The kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and forever

Preacher: Sue
Readings: Luke 1.39-55, Matt 4:1-11, Phil 2:5-11

So here we are at the last in our sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer. Our phrase for today is “The kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and forever” which actually doesn’t come from the gospel texts themselves. It’s a doxology, which means a prayer that acknowledges the glory (or doxa) of God. Jews were used to using a doxology at various points in their liturgies. In fact this phrase “the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and forever” is very reminiscent both of parts of the Jewish Kaddish and of David’s words in 1 Chron 29:10-11: “Blessed are you, O Lord, the God of our ancestor Israel, forever and ever. Yours, O Lord, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty; for all that is in the heavens and on the earth is yours; yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all.”

An early Christian document, the Didache, includes this phrase in its version of the Lord’s Prayer, probably because the early Christians would naturally expect to end a prayer with a doxology and were probably doing so spontaneously before this document captured it in writing and shaped the practice of many denominations since then.

Now at first sight I think this phrase looks like a very Anabaptist kind of prayer. To say that the kingdom, the power and the glory are God’s is a big claim, and it’s a claim with political force. It may look to us as though power is in the hands of the G20 or the companies which span every continent. (According to a recent book on Latin American economies, Wal-Mart is bigger than the GDP of Argentina and Nestles sales are bigger than the GDP of Peru) . But to pray “the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and forever” is to assert, against appearances to the contrary, that the ultimate power is God’s.

That’s why Mary in the Magnificat can anticipate a reversal of fortunes in which the poor are lifted up and the rich and powerful catapulted to obscurity and emptiness. She knows that in the end God will make things right. So this last line of the Lord’s prayer is an expression of hope and confidence in the ultimate triumph of God’s justice.

But, when I think about this line some more, I find it puzzling as well, on two counts. Firstly that our world doesn’t look as though God is in power right now and secondly that in some ways “power” doesn’t necessarily sound very Christ-like.

Let’s start with the first of my puzzles, that the world doesn’t always look as though God has the power. I guess this is another way of stating the problem of evil and suffering which warrants a complete sermon in its own right (and indeed I preached one around 18 months ago and Lesley preached wisely and movingly on Job in May this year). In previous sermons in our current series I have already touched on one aspect of this. We live, in a way, between times. God has already brought in the kingdom and delivered us from evil - but the kingdom is not yet fully come and we do not yet experience always being rescued from evil.

For now I will add only two points. The first looks back to our reading of last week - Romans 8:18-39 - which told us that, whatever happens God has the power to ensure that nothing can separate us from the love of God. God will always be with us in love even when it feels as though everything is out of God’s control. And the second is that I think God often exercises power differently from how we expect. God’s initiative to deal with the mess and pain of humanity and indeed all of creation was to come into the world as Jesus, to get in harm’s way (to quote the motto of Christian Peacemaker Teams - www.cpt.org). So God’s solution to the suffering of the world was God’s own risk and suffering not a “shock and awe” display of might.

And in saying that I’ve kind of answered my second puzzle. It’s easy for me, when I use the word power, to think of economic or political or military power, or just the power that comes from being in the majority or part of an “in crowd”. And that doesn’t look very like Jesus. But one of the lessons we can learn from Jesus is that power doesn’t have to be that way. Our reading from Philippians reminds us that Jesus, despite being God, was willing to come humbly not insisting on a red carpet and a bodyguard (or even on stopping the traffic, for those of you who have been following the election of the EU president) but, rather, being willing to suffer and die.

In our reading from Matthew we were reminded of the ways Jesus was tempted - at the very beginning of his ministry - to misuse power in order to gain control of many kingdoms. And if Jesus had gone ahead with commanding the stones to become bread, that too could have been a route to easy political power. But Jesus pursues his mission in very different ways, ultimately through a willingness to suffer and die at the hands of the establishment powers. So actually Jesus has a lot to teach us about power and about what we mean when we pray “the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and forever”. As Anabaptists we read the bible through the lens of Jesus. So too I think we need to pray this prayer through the lens of Jesus.

Hauerwas and Willimon suggest that these words challenge us to let God have the power and the glory in our own lives. Christian martyrs, they say, trust to God for the significance of their lives. As I reflect on this, I think I can see what they are saying. Some martyrs die young, before they have “achieved” very much and in consenting to die for their faith they give up the chance of future landmarks and publicly recognised significance. So they agree to let the power and the glory be God’s and not to worry about their own power and glory and their own significance.

Now I have to admit, rather sheepishly, that I like lots of affirmation even for something as trivial as folding the laundry, I hate the feeling of failure and find it hard to look back contentedly on a day if I don’t feel I’ve “achieved” something. So the idea of just trying to do what is right and leaving everything else in God’s hands and not seeking some sense of whether I’ve “done well” comes hard to me. And yet I think it would bring real freedom if I could do that.

My first paid job was secure and well paid and for a while I felt it would be too risky to leave, so that I might be trapped there forever even once it ceased to feel meaningful or fun. To use a phrase that Peter coined when we were talking about this, I was trapped by my own security. I remember a real feeling of freedom when I finally did leave (and for a one-year contract on less pay at that). And in a radio programme I heard last week about the former Yugoslavia under communism, the journalist talked about the drabness and oppressiveness of that time and commented that the only people who seemed to be having any fun were those who had already “come out” as dissidents and were no longer looking over their shoulders all the time. By deciding to relinquish control of their own security, to embrace risk and truth as they tried to unmask and resist the lies of the state, they had gained an unexpected freedom.

And that’s how I think it is supposed to be for us too, that we can learn to relinquish control and a need for acknowledgment and achievement and success and to trust instead to God. That’s a very tough one for me. I’m sure my inability to do that makes me excessively cautious, as well as devastated out of all proportion each time I make a mistake. But I think it would be healing for me to learn to really pray this prayer. Because I think that praying “the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and forever” is supposed to be the gateway to a joyful freedom of trust in God, of leaving things to God, of Gelassenheit indeed.

That thought forms a link for me with many of the other phrases of the Lord’s prayer and our sermons in this series. As we’ve seen before, praying this prayer helps us to know what to ask God for, but it’s not just about asking God for things, whether those be exalted things like the hallowing of God’s name and the coming of the kingdom or down to earth stuff like daily bread. It is also, if we pray it earnestly, about being changed by its words.

Stanley Hauerwas talks about this in an essay called “The Politics of the Church: How We Lay Bricks and Make Disciples” where he says that learning to be a disciple is a bit like being apprenticed in a craft. You are initiated into a practice by a master craftsman. You learn the practices of the community of that craft - the community of bricklayers in Hauerwas’ analogy - and it’s not till you yourself are a master that you have freedom to go beyond the tradition and start being creative and spontaneous. (As an aside, I wonder whether that helps explain Jesus’ relationship with the Jewish law and prophets. As a master craftsman he had the understanding and the authority to rework them creatively while still remaining so firmly in the tradition that he could say he had come not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfil them.)

Hauerwas goes on to say that the way we learn about God, the way we learn to be people who can pray is by praying. He defines Christians as those who “have been taught to pray, 'Our father, who art in heaven…’"

A good place to begin to understand what Christians are about, he says, is to join in that prayer.

For to learn to pray is no easy matter but requires much training, not unlike learning to lay brick. It does no one any good to believe in God, at least the God we find in Jesus of Nazareth, if they have not learned to pray. To learn to pray means we must acquire humility not as something we try to do, but as commensurate with the practice of prayer. In short, we do not believe in God, become humble and then learn to pray, but in learning to pray we humbly discover we cannot do other than believe in God.

For me this sermon series has helped me think more about what we mean when we pray the Lord’s Prayer. I have come to think of praying the Lord’s Prayer as an important Christian discipline, which I think can increase our sensitivity to God and to others, challenge us to follow Jesus more closely and train us in good habits of thought.

As Arthur Paul Boers puts it, “[p]raying the Lord’s prayer is to spirituality what playing the scales is to music”.

So I hope the sermon series has inspired you and me to keep praying that prayer attentively, not mechanically, so that we can learn and be changed by it as we pray it together.

Deliver us from evil

Preacher: Sue
Readings: Romans 8:18-39, Matthew 6:5-17

This is the second last in our sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer but for various reasons it will be just a five minute mini-sermon.

Our phrase for today is “deliver us from evil” which we find in Matthew and in a few manuscripts of Luke’s gospel. Apparently the Greek is such that we can’t tell whether Matthew means “deliver us from evil” or “deliver us from the evil one”. Both senses seem to occur elsewhere in the bible. The German theologian Lochman suggests that our reading of this may be shaped by our theological beliefs. The Eastern church with its emphasis on Jesus’ death and resurrection as a victory which rescues us from the devil’s clutches is more inclined to hear “deliver us from the evil one”. The Western church - Catholic and Protestant - with its focus on how Jesus redeems us from our own sin is more likely to hear “deliver us from evil”.

Perhaps we can be ready to hear both and let the two readings come alive to us at different times in our lives.

Either way, the prayer cries out to God for rescue. Either way, the prayer trusts that ultimately, however much evil may sometimes appear to have the upper hand, it will in the end be overthrown. Not that we will always experience this immediately or at an individual level. We live in the “already and not yet” and we pray for an “us” which includes those who are distant in time or space. So we trust that God has already overcome evil for us all. But evil has not yet been expelled entirely and forever and at times we will each experience that “not yet” very close to home.

But we need this prayer even when we are not besieged by evil. One writer points out that Jesus’ encounter with the tempter should make us very cautious - the devil’s arguments are based on scripture and sound plausible and indeed full of concern for Jesus’ wellbeing. So this prayer can be preventative maintenance, asking God to deliver us from slipping gradually away from God and the values of the kingdom of God in ways that are superficially reasonable and easy to justify.

And another reason to pray this prayer even in times of quiet is in solidarity with those for whom life is full of threat. Just as we ask for our daily bread in solidarity with those who hunger, so too we ask for rescue from evil in the name of all who suffer. Perhaps we should say in the name of all that suffers, with the reminder from Romans 8 that not only do we suffer till God brings the ultimate rescue from evil but so too does all creation, which of course links to our other theme for today, of care for creation and combating climate change.

So the Lord’s prayer started with a focus on heaven and moved through the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth to prayer for ourselves and the world including all of creation. We started by reverently contemplating God and over the course of the prayer we came down to earth and back to the memory of evil and pain and injustice. But praying “deliver us from evil” reminds us that God is with us at this end of the prayer too. So although the Lord’s prayer encourages us to pray (and work) for God’s kingdom to come, it also invites us to patience and trust as we look to God for rescue. So though we may feel overwhelmed by the scale of evil and the enormity of the task of bringing in God’s kingdom, we can also trust, wait and hope for the dawn, the deliverance from evil, that will surely come.

Save Us From the Time of Trial

Preacher: Lesley

This is another in our series of sermons on the Lord's Prayer: Save us from the time of trial.

Of course many of us grew up saying 'and lead us not into temptation'. So are we talking about temptation or trial? The Latin version of the Bible – the Vulgate translated it as temptation, so that's what was put in the King James version, and therefore that was the version in the Book of Common Prayer, which has influenced English-speaking Protestants ever since.

I find it difficult to understand why 'Lead us not into temptation' became the standard translation because the passage from James which we just had read, that says God doesn't tempt anyone. So, modern translations of the Lord's Prayer talk about the time of trial.

Is it temptation or trial? Well, the answer is both, or either. The same Greek word is translated trial or temptation or test. In the passage from James that we heard, it's the same word for trials when it says 'Consider it joy when you face trials of any kind' and for temptation in verse 12, where it is translated, 'Blessed is anyone who endures temptation.' And it's the same word when the Gospels talk about the Pharisees testing Jesus. In Matthew or Luke, the Lord's prayer has the same phrase which we have translated as 'Save us from the time of trial'.

What is the time of trial? The New Testament does talk about a time of trial for the whole world. Revelation 3 says: Because you have kept my word of patient endurance, I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth. In Matthew 24 Jesus talks about a coming time of suffering: “And if those days had not been cut short no-one would be saved, but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short.” However, there is no reason to think that in the Lord's prayer Jesus was talking about this apocalyptic event, especially when the other possible translations are about trials and temptations that happen to us a s individuals. The theologian Tom Wright simply puts it: 'Don't put us to the test'.

Having got that out of the way, it's worth looking at why the New Testament used the same word for temptation, test and trial. It's because in the thought of early Christians, these were all pretty much the same thing. It was all about how people cope with the circumstances of life. Do we do the right thing or fall into sin? Do we take a course of action that is helpful or gives ourselves and others problems and cuts us of from God? What we might call temptation – that is the longing for things or actions that we know to be wrong - is just one aspect of the trials that we might face in the Christian life. The common factor is that in dealing with the things that life throws at us, or our own longings or distortions of personality, there are opportunities to move towards the light or away from it, to grow in knowledge of ourselves and God or to pursue a path which is about stagnation and decay.

This is summed up in the idea, running all the way through the Bible, that human beings are subject to tests and trials that may be sent or allowed by God. Is God, then like some cruel sergeant-major who puts us through drills and disciplines to make us strong and fit for duty?

As I was writing this I was listening to the tennis star, Serena Williams. on the radio, talking about her autobiography. The interviewer asked why in her early years her father moved his family from Saginaw, Michigan to Compton, Los Angeles, a much tougher area, which he described as a ghetto. It is said that Richard, a former sharecropper from Louisiana, planned his daughters' careers before they were born. He has said that he chose to bring up the family in Compton so they could "see first hand how their lives might turn out if they did not work hard and get an education". Serena said that he wanted to toughen them up as he encouraged them to practice their tennis from the age of 3 on public courts that might be littered with broken glass or hypodermic needles.

How different this is from what so many parents do – struggling to move to more up-market areas where their children will get into schools that have better results and where they may be less likely to get into trouble as they're growing up. And what a gamble – Serena and her sister Venus have turned into tennis champions but their older sister Tunde, who stayed in Compton was shot dead, as A victim of gang violence aimed at her boyfriend.

Is that what God does with the people who seek to follow the Christian way? In some ways the answer is Yes. God doesn't take us out of the world and we suffer all the things that will impact on everyone else. In 1 Cor 10, Paul writes 'No testing has overtaken you that is common to everyone'. For some of us that will be worse than others, depending on the circumstances of our birth, the accidents of life and what we do with it. However, in a society in which most people are not seeking to follow Jesus, we may have more troubles than the majority of people in similar circumstances, because we may have a set of ethics which may not allow us to choose an easy life. But Paul goes on to say 'God is faithful and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out, so that you may be able to endure it'.

I must say that when I've been really up against it in the past, I've remembered that promise and I've thought 'oh Yeah' Where is my way of escape? I think about those who have been described as having lost their faith because of the circumstances they have faced. I'm talking about the kind of situation which we feel to be intolerable, often emotionally intolerable, in which the only way out seems to be to do something that we know to be wrong.

I do believe that God makes ways of escape that we refuse to see or imagine, sometimes because they all outside our pre-conceived ideas and habits of thought and practice. So there are some things we just do not do – such as my mother never leaving the house without doing the washing up, even if she was going to be late. I'm proud to say that is a rule that I have managed to un-learn – and I'm still always late! But you get the idea – there are things to which we would say 'I can't do that' when what we really mean is that 'I won't do that'. And often we won't do it because it violates our sense of who we are. It is frequently a matter of pride: I'm not the sort of person who goes out leaving the washing up; I'm not the sort of person who feeds convenience food to my children; I'm not the sort of person who goes bankrupt; I'm not the sort of person who does that kind of job or lives in an area like that etc, etc. So part of the test may be to address our preconceptions about who we are – that somehow we are different or better than other people. Some of these things are to do with our gender identity – what our society says we should be or do as men or women and i think because, social roles tend to be more flexible for women these days, this can be more difficult for men. Sometimes we confuse these rules that we have for ourselves, and which often we learnt from our parents' values, with God's values and God's rules. It is not a sin to go out without combing your hair, even though your Mum would have told you off about it. It's not a sin to do something stupid or embarrassing, even if you feel awful about it!

And related to this kind of refusal to take the way out that God offers, may be anger against God – a fury that we should find ourselves in these circumstances and that God could leave us in the situation or only offer solutions which are not acceptable to us. We are then in danger of adding deliberate rejection of God to taking the sinful way out.

Then there's the question of what being tested 'beyond our strength' means. What does the Bible says ‘that we would be able to endure’? It seems to me that God's idea of what we can bear may be different from ours. It's like the child who says 'I can't go to school in that old pair of trainers any more.' We know that what they are really saying is not that the shoes are letting in water but that the young person is unwilling to put up with the real or imagined contempt of fellow-students for the unfashionable footwear. Of course, our dilemmas are more serious than this aren't they?

To resist temptation we need to be aware of what we are saying to ourselves. One of the most damaging things we can do to ourselves is to keep saying 'I can't bear it.' because probably then we won't. It's almost as bad as saying to ourselves, or others, 'I don't see why I should' because that is to reject the love of God who has given us a reason in the saving life of Christ for following in his footprints.

It may be that for some people, taking the right decision will involve grief or serious depression, pain or even death. These are the routes which we say we cannot endure. And what we are told is not that we will escape these but that with God even these can be borne, despite what we may feel now. I must say that Veronica springs to mind here. She has been more or less depressed for many years, as most of us know. Being subject to depression myself, I'm sure that she has been tempted to drastically change her life in desperate ways which might have offered a hope of escaping the misery. She may often have thought she would be unable to bear the depression, because the nature of it is that when someone is really down there is the light at the end of the tunnel is too dim to see. I have seen Veronica faithfully bearing the depression year on year, even when God feels too distant to care. She may not see it that way and will be aware of her various lapses day to day, but the quality of her Christian journey is one of patient endurance, and I believe that this is possible only because God is there for her, partly through others round about her. I know that will embarrass her, but I want to continue by saying that her husband, Ed, has equal if not more patient endurance.

Sometimes the only way out in keeping with our ethics lies through pain and death, though few of us will be offered this choice. It may be more common in war. We have recalled that today is Remembrance Day. I was moved recently by a radio archive programme in which the former bishop of Edinburgh explored what happens to people's faith under the extreme situations that so many encounter as participants or victims of warfare. For some their faith was strengthened; for others it was destroyed. I suspect that there are many who refuse to engage with the spiritual aspects of what they endure. We can in no way condone or welcome or justify war but it is true that the challenge of war can bring out the extremes of heroism and selflessness or degradation and self-seeking that lurk within the human character. Some people have discovered themselves in the experience; others can only try to forget what they found out about their own depravity. The programme certainly made me think – what would I do in such a situation? I don't know and most of us don't know how we would stand up if our life were in the balance. Maybe, we can enjoy the benefits of peace because God is answering our prayer - “Save us from the time of trial.”

What we do know is that Jesus faced this trial – to choose to go to Jerusalem and to face suffering and death or to betray his mission and escape the torture. We know that he set his face like a flint and faced his destiny, that he wept tears like blood as he struggled with what was required of him. He passed the test. He was tortured to death rather than give in to the temptation to run away. And we see the result. In his death and resurrection we find a promise of eternal life. So some of us, who may be called by God to risk death rather than doing wrong, can know that for us, death itself can be a way out.

Trials and tests can come from many sources. It may be that the behaviour of others is what we find really trying. We have to cope both with what they do and our own reactions to it. The answer is not to become a permanent hermit. Although from the 3rd century or so this became a lifestyle which was honoured as being a highly spiritual way of devoting the self to communing with God, in some ways it is a cop-out. Yes the desert fathers had to endure loneliness and privation, but they didn't have to cope with screaming kids, a demanding boss, a dissatisfied wife, a baby that woke them at 4 in the morning, a church that was in conflict or friends who rang at inconvenient hours to talk about their boyfriends. Jesus showed us that there was value in being alone with God and that it could be a time of real spiritual growth, but even he only stayed in the wilderness for 40 days. Community, family, society are key elements in shaping us into the sort of people who God wants us to be.

One of the ways in which God makes us fit for the Kingdom of God is to be part of the people of God. In other words believers are supposed to be in churches, which may well be something of a trial to us. There are people who say that they believe in God but they can’t stand the church. Yet that is part of God’s refinement of us. How are we going to stand these people in heaven if we can’t stand them on earth?

Circumstances can be another great source of trial to us – illness, poverty, bereavement, disaster and loss can all test our faith. The question is how we respond to these. Do we blame God, wonder what we've done to deserve it?

Our reading points out that one of the chief sources of pain, grief and trial is ourselves. In fact, in every trial, it is ourselves that is the problem – and our responses to the things that happen to us. How much easier to talk about being tempted by the Devil – to put it outside ourselves and blame someone else. So right at the beginning of the Bible, Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. But Satan wasn’t always the evil one. He started as the simple literary device we find in the book of Job of explaining circumstances as being brought about by the adversary, who is a servant of God who is like the Council for the prosecution in court to test people and to enable humans to become what they ought to be. As things progressed in the story of God’s people it wasn’t far from there to Satan developing into an evil one and then the quintessence of evil who is engaged in tempting people on his own account and for the defeat of God. So sin becomes more the Devil’s fault for tempting us, than our own – just as Adam said that Eve tempted him and Eve blamed the serpent.

There is another source of trial which is recognised by many who have tried to come near to God. That is the perception of the absence of God. It is the feeling that our prayers just bounce off the ceiling and God does not care. This dark night of the soul has been the experience of great mystics and ordinary believers. It’s worth mentioning that it is only a trial to those who love God and seek to walk in God's way and hope to enjoy the loving divine presence. Anyone else would not care and those who persevere through this painful time will find that their devotion is rewarded.

Like sin, the word 'temptation' has gone out of fashion and so has 'sanctification' but that is what we are talking about here. Yoder insists that there are not 2 things in Christian salvation – first of all being saved by Jesus death and then being made holy. Unlike evangelicals and Catholics, Mennonites have never made any great distinction between these two but see it all part of the believer's closer and closer walk with God. And I think that for many of us, that corresponds with our experience. Yet it is still worth thinking about the process by which we become fit for eternal life. We may be forgiven, but how do we stand up in the presence of God with our selfishness and greed? Sanctification is the process of making us more like Jesus, more a member of the household of God and less at home in this world. It is not an easy process, yet it is essential or else a loving God would not allow us to go through it. John Donne remarked that no-one has enough affliction who is not changed and refined by it.

That’s a miserable way to finish this sermon and so I want to read you a bit from the writing of E Stanley Jones. He was a missionary to India in the 30s and originated the phrase ‘the Nazareth Manifesto’ to describe Jesus’ sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth in Luke 4. Some of his books are in the Mennonite Centre library. One of these is ‘Victorious Living’. He wrote:

“Victorious living does not mean freedom from temptation. Nor does it mean freedom from mistakes. We are personalities in the making, limited and grappling with things too high for us. Obviously we, at our very best, will make many mistakes. But these mistakes need not be sins. Our actions are the results of our intentions and our intelligence. Our intention may be very good but because our intelligence is limited the action may turn out to be a mistake – a mistake, but not necessarily a sin. For sin comes out of a wrong intention. Therefore the action carries a sense of incompleteness and of frustration , but not of guilt…

Nor does it mean that we may not occasionally lapse into a wrong act, which may be called a sin. At that point we may have lost a skirmish, but it doesn’t mean we may not still win the battle. We may even lose a battle and still win the war. One of the differences between a sheep and a swine is that when a sheep falls into a mudhole it bleats to get out, while the swine loves it and wallows in it.”

So though we may be subject to trial and temptation we can choose to be swine or to be sheep. It all depends on what our attitude is and which direction we are going.

Forgiving others

Preacher: Veronica
Readings: Matthew 6.12-15 and Matthew 18.23-35

When I saw that I had been put down to preach today on forgiving others , I thought I’d got the most difficult of all our series on the Lord’s Prayer. Actually I was originally meant to preach some weeks ago on ‘Your kingdom come’, but in the event I wasn’t well enough to preach it, and Sue kindly took over. So now I’m stuck with the subject most likely to get a preacher labelled as a hypocrite, if she doesn’t practise what she preaches. And for me at least, this is one of the hardest things in Jesus’ teaching to practise. In preparation for this sermon I have spent time over the last few weeks trying to forgive everyone I have ever failed to forgive, and I’m not sure I’ve got very far. Your mileage may vary, as they say online.

On the face of it Jesus’ message is very clear and unequivocal. Our forgiveness by God is dependant on our forgiving others. If we don’t forgive, we will not be able to experience God’s forgiveness of our many failings.

But wait a minute. Does that mean God’s forgiveness of our sins is conditional? Is Jesus essentially saying, To earn God’s forgiveness you have to do something - you have to forgive others? It certainly looks like that. I can now hear Protestants all over the world, whose motto is ‘Sola fide’ or ‘faith alone’, squirming uncomfortably in their seats. Or at least they would be if they were all listening to me. Surely the only condition for forgiveness is that in Christ, God took our sins on God’s own shoulders and atoned for them? Does God’s forgiveness of us only apply if we have forgiven every one who’s wronged us?

This is one reason this subject is so scary. Which of us can say we have forgiven everyone who’s offended us, as Matthew 18 says, ‘from the heart’? I think there is a way round this, and I hope I’m not making excuses here. I’d like to suggest God’s forgiveness of us is truly unconditional. God is after all portrayed by Jesus as a loving father. As someone wrote recently on Ship of Fools website: ‘ I cannot conceive of disowning my child, whatever she might do, in any circumstances, for one second, ever. God's love for us is not less than our love for our children.’

Where the link with our forgiveness of others comes in, I think , is that while we are harbouring grudges and unforgiveness in our hearts, we are not in a state where we can truly experience God’s forgiveness of us. If our mental state is one of grudge-bearing, we will project that onto God, as it were making God in our own image as a hard man who reaps where he does not sow and gathers where he does not scatter. So in order to be able to see God’s forgiveness clearly, we have to be in a state of forgiveness ourselves. So in the parable of the unforgiving servant which we heard earlier, the master is fully prepared to forgive, but when the servant is unforgiving, he loses the benefit of the master’s forgiveness. And I think this parable also tells us that God’s forgiveness of us is meant to have results in our own behaviour to others. If knowing we are forgiven does not inspire us to forgive others, then perhaps we don’t understand God’s forgiveness very well at all.

That’s the only way I can make sense of the link Jesus makes between our forgiveness and God’s. But of course the story doesn’t end there. There’s the small matter of how we manage to forgive, and what counts as true forgiveness anyway? And are there any preconditions to our forgiveness of others?

Well there’s one definite precondition, and that is that to practise forgiveness, we have to have enemies. You can’t practise enemy love without having an enemy. Having enemies is an uncomfortable position to be in, and I’m in that position at the moment in relation to my son’s headmaster, who is depriving children with special needs of the support which is their legal right. So forgiveness is a very live issue for me.

Of course some of the people we need to forgive - perhaps most of them - will be our friends, and especially our family. The closer we are to someone, the more they can hurt us. And the closest of all to us is ourselves, and it’s not always easy to forgive ourselves for things we regret doing or saying.

