The hymn we just sang, A Mighty Fortress is Our God, was written by the great reformer Martin Luther as a response to the murder of his good friend who was burned at the stake. Luther was striving to find meaning in a world filled with violence and despair and reached for God whose presence remained steady and sure above all of the religious wars in Europe at the time. Luther looked to a transcendent God for help.

Sometimes in our preaching at Edgewood we emphasize the immanence of God and don’t say much about the transcendence of God. What that means is that we preach often about presence of God. God is near; God is available; God does not let you fall or be lost. Like our Psalm today: the moment I called out you stepped in. You made life large with strength.

Yet we don’t often address transcendence. Transcendence means understanding that God is ultimately unknowable, unfathomable, or “unboxed” as we talked about in the Thursday Brueggemann class this month. God is not domesticated. We are limited human beings and thus cannot know God or fully comprehend God because God is ultimately unknowable to our smaller human understanding.

Transcendence means we have a sense of God beyond us, a God who sees the sweep of history and time but sits outside of it. Not that God is unmoved or uninvolved, but God is not captured or limited by our humans lives. “The nature of God is to act within history while being above human history.” (midrash.org list serv)

As people of faith we receive the blessing of this both/and, imminence and transcendence, if we are mindful of it. It is a balancing act and the prayer Jesus teaches the disciples offers us a pattern, template for that balance. Balance two sides of God.

God outside of yet active in human history and human lives. God to be praised and worship yet also petitioned and complained to. God beyond moving, yet compassionate and will hear us. Both/and

Jesus comes back from praying alone, something he did fairly often, and I think, one of the ways he kept grounded and connected to God in the midst of the chaos, fear, danger and exhaustion of his life.

When he comes back the disciples ask him, teacher, teach us how to pray just like John taught his disciples how to pray. And Jesus does saying,

‘When you pray, say:
Father,* hallowed be your name.
   Your kingdom come.* 
3   Give us each day our daily bread.* 
4   And forgive us our sins,
     for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
   And do not bring us to the time of trial.’

He teaches them the prayer that later becomes known as the Lord’s Prayer or the Disciples’ Prayer. 

Does it sound familiar? And yet, isn’t there something missing? The words for this prayer, and Jesus teaching the prayer, are in the gospel of Luke, today’s reading, and the gospel of Matthew. They are different in each gospel. Matthew’s version is a little longer adding the bits Our Father, in heaven, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven—Matthew adds a heavenly location for God and a plea to be rescued from the evil one.

Even Matthew’s text isn’t exactly what we pray on a Sunday morning which is what happens when a prayer moves through 2000 years of practice and theological tinkering.

But the prayer that we say, the prayer the disciples learned, gives us the essence of Christian belief and practice. Martin Luther called the Lord’s Prayer “a summary of the whole gospel.”

We begin: Father, God, Creator, whatever our name for God, hallowed be your name.

Hallowing means respecting, treating as holy. In hallowing we remember that God is God and that we are not God. And that nothing that we own, believe, covet or lust for should be god either. Foremost, center, is God. A God who is too big for our pocket or convenient shaping to our desires. In hallowing we remember our smallness in relation to God’s infinitude. God’s absolute goodness in comparison to our challenges and flaws.

The story goes that one time when Bill Moyers was a special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. He was asked to say grace before a meal in the family quarters of the White House. As Moyers began praying softly, the President interrupted him with "Speak up, Bill! Speak up!"The former Baptist minister from east Texas stopped in mid-sentence and without looking up replied steadily, "I wasn't addressing you, Mr. President."   (Don Oberdorfer in Washington Post. Reader's Digest, April 1980.)

Hallowing is not groveling. Hallowing is invoking the presence of God beyond us.

Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Disputed Questions on the Power of God: “Wherefore man reaches the highest point of his knowledge about God when he knows that he knows him not, inasmuch as he knows that that which God is transcends whatsoever he conceives of him” God is God or as said to Moses, I AM who I AM.

We experience the transcendence of God in fleeting moments—times when we feel for an eternal moment that we are part of the living breathing universe, we feel our unity not our individuality. Sometimes these moments come in times of great need or great struggle or great peace. I remember the moment when I received my call to ministry when experienced God, transcendence, a connection to universe beyond self. A moment and then it was gone but something I still can touch and recall perfectly. It was a sense of the awesomeness, or as our ancestors would say, the awe-fulness of God.

We Protestants are very wordy people. We lift up the Word, the scripture, the sermon, as the centerpiece of our liturgy. We pray in words, are called to worship in words, sing in words. Words words words. Words do not capture transcendence very well, can’t, in fact, capture it.

Which is why we pause briefly in our service for a moment of silence. No, the time is not actually for everyone to get out the cough they’ve been holding in, or to contemplate the gravity of the sermon topic. It is rather a moment in the midst of all the talking to let God have a word in. Or, more likely, in the silence, to get a sense of presence, of the awe-fullness of God. In silence we are often more able to hallow God, to experience the holiness of God.

Transcendence also offers us a comfort that requires lifting ourselves out of our every day context. God’s transcendence, God being God, means that no matter what happens in our lives, happens to us, or to those we love, all will also be ok. It does not ultimately matter.

And when I say ultimately, I mean ultimately. Even if we burn up our world in global warming or fry it with nuclear weapons or some new manufactured great disease, or kill each other for scarce resource, it will ultimately be ok. And Even if we pull ourselves out of the ditch so to speak, our world will still end. It is finite. In half a billion years or so the earth fall into the sun and burn up(space.com).  We know this—it is the life cycle of our solar system. We will die, our earth will die, everything we know will end.  But not  God.

All of these realities fade somewhat when seen next to the eternal awesomeness of God. Because God is still God. Because our creator, the pulse of the universe, God still is there. Forever. Eternally. This is not something we comprehend very well. But it puts our sorrows and struggles and challenges in perspective. God is, and nothing we can do will change that, which is a relief on power run amok. This is the perspective we get on a warm summer night looking up at the stars seeing the billions and billions of points of light, knowing they are unfathomingly far away and knowing ourselves as but a speck in span of all things.

God, hallowed be your name. The one eternal point in all that is.

Now, a focus on transcendence can be an escape. If we lean wholly on transcendence, we give ourselves permission to ignore fellow human beings, and the problems and challenges of this world. It doesn’t matter, we might say, because everything is in vain (a topic we will tackle in next week’s sermon). Why focus on all these petty problems when in the big picture God is God and God only will go on? The next world is better than this one anyway.

But the prayer Jesus teaches does not end with hallowing. Transcendence is the first part, the first anchor. And then the prayer moves on.

   Your kingdom come.* 
3   Give us each day our daily bread.* 
4   And forgive us our sins,
     for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
   And do not bring us to the time of trial

God’s kingdom come—what does that look like? Well, the rest of the prayer tells us. As pastor Todd Weir comments: The Lord’s Prayer lays out the practical basics of what God’s will looks like.  There should be enough bread for everyone (and clean drinking water, health care, etc.) forgiveness and grace are practiced, and God will help us resist temptation and accompany us in the face of evil.   (Bloomingcactus.com)

The same need for food and forgiveness is fundamental to every human being. We are charged with bring that about. I wonder how our prayers reflect this. Do we follow Jesus’ instructions when we pray? When I think about the joys and concerns we share as a congregation—an extremely important part of how we live out our faith life together—I do sense that there are some things we pray for: people’s health, deaths and tragedies, some global concerns especially natural disasters or gross injustice, places of fear and loss.

But that’s not the whole of what Jesus tells us to pray for. Jesus instructs us to hallow God, to pray for God’s will in the universe, to pray for daily bread for all, to pray for forgiveness for ourselves, and to forgive others, and for strength in face of temptation.

I am trying to remember the last time I read a prayer card that said: please offer prayers for me as I seek to forgive my mother, brother, best friend, the person suing me, the doctor whose botched surgery killed my niece etc etc.

Or a card that read: God give me strength as I face the temptation to work all the time, to fall back into addiction, to batter my spouse, or to keep consuming and consuming more and more.

Or a prayer lifting up how good God is, how steadfast, how solid, how awesome.

Or a card that read: I am asking for prayers of forgiveness as I cheated on my taxes, broke my vows to another person, decided it was too much trouble to get involved in my local town’s fair housing debate, drove home drunk last week, lost my temper again.

The disciples asked, “how should we pray?” Jesus said this is what’s important: understanding the eternal nature and goodness of God, tending your relationship with other people, and hewing to a faith path against all sort of temptations.

The Lord’s prayer is a balance—God beyond us and God present with us. Indeed, (suggest Grenz and Olson), “where such balance is lacking, serious theological problems readily emerge. An overemphasis on transcendence can lead to a theology that is irrelevant to the cultural context in which it seeks to speak, whereas an overemphasis on immanence can produce a theology held captive to a specific culture.” (textweek.com) Either God has nothing to do with you and your life or God is exclusively to do with you and your life.

Imminence and transcendence help us face human problems especially ones that are so large, so huge, so intractable, impossible. When facing human trafficking, hurricanes, continued racism, dioxin in the water, we seek God.

One the one hand God is here to help us, move us, fashion us with compassion. As today’s psalm says, “God, you are not finished with me yet, keep working on me. Help me.”  On the other hand, if we fail, when we fail to change the tide of injustice, or heal the world’s brokenness or our own failures, God is still God, beyond and above all that is.

God responds to our prayers but is not held captive to our desires, our demands, our small imagination. God is too large. The Lord’s prayer also reminds us that our prayers are not just “I want I want I want.”

St. Cyprian, when defending against charges that Christianity was a secretive cult during a third century persecution, said, “Our prayer is public for all, and when we pray, we pray not for a single person, but for the whole people, because we are all one.”

When we pray, we pray for all, and we pray for the kingdom of God, of which we are just one small part. God with us. God beyond us.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “The moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.” I think that is very true. The Lord’s Prayer is a way of combating that rush of need, desire, fear, want, and instead allowing for the presence and will of God to flow in.

An old missionary story circulated. It said that rural African converts to Christianity were earnest and regular in private devotions. Each one supposedly had a separate spot in the thicket where she or he would pour out his or her heart to God. Over time the paths to these places became well worn. As a result, if one of these believers began to neglect prayer, it was soon apparent to the others. They would kindly remind the negligent one, "Brother, Sister, the grass grows on your path." (Today in the Word, June 29, 1992.)

What we must do is pray. Pray to the transcendent God. Pray to the God who meets us like a loving parent. God, who is beyond our comprehension, who beholds worlds and all of time in a moment. And God who gets up in the night to fetch us the bread we need.  God among us, God beyond us. We pray such that the grass does not grow on our path.

And Jesus teaches us how: God, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give all the daily bread we need. And forgive us. May we forgive others. And keep us from temptation.

Amen.