Delivered at Billtown Baptist Church, Feb. 23, 2025.

So, we are going through the Lord’s Prayer. Pastor Angela has covered “Our Father in Heaven.” She’s been taking her time. She began with “Our,” then “Father,” then last week, we were away in Halifax for family day, but she tackled “in Heaven.” I got a whopping four words to cover this morning. At this rate, we may be done this series sometime next year. I am only teasing.

I tease but I feel like doing this reminded me to slow down. I am the kind of person who reads and reads and wants to get things done and move on to the next thing. That is how we live our lives. Our lives can so often be the rat race of getting things done on to the next thing to get done.

I remember one time at Laurentian University, where I used to teach; my day would also be so filled with things I needed to get done and events I had to plan that I would make a to-do list in my head and motor through them. One of those, often, was getting books from the library, which was several buildings away from my office, so I would quickly walk there and try to get back as fast as I could. One day, I remember I was just feeling a bit tired so I got a cup of coffee in the Starbucks in the lobby just before going into the library. I remember pausing for a second to sip the coffee, and then I looked up and realized there was a massive art piece on the wall coming into the library. It was of several blue orchids painted in that impressionist style that was simply stunning, and I had this moment of realizing that I had passed by this art piece many times and just never bothered to notice because I was too busy.

We can do the same thing about God, and we can do the same thing with the Scriptures, too, if we don’t slow down.

And this is particularly important with words that often are so familiar to us like these ones. We can say them and not stop to think about them. I remember talking to a pastor one time, and he talked about how growing up, his dad would always pray the same prayer at dinner time (I am totally guilty of this—by 5:30, I’m tired and but hangry, originality or anything profound is just not coming out of my mouth as my kids bicker—often my prayers just end up sounding like parental auto-suggestion: “God help us all to be nice and be grateful for our food. Amen!”). Nevertheless, this guy’s dad would pray the same puzzling words every day: “God bless this food and antenna juice.” And for years, he said to me, he was always puzzled about why his dad prayed for the “antenna juice.” Finally, he could not hold it in any longer and he asked his dad one day, “What is going on with the antenna juice?” And did you figure out what it is? His dad, puzzled, said, “I pray ‘God bless this food for its intended use.’” Ohhhh! (The other moral of the story is that a little annunciation goes a long way.)

“Hallowed be your name”…?

Words we recite day in and day out can end up becoming routine. We can say them without thinking about what they mean, and I particularly feel that with this line in the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by your name” (as I learned it in King James English). I remember thinking as a kid, “Why is God’s name hollow?” that does not make a lot of sense. Of course, eventually, I figured out that it is actually “hallowed” or “to be made holy,” but that didn’t really clear things up either: Why is God’s name need to be made holy? Isn’t God already holy? How do you “hallow” something, especially when that something is God’s name?

There is something really important and nourishing about slowing down and thinking about the Scriptures little by little, word by word. That is what I am going to do this morning. Let’s re-ask those questions: What is God’s name? Why is God’s name being brought up here rather than just God? What does it mean to be holy? And why does this line of the prayer petition God to make God’s name holy?

So, first, what is God’s name? Some folks think “Father” is the name of God in this prayer, and that is not actually accurate. Father is a title of God with its own particular history that Jesus used to talk about how he is the Son of God, the Messiah.

What is God’s name then? We see what it is back in the book of Exodus. Moses comes to the burning bush, and God says he has heard the cries of his people. He says he is going to send Moses to liberate the people from slavery, and after that, Moses asks, “That’s great, but, by the way, what do I call you if anyone asks?” And God gives this strange answer, “I am who I am.”

Ancient names meant something. At some point when Meagan and I were dating, we would chat about whether we were to have kids and how many (the answer at the time was three, by the way). But we also talked about hypothetical names for our kids, and we could never agree on one. I remember one time at the church we attended in Cambridge, Ontario, this couple introduced themselves to us, and then they turned and said, “This is our boy, Rowan.” I remember thinking to myself, “I really like that name.” Then I turned to Meagan, who had a look on her face like she was thinking the exact same thing. Then I realized in my heart what we had to do: We could not be friends with these people because we needed to steal this name and claim we creatively thought of it ourselves as good millennials.

Admittedly, we have really only chosen names that have a nice sound to them. That is really subjective. There really wasn’t any deeper meaning to why we chose our kids’ names. Rowan means “from the Ashberry tree.” I still, to this day,don’tt know what an Ashberry tree looks like.

Well, the ancient people took the meaning of names a bit more seriously than Meagan, and I have, and God gives his name to Moses, and not “Bill” or “Dave” or anything you can just casually write on a name sticker with a sharpie during an ice breaker event. It is this mysterious, perplexing name: “I Am who I Am.” What does that mean?

That is kind of a strange name. It almost feels comical, like something out of an Abbot and Costello routine: Who is on first base? Who is. The man’s name is Who. That’s who.

Moses asks, “Who are you?” and God says, “I Am. I Just Am.” That is the name God chooses. Why? Well, in ancient culture, if you knew the true name of a god, you could control and invoke the power of that god as a magical incantation, or so the priests of Egypt thought. For God to reply, “I Am who I Am,” is saying who God is goes beyond this whole exercise of naming and controlling.

I am beyond your concept of what God is;

I am not one god amongst others.

I am beyond all beings;

I am the source of all being itself;

All other gods are nothing compared to me; I am the one who simply is.

God gives Moses this name, which writers in church history have sometimes called the “Nameless Name” (cf. Ps. Dionysius) as a way of reminding people that God cannot be thought of or controlled like other gods. God is simply the one who is.

Salvation in God’s Name

And yet, God also says to Moses, “I am with you.” This God whose name suggests God is the absolute purity of existence, something infinite and incomparable, this God is not far off, aloof and unconcerned with the world; this God chooses to come alongside this small, insignificant, enslaved nation, to walk with people in the midst of everyday life and their struggles. This God chooses to make promises of liberation. And what God does with Israel is a sign of what God is about for all humanity.

This God is the one who is.

This God is the real God.

This God has real power.

This God is truly just.

This God is compassionate and gracious.

This God is on the side of the forgotten and unworthy of the earth.

This God can be trusted.

So, beginning with Exodus, God sets out to, we might say, make a name for himself, and Israel is called to testify of what God does to the surrounding nations. Their history is to be like a living resume to the rest of humanity, showing that God is trustworthy and up for the task of redemption. God sets out to act in such a way that when people hear about the God of Israel, this God who is the I Am, the one who is (or in Hebrew, Yahweh), this God is different.

That is what holiness means, by the way. The Hebrew word kadosh means to be set apart. Something that is holy is different. This God is a holy God. God is different from the rest.

Throughout the Old Testament, you have God’s people invoking God’s name to say, “Come and save us. We know that you are the God who will.” Psalm 53 does this.

¹ Save me, O God, by your name,
    and vindicate me by your might…

³ For the insolent have risen against me,
    the ruthless seek my life;
    they do not set God before them.

⁴ But surely, God is my helper;
    the Lord is the upholder of my life.
⁵ He will repay my enemies for their evil.

So, the people call on the name of God in prayer and worship by name.

In college, I had a friend who was a part of AA, alcoholics anonymous. He joined AA to clean up his life, and at the same time he found faith in Jesus and eventually felt called to be a missionary, and that is what he was studying for. I remember one time he took me to one of those meetings where visitors were allowed, and it was a humbling time for me to hear his testimony and others.

One part of all the testimonies mentioned one of the steps in the program, namely, trusting in a higher power. I remember talking about that with him one time. He said, you know, in AA, we are told to trust in a higher power, and for most, this could be anything: it could be Allah, Buddha, or some other deity from the great religions; it could be an angel, or the oneness of the universe, or the force from Star Wars for that matter—it really could be anything as long as you believe in something more than yourself since one of the qualities of the steps is realizing one’s enslavement to addiction.  

Well, he said, that is all fine and good, but he said, I don’t know how you can believe in those other things and have any assurance you are going to be okay through all this. Of course, he did not mean it like Christians are better or that if you are a Christian in AA, you are obviously never going to struggle or fail at your addiction or any of that. What he meant is that lots of people believe in God or believe in a higher power, and that often helps make people better people. But the question becomes, what is God like, and how do you know this? If there is a higher power, that’s great, but is this higher power merciful? That is where the God of the Bible made a difference for him.

For him, it simply meant his higher power, the one he looked to for strength to succeed in sobriety and forgiveness when he failed, had a name. His higher power, whom he trusted, has a track record of being there for sinners. In fact, his higher power loves sinners so much that he died for them as one of them and rose from the grave to give them hope.

The name of his higher power that he trusted was Jesus, whose name means “God saves.” Jesus is the ultimate display of this “I Am” God capable of being with us.

This does not mean that we pray in “Jesus’ name” like it is a magic formula to make God do things or the secret ingredient in a recipe. Surely, God hears the cries of anyone, anywhere, regardless of how they pray. But we pray, invoking the name of God, the identity of Jesus, God’s Son, to remind ourselves and others that it is this particular God who answers prayer, who has shown himself to be faithful.

God’s Name is Being Profaned

Well, that still does not answer why Jesus tells us to pray, “Make your name holy.” In fact, that really makes things more confusing: Isn’t it already holy, isn’t that why we are praying to it?

Well, to answer that, we need to remember that things did not always go rosy for Israel, and things are not the way they should be in the world. Israel disobeys; they are unfaithful to God; they commit idolatry; they neglect the poor and engage in dirty politics with the empires of the world, and so, they get conquered and carried off into exile.

The people disobey God and feel the consequences, but God does not stop being their God. God has made promises of faithfulness and restoration that God has said he will keep despite their unfaithfulness. And so you have these prayers then in the later parts of the Old Testament, longing for God to come.

