A Beginner’s Prayer
October 11, 2026
20th Sunday after Pentecost
MINISTER
Rev. David J. Wood
SCRIPTURE
Matthew 6: 5-15
“A Beginner’s Prayer”
by Rev. David J. Wood
20th Sunday After Pentecost, October 11, 2026
First Congregational Church of Camden
Scripture Reading: Matthew 6: 5-15
The story is told of the 2nd Grade Sunday School teacher who was approached by one of her students as they were settling in for their class.
“Do you know God’s name?”
“I’m not quite sure—why don’t you tell me.” The teacher replied
“It’s Harold!”
“Harold?” The teacher replied.
Curious to know more, she asked: “Where did you learn that?”
“Last Sunday in church. I heard everyone say, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, HAROLD be Thy name!”
And then there was the little boy in a Sunday school class in a New York City church who grew up wondering why Penn Station was such a bad place.
For years, every Sunday in church, he had been praying, “Lead us not into Penn Station.”
The truth is, most of us learned the Lord’s Prayer long before we understood, or actually even knew, the words of the prayer. Even when we come to know the words, it’s easy to find ourselves skating across the surface so that it doesn’t lead us into prayer in the way Jesus intended.
Over the next four Sundays, I want us to dwell on the different stanzas of the prayer…to linger with each phrase in an effort to comprehend it more full…to pray it more deeply.
Today, I want to take up what I am calling the first stanza of this prayer:
“Our Father, who art in heaven
Hallowed be Thy Name.”
But before I do that, I wanted to make three comments about PRAYER itself:
ONE: Prayer as an act of resistance.
I want to come back that quote from Karl Barth I shared earlier in the service,
“To clasp hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”
In a world where we are tempted to feel we don’t have time for prayer, when it’s not uncommon to feel we are skimming across the surface of things, when it’s easy to feel ourselves being sucked into black holes in our technologically mediated informational universe, scrolling our lives away.
In such a world, prayer itself becomes an act of resistance…
To resignation
To acquiescence
To a kind of hyper-activity…
The theologian Jacques Ellul, in his book, Prayer and Modern Man, put it this way:
Precisely because our technological society is given over entirely to action,
the person who retires to his or her room to pray is the true radical.
Prayer is an act of resistance.
TWO: Prayer is Answering Speech.
My late friend, pastor & theologian, Eugene Peterson, was fond of saying that Prayer, is answering speech. In other words, prayer is our way of answering the God who is always there…awaiting us… It is opening ourselves up to the God who is there…the One who knows us before we make ourselves known.
Reflecting on his own practice of prayer, the poet, Christian Wiman, writes,
“Prayer is how I subject myself to the possibility of God.”
To understand prayer as answering speech is to realize that prayer is not the means by which we get God’s attention… but in itself is how we come to recognize that God is present. Prayer is how we become present to the God who is.
Prayer is answering speech..
THREE: Prayer Begins with God not ourselves.
Prayer is a turning of our attention from ourselves.
Here I want to look at the Lord’s Prayer as a whole:
It begins with God..not ourselves. We pray
For God’s name be hallowed
For God’s Kingdom Come
For God’s will be done…
While prayer begins with God, then, and only then, moves to the concrete reality and particularity of our lives. Notice that at the center of The Lord’s Prayer, there is a decisive shift: a shift from directing our attention to God, to directing God’s attention to us.
Feed Us
Forgive us
Deliver us
Keep us from going astray…
All of this cuts against the grain of drive for self-sufficiency…it names a dependency that is true for all us all the time…it speaks to all the ways we share vulnerability as human beings: our shared vulnerability to hunger, to sin, to evil.
But it doesn’t begin there…it begins with God.
Prayer is an act of resistance,
Prayer is answering speech
Prayer begins with God.
So let’s turn now to the Lord’s Prayer:
Our Father, who art in heaven:
Let’s begin with the First word: OUR. How different this prayer would play if it was singular here… It is plural all the way through.
OUR Father…
Our daily bread…
Forgive us…as WE forgive
Lead us..Deliver us…
Even when we pray alone, we never pray on our own.
While prayer is a solitary act, it is, at the same time an act of solidarity…with all who pray.
As a Pastor, I am often as to pray for people…but I must confess, I feel most “pastoral" when I am praying WITH people…And praying the Lord’s prayer is one of the ways I experienced that.
Experience it here…this past week as I prayed with a few of you in your homes…as I prayed with Sally Fernald the afternoon before she died. It was when I turned from praying for her and began to pray the Lord’s Prayer WITH her that I felt her hand grip mine more firmly…as we prayed together. I felt like she remembered all of you, the community with whom she prayed for so many years.
Our FATHER…
I think the Episcopalians have it right when they begin the Lord’s Prayer by saying: “And now as our Savior Jesus Christ has taught us, We are bold to say…”
To call God Father is a bold and radical claim. Throughout the Gospels, it is how Jesus prays, the way he addresses God. To call God “Father” is not a assign GENDER to GOD…as if God were MALE or FEMALE.
God is beyond gender.
It is rather the naming of RELATIONSHIP…an invocation of a unique intimacy. In this life, we normally only name one person in that way.
That being said, in our modern culture, “father” language often evokes not intimacy but oppression.
Theologian, Roberta Bondi talks of how for many years the word "Father," was a source of pain and anger for her.
“Part of my difficulty, “she writes, “was my inability to escape the way God's fatherhood had been used to support a status quo in the church and in the culture that has hurt women and had hurt me.”
She writes of her own experience of growing up with “a loving but authoritarian, perfectionistic father who left the family when I was eleven. Like many other people, having transferred to God the Father all the pain I felt around my human father, I simply couldn't get past the father language of the prayer to reach God.”
It was for her an insurmountable a barrier in her relationship to God…
She continues, “During this period, I found when I prayed that it helped me, as it has helped so many other people I have spoken with, to substitute a name, like Mother or Friend, that actually would allow me to approach God rather than turn me away.”
“However,” she writes, over time, “I came to understand Jesus’ teaching about God's fatherhood actually subversive. That it stands as a judgment on all human fatherhood…”
She concludes, “I challenge anybody to find a place where Jesus uses God's fatherhood to shore up human male authority, including the authority of our own fathers. Indeed, he teaches the very opposite. "Call no one father save God alone,"
The invocation here, first and foremost, is of a relationship. However that relationship is named matters less than that it is named and known and received…
Our Father, WHO ART IN HEAVEN…
The dance of intimacy and otherness…knowing and mystery…nearness and beyondness…God is God and we are not.
But putting God in heaven isn't meant to locate God somewhere physically.
It's meant to affirm that what we see around us is not all that is, and that the Creator of all that we see sees more. And that God can't be limited to here, or there.
Hallowed be Thy Name:
May your name be hallowed in and through us—in our lives, our words, our thoughts, our actions; in our world, in this time.
God’s name is not to be used to authorize, make sacred our own undertakings. It is a common temptation to use God’s name for our own purposes… to USE God’s name to legitimize our own undertakings…
You may have noticed that there has been a lot of public praying at the Pentagon in recent days. The Secretary of Defense regularly leads the troops in prayer:
In a recent prayer, he asked God to grant troops "clear and righteous targets for violence" and "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy," alongside requests to "break the teeth of the ungodly" and deliver wicked souls to eternal damnation.
Lord, have mercy!
I cannot think of a more contemporary, blatant instance of dishonoring of God’s Name.
To hallow God’s name is to refuse to bring God down to our size. As my friend, and preaching colleague Wes Avram put it, "Oh God, we might pretend we want you to be as small as us. But don't believe us. We need you to be more. We need you to be holy—seen and not seen, known and not known, ours and beyond ours!”
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Our Father, who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name…
These few words mark the beginning of the prayer that is for all of us who want to learn how to pray. It is a prayer for all of us who feel like we are beginners when it comes to prayer.
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Let me conclude with a story I may have told you before…but it bears repeating…like all good and true stories…
The New Testament scholar, Kenneth Bailey, tells about his experience of lecturing in Riga, the capital city of Latvia. It was right after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall.
His audience was largely made up of students between 25-35…so they had been educated in the communist system, indoctrinated into atheism….he was curious.
He asked one of the young women how she came to the christian faith.
“Was there a church in your village?”
“No,” she said, “the communists shut them all down.”
“Did some saintly grandmother instruct you into the ways of God?”
“No,” she replied, “all the members of my family were avowed atheists.”
Pressing further, he asked, “Did you have secret home bible studies—or was there an underground church in your area?”
“No,” she said, “none of that.”
“So,” Bailey said, finally, “what happened? How did you come to faith?”
She explained. “At funerals, we were allowed to recite the Lord’s Prayer. As a young child, I heard those words, which were strange to me.
I had no idea who we were talking to, what the words meant, where they came from or why we were reciting them.
When freedom came at last to our country, I had the opportunity to search for their meaning. When you are in total darkness, the tiniest point of light is very bright.”
“For me,” she concluded, “the Lord’s Prayer was that tiny point of light. By the time I found its meaning, I was a Christian.”
Who among us does not need that tiny point of light? Amen.