Some weeks ago the Gospel reading was from John 17. That text gave us a unique insight into how Jesus prayed to God and, in particular, what he asked of God for us. The heart of it was a request that we be taken up into the trinitarian love of God. You might remember the wonderful Rublev icon of the trinity, which could be read as a depiction of that prayer.

Today we meet another prayer of Jesus. This time, however, it is how he said we should to pray. Jesus was praying, and after he had finished, one of his followers asked him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray. He said to them, "When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name …"’ And so on. The most famous prayer in the world.

Following this instruction in the form of prayer, Jesus gives two further hints on the practice of prayer. One, stick at it. That advice comes in the story about the reluctant friend who, having shut up shop for the night, can’t stir himself to help the chap next door who has run out of bread at an inconvenient moment. And yet, says Jesus, ‘because of his persistence,’ the friend ‘will get up and give him whatever he needs.’ So, hang in there!

The second hint is, be confident. ‘Ask, and it will be given; Search, and you will find; Knock and the door will be opened for you.’ Why?—because God is good and intends to give us what we need. As we do with our children.

So, pray in this way. Keep at it. Be confident. A master class in prayer from Jesus himself.

As the set reading for today, Luke has a short form of Jesus’ prayer. But I want to use Matthew’s version, first because that’s the one we say ourselves; and second because it makes the point I want to stress more forcefully than the Luke’s. The Matthean version is printed in your order of service. ‘When you pray, say:

hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

And do not bring us to the time of trial, but recue us from the evil one."

The prayer has three parts. One: the address, naming God to whom the prayer is directed: ‘Our Father in heaven’. Two: words addressed to God about God: your name (O God) be hallowed; your kingdom (O God) come; your will (O God) be done. Three: words addressed to God about us: give us our daily bread; forgive us our sins; rescue us from the evil one. That’s the basic form of this prayer. Address to God, about God, and for us. All three prepositions are significant.

1. To God: Prayer is address to God. That’s so obvious it scarcely needs mention. And yet it doesn’t always happen. We’ve heard some people pray, and we just know they’re not talking to God. ‘O Lord, you know how badly we need our thank offering to reach 10 thousand dollars …’ Well, we know who’s meant to hear that message. It’s not a prayer, it’s an advertisement.

No. When you pray, said Jesus, say ‘Our Father in heaven.’ Prayer is speech to God, exclusively to God, directly to God, and on God’s home ground, so to speak, heaven. And Jesus calls God, ‘Father’. Sometimes indeed he used the Aramaic word ‘Abba’, which means ‘dear father’; a term of intimacy and affection; a child’s call to a beloved parent. Prayer for Jesus is personal. God is near and God is dear.

I know we moderns face difficulties here. Gender-typing of God is problematic for us. The women of our communities have made the male gender bias of so much of our God-talk utterly clear, and asked us to be careful of the damage it can cause. We have to pay attention to that. Simply to go on referring to God a ‘he’ and ‘him’ all the time, is to put a huge barrier in the way of many people. This isn’t the place to detail the ways we might reform our speech about God. But if in the Lord’s prayer, the gender specific ‘our Father in heaven’ creates a problem for us, then let us simply say ‘dear God in heaven.’ For that is what the prayer intends. A prayer addressed to God, and to God in the intimacy of generative love.

2. About God. One of the most intriguing features of Jesus’ prayer is that its entire first section is about God. ‘May your name be hallowed’; that is, may you, God, be holy; you, God, be given the respect that befits your divinity. ‘May your kingdom come’; that is, may your divine rule be manifest in the world; may you, God, order and govern the whole creation. ‘May your will be done on earth as in heaven’; that is, may your intentions, God, for us and all being, find true expression here, so that earth may reflect the reality of heaven, and the world be charged with the glory of God.

Now at first that seems a strange thing to pray. It’s like telling God to go ahead and be God. And that’s superfluous, if not impertinent. God’s name is already holy; holiness is the nature of God’s being. And God’s kingdom is already real. God is in essence the Lord of all being. And God’s will is already done. It is the ground and goal of the universe. God doesn’t need us to instruct God in holiness, Lordship or agency. God is God and remains God from eternity to eternity. So no, the prayer is not ‘O God be God’. But ‘dear God, be truly God for us.’ May we know and respond to you here on earth as the true God that you are in yourself in heaven. May we ask for your holiness to touch us; may we seek your will to transform us; may we knock at the door of your kingdom to find entrance. That is the prayer. ‘O God be God for us here, as you are God in the realms of heaven.’

3. For Us: The final section of the prayer turns on three petitions to God for us: O God, give us, forgive us, rescue us. ‘Give us our daily bread’; give us what we need to continue to be, to stay alive as part of your wondrous creation. ‘Forgive us our sins’; accept us, renew us, befriend us, in spite of the fact that we often distort our lives and spoil your world and hurt other people, sometimes accidentally and sometimes quite deliberately. And ‘rescue us from the evil one’; save us from being swamped by the force of evil that opposes your will in the world. Bring us finally to unity with God in heaven not alienation from God in hell. If we bring this third part of the prayer down to its basics, it reads: ‘Dear God, let us (human beings) be truly yours, truly your people.’

Putting all this together, Jesus’ master class in prayer, in its most basic form, comes to this. ‘Dear God, be truly God for us; and make us truly your people.’ Be God for us, and make us yours. That is the heart of Jesus’ prayer. And see how deeply it reaches into the tradition of God’s self-revelation in scripture. The fundamental word of God to the covenant people of Israel recorded in the OT is this: ‘I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you will be my people.’ (Lev 26’12). That is the fundamental meaning and promise of God’s covenant with Israel. Of course, they often messed it up. That is the story of the OT. Israel forgot God, or mistook something else for God, and often behaved in ways that belied God’s kingdom and opposed God’s will. We do the same. But the vision and promise remain. And exactly this is what Jesus’ prayer sets before us us. ‘Dear God, renew your covenant with us. Be truly God for us, and make us truly your people.’

One more thing. Each of the two sections of the prayer, the words about God and the words about ourselves, have three parts to them: your name, your kingdom, your will, in reference to God. Give, forgive, rescue in relation to us. Hmm… I can’t resist the gravitational pull of the identity of God as trinity in that threefold structure. ‘Be truly God for us’, means, for Christians, be truly the triune God you have revealed yourself to be in Jesus. Look at it.

‘Hallowed be your name’. The holiness of God refers to the mystery, the transcendence, the glory of God, the Lord of all being. God the father almighty. ‘Your kingdom come.’ God’s rule in our realm, on earth, comes in Jesus Christ. He is the one who reflects the truth of the Creator’s love in our midst; the one who lives the order and freedom of God’s rule among us. ‘Your will be done on earth as in heaven’. That we humans can know the will of God, can choose the will of God, is only possible in that God has shed abroad the Holy Spirit in our hearts. To pray, ‘Dear God, be God for us’, is to pray that God will be for us Abba, Christ and Spirit. This is who God is. And for this God we pray with Jesus.

And in reference to ourselves. To pray, ‘may we be truly God’s people’, is to ask that we reflect the triune God in our daily living. ‘Give us our daily bread’. Keep us, O God, in life, in other words, make us truly your creatures in the world. ‘Forgive us our sins’. Draw us, O Christ, into your reconciling love that we may be renewed despite our fallibility and foolishness. ‘Rescue us from evil.’ By your Spirit bring us through this world into your eternal kingdom rather than its dark opposite. To be, to be forgiven, to enter eternal life, that is what it means to be God’s people on earth.

‘When you pray say, … "Dear God, be God for us, and make us yours."’ This is the basic form of Christian prayer; whatever the detail of our praying, however halting or however sophisticated it may be, this remains the heart and the hope of our encounter with God.

Let me finish with a tiny reference to the two other points that Jesus made in his master class on prayer: stick at it, and be confident. Both these teachings make a lot of sense in the light of this understanding of the prayer. For God really to become God for us is the true meaning of our life in whatever state or stage we may be in. If we are to pray at all, this prayer: ‘God be God for us and make us your people’, is the most relevant and most joyful prayer we can muster. And it is never passé. It is always relevant.

Finally, we can pray this prayer in complete confidence that it will be heard. For this has been God’s will from the earliest days of God’s dealings with human beings. ‘I will be your God, you will be my people’, is the truth of God’s promise. The nature of God’s covenant. The substance of God’s kingdom. The intention of God’s will. And its fulfillment is the forgiveness of our sins and our rescue from evil.

Lord, teach us to pray.