Proper 12 (July 24-30)
Texts: Luke 11:1-13;
Col 2:6-15; Gen 18:2-32
YouTube: https://youtu.be/4hYn1nRbccc
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Note: This manuscript is different from the YouTube version. I wrote it first, then produced the Sermon Notes, and finally preached extemporaneously from the Notes.
A SMALL CATECHISM ON THE LORD’S PRAYER
When I pray this prayer —
God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
and the Wisdom to know the difference —
With what do you associate it? To what organization is it commonly connected? Anyone? That’s right. Alcoholics Anonymous. The Serenity Prayer has been a long-time staple of their Twelve Steps programs.
Today’s Gospel reading begins with something like the Serenity Prayer being identified with a group like A.A. Apparently, the disciples of Jewish rabbis could be identified by the prayers their teachers taught them. Jesus’s disciples give the example of John the Baptist, and they ask if Jesus could teach them a prayer by which to mark them by. Wow! Was that ever a success! Two thousand years later disciples of Jesus are still known for saying the Lord’s Prayer.
It’s changed a bit over the years. We have two official versions which we learn and use. Many have never learned the newer one by heart. Everyone knows the older one. When visiting with older members who have dementia, I’m often struck by how they can still recite the Lord’s Prayer with me. They can’t remember my name, but they can remember the Lord’s Prayer.
I’d like for us to take a few moments this morning to refresh our encounter with this prayer by paying attention to Luke’s trimmed-down version of it. Let me offer you my translation of it (printed in today’s Sermon Notes):
Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our promised (victory) bread.
And forgive us our sins, as we ourselves also forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not lead us into testing.
What strikes you as the heart of this prayer? To me, it’s the short and simple petition that leads things off, “Your kingdom come.” This is what we’ve been highlighting as the revitalized Good News we are to proclaim. God’s reign is coming into this world through Jesus! In recent generations of Christians, we seem to be focused on the opposite, on leaving this world behind when we die, in order to go elsewhere . . . to God’s heavenly kingdom — wherever that is.
And that’s really the first problem with the thinking of going to heaven when we die. Where is it? For Jews like Jesus, heaven is simply part of this world, of this creation. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ If you pressed them further about where that is, they might point up. But basically, heaven is the unseen dimension of creation where God dwells. When we die, we don’t leave this world. We simply dwell with God in the unseen dimension until the day of resurrection. Until the day that we receive new resurrection bodies with which to enjoy God’s creation come to fulfillment — a virtually new creation. New creation is everything, says St. Paul, who’s also quoting the prophet Isaiah. And the down-payment on New Creation is Easter. That’s why the Gospel is all about God’s reign coming into this world in a new and powerful way through Jesus the Messiah. His resurrection is the promise that God’s renewing of creation is underway.
That’s why we disciples are taught to pray, above all else, “You kingdom come.” Do you see how fundamental this is? We are not praying, “Take us to your heavenly kingdom when we die, so that we might live with you there forever.” Again, this is not about taking away the hope of life-after-death. It’s about rethinking it. Yes, if we die before new creation is finished, we do somehow dwell with God in heaven until that day. But our ultimate hope is not life-after-death in heaven. It’s life after life-after-death. The ultimate hope is for a life with resurrection bodies that can fully enjoy the creation made new.
That’s why Jesus teaches us to pray, “Your kingdom come.” Come into this world which our sin is spoiling and show us how to renew it. Show us how to properly care for this world, this creation, so that we can be a part of its coming to fulfillment. Yes, that blessed day when new creation is completed may come after we die. But Jesus’s resurrection body is the promise that someday we will have resurrection bodies to enjoy New Creation. Until that day, teach us to pray with all our heart and soul, “Your kingdom come!” Open our eyes and ears, open our lives, to the coming of God’s reign among us that is renewing the creation which we have spoiled with our sin. New Creation is everything. Learning to pray, “Your kingdom come,” is everything.
Let’s do a small catechism of this prayer that centers on praying, “Your kingdom come.” There’s a deep mystery attached to the next seemingly simply petition, which we’ve been taught to pray as, “Give us each day our daily bread.” Something has really been lost in the translation for two thousand years now. The Greek word we translate as “daily” is epiousios. There’s something very strange and unusual about this word. There are a few words in the Greek New Testament that only appear once, but they are words that we find in the Greek culture of that time. The absolutely unique thing about the word epiousios is that it’s not only unique to Luke’s and Matthew’s versions of the Lord’s Prayer, found nowhere else in the New Testament, but scholars have never found it used anywhere else in the Greek speaking world! What does that mean? It would presumably mean that the early church made-up the word epiousios specifically for the Lord’s Prayer.
Why would they make up this word? I don’t think it was to mean something so conventional as “daily.” I think it was trying to translate an unusual word in Jesus’s own tongue, Aramaic. And I believe it’s a word having to do with the coming of God’s reign into the world, the reign of the Messiah, the reign that brings New Creation. The reign that someday brings a messianic banquet, a great celebration of the time when God’s power of life will fill everything.1
It’s the kind of thing we celebrate in anticipation here on Sundays. We are not just looking back on when Jesus gave up his body and poured out his blood for us. We are also looking ahead to what that self-sacrifice brings into the world. We are looking ahead to the feast of the New Creation, the messianic banquet, if you will. That’s why we’ve added hymns of praise to our liturgy like, “This is the feast of victory for our God. Alleluia!”
So, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus is teaching us to pray for the bread we will someday share in earnest at the messianic banquet, the great victory celebration. But we pray to also be fed in anticipation with that bread today. Give us each day the promised bread, the victory bread, that we might live toward the coming of God’s reign. In other words, this is the special bread of both the Lord’s Prayer and the Lord’s Supper. This bread we share on Sundays is a bread that helps us live toward the ultimate victory of God’s reign in the world. And so we are taught to pray, “Give us each day the promised victory bread.” We are to live not weighed down by defeat but lifted up by promised victory.
What marks that day of victory? Forgiveness of sins. Forgiveness of debts. Recall that in Luke’s Gospel Jesus inaugurates his ministry by reading Isaiah 61 in his hometown synagogue (Luke 4:14-30). He proclaims the Jubilee Year, when all human beings are returned to an equal footing. The blind can see. The lame can walk. The prisoners are set free. And all our debts are released — most especially those debts we hold against each other, those debts which cause so much division. No, in the Jubilee Year, the time of New Creation, one thing will be most evident: we are all created equal. We are all created with an equal potential to find our lives flourishing. We are brothers and sisters in God’s family of humankind and the rest of creation. “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day the promised victory bread. Forgive us our sins, as we ourselves forgive those indebted to us.”
There’s one petition left, isn’t there? “Do not lead us into testing.” In Luke’s Gospel, even before he launches his ministry in the Nazareth synagogue, Jesus is tested three times in the wilderness by Satan (Luke 4:1-13). In your Sermon Notes, I have a chart that suggests how those three tests match up with petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.2 Jesus teaches us to pray that we not be led into such testing. But he also knows that if and when we are, he has also shown us the way through such testing.
That’s my Small Catechism on the Lord’s Prayer. Everything depends on our learning to pray — which is to say, learning to live into — “Your Kingdom Come.” Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, July 27, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/4hYn1nRbccc
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. My chief source for this idea is Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington III, The Gospel of Luke, New Cambridge Bible Commentary Series (Cambridge, 2018), 313-14.
2. The following chart is from Ched Myers, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Fortress Press, 2025), 108:
