This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 10/05/25, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Isaiah 29:13-14 & Matthew 6:5-15.
With everything that is happening in our lives and in our nation right now, I feel like it’s good to get back to basics. We don’t need complicated theology or long history lessons. We need to get to the core of our faith. What does it mean for us to be a community seeking to follow God and Jesus in this time and place?
We are living through very complex times, but the good news is that our faith doesn’t have to add to the confusion. The way of Jesus is very challenging, but it’s not complicated.
Sometimes religion can become a place that we hide from the truth. If we’re not careful, we can turn our community, our practices, our tradition into an elaborate distraction.
Jesus saw this problem in his own complex historical situation: Roman-occupied Judea. Jesus was a Jew, and in the gospels we read about how Jesus faced a Jewish society that had increasingly come to use religion as a tool of human control rather than an instrument of spiritual liberation. The faith of synagogue and temple had veered away from its original purpose; it was now often employed to shore up human ideologies, human power struggles, and human hierarchies.
One of the main organized religious groups that Jesus interacted with during his ministry was the Pharisees. Nowadays, we tend to think of the Pharisees as being bad people, but they weren’t. They were good people. They were religious people. They were folks who took the Bible seriously, and wanted to make sure they were doing all the right things. They had a lot in common with church-going folks today in our country.
But Jesus saw that these middle-class, devout Pharisees had gotten the whole religion twisted up into something it was never meant to be. God had gathered the people of Israel to be a holy nation, devoted to the truth and righteousness of God. Religion was a means to an end, a strategy to train the people in holiness.
But over time, the religious people had slowly but surely made religion the ends rather than the means. The Pharisees developed an elaborate legal code, based on the Bible. They used this legal jurisprudence to figure out all the rules and all the loopholes that they had to follow to be justified.
By the time Jesus showed up, they had regulations about washing pots and pans and tithing herbs from their spice rack, while at the same time making up rules for why they were allowed to avoid supporting their parents in old age. The religious system had become an idol, binding the devout in a web of complex rules and regulations that was easily detached from those things that God truly desires: Love, mercy, justice, and a fidelity to the truth.
In this environment, Jesus taught his disciples a simple way. A way of moment-by-moment listening to the voice of God’s Spirit. A way not ruled by complex legal codes and expensive rituals. A way of humble seeking after God’s direction within and the practice of compassion without.
In our reading this morning from the Gospel of Matthew, which comes in the midst of the famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructs his disciples on how to pray. Before he introduces the prayer that he taught the disciples, which is now known as the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus gives some general instructions about how not to pray: We are not to pray like the hypocrites, who stand on street corners, performing their religion for the crowds. Instead, Jesus says that his disciples should pray in private. Real prayer is sincere; it’s not a show for other people, it’s communion with God.
Jesus gives a little more teaching about prayer. He urges the disciples not to try and use a lot of fancy words or to speak for a long time. In fact, it seems like Jesus maybe thinks that the words themselves aren’t particularly important. After all, he says, “your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” Jesus seems to indicate that the point isn’t so much the words that we say to God, but the spirit in which we say them. God wants to hear from us, and we should also want to hear from God.
Finally, Jesus provides a model prayer for his disciples to use:
Our Father in heaven,
may your name be revered as holy.
May your kingdom come.
May your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial,
but rescue us from the evil one.
Just an interesting side note here: Those of us who have this prayer memorized probably have a little extra bit on the end: “For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.” Those lines appear in some of the ancient manuscripts, but not in all of them. It was probably a later addition, and it doesn’t appear in Luke. Leaving those lines off makes the prayer even simpler.
So what does this simple prayer from Jesus teach us to focus on? We are to focus on God, seeking his divine order in the world – on earth as it is in heaven. What does that divine order look like? Not worrying about tomorrow, but receiving our daily needs as a gift. Forgiving what others owe us, and having our debts forgotten, too. Jubilee. And rescue from evil. The great evil that we fear, may God protect us from it.