Ezekiel 39 gives a vision that one day, God will come, and he will make his name holy. Let me read the ten verses:  

And you, mortal, prophesy against Gog, and say: Thus says the Lord God: I am against you, O Gog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal! ² I will turn you round and drive you forwards, and bring you up from the remotest parts of the north, and lead you against the mountains of Israel. ³ I will strike your bow from your left hand, and will make your arrows drop out of your right hand. ⁴ You shall fall on the mountains of Israel, you and all your troops and the peoples that are with you; I will give you to birds of prey of every kind and to the wild animals to be devoured. ⁵ You shall fall in the open field; for I have spoken, says the Lord God. ⁶ I will send fire on Magog and on those who live securely in the coastlands; and they shall know that I am the Lord. ⁷ My holy name I will make known among my people Israel; and I will not let my holy name be profaned anymore; and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, the Holy One in Israel. ⁸ It has come! It has happened, says the Lord God. This is the day of which I have spoken. ⁹ Then those who live in the towns of Israel will go out and make fires of the weapons and burn them—bucklers and shields, bows and arrows, hand-pikes and spears—and they will make fires of them for seven years. ¹⁰ They will not need to take wood out of the field or cut down any trees in the forests, for they will make their fires of the weapons; they will despoil those who despoiled them, and plunder those who plundered them, says the Lord God.

Gog and Magog are nicknames of the areas where the brutal Babylonians and Assyrians came from. Meschech and Tubal are in the northern mountain region of modern-day Iraq and Turkey. The Bible geeks in the room might know the phrase “Gog and Magog” from the book of Revelation, which re-uses the phrase as an archetype for any brutal military power, which, for the writer of Revelation, was the empire of Rome.

Ezekiel’s vision, which if you found it bizarre and jarring that is exactly what apocalyptic visions do to get us to think differently, is that these arrogant and violent nations oppressing people will come to an end, as all empires will, whether that is Assyria, Babylon, or Rome, or whether that is Russia, China, or the British empire, or the America empire. Their armies will be destroyed, but not only that, their weapons will be gathered up and burned for firewood, so much so that the people of God will be warmed by its heat for years to come, and they will live in safety, no longer needing weapons of war anymore.

Most importantly, (did you hear the line?), it says, “My holy name I will make known among my people; and I will not let my holy name be profaned anymore.”

God’s name was in a state of being profaned: insulted, tarnished, desecrated. Why? Because oppression is rampant on the earth and the innocent suffer.

God looks at the state of the world, the state of his people, the cries of the poor, the innocent, and the oppressed. God sees the rampant war. God sees hard-heartedness in God’s people, and God sees his name profaned.

Boy, I am sure glad we solved all those problems in the Old Testament, and that stuff never happens today!

Notice God’s response: God doesn’t just turn to us and say, “Well, I gave you a choice, and you really messed that up, so too bad, not my problem.” Although we certainly have made choices that have messed things up.

God doesn’t just turn to us and say, “See, you might think all this evil is bad, but I am actually all-powerful; I am in control; I can do whatever I want, even if that means causing or allowing terrible things to happen. So be it. So, how dare you question me?!” He doesn’t do that either, even though that is what many of us were taught growing up.

I remember talking to an atheist one time, and I asked him why he believed what he believed (there are, of course, many reasons for why someone is an atheist). The person said how he looks at the world and the evil in it, and he sees this as a contradiction to the existence of a good God.

I had to say, “I agree. But that is why I believe in God. Evil does not belong here.” Thankfully, I think God agrees too: God sees the evil of the earth, and God sees this as a contradiction to who he is. God takes the evil and tragedy of this world personally.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his book, The Prophets, writes about this:

“Why does religion, the essence of which is worship of God, put such stress on justice for humanity?… Perhaps the answer lies here: righteousness is not just a value; it is God’s part of human life, God’s stake in human history. Perhaps it is because the suffering of man is a blot upon God’s conscience; because it is in relations between man and man that God is at stake. Or is it simply because the infamy of a wicked act is infinitely greater than we are able to imagine? People act as they please, doing what is vile, abusing the weak, not realizing that they are fighting God, affronting the divine, or that the oppression of man is a humiliation of God.”

God looks at this world, broken and corrupted, this world he created, this world that belongs to him, this world he loves, and his people in his image, all humanity as God’s children, whether we have acknowledged him or not, us who are hurt and hurting others, and he makes promises to us:  I am going to do something about his. It is an affront to who I am.

Do We Dare Pray this Prayer?

And so, Jesus, the one who is God Immanuel, gives a prayer to his disciples.

Pray this way: Our Father in heaven—Father of all creation, all humanity, a father to the oppressed and forgotten, the unworthy and unforgiven—our Father.

May your name be holy—God may you do something about how the state of this world is an insult to your justice and