The second possible precondition is repentance. We experience God’s forgiveness best when we turn away from whatever we are doing that is against God’s will. Is it the same between us and fellow human beings - do people have to repent before we can forgive them?

I don’t know if any of you listened to The Moral Maze on Radio 4 on Wednesday before last? It was all about forgiveness, sparked by the fact that the bomber of the Grand Hotel Brighton in 1974, Pat Magee, was appearing in the House of Commons alongside the daughter of one of his victims. If you remember, that was the bombing of the Tory conference, where five people were killed, and where Norman Tebbit’s wife was paralysed.

The ‘witnesses’ on the show were Paul Bowman, whose daughter Sally Ann was raped and murdered by a serial sex offender; Timothy Latchbourne, the grandson of Earl Mountbatten, who lost his grandfather and his twin in another IRA bombing, and has written a book about learning to forgive the bombers; Ruth Dudley Edwards, who has written a book about the Omagh bombing, and Peter Price, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, who has been involved in a lot of reconciliation work.

A lot of the discussion centred around the fact that while Pat Magee is no longer a terrorist, he has refused to repent of what he did and says in the same circumstances he might do it again. Most of the panel were very sure that forgiveness can only happen where there is repentance. One said that there were some crimes too heinous ever to be forgiven; and Paul Bowman said that even if his daughter’s killer expressed remorse, he would never forgive him, and that to do so would be disrespect to his daughter’s memory.

The one clear Christian voice on the programme was the Bishop, who said that even if there is no repentance, forgiving can be beneficial to the victim in coming to terms with what has happened. His experience also told him that forgiveness ahead of repentance, can also sometimes lead to a change of heart in the offender. What struck me most in what he said is this: ‘The ability to forgive is part of a life well lived.’ The unforgiveness of Paul Bowman stood out starkly against this, and it seemed to me that his inability to forgive was inflicting far more pain on him than it was on his daughter’s murderer.

Bishop Peter also made the link between our forgiveness and God’s, by saying ‘I forgive because I am forgiven’. As the panel points out however, this could be problematic, because for most of us, what we need to be forgiven of is nothing so dramatic as rape, murder or terrorism. As the parable of the Pharisee and the publican shows, it is sometimes harder for the ‘good’ religious person to understand forgiveness than it is for the out and out criminal. In the face of the glory of God, however, we all feel besmirched and in need of cleansing, as in the reading from Isaiah we had last week: ‘Woe is me I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips, yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts’ (Is 6.5).

But what is forgiveness anyway? Is it just an internal attitude? Or is it an objective change in the relationship between people? And if it’s the latter, does it mean releasing the perpetrator from all consequences or penalties of their actions? There was a lot of talk on the Moral Maze panel about the relationship between forgiveness and justice. Most of the panel agreed that forgiveness did not mean leaving crimes unpunished; and some said there could be no forgiveness until justice was done.

Which brings us to that other passage we heard from Matthew 18, which describes a process of confrontation and reconciliation between Christians. It’s interesting that Matthew’s order has Jesus advising this process before the parable of the unforgiving servant. Do we actually need to do something active, when we can, to put things right, before we can forgive? Certainly there is such a thing as forgiving, or apparently forgiving, too soon, when we haven’t really dealt with our anger. This can leave us still seething inwardly., with only a veneer of forgiveness. I’d like to suggest that if we read these two passages together, we can say that forgiveness is not an end in itself, it is a part of reconciliation. And perhaps sometimes it is not the precondition for reconciliation, but the result of it.

So where does that leave me, trying to forgive the Demon Headmaster for his offences against my child and others’ children, while at the same time chairing a campaign to stop him doing it? And as a result constantly hearing more of the appalling and probably illegal things he’s saying and doing, and being reminded how angry I am with him?

Well at the moment it leaves me struggling. I know I have to bless those who curse me and pray for those who persecute me, but what keeps coming into my head instead is ‘Woe to him who harms any of these little ones’ and part of me would love to tie a millstone round his neck and throw him into the sea.

The last person who gave me so much material for forgiveness, is now dead, and in some ways that makes it easier to forgive him, because I know for sure he’s not going to carry on doing the things that upset me. And if he was still alive, I’m afraid I suspect he would have gone on doing them.

As Hamlet said, ‘Ay, there’s the rub’. Unfortunately when Peter asked how often he should forgive his brother, Jesus didn’t say ‘Seventy times seven but only if he repents’. Nor did he say ‘490 and then you can beat him up as much as you like.’ Ultimately, if we are modelling our forgiveness on God’s forgiveness, we have to look to Romans 5.8: ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’. If God didn’t wait till we repented, can we do that to others?

Perhaps there’s some significance in the fact that Peter asks Jesus about his ‘brother’ meaning ‘brother in the Lord’. I think we could make a case that in Matthew 18 Jesus is recommending that with fellow Christians, we need a process of actively seeking repentance and change, not simply forgiving and forgetting. We should expect our Christian sister or brother, not to earn our forgiveness, but to respond to it with change. Perhaps with those who aren’t followers of Jesus, we cannot so readily expect repentance, so all we can do is forgive and pray for a change of heart. I can certainly try praying for my enemy the head master; and perhaps as a step towards forgiving him I should stop calling him the Demon Headmaster. I shall still however go on fighting his policies because they are harmful to vulnerable children.

So to sum up the main points, our forgiveness by God is not dependant on our forgiving others, but it is expected to lead to it; and we might need to forgiven others before we can really receive God’s forgiveness. Equally, our forgiveness of others is not dependant on their repentance, but it is meant to inspire their repentance; and when we are dealing with fellow Christians, we may need to confront their sin at the same time as forgiving it. Perhaps the most useful things said on The Moral Maze was that forgiveness is a process. Reconciliation is a process too, and the two need to go hand in hand.

In the bombed cathedral in Coventry, where I grew up, there is an altar with a cross on it made of blackened medieval nails salvaged from the ruins. On the altar there is a text in gold letters: Father, forgive. I’m sure it’s meant to remind us of the rest of that saying of Jesus from the cross: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’. Surrounded by the Gothic ruins, this clearly implies a reference to the Germans who bombed Coventry so heavily 55 years ago next month. Our country, of course, retaliated by dropping even more devastating bombs on Dresden and other cities. However since the new cathedral was built in the 60s, the cathedral has had an active ministry of international reconciliation, especially with Germany, and established a kind of scattered community of reconcilation called the Fellowship of the Cross of Nails.

If Jesus asked God to forgive the worst thing we have ever done to God, what right have we to withhold forgiveness from others? But please pray for me that I may be able not only to preach about it, but to do it. I’ve got a long way to go.

Forgive Us Our Sins

Preacher: Lesley

Forgive us our sins is the subject of this sermon in our series on the Lord’s Prayer. Sin has gone out of fashion. We don’t often preach about it in this church and it’s certainly not a word you find used much in society in general.

First of all, let’s be sure about this word ‘sins’. We may have grown up saying ‘Forgive us our trespasses’ and other versions of the Lord’s prayer say ‘Forgive us our debts’ So which is right? Well, having done extensive research using Sue’s Greek/English New Testament, which I failed to give back to her after I borrowed it some while ago, I can definitely say that in Luke the word is trespasses, whereas in Matthew, which is the version we tend to follow, the word is debts. So how do we get from debts to sins? The Greek word means ‘obligations’ or ‘things owing’. In the Lord’s prayer we start by addressing ourselves to God and, remember, we take with us, in saying ‘OUR Father’, all those who might claim to be children of God. To pray ‘Forgive us our debts’ in this prayer means that to do so we must be in harmony with the earlier parts of the prayer. We are approaching with this request the loving Father who longs to give us bread. To do so hallows God’s name, fulfils God’s will and hastens the coming of the Kingdom.

So what does the Bible tell us we owe to God and to the rest of God’s family? We are told that we must love the Lord our God, with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind and with all our strength. And we must love our neighbours with the same care and attention we show to ourselves. Now which of us can stand up and say that we have not, just occasionally, failed in this obligation? And that failure is what the Bible calls sin.

We understand debts because the vast majority of the population probably have debts of one kind of another, even if it is only an outstanding credit card bill which they usually pay off every month. So the state of being a debtor is pretty well universal, but the debts are owed by each as an individual and it is for what we owe as individuals that each will be held accountable.

We know that Jesus linked debts and sins because he told parables which equated the two. The people of his day knew a lot about debts. Most peasant farmers – that is most of the population – were more or less permanently indebted to the large landowners who had flourished under Roman rule. These debts could be passed on from parent to child, so that someone could be born in debt, even though it was in contravention to the Law of God. One such parable, in Matthew 18, is in response to Peter’s question ‘How many times shall I forgive my brother who sins against me?’ Jesus replies with the parable about a king who cancelled the huge debt owed to him by one of his servants. I won’t go into the parable now because I expect that Veronica may want to talk about it next week, but I just want to point out that the word used for debts in the parable is the same as that used earlier in Matthew in the Lord’s prayer. So when Jesus teaches us to say ‘Forgive us our debts, he clearly means our sins – in other words, our failures to love God or our neighbours. And the word for forgive is the same as that for release from debts in other parts of the Gospels. It means to set free, not from prison, but from the chains of obligation.


