Our Father Homily - 7/25/2010

**To listen to this homily, click on the title**

Gospel - Luke 11:1-13

This morning we heard the apostles say to Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us to pray just like John taught his disciples”. I suspect very strongly that his apostles had been watching Him, observing Him. Observing Him in prayer, observing Him in most likely pretty intense prayer with His Father in heaven and they probably thought “I’d love to be able to get that close to God and I’d love to be able to pray that way. Please Lord, teach us to pray”. This, of course, resulted in the prayer we know as the Our Father. This very day, this very moment there are people all over the world praying that beautiful prayer. In every language, all the different Christian denominations, the Greek Orthodox, the non-Catholics, the Catholics all over the world praying the Our Father at all times of the day. There’s a church at the top of the Mount of Olives just outside of Jerusalem called the Church of the Pater Noster. All over the walls are all these mosaics of the Our Father in I think 62 different languages representing a lot of the different languages in the world. What a beautiful prayer.

So as I prepared, to be honest with you, sometimes it’s a struggle in preparation for a homily. And I can’t speak for others but usually when I struggle, it’s not to know what to say, it’s to know what not to say. There’s so much in today’s readings that we could do a lot of things. We could go right all the way into the 12:45 mass – is that OK? That probably wouldn’t be a good idea. So I prayed and thought, “All right what are we gonna do Lord. What are we gonna do”? So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do first, I’m going to send you home with some homework. What I’d really like to recommend and suggest and encourage you to do is sometime today or this week, is take the Our Father from the Gospel of Luke, the gospel today, it’s a lot shorter than the one from Matthew, but take this prayer from the scripture and reflect on each one of the segments of it. Reflect upon what it means to say, “Hallowed be your name”. What does it mean to begin our prayer with praise to God? Then to pray, “Your Kingdom come”, what does it mean in my life for God’s Kingdom to come into my life. How about praying the segment, “Give us this day our daily bread”? Praying for just our needs, not the wants, but the needs. Asking for forgiveness – being able to forgive others and seeking and asking God to protect us from harm. I want to encourage you to do that because we could spend some time on each one of those things. That’s not where the Lord led me today.

We could spend some time talking about the importance of persistence in prayer and that is important. There’s an essential part of that message today about being persistent just like Abraham. But it’s not so much about being persistent to talk God into giving us what we want, it really is a certain sense of being persistent about praying and understanding God’s will. So there’s an importance in that.
But what I felt was the important thing for us to spend some time on this morning, was to pray and to come to a better understanding about to whom it is that we pray to each time we go into prayer. About who it is that we go to when we pray this prayer. In this particular gospel, Jesus begins the prayer with one word - Father. Not our father, Father. The sense of it is very, very personal – Abba – Daddy – Papa. This is a very personal address of Jesus and that is what He’s teaching His apostles and that’s what He’s teaching us. It’s to go to the Father who is a personal God. Abba-Daddy-Father. So that when we go into prayer, we sit at His feet and we climb up into His lap and know that it is our loving God, our loving Father, our loving Creator who is a just, merciful, loving God. And Jesus, the way He did so many times, in so many of His teachings, He liked to begin with sort of the human level. And He talked to us about earthly fathers. And He says “What father among you would give your child something bad or hurtful or harmful when they ask for something good”? And so He takes us first to that earthly level to have us look at the earthly father, the loving earthly father.

I want to share with you an experience that just unfolded in our family over the past couple of weeks. Something that touched me very profoundly. Many of you know my son in law Doug. Doug has a hobby. Doug has a hobby of flying inline model airplanes. Not radio controlled but the kind with the wires and you’ve got to hold them and turn around and spin around. And I’m always impressed with his talent, his gift for flying those and doing all of the patterns and all the things but I’m frankly more impressed with the fact that he doesn’t get dizzy and fall over spinning around like that. But anyway he’s very successful, he’s very good. He’s been going to the national competition for the past several years. Last year he won third place. He went this year with the intention of coming back victorious with first place. But he was there one day and we got a text message from him with a picture attached and it was his airplane - it was in about a thousand pieces. It was like 8 years old and during a practice flight it just folded up. The wings just folded and crashed and burned and that was it. The week’s investment was done. Except for the fact that his earthly father, who lives in Granbury, said I’m going to bring you your back up airplane. He drove from Granbury to Dallas then he drove 14 hours to Muncie, Indiana of all places to take him a back up airplane. Doug dusted it off, did some tweaking, practiced a few times with it and he almost got there – he was 2nd place this year with his backup airplane. Next year, first place. But you know what? What a beautiful example of an earthly father who was willing to go out of his way to give to his son the best that he could to help him out the best that he could. What a beautiful example he was to Doug who said to me “I hope someday I get the chance to do the same thing for my son”. Beautiful example of a loving earthly father.

Now, the reality becomes however, that we need to move beyond the earthly and we need to move to the heavenly. Not everybody has an example of an earthly father who loves like that and who gives like that. Jesus even said, “look, if you who are wicked can do those good things think how much more your heavenly Father will love you and do for you”. That’s where we need to move. We need to move to an understanding of our Father being a heavenly father who will never turn away from us, who will never hurt us, who will never die but will be with us and love us for all of eternity. A God who wants us to be with Him forever.

And we look at that wonderful first reading and we could spend a whole lot of time on that one too. This whole discussion of Abraham and God. They were in conversation, they were in dialog. We call that prayer don’t we? Abraham was trying to uncover who God really truly was. He knew that He was a just God. He knew that He was a merciful God. And so he began to talk to God and say, “Now look Lord, if we found 50 innocent people, wouldn’t you spare the innocent just for 50 people”? God said” yes, sure”. And Abraham negotiated him all the way down to 10. The revelation of God’s loving, merciful, just self - that just gives us a little glimpse of the Lord God who created us. He doesn’t want to destroy us. He doesn’t want harm to come to us. He wants instead for us to live with Him forever.

And He proved that by sending His son who, when nailed to that cross He became the one innocent person. The one who bore the sins for all of us. The one who died for us. God loved us so much, that he was willing to do that. So hopefully we can move from the earthly father and we can look at the loving heavenly father, creator God. Father God. The one who loves us. So that when we sit down each day to pray, when we sit down each day to take our time with Him, to come before Him, to sit at His feet, to climb up into His lap, we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that it is our Father, Daddy, God to whom we pray. He loves us, he created us. And so then when we can recognize that, it is then that we can sit down and in that prayer we can proclaim him, Holy is Your Name. We can pray that his kingdom come in our lives in whatever that means in our own lives, we can accept it, be willing to accept it. It is then that when we recognize him as Holy Father God that we can pray for our daily needs. Not our daily wants so much, that’s okay, but we cannot expect him to give us everything but only what is good for us. And it is then that we can come before him and ask his forgiveness for our sins and the strength to forgive others. It is then that we know and we ask that He protect us from harm and evil.

And when we recognize Him as daddy God, we will know from the bottom of our hearts, the very core of our lives, how very, very much he loves us.