The Lord's Prayer: Our Needs - Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost Summer Series

The Lord’s Prayer: Our Needs

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost – Narrative Lectionary Summer Series

June 16, 2024

Our Savior’s, Faribault, MN

Luke 11.2-4; Psalm 23

Quite a few years ago we received a card in the mail offering a “free” dinner at a local restaurant. I decided to go even though I knew there was going to be a sales pitch, but Cindy wisely declined. Indeed, the organizers showed a scary movie about fires to get us to buy an alarm system. When I came home and described the evening to Cindy, her only comment was, “We’re not buying.” Of course, I knew that, but the pull was strong and it is evidence of our culture of wanting things. Now, it’s not a sin to want things, unless it’s other peoples’ stuff. That breaks at least a couple of the Ten Commandments.

The Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23 seem to be at odds with each other. On the one hand, Jesus is commanding us to ask God for what we need while on the other hand, the psalmist is telling us we are not to want for anything. There’s the additional tension that we have a very short sermon to handle the abundance of riches in these two texts. We’ve spent one week each on God as Father, God’s holy name, and God’s kingdom. We could easily use three more weeks, one each on the remaining three petitions. As for Psalm 23, the latter could take its own multi-week series.

So, with these items in mind, I’m going to give you some broad strokes as food for thought. 

First, in praying the Lord’s Prayer and reciting Psalm 23, we remind ourselves that we live in a culture that teaches us to not only want everything but also perpetuates the myth that we can “have it all.” Not only can we not have it all, we know that having does not bring happiness. Happiness flows from a life of gratitude for what we have. Second, inherent in our asking God for daily bread is the reminder that we are to neither be anxious for what we need nor are we to pile up for ourselves more than we need. The lesson to the Israelites in the wilderness is that God gives us our “manna” each and every day. Finally, both the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23 encourage us to ask while making us mindful Who it is that gives us what we need.

Today is Father's Day and like many of you, my dad was far from perfect. But one thing I’m always grateful for is how hard he worked to provide for us, to get us what we needed. In fact, I hated to ask for anything because I knew we didn’t have much. Yet our heavenly Father tells us otherwise, that we are to ask and be assured that God gives us what we need. For God so loved the world that he even gave us his Son Jesus so that we might have life and have it abundantly.

That Son gave his life to repair the broken relationship between us and God so that we can do the same with one another and we can live as God intended us to live. God forgives us so we can forgive others. That God continues to give God’s self as we are seeing today, first in the waters of baptism that washed over Beau and Tyler. In baptism, God “anoints their heads with oil.” Then in the Holy Table that God spreads before us “in the presence of our enemies,” we are fed with God’s very self. Jesus is both the Good Shepherd who pursues us “through the goodness and mercy that follows us” and our daily bread that sustains us as we “dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Thanks be to God. Amen.

My sermons don't always preach as they are written. For video of the sermon with the entire service, click here.