.It has always seemed to me that there is a rather abrupt shift in the Lord’s prayer. We have moved from honouring God to making requests. And our first request is for the basic necessities of life, summed up by the term ‘daily bread’. I would expect that the next request would be for the next most pressing requirement that people have. The psychologist, Maslow, even proposed a hierarchy of needs, starting with food and water at the bottom, through needs for social interaction, to what he called self-actualisation, including spiritual needs, at the top – something to which we may pay attention when all other requirements are satisfied. The Lord’s prayer is more realistic. In fact we find people all over the world attending to spiritual needs when other things are far from satisfactory. Among the billion people who are hungry in the world they still pray. As Jesus told Satan ‘Humankind does not live by bread alone’. So what comes right after our daily bread is a spiritual need. What Jesus implies is that getting our sins sorted out is the most urgent spiritual need we have.

As I said sin has gone out of fashion – if it ever was in fashion. I mean the word sin. Being sinful has always been popular. In these days we’ve stopped talking about it. The word ‘sin’ conjures up images of outdated and absolute moral codes and formal authority and other people telling us that we’re bad. And quite frankly, these days, we just don’t want to know. In fact our society has a great antipathy to anyone presuming to tell others what they should do. Even someone whose personal behaviour shows up the low standards of the rest of us is intolerable to a good section of the population. So we have books and TV programmes revealing all the shortcomings of Martin Luther King or Ghandhi or Mother Theresa. But this attitude seeks to ignore the fact that these individuals show that it is possible for humans to do a great deal more neighbour-loving than most of us manage. It’s as if we can feel better about ourselves if we can show that they weren’t perfect – as, of course, they weren’t.

In Western culture’s denial of sin; the only real crime is hypocrisy. And look at the glee with which the media have pointed the finger at MPs about their expenses – even, now, about being so profligate as to pay their cleaners more than £40 a week! (Even though this was allowed within the previous rules.) You’d think that MPs didn’t have anything else to do with spending large amounts of public money! I think this obsession with MP’s personal dishonesty is because. in the course of governing the country, these people, by the nature of their work, have to say something about the way that the rest of us live and what is right for society as a whole. But let’s remember what Jesus said about casting the first stone and that no matter how much I cut someone else down to size, it doesn’t increase my stature by one centimetre

At the same time, we see in our culture a strong tendency towards externalisation of evil. By that I mean that we tend to feel that it’s not us that’s bad; it’s something outside ourselves. The evil people are serial killers or child abusers; they’re Osama Bin Laden or, earlier, Sadam Hussein. We have a tendency to make whole groups of people into scapegoats – Muslims, homosexuals, young drinkers. The other tendency is to fantasise evil. There’s a huge proliferation of TV shows with paranormal themes and lots of vampires, witches (both of which seem to be being rehabilitated) ghosts and ghost hunters. For Halloween we’re told there will be a dangerous paranormal experiment, revealing the real face of evil or some such stuff.

What is clear is that, in our society evil is them not us. But on Friday I came across a Sunday Times magazine article showing pictures of various notorious people and pointing out that Himmler had ‘nice eyes’, that Rosemary West and the killer of Baby P look like people you’d see on the street any day. And I must say that one of the things I find difficult in the work that I do on the Mental Health Review Tribunal is that I can meet people who have committed heinous crimes and yet seem quite pleasant. I’m sure Judith could say the same about people she meets as a probation officer.

What the Lord’s Prayer asks us to do is to admit our sins – to recognise that we are as capable of sin as the next person and that we have done things of which we cannot be proud. It recognises that this is the last thing we want to do. Last week I heard a radio interview with Gillian Slovo, whose parents Joe Slovo and Ruth First were anti-apartheid activists (and Ruth First was assassinated for this.) She described attending various sessions of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This post-apartheid body gave people amnesty for crimes, including murder, committed as a result of their administration of the apartheid system, so long as they told the truth about what they had done. Gillian Slovo said she had only heard one person tell the truth. The others said what they had done but they hedged it around with justifications and mitigating factors. As she said, how do you live with the knowledge that you have done terrible things?

I don’t think it’s just about big crimes. We all of us spend our lives conducting an internal narrative about ourselves – who we are, what we’ve done, why we did those things. It is essential to our sense of identity and we will still try to do it even if we can no longer remember what has happened in the past – so people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease can come up with some bizarre explanations for things, for instance as they try to make sense of their lives. And in our internal narrative, we want to be the hero of the tale, so we explain things to ourselves in a way that shows ourselves in the best light. We do not believe we are sinful. We make excuses and justifications for our actions.

Thinking again of murderers; they also have an internal narrative and will tend to minimise or explain away their crimes. None of us like to think of ourselves as evil. In Britain, someone convicted of murder has a mandatory life sentence, and at the time of sentencing a tariff is set by the judge – a period that has to be served before parole can be considered, depending on the nature of the crime. Parole is not automatic. It is only possible if it is likely that that person will no longer be a danger to the public. One of the things the Parole Board is looking at is whether the person admits the crime, is remorseful and empathises with the victims. I deal on occasions with murderers who have mental health problems. They still have to serve the tariff and the tribunal then is looking at their psychological state and, again, whether they continue to minimise the severity of the crime, to blame the victim or others, to give excuses for their actions. The system requires the offender to face their sin in all its naked horror and to accept responsibility for it.

And God requires the same thing of us. We are not different from the rest of humankind. In the Lord’s Prayer, it is our debts which we bring to God. So we number ourselves amongst the great crowd of sinners. Just as the publican who stood in the Temple said ‘Lord be merciful to me, a sinner’. We do not claim to be different from the great herd of mankind. So the Pharisee who said ‘Thankyou God that I am not like other men’ was not forgiven, while the tax-collector was. As I John says, ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and are strangers to the truth. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.’

In the case of murderers, we demand this so they can participate in society again. God requires us to confess our sins and to ask for forgiveness so that we can be part of the society of Heaven – or whatever phrase we may use for freely partaking in the company of our God.

This is where we look at that peculiar series of readings that we had. I went through the Bible and I picked out the descriptions of encounters between God or God’s heavenly agents and human beings. What is the common factor? Being Afraid. What’s the first thing people do? Mostly they fall down – usually flat on their faces. Noel Moules used to say this when I did the Workshop course, so I thought I’d have a look at it for myself. I thought he was exaggerating. But I was staggered by the consistency with which people fall down in their terror, in such a way as to hide their faces. The question is why? Well, pure fear of the unknown may be one reason, but I would think that usually people’s response to a frightening apparition would be more varied. They might scream, run away, freeze in shock, pretend it’s not happening etc.

Falling down indicates both fear and submission. It is cowering in recognition of almighty power. In these events, the people recognise that they are dealing with God. Isaiah gives a clue to the other factor. "My destruction is sealed, for I am a sinful man and a member of a sinful race. Yet I have seen the King, the Lord Almighty!" In other words, it didn’t matter what story they had been telling themselves about themselves or how they had rationalized away the things they had done, at the point of encounter with the power of God, each of those people were terrified as they recognized the purity of God and their own inadequacy to face up to this. So they literally covered their faces from God.

God has not changed. We are still unfit to stand in God’s presence. We require forgiveness. But forgiveness cannot be based on a lie. Just as we require murderers to admit the truth of our crime so we need to look at the truth about what we are really like. Remember that we are thinking about all the ways we have failed in love to God or neighbour. I can only be forgiven myself if I am first of all conscious of my sin. Forgiveness cannot come first.

One of the other reasons that people don’t like to talk about sin any more is that psychologists tell us that we need self-esteem and there is quite a tension between knowledge of our sinfulness and self-esteem. As I’ve been involved in counselling and psychotherapy in various roles for many years, that has been an issue for me. However, I have come to the conclusion that we cannot base self-esteem on a lie. How does it help anyone for a person to think well of themselves when in fact they hurt others around them? The sin still works away under the surface, even if it is buried, and causes pain and distress. Better to know what I really am and to come for forgiveness. It is noticeable that seeking the forgiveness of the people that I have hurt is an essential step in the Alcoholics Anonymous and 12-step Addiction programmes.

Yes, low self-esteem, often thought to be due to lack of feeling loved during infancy is a real cause of hurt and distress, as people cannot make relationships properly without having them distorted through a lens of how they view themselves and others.. How can someone find that love in later life? Do we expect a partner to be able to make up for what we never had? The burden is often too great for the relationship to sustain. Do we seek to love ourselves and look after ourselves first? We risk even more failures towards our neighbours – and it’s often difficult to love even ourselves when we have suffered damage as infants.

But there is One whose love is big enough to sustain even the most damaged. ‘Don’t be afraid’, the angel said. ‘I bring news of great joy’. and ‘He is risen!’ In Jesus’ death and resurrection, there is a way for us also to be forgiven and loved. The cost is coming to God as we really are, with all our sins exposed, and that may feel like death. But the reward is that we may rise like Jesus, as the song says: ‘Forgiven, loved and free.’ 1 John, which tells us that we are all sinners is also the book in the Bible which most talks about love – love for our neighbours, the love of Jesus in his incarnation, death and resurrection and the overwhelming love of God, so that it says ‘God is love’. And that love is for us. As Gene Robinson said on a tape that our small group listened to on Thursday – in my words. Just as God can be throughout the Universe and beyond and yet can hear our small prayer, so God can love all of us equally – and yet I am his favourite – and so are you.

Give us today our daily bread

Preacher: Sue
Readings: Exodus 16:14-21, Deuteronomy 8:1-9, Matt 6:9-15, Luke 11:1-4

Today we’re continuing our series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer, and our phrase today is “Give us today our daily bread”. It’s a very rich, resonant request but it raises a big question for me.

Because for me it’s been a long time since I last had to really worry about whether I’d have enough money to feed myself. Even at the worst of times I’ve always been able to afford staples like bread, potatoes, rice or porridge, as well as the essentials of tea and milk! In fact it was only when I spent two years with Operation Mobilisation more than twenty years ago that I really faced tough choices, for instance between medical treatment and food, and things once got so bad that our penniless and hungry team sat together reading Judges chapter 7, fantasising about the cake of barley bread that tumbled into the camp of Midian and desperately praying for food or money. (On that occasion, you will be pleased to know, we had a rush of gifts of food and money and invitations to eat at other people’s houses.)

So, I wonder, is it honest for me to pray “Give us today our daily bread”? Or is it just going through the motions? Do we need to be living hand to mouth, not sure where our next meal will come from, in order to pray this without hypocrisy?

Well, I think this is an important prayer for us all, whether in times of plenty or hunger, and I hope I can convince you of that too,

Let’s look at where we’ve been so far in this sermon series. “Our Father in Heaven hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven”. These are all quite lofty requests, focused on God and God’s purposes, and full of “you” - “hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done”. And then all of a sudden we switch to “us” - “Give us today our daily bread”. And it’s so down to earth and close to home. It reminds us that however important it is to focus on God and work and pray for God’s kingdom, we are frail, physical and human and have physical needs. We need to eat and drink, sleep and have shelter. And we are not expected to ignore these basic needs for the sake of the kingdom; indeed we’re encouraged to pray for the kingdom and ourselves virtually in the same breath.

I’m interested in the two versions of this phrase which Matthew and Luke give us. (I’ll divert for just a moment to talk about that. Joachim Jeremias thinks that both Matthew and Luke are reproducing a catechism on prayer based on Jesus’ teaching, different for their different audiences. Luke’s Gentile readers are new to prayer so have a kind of primer for beginners while Matthew’s Jewish readers already know about prayer so the basic framework of Luke has been expanded into a more advanced lesson. So Jeremias thinks Luke’s version came first. However, he finds the concepts more challenging and the language more complex in Matthew than in Luke. Based on this and on Aramaic texts which he thinks reflect the Aramaic of Jesus’ original teaching, he concludes that Matthew’s actual words are closer to Jesus.)

So, let’s look more closely at our line for today. Matthew says: “Give us this day our daily bread” while Luke has “Give us each day our daily bread”. Now I can see the attraction of Luke’s approach. Just pray “Give us each day our daily bread” every now and then and you’ve got the whole of the foreseeable future covered. It’s got to be a more efficient approach that Matthew’s “Give us this day our daily bread” with its implication that we have to come back to God in prayer every day for our daily needs. If I were trying to design a sustainable system I’d go for Luke’s approach every time. But…

I really like Luke’s gospel but, you know, here I think he has it wrong and that Matthew is much closer to the spirit of this prayer (so I’m with Jeremias I guess). I think we really are supposed to be praying in daily dependence on God and trust in God, as the people of Israel had to do in the wilderness for forty years, gathering each day the manna they needed for that day and not hoarding for the next day - unless the next day was the Sabbath in which case they did need to gather two days’ worth and the stored manna didn’t go off.

I find this a challenge for us whose cupboards are probably never literally bare so aren’t confronted with our dependence on God by the kind of poverty that so many of our world’s population live in. To take just one statistic, the average daily per capita income of the poorest half of Haiti’s people is 44 cents. I guess that buys a bit more in Haiti than it does in London, but still, a poor Haitian would have a lot more incentive to pray for daily bread than I do.

So I think this part of the Lord’s prayer is a challenge both to remember our dependence on God and to stand in solidarity with the poor by praying the same prayer of dependence as they pray. Indeed, we are not invited to pray “give me this day my daily bread”, even though we’re encouraged go into our room and shut the door and pray to our Father who is in secret. Even if prayed alone, this is a prayer for our bread. So I think this phrase “Give us today our daily bread”, which has so much resonance, can among other things stand as short hand for the prayer we prayed at last week’s communion service here and often sing as a grace:

God bless to us this bread
and give bread to all those who are hungry
and hunger for justice to those who are fed.
God bless to us this bread.

As one who is fed and needs to hunger for justice, I think I will pray this phrase differently in future having lived with these thoughts this week.

Let’s think some more about praying for bread. On the one hand this is a very modest request. As Gregory of Nyssa pointed out in the fourth century (in rather fourth century terms, including a reference to slave ownership):

"So we say to God: Give us bread. Not delicacies or riches, nor magnificent purple robes, golden ornaments, and precious stones, or silver dishes. Nor do we ask Him for landed estates, or military commands, or political leadership. We pray neither for herds of horses and oxen or other cattle in great numbers, nor for a host of slaves. We do not say, give us a prominent position in assemblies or monuments and statues raised to us, nor silken robes and musicians at meals, nor any other thing by which the soul is estranged from the thought of God and higher things; no--but only bread!”

But in another way bread stands for so much more. In our reading from Deuteronomy it stands for having one’s basic material needs met in a way that resonates with the vision of shalom:

For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper.

So bread can stand for material sufficiency and well-being, but its symbolism goes further. For Abraham offering bread to strangers is a sign of hospitality. In Isaiah 58 sharing bread stands for food and practical provision more generally (and notice the language of sharing, not just breaking off a little corner that won’t be missed):

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? (Isaiah 58:6-7)

And I think that is one of the powerful things about this petition, that bread is at the same time a modest staple, an essential, and yet can symbolise so much more too. If we think of Jesus’ quotation from our Deuteronomy passage, that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord, bread may remind us of Jesus, the Word of God and the bread of life. And think of the bread of the last supper or the bread broken at Emmaus which reveals the stranger on the road to be the risen Jesus. Bread can bring so much to mind, yet is so simple. Maybe it can remind us of the sacred-ness of the everyday. One of the things I really like about our tradition is that the same bread that we buy from the corner shop for our lunch is also the bread we break together at communion.

Now some commentators really major on this symbolic and spiritual dimension of bread as they look at the Lord’s prayer, so I want to talk about that briefly.

Part of the reason for this emphasis is the word which we translate as “daily” which, rather unhelpfully seems to be a new coinage by the gospel writers, or at least records of other usage at the time haven’t come down to us. So what does it mean? Well, the consensus seems to be along the lines of “daily”, “necessary”, “today’s” and “tomorrow’s”. So some read it as “tomorrow’s” and think it looks ahead to the heavenly banquet. And maybe in part it does… But for today I want to stick with the down-to-earth concrete idea of the physical bread we need to survive and think a bit more about necessity and praying for today’s essentials - or perhaps at night praying to have enough to eat tomorrow.

And here comes another challenge. To pray this prayer is to confess that “enough” is “enough”, that we need what is necessary but don’t need the kind of consumerist excess that so many other daily messages tell us we do need and even deserve. Certainly in the fourth century St. Basil read it as urging simplicity and generosity and contrasted “daily bread” with having more than enough:

"The bread that is spoiling in your house belongs to the hungry. The shoes that are mildewing under your bed belong to those who have none. The clothes stored away in your trunk belong to those who are naked. The money that is depreciating in your treasury belongs to the poor."

Or as Hauerwas and Willimon put it:

Through learning to pray this prayer we are taught that our money is not “ours”. Thus we can be asked to share because what we have is shared.

Perhaps we need to pray this phrase again and again just to counteract the other pressures on us to buy, to consume, to hoard. Perhaps it can even become for us a prayer that we might grow to know more and more clearly what we do need, how much is enough, and what we simply want, at the expense of the poor and the environment.

I wonder how many of you have tried the carbon footprint calculator on the WWF website which Dave Nussbaum mentioned at the weekend away. Peter & tried it several times, each time changing another answer to something we thought we might be able to manage but weren’t yet doing, but however simply we even imagined living - and this is well off what we are actually attempting right now - the calculator still showed us needing substantially more than our “share” of the planet’s resources. Maybe praying “Give us today our daily bread” can be a prayer to learn to tread more lightly on our struggling planet.

