In the remote Sri Lankan village of Agalawatta, where our sisters and brothers met for worship about 11 hours ago, they may have prayed the Lord's Prayer. This, I am still convinced, is the most promising Baptist Church in Sri Lanka. I preached there, on my first Sunday there. That Thursday was a public holiday and they were planning a day long revival meeting for over 400 people from the neighboring villages. They had a business meeting after church and it was all about, who's bringing what, to feed 400 people! And these were poor people, peasants, most of them, and it was like they were bringing their 5 loaves and 2 fishes. That church hosts 16 thriving cell groups in villages that are 5-10 miles apart. These people can't come to church very often because bus service on Sunday morning is not that great. So they are going to build two church buildings in strategic locations. Each is going to cost -- now get this -- $2000.

Then on the second Sunday I was there, I preached in the central city church of Cinnamon Gardens, a mostly middle class urban congregation. That church is more like us. Many more people than we do these days, but struggling much harder than us to survive. I reminded them, as I did the saints at Agalawatta, that they are connected with us here: that we are members of one body -- the body of Christ. Even our worship styles are similar, and if they would pray the Lord's prayer we could jump right in, even though it may be in a different language. This is what's interesting about the Lord's Prayer. That prayer may be the most common and most universal part of our liturgical heritage. Everywhere in the world and in all denominations Christians would pray it and pray it regularly.

In our journey through the gospel of Luke, we have come today to the Lord's prayer. This is a good time to consider it, now that I am back, and Anna has been back for a few weeks from her travels and Amy has just moved to our neighborhood all geared up to become our Children's Minister, and I can see it in your faces, you all are waiting so eagerly to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Its going to be an exciting August. After we decide on our tag-line today, we will get down to doing some solid publicity -- press releases, advertising, putting up a new sign, perhaps some direct mail -- so that on September 9, on the day that corresponds to our 51^st birthday, we want to have a grand opening event so that the entire neighborhood will know us by our new identity. At a time like this we must be solidly rooted in Jesus and his identity and mission. And there is no better or more succinct expression of that than the Lord's Prayer.

The disciples come to Jesus one day with a question: "Lord teach us how to pray." And Jesus gives them this prayer. Now, I don’t think Jesus made it up on the spot, do you? It is far more likely that Jesus simply told them to pray what he himself was praying -- a prayer for God's reign on earth as it is in heaven. As you know, God's reign consumed all his energies. His identity was wrapped up in it: it was his theology of mission. This prayer must have been at the center of his prayer life. It obviously came right out of his heart. But notice: this is what Jesus taught the disciples to pray. He did not mean for it to be a Lord’s Prayer but the Disciples' Prayer. Just as much as the God's reign was central to his identity and mission, he wanted that to be the disciples' identity and mission as well. So, let’s see if we can capture some of its grandeur.

First -- the petition, "Your kingdom come" stands out from the rest of the Lord's prayer. It is like the axle, and like spokes on a wheel the other parts of the prayer extend outward from this axle. When the reign of God stands, the other petitions in the prayer also stand. God's reign was a matter of great seriousness for Jesus -- after all, it would cost him his life in the end?

I talked about this with several church leaders in Sri Lanka. Interestingly, people who are in top leadership, the two bishops of the Anglican Church and the president of the Methodist Church went to seminary with me. So, I have easy access to them. It is sad to see them demoralized, though. They are relatively young and energetic people, but thoroughly incapable of breaking through old paradigms and the mainline churches are in serious decline. Because the church was not prophetic early in the country's conflict, now, even when they have anything useful to say, no body listens to them. Instead, persecutions against Christians are on the rise, because the country has become thoroughly desensitized to violence. And the church has lost its witness. "Thy Kingdom Come," is a serious petition for these church leaders.

As some of you know, my second son Devaka went this time to do a study of how Liberation Theology is lived out in Sri Lanka. He is based at the seminary there. I drove him around to have conversations with Sri Lankan theologians who are somewhat outside the mainline church. I am so glad I did this, because there I found a lot of life and vigor and enthusiasm. New communities are springing up that are finding again what it means to live out the gospel. They are engaged in their villages, they take seriously the Buddhist context they are in, they live out principles of economic equality that was so much a part of the early Christian communities. But they aren't in the mainstream. In fact, they are definitely in the margins. But there's real energy and excitement there. I've come away thinking that the church in Sri Lanka is being re-born. God is answering the prayer, "Thy Kingdom Come." But the new life is coming from remote villages like Agalawatta and from these new communities.

But you know, the reign of God is not only about institutions. It is also about people. When individuals are mired in sin, that pertains to God’s reign. When people are enslaved with addictions that take enormous toll on their personal and family lives, that pertains to God’s reign. When anxieties of our day to day existence gets a hold of us and we order our priorities based on those and don’t pay attention to the priorities that God intends for us, that pertains to God’s reign. When sickness overpowers us, that pertains to God’s reign.

A lot of my energies were spent on finding a way to care for my brother. He is ready to leave the mental hospital, an awfully depressing and dirty place, but not quite ready to live independently. There are just a handful of institutions there for people like him. The one place that he has been in before has serious staffing problems. They can't pay enough to get the caliber of person who can do this work and they don't have money to send people for training. I did not want to send him there until they got that situation under control. But healing for my brother requires that he be cared for in an institution. But when that is not available, sickness overpowers him. That's not God's reign then -- because God's reign is about healing.

I think Jesus understood something about God’s reign that many of us have difficulty understanding. Jesus understood that the reign of God was about power -- power to effectively reach people with God’s love, power to heal the sick, to comfort the afflicted, to liberate the oppressed, power to take on oppressive governments, business and even religious institutions. Actually, many of us do understand that, but we shy away from it, because to understand that means to deal with the powerfully and proactively with the people, institutions and influences that keep us oppressed, enslaved and in sin.

On Monday, a week ago, when my return was coming up on Friday, there were no options open for my brother. To leave like that would have been to say my brother, God is powerless to act in this situation, God is not reigning, so there is no healing possible for you and you are doomed to stay in this awful place. That's why I needed to stay longer. But in my heart's agonizing, I realized that God had given me the power to do whatever that was necessary to provide for healing. There was one other option at the mental hospital itself, a paying section of the hospital, a much cleaner and open place called the villas that focussed on rehabilitation. Everybody I talked to, including his psychiatrist said was impossible to get a place in. So, last week I decided that I needed to go to the very top of Sri Lanka's medical establishment -- the Minister of Health in the Central Government. When I first suggested this to my family, they racked their brains. So and so knows so and so, they said, and that's the only way to get an appointment with the minister. I had no time or energy for that. I just prayed for an opening and walked in to the minister's office. He returned from a conference while I was seated in front of his office -- of course surrounded by security and staff. And for whatever reason, through all those people, he looked at me and smiled. In 10 minutes he had called me in and I found myself was seated in front of him at his desk. He gave me less than 2 minutes, but that was enough. He called in his Co-ordinating Secretary and told him that he is very interested in helping this patient because of my unusual circumstances. And in 15 minutes I had a letter in my hand that requested the Medical Superintendent of the Mental Hospital to give my brother a place in the villas -- cutting through all kinds of red-tape. This is not yet done, but I am hopeful.

This must be why Jesus taught his followers to pray, "hallowed be thy name." The name that is holy, is not any other name, but the name of God. The reign Jesus prayed for is not the reign of a powerful king or a ruthless dictator, but the reign of the Holy One. Let’s understand this carefully. Holiness in the Bible is not a simplistic moral code. It means wholeness, completeness, and fullness. In that sense, the hallowed name has so much in common with the petition, "thy kingdom come." God’s holiness – i.e. God’s wholeness, completeness, fullness, in contrast to our sinfulness, oppression and pain of the world is utterly stark. The holy name carries with it the healing and liberating power in the world of agony, conflict, and pain. So to pray hallowed be thy name, is in fact to say, "Holy One, become holy: God, become God -- in my life, in our time, in the reality of this world, in our history." But every time we pray that we acknowledge that among us the Holy One is not holy. In Sri Lanka where terrorists still blast public facilities with impunity -- this time almost half the fleet of Sri Lankan Airlines was completely destroyed -- and the government is both corrupt and inept to deal with this crisis, the Holy one is not holy. Every time we acknowledge our sinfulness, brokenness and pain, we acknowledge that in our midst the holy one is incomplete, unfulfilled and broken. Hallowed be thy name, then means, Holy one, we long for you to be holy, whole, complete, fulfilled, in other words, holy -- in our lives, in our neighborhood and in our world.

I can tell you many more stories about Sri Lanka but I won't because if I do, we'll never get through here, and this prayer is important for us to get a handle on at this time. So let's focus on our context.

"Give us this day our daily bread" Bread and the reign of God! Why are we not surprised? The name of God in time, the reign of God in history, and the mission of God in the reality of the world, all have to do with bread. This is not about some symbolic bread nor is it about the spiritual bread that we receive at the communion table. This is about daily bread on the table, and the rice that is eaten at dinner. We have too quickly spiritualized the daily bread for which Jesus prayed. Jesus in his ministry did not feed the hungry people with symbolic bread. When he gave real bread to 5000 people, and it wasn’t a measly little crumb or two, but till they were all full and had 12 baskets of leftovers. Jesus was about bread and bread in all its abundance. The church has often tended to denigrate the material life and needs of people in favor of the spiritual. But as I have served here for the past 11 years, I have come to understand that it is only when bread and what it stands for are appreciated in their full material sense, that they begin to disclose their spiritual meaning. When a hungry person is fed, when the systems that keep people hungry are eliminated, when businesses invest in our neighborhoods so that there are jobs for people to do, so that they can go to the store and buy bread -- those deal with real material needs. And when we do, we will find that it has an enormous spiritual impact.

This is an important petition for all of us. Which one of us is not dealing with the anxieties of tomorrow, concerned about our jobs, our houses, our children’s education, the food on the table? Which one of us is not worried that by some accident we may be disabled, or by some turn of events we may be demoted, fired or otherwise unable to work? So, we try to hold on to things, we work extraordinary hours, we try to protect and grasp for ourselves – and as a result we are not as generous, or even fulfilled. The very comfort we are trying to hold keeps evading us. We forget that it is God who gives us everything we have: from our money to our families. And the same God keeps on giving our daily bread today.

In the next petition, Jesus moves on to the question of forgiveness. Interestingly, with his "Forgive our debts" is also included, "as we also forgive our debtors." This sounds strange, doesn’t it? Is this the same Jesus who told us of a father who forgives his son unconditionally? Surely, Jesus is not putting conditions on our forgiveness. Rather, I think, the question has to do with how we receive our forgiveness and what we are going to do after we receive it.

The story of Zaccheus is a good example. Jesus goes to the tree that Zaccheus had climbed and speaks to him, "Zaccheus, quickly come down, for I must stay at your house today." The word "forgiveness" is not used. Does it have to be? Isn't there more forgiveness in what Jesus said, than the word itself? Zaccheus, a very self-conscious sinner, must have heard Jesus' words as forgiveness. Jesus wanted to stay in his house. It becomes clear to him that forgiveness is not a mere word; it is an action. It is not the pronouncement of a formula; it is an event of acceptance. Zaccheus, then, translated into action his experience of forgiveness and his joy of being accepted. "Here and now, sir," he said to Jesus, "I will give half my possessions to charity; and if I have defrauded anyone, I will repay them four times over." Deeply moved, Jesus declared to those who were there, "Salvation has come to this house!" Forgiveness in the reign of God is not about saying the right words or understanding the right concepts. Rather it is about acting on forgiveness; it is about reconciling relationships with those whom you've hurt; it is about receiving God’s acceptance.

The last petition, "Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from the evil one," seems very much to arise out of Jesus’ own experience. It grows out of his own struggles with temptation. Doesn’t it remind you of Jesus' temptations in the wilderness? Wouldn’t Jesus be thinking of his own exposure from time to time to the temptations of the power, glory and success that his career would bring him, if only, he would yield to his own human ambitions and compromise with the powers and principalities of this world? Was he also not concerned about the temptations of a similar kind to which the community of his followers would also be exposed? Jesus' concern is more than justified. How quickly we have fallen victim to the tempter? Lead us not into temptation is about not giving God reign over our lives, in our lifestyles, in our day to day attitudes and actions and decision making. How quickly the church has fallen victim to the tempter, and given our allegiances to the political power structures and business interests that oppress, than to the Holy One?

Let me bring this home to you. First, let’s understand this. We often spiritualize the Lord’s prayer just as much as we tend to spiritualize God’s reign. The Lord’s Prayer is about real people, real families, real neighborhoods, real work places – it is about real systems. It is about real food, real forgiveness, real temptations and real evil. It is given to real people, like you and I who will commit themselves to Jesus, whose identity and mission was God’s reign everywhere – on earth as it is in heaven.

Second, let’s understand that the Lord’s prayer is not just a recitation, or even just a prayer. When Jesus taught this in Matthew, he said, "Don’t pray like the Gentiles," Jesus said, "full of talk, talk, talk." No, this prayer is about walking the walk. If the Gentiles are stuck in talk, Jesus is giving the power to walk the walk. For us looking towards the new things God is going to do, this is important. But let’s also understand this clearly. The Power is not ours. It is God’s. God gives it to us in great abundance to be used for the purposes of God’s reign.

This is why we need to be rooted in this prayer particularly at this time in our church life. But make no mistake -- its God's power that creates new possibilities for the church in Sri Lanka, provides means of healing for individuals, literally opens doors to high places, creates new possibilities for us discovering a new identity and mission. It is God's power. That's why it is most fitting that we end the Lord’s prayer with this acknowledgement.

For thine is kingdom, the power and the glory for ever and ever. Amen.