8/23/23
My mom’s favorite movie was I’d Climb the Highest Mountain, based on the Corra Harris book Circuit Riding Preacher’s Wife. It’s a really sweet Susan Heyward movie (does anyone remember her?) about the wife of a Methodist preacher in rural north Georgia. The ending gets me every time: After 3 years, the pastor and his wife have to move on to their next charge, and the community gathers to say goodbye – even the unbelievers who were touched by the couple's love and concern. As the pastor and his wife pull away in their buggy, an off-screen chorus sings “The Lord’s Prayer.” My favorite moment is when the pastor pulls his buggy to a stop and turns for one last look. There, gathered in front of the little country church is this little country bunch of people. The music swells and the choir sings “for Thine is the kingdom.”
I remember watching it for the first time and wiping tears from my eyes at that moment thinking, “Yes, that’s right.”
Like yeast hidden in flour or a tiny, easily overlooked mustard seed, the Kingdom of God pops up in some unexpected (and easily overlooked) places.
The Kingdom isn’t always where you think it would be. In recent sermons I’ve mentioned large, influential churches where the leadership was narcissistic and immoral, in too many instances causing national scandals. On the outside, it looked like God was blessing . . . but when the lid got lifted, it became obvious that it was a case of “the will of the lead pastor be done” rather than “thy will be done.” Just because something looks holy and successful (by the world’s standards) doesn’t mean . . .
For instance, the late Christian singer, Rich Mullins told the story of a man at one of his concerts who told Mullins he had really felt the Spirit on one particular song, especially right before the last chorus. “That wasn’t the Spirit,” said Mullins. “That was when the kick drum came in.” (A sound engineer friend of mine tells a similar story of a service he observed at a large church. At one point the sound tech said, “Watch this.” He pushed a button and suddenly hands shot up all over the auditorium. “We call it the ‘hallelujah button.’ It controls the microphone next to the kick drum.”)
You have to be able to tell the kingdom from the kick drum.
In any kingdom, the will of the king is done. If not, then why have a king! Over the last several weeks, I’ve been preaching on the Kingdom of God, saying that the Kingdom is where God’s will is done. Certainly it is done where the King is – in heaven – but according to Jesus, God’s desire is for His will to be done everywhere, “on earth as it is in heaven.”
The line is, of course, from the Lord’s Prayer. We pray the Lord’s Prayer every week, and some pray it every day. And it’s not a magical formula or a mantra or a mere formality – it can become that, but it shouldn’t. Not when you really pay attention to the words.
The prayer is a prayer for the Kingdom of God. How many people pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” without ever thinking what that really means. This prayer expresses the heart of Jesus’ essential message that God’s kingdom spreads throughout the world.
One thing I love about praying the Lord’s prayer is how it puts everything into perspective. We pray “our '' because it’s a prayer of God’s people (there’s no “me” or “mine” anywhere in it). Praying “our '' and praying to God as “Father” not only puts us into a tender relationship with God, but it also means that those praying with me are my brothers and sisters. And since God is “our Father,” like the Israelites in the wilderness or the birds of the air and lilies of the field, we don’t need to worry about food, clothing, and other material things; we depend on God. Again, our identity is rooted in our relationship to our Father – we are children around our Father’s table. And as God's children, we’ve experienced God’s forgiveness, so we’ve got to be willing to forgive others. The request to “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” is a plea for God to deliver us from all dangers – whether hostile forces outside us, or the evil within us that makes us susceptible to temptation.
Praying the Lord’s Prayer is a wonderful spiritual discipline that dislodges our attention and affection away from distractions and focuses them on what matters most to God. When we can lay our needs before our Father, then we have the freedom to focus on his desires and the needs of the world.
And the prayer closes with a doxology that throws some people: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” If you’ve ever attended a Catholic service, you can always tell the Protestants because we want to go on with the doxology! There’s some dispute whether or not this was originally part of the prayer (in the earliest versions of the prayer, in the Greek and Latin texts, the closing doxology, “for thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory, forever” isn’t there and it’s missing from Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer). But it provides a conclusion to the prayer for use in public settings that is glorious, beautiful and even quite radical.
Why radical? It claims for God three things that every kingdom of this world tries to claim for itself: kingdom, power, and glory. Praying that last line is our raising a fist against every earthly authority that claims power, but also raising a hand in praise and commitment to God.
This Sunday, our entire service will be focused on the Lord’s Prayer, and it will be quite different from our regular services. We’re calling it a “Symphony of Prayer,” with each section of the service built around a phrase taken from the Lord’s Prayer. There will be lots of music (as you’d expect in a symphony) but there’s also going to be lots of prayer.
Why do this? Because we want to be a place where God’s will is done. We want to be, like that little country church in the movie, a place where people can look at us and declare that here – even in a strip mall in a small rural community – is the kingdom of God.