So I have found this at once a sobering and an exciting phrase to meditate on. It reminds me that, whatever illusions I may have of self-sufficiency and autonomy, I am dependent on God - and maybe I should say grace before meals more often as a way of reminding myself of this and acknowledging my dependence on God and my need for God’s daily presence. Praying “Give us today our daily bread” challenges me to remember the hungry and to hunger for justice even when I am fed - and to think about how I store the money I have to save in case my tenants need repairs done on my house in Hemel Hempstead. Maybe it’s time to put that into Shared Interest as Ken has been telling me since the days when I was barely solvent! It reminds me too of the sacredness of the everyday, of the bread that is both a staple and a token of so much else. And it comes as a corrective to the messages that tell me that I need more possessions, that I am worth more expensive shampoo, and that it’s reasonable to consume and pollute far beyond what the earth can afford to give me. I may not start each day wondering where my next meal is coming from - but that is precisely why I need to pray this prayer, “Give us today our daily bread”.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven

Preacher: Sue
Readings: Luke 11:1-13, Luke 4:16-21

Today we’re continuing our series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer, looking at “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven”. Lesley began last week with “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. I’m still reeling from her challenge that to pray “our Father” is to take with us into prayer everyone who can call God “Father” - and who are we to judge who is included in that. Prayer cannot be an escape from our common humanity or a safe haven for our selfish likes & dislikes. However difficult my relationship with someone else, however sure I am that they are “wrong”, I cannot ask God to take my side against them. I need to find a way - metaphorically at least - to pray with them, as if alongside them.

In their book Lord Teach Us Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon make a similar point about our phrase for today, “your kingdom come”. Our prayers are to be for the kingdom of God not, for instance, for “our nation” or even “our family”. Of course, this put the early church at odds with an empire which expected not only loyalty to the empire but even worship of the emperor, and can put us at odds today with the gods of our culture such as nationalism and consumerism.

So that’s my first point: to pray “your kingdom come” is to focus away from our own petty or territorial concerns and towards Jesus and his concerns. (That’s not to say our griefs and joys, our fears and hopes don’t count - I’m talking about not letting our parochial or partisan concerns or our envies and rivalries get in the way of praying for the coming of God’s kingdom.) And my next point is like unto the first, to pray “your kingdom come” is to remember that we are pilgrims and strangers, resident aliens, whose citizenship is in the kingdom of God and whose loyalty is to Jesus.

Now, I’m already two points in and I haven’t tried to define “the kingdom of God”. Maybe that’s because there isn’t really a neat one sentence definition, or better still a one verse definition lifted straight from one of the gospels. Perhaps that’s partly because for Jesus’ Jewish hearers, the idea of the kingship and sovereignty of God ran through their entire scriptures. In their book Kingdom Ethics Stassen and Gushee point out how the life and words of Jesus echo the book of Isaiah. And Isaiah was probably significant for forming 1st century Jewish expectations of the kingdom of God. Isaiah looks forward to a time when God will act to deliver the oppressed and bring salvation. And the words and images that come up time and time again in Isaiah’s descriptions of this deliverance are light, joy, peace, justice, righteousness, healing and return from exile. So perhaps this is the vision Jesus’ use of the phrase “the kingdom of God” conjured up for his listeners - and it certainly sounds familiar to anyone who knows Romans 14:17: “For the kingdom of God is… righteousness (or justice) and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

But maybe also Jesus doesn’t bother defining the kingdom of God because the kingdom of God is what Jesus’ life is all about. He doesn’t need to define it because he is living it. Listen to Jesus’ at the synagogue in Nazareth, in Luke 4:16-21:

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour." And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

So to pray “your kingdom come” is to pray for signs of the life of Jesus to become visible among us. Now the church can be one of those signs - but there’s a warning from Jürgen Moltmann (via Chris Marshall for those who remember his time in this church):
The church is not there for its own sake. It is there for the sake of 'Jesus' concern'. All the church's interests -- its continuation in its existing form, the extension of its influence -- must be subordinated to the interests of the kingdom of God. If the spirit and the institutions of the church are in line with God's kingdom, then the church is Christ's church. If they run counter to God's kingdom, the church loses its right to exist and becomes a superfluous religious society.

The last point I want to make about the kingdom is that it is full of paradox. In the early days of Jesus ministry he proclaims “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15). So the kingdom is brought in by Jesus and it is already here. But it’s not fully here yet - we can all think of hundreds of ways in which our world today falls short of righteousness and peace and joy, of letting the oppressed go free. And although the kingdom of God dawns with Jesus, although in Jesus some of those visions of Isaiah are realised, and although we are to wait eagerly and expectantly and hopefully for God’s continued interventions, we are also called to do something ourselves - to repent and believe, to get involved, to enact that hope in God, to act - and to pray - faithfully for God’s kingdom to come.

The kingdom of God - for those of you who have been following John and Anicka’s blog as they prepare to move house within Kinshasa - is like a house that is structurally sound and has great potential and where you have all the necessary agreements with the landlord that you can move in in due course but where the plumbing may not actually be functional just yet and which will take some months and plenty of money to fix up before they can move in and longer still till it becomes a home. Or the kingdom of God “is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches” (Luke 13:19). The seed is sown in Jesus but there’s some growing and spreading still to do before the earth is full of mustard trees. In fact on Tuesday evening we used a liturgy which sent us out “in joy and service scattering like tiny seeds” to be part of the spreading of the kingdom, to be “the irrepressible weeds of peace”.

But Jesus tells his disciples to pray not only for the coming of the kingdom but for the Father’s will to be done. Does that contradict what I’ve just been saying about our part in God’s purposes? Do we actually just need to sit and wait for God to do it all? Hauerwas and Willimon say that while praying “your kingdom come” challenges us to be hopeful and actively involved with the kingdom, “your will be done” helps us learn patience, to learn not to turn to violence as we long for the kingdom to come but, rather, to wait to achieve those dreams with God, to practise Gelassenheit as we trust to God to act.

I have to say that I find this difficult. Sometimes I am quite passive so “waiting for God” sounds attractive, but maybe this is a temptation. Perhaps there are times when I have a responsibility not to wait but to act. But I can be impatient too, so sometimes jumping into what I see as the tide of the kingdom will appeal, but perhaps that too is a temptation. And I don’t know the answer, indeed I am wrestling with concrete questions along these lines right now.

What can I do? Well, I fear there is no quick fix answer. Maybe I have to practise praying “your will be done” - practise praying it day after day, week after week - trying to learn what God wants. Perhaps in the faithful praying of those few words I can express a longing along the lines of the well known prayer (but rather more wordy!) God, grant me the Gelassenheit to wait patiently for your time and intervention where that is most helpful, the courage to act where acting can help build your kingdom, the obedience to act faithfully even where it seems pointless - and the wisdom to know the difference, to know your will and to pray “your kingdom come”.

Our Father in Heaven, Hallowed be your Name

Preacher: Lesley

This is the beginning of our sermon series in which we are going to look at the Lord’s Prayer. It may seem that going through this prayer sentence by sentence will be extremely boring. But I have found that in just looking at it’s beginning, I have so many questions and ideas that I’m not going to fit them into a sermon!

The version of the Lord’s Prayer that we usually use is the one in Matthew, which we heard read. We took a slightly larger passage just to put it in it’s context in the sermon on the mount, where it’s part of Jesus’ instruction against what we might call ‘showing off’ our religion.

In the parallel passage in Luke 11, Jesus’ disciples ask him to teach them how to pray, as John the Baptist did for his disciples.

Either way it arose we can learn immediately that:
1) Jesus believes that prayer is important.
2) There is a good and not-so-good way to go about it.

The Matthew passage tells us that prayer is something private, not something to be done ostentatiously to show how pious someone is, but the cultivation of a private relationship with God.

It’s not quite clear what Jesus meant when he condemned ‘heaping up empty phrases such as the Gentiles do’. He may have had in mind the repletion of certain phrases such as Hare Krishna or Hail Mary or even Lord have mercy. But it could also mean not using set prayers. In this case what we call the Lord’s prayer may have been intended not as a prayer to be used in public and private worship but as a pattern for the kind of things we should say when we pray. (The Mormons, for instance, will not use the Lord’s Prayer for that reason.) I think there is some merit in this but I also remember Alan Kreider describing the way that after his father had a stroke he was not able to communicate in other ways, but was able to repeat prayers he had learnt by heart. I hope Ian won’t mind me saying that this has been important in praying with his very frail father.

Whether or not we think it’s important to know set prayers, it’s clear that Jesus It’s not about ‘saying your prayers’ – I mean by that going through a routine of words without really having mind and emotions engaged in the content of the prayer. (My late husband Bernard used to describe his father trying to rattle through his Jewish morning prayers while indicating that yes he would like a cup of tea or something.) Nor is it about amassing some sort of religious merit award for praying.

Jesus says repeating something over and over again is not helpful – God is not deaf and the repetitions can become a meaningless ritual. The most important thing is that prayer is directed towards God and that it has real significance and content. Jesus clearly thinks that prayer is an essential activity, because it is about a relationship to God, who is there listening no matter where we are. God knows what we need before we speak, but the important thing is to speak, because without that articulation there is no 2-way relationship of love and trust.

Just imagine a phone conversation carried out in the way that we sometimes pray.

