us and to be a role model for us. Jesus begins with the assumption and belief and encourages us to believe that God loves us and cares about us like a parent.
I want to be careful this morning because I am going to use an idea that can be a negative stereotype so I want to try to get this next part right.
I have been a pastor since I served my first church in 1968 … a little church with maybe 50 people in the pews on an average Sunday. I experienced being the pastor of someone who was dying at that little church for the first time. I did my first funeral. At the first church I served after seminary I average a funeral every two weeks. Over the years I sat with many, many people who were dying. I was sometimes sitting and praying with them at the moment they stopped breathing.
I thought I had become somewhat experienced at living with death.
Then when I was in my late 40s my mother died. I tried to deal with it emotionally and spiritually the way I had learned to deal with the deaths of parishioners I loved. It didn’t work.
Jane and I were driving to meet with my family to prepare the service and I said to her, “You know, I feel really awful inside.”
In her kind and sensitive way, she said: “Of course you do. Your mother just died. What do you expect to feel?”
As she said it, this idea popped into my head. I thought to myself, “I’m an orphan.” I could not shake the idea and feeling. “I am an orphan.”
In some ways it was silly. I was 47 years old. I had a loving family. I had children of my own. But for a time after my mother died, I was consumed by an orphan spirit.
This is where I want to be careful. Not everyone who is biologically an orphan is an orphan. Being a parent and child is about much more than biology.
And there are those of us who have biological parents who can still feel like orphans.
We can feel as if no one is there to protect us, provide for us, and teach us. We feel as if we are ultimately on our own.
I knew someone once who was a foster parent to a child whose life had been unbelievable chaotic until he got placed in his foster home. His foster father told me that every time they sat down to a meal, as soon as he thought no one was looking; the boy would fill his pockets with food.
Every meal, his foster father would say to him, “Son, you
see the food in front of you on this table?
There is going to be food like this on this table three times tomorrow and the
day after that and the day after that. There will always be food here.
Then he would take the boy out to the refrigerator and open it, and say, “There will always be food inside this refrigerator. Any time you want something to eat; you can come and help yourself. There will always be food here.”
It took months for the boy to stop trying to hide and hoard food. He was consumed by an orphan spirit.
During World War 2 in Europe, thousands of children were orphaned and became homeless and without food. Some were rescued and placed in orphanages where they received food and good care. It was a common experience that these children could not sleep at night. They tossed and turned and cried. Finally someone came up with the idea of giving each child a piece of bread to hold during the night so that they would know that if they got hungry they would have something to eat. Finally the children could sleep through the night.
The universe staggers me. I am spending more time out in the country these days where you can sometimes see the night sky full of stars in way you can’t in the city. You can turn all the lights off, and sit on the back patio and see universes and galaxies. Psalm 8 often comes to mind: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”
And nature can be frightening: tornados, hurricanes, and floods.
Yet Jesus begins his prayer with the assumption and belief that the Creator and Lord of all this has the heart of a parent. That the Creator and Lord of the universes and galaxies, the Creator and Lord of all nature, loves us like a mother or father should.
We often read John 14 at memorial services here. You know it: “In my Father’s house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”
There is a line in this teaching that Jesus does for his disciples that I only really noticed recently: In verse 14, Jesus says to his disciples: “I will not leave you orphaned.”
There are no orphans in the Kingdom of God.
When we start feeling as if we are on our own … when we start feelings as if there is no one to protect us or provide for us or teach us … when the universe begins to feel cold and harsh …. what is it that we need to hold onto, like orphans with a slice of bread?
We can hold onto this prayer Jesus taught us … that we can
trust the heart of our Father/Mother God.
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