And that’s it! Looking to God. Seeking his divine order. Receiving what we need and forgiving what we’ve lost. Deliverance from evil. Jesus gives us this powerful prayer that grounds us in the present moment, both in the reality of God’s glory (vertical) and in the tangible society of justice and peace that this glory calls us to (horizontal).
I pray this prayer a lot. It’s a key part of my spiritual practice.
So I was horrified when I saw a recent video posted to social media by the US Department of Defense. The video shows the Defense Secretary standing with his head bowed in front of a group of soldiers, praying the Lord’s Prayer. As he continues to pray, we are shown a montage of US military might. And when he says those final lines, that scripture often leaves out: “For thine is the kingdom” (We see a masked soldier aiming a rifle) “and the power” (Massed aircraft on a runway) “and the glory” (The American flag) “forever and ever” (The president, vice president, and Defense Secretary saluting) “Amen” (The logo of the “Department of War”).
This video is a blasphemous mockery of Jesus’ teachings. Jesus brings daily bread; this regime brings paratroopers. Jesus commands us to forgive others; this government brings us a call to arms. Jesus calls us to look upwards to our heavenly Father, seeking his kingdom; this regime bids us gaze at the American flag, and look to politicians as saviors.
When we see blasphemy like this, the followers of Jesus cannot be neutral. We have to pick which kingdom we are going to serve. Will we throw our lot in with Jesus’ kingdom of love, justice, peace, and forgiveness? Or will we be overwhelmed by the violent, despotic kingdom of the War Department, DHS, ICE, and a weaponized federal government?
We at Berkeley Friends Church commit ourselves to walk in the path of Jesus. The path of the cross. The path that Jesus lays out for us in his simple prayer for complicated times. A prayer that is well-adapted even for dark times: Looking to God. Seeking his divine order. Receiving what we need and forgiving what we’ve lost. Deliverance from evil.
There’s a lot more to Christian theology. We can talk for days about the nature of the incarnation, the Trinity, the atonement, and so much more. But in a pinch, the Lord’s Prayer will do.
In the midst of all this confusion and hatred, we commit ourselves to that.
For us, as the church of Jesus Christ, the greatest danger right now is that we fail to see clearly that this government is weaponizing our own Christian tradition against the people. They are quoting the Bible to justify their policies. But this is all a smokescreen. When they mock immigrants and use children as pawns, that’s not the gospel. That’s not “on earth as it is in heaven.”
When they raided a large apartment building in Chicago in the middle of the night, invading it with ICE SWAT teams, when they pulled people out of their beds – men, women, and little children – and handcuffed them and hauled them off to jail? That’s not the gospel. That’s not delivering us from evil. They are delivering us to evil.
As I said last week, we are in a spiritual war. We are facing demonic principalities and powers that want to rip us apart. Rip our country apart, rip our communities apart, rip this church apart. In the face of this, we take refuge in the simple prayer of Jesus. Love God. Love neighbors. Do justice. Walk humbly.
In the face of this darkness, we take courage. Because the light is inside us. God has called us to be his image-bearers in the midst of this terrible suffering. God has appointed us as ambassadors of his gospel.
That’s why we cannot be silent. Now more than ever, we have to be living our faith. We have to be sharing the real gospel as an alternative to the counterfeit gospel that those in power are spreading through all available means. We have to be visible, so that those who are confused, those who are on the fence, and those who are being oppressed can see that none of the evil that’s happening right now is God’s will. God stands with those who are being crushed. And so do we.
Rightly did Isaiah prophesy about this generation when he said, “These people draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me.” Our hearts must be very close to God now. In an age of hypocrisy, we are called to be simple and sincere. Following the example of Jesus and the prayer he teaches us.
Our Father in heaven,
may your name be revered as holy.
May your kingdom come.
May your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial,
but rescue us from the evil one.