Here is John calling Linda

John: O Linda
Linda: Yes, John
John: O Linda
Linda: Yes, John
John: O Linda
Linda: What is it, John?
John: O Linda
Linda: What do want, John?
John: O Linda
Linda: Look John, you called me. I haven’t got time for this!
John: I love you Linda
Linda: That’s nice
John: I love you, Linda
Linda: I love you too, John
John: I love you Linda
Linda: Yes, John, I love you, but what do you want?
John: Roses are red, violets are blue
Sugar is sweet and so are you
Linda: That’s lovely, John, but I’ve got to go now.
John: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...
Linda: You’re wonderful too, John
John: My love is like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprung in June
My love is like a violin that’s sweetly played in tune.
Linda: That’s sweet but I’m sorry John, please tell me what you want!
John: Love means never having to say that you’re sorry.
Linda: That’s it, I haven’t got time for this. Tell me why you’re ringing or
hang up!
John: It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
Linda: Goodbye, John
John: O Linda, Love never fails.

So whether the Lord's Prayer is a guideline on how to pray or something to be learned and repeated by rote, the attitude of the mind and heart and attention to the content of what we say are both important.

In fact most of what Jesus said in the Lord’s prayer was quite familiar to his Jewish hearers, except, perhaps this emphasis on forgiveness, which is why perhaps he reinforces after teaching his disciples the prayer – but that is material for a later sermon. But looking very carefully at the content of that prayer we can learn a great deal.

Let’s look at what it says.

The first word in our English translation of Matthew may immediately cause us problems. It is…? ‘Our’ is definitely there in the Greek. We usually say ‘our’ when we’re in public worship and we’re used to that. But hang on a moment. Isn’t this the way that Jesus said that we should pray when we’re in private? Who is this ‘we’ who have invaded my privacy and who may also address God as Father?

I was helped to see the strangeness of this ’our’ when I came across the writing on the Lord’s Prayer by F.D Maurice, who preached 9 sermons on it in 1848. This was a long time ago but many things have not changed. One of these is that we may not always feel identified with other people. We might not want to bring them with us to God in the privacy of our relationship with Him. He wrote;” How can we look around upon the people whom we habitually feel to be separated from us by almost impassable barriers… upon the people of an opposite faction to our own…upon men whom we have reason to despise… and then teach ourselves to think that in the very highest exercise of our lives, these are associated with us.” Maurice goes on to talk about all the divisions in society and barriers between people which we must overcome in approaching God. This chimes well with Jesus’s previous statement in Matthew 5; 23 that you should be reconciled with your brother or sister before offering your gift at the altar.

In our culture, though, there is something that would be unfamiliar in the First century and even to FD Maurice – and that is our individualism. In this century people may often that they can be Christians without being involved with church. They believe that their faith is just a matter between themselves as individuals and God. We see it in the number of songs which are about ‘My Saviour’, ‘My God’ etc. The psalms show us that there is a place for this, but the pattern Jesus lays down for prayer in general is that it is about me praying in the context of belonging to a group. The implication of ‘our’ is that in coming to God, in our most intimate prayer, we are not individuals Jesus expects us to identify with, bring with us and speak on behalf of all those who can call him Father – that is, all the family of God, whoever they may be.

The idea of God as Father was not new to Jesus’ hearers. It is there in the Hebrew Scriptures. They would, probably, though, have thought that the children of God were really the Jews - God’s chosen people. But the passage we heard from Galatians (3;26 - 4;7) tells us who the children of God are. They are those who have believed in Christ, the Son of God, and have become associated with him through baptism. This passage goes on to make clear that our ability to recognize God as our Father is a work of the Holy Spirit. Otherwise how could we presume to call him Daddy, as Galatians indicates.

But Maurice points out that this adoption as God’s children rests on the act of Jesus for all humankind, that the nature of the family of God was shown by the Spirit giving people the ability to call God Father in the language of every nation. He concludes ‘the baptized community was literally to represent mankind’. It is not given to us to distinguish those to whom God’s saving grace will be given. We are not the judges. Anyone and everyone is potentially within the scope of God’s salvation. So in coming into God’s presence in prayer, we are expected to bring the whole of humanity and recognize them as family.

I don’t want to go deeply into the question of the fatherhood or motherhood of God here. What is important is that God is a parent, having infinitely more of the characteristics of parenthood than any man or woman ever could. In a patriarchal society the term ‘mother’ would have indicated nurturing but also relative powerlessness – and that is not what Jesus or the New Testament writers were seeking to convey. They were trying to depict the ultimate caring relationship together with the ultimate power to create and save.

If we are then God’s children, all believers are part of the same family, not only heirs of everything God has promised but brothers and sisters of Christ and of each other. Unfortunately, as psycho-analysts and those using Family Systems Theory can tell us, conflicts within the family can be the deepest, most painful and most intractable. The Old Testament is full of dysfunctional families, giving rise to feuds which span generations. Real communities that meet in the name of God are often not much different and I praise God for the work of BridgeBuilders which helps to reduce some of those divisions.

Real families are seldom what Hollywood would have us believe – and yet we all know what they should be like. .So, when we name God as Our Father, we are also committing ourselves to be family in the way we know we should be, to all the other brothers and sisters of Jesus – no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but all one in Jesus. For Maurice, when we insist upon these human distinctions, which bolster up our pride and position, we have failed to take on the saving death and resurrection of Christ and cannot claim God as our Father.

In Maurice’s sermon even the words ‘who art’ take on a great significance as they indicate the current living nature of God, active even now. Then there's the issue of Heaven and where it may be. I think we all have a good idea that being in Heaven implies the holiness and divinity of God, and the fact that he is greater than all earthly things.

At the time of Jesus, there is no doubt that people believed that Heaven or ‘the heavens’ are somewhere ‘up there’. The astronauts did not find heaven in space, though perhaps they changed our view of Earth for ever. But, long before the first blast off, we knew that the residence of God probably was not anywhere in our Universe, but in some way beyond it, in some other dimension or spiritual reality. Does that change what we know of Heaven? One thing we know is that after being raised from death Jesus ascended to Heaven. So as well as being where God is, Heaven is where Jesus’ resurrection body is. Since people’s worldview has changed and we no longer see Heaven as being up in the sky somewhere, ascension seems to mean means that Jesus is no longer present in our world. But the early church saw Jesus continuing to be incarnated in the Universe, since for them Heaven was a part of it and therefore Jesus is able to be present with us. A group of theologians at Kings College London, where Sue and I both studied, have been looking at this problem. As far as I can understand it they have concluded that Jesus must still be present within the Cosmos, in a transformed way, perhaps interpenetrating all of it at some level. As a result they have come up with a theological movement they call Transformation Theology, which seeks to base theology much more in the real world rather than in theory and ideas. I must say I don’t really know how it works but they are finding these ideas a dynamic incentive for theological thought to be more actively engaged in what goes on in the world – and that, surely must be a good thing,
.
The first thing we do in praying, apart from establishing our relationship with God, is to honour God’s Name. The Name very much part of the Jewish tradition, in which the name of God is seen as something holy in itself because it sums up all that God does and is. It was traditionally too holy to be pronounced, so God may still be referred to as Hashem – the Name

The pattern of prayer that Jesus recommends does not start by asking for daily bread. Jesus tells us that God already knows what we need and it would seem more honest to cry out the desire of our heart without what seem like artificial gestures to the greatness of God. A couple of weeks sgo, my son Adam and I visited Windsor castle and we saw the way that the progression and layout of the state rooms reflected all the procedures and rituals that were necessary before you approached the presence of the King. The beginning of the Lord’s prayer may seem like visiting the King and having to bow formally to and make lots of flowery praises (O king live for ever) before we can petition for justice or whatever. Does God really want us to prostrate ourselves or kiss his ring before we can speak to Him?

In fact, the Lord’s prayer does not say “I hallow your Name”. It asks that God’s Name be hallowed. The word hallowed here means the same as sanctified – made sacred or seen to be most high and worthy. In this prayer we are asking that God may be recognized for what God is – the unutterable greatness, glory and splendour, whose goodness is beyond what we can ever imagine. And yet despite and because of this holiness we recognize that this is the One who fulfils every secret longing of our heart. Because more than bread to survive and more even than to be forgiven, our souls yearn after the divine.

It puts me in mind of computer dating sites that match people by likes and dislikes, looks, personality etc. Fine as far as it goes. But don’t we really long not for someone who is just like us but who is somehow a little bit better than us. If that valuable and desirable person can be attracted to me, aren’t I just a little bit better than my worst estimate of myself? Or maybe that’s just me. Augustine wrote ‘You made us for yourself and our hearts are restless till they find themselves in thee’.

When we say ‘hallowed be your Name’ we are saying that we do not seek a pocket God who just does what we want, but a God who is far beyond us. This is the One who we are commanded to love with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. Can we do less than to ask for the world to recognize and revere the one that we love?

The amazing thing is that One who we approach with our banal requests is the creator of the Universe. This is the one about whom Isaiah wrote: “For thus says the high and lofty one who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place,’ and then he continues ‘and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite.” And the amazing thing we see in the Lord’s Prayer is that this everlasting spirit, who is beyond anything we can imagine, not only is willing to listen to our prayer, but in Jesus to become human and to live with us for ever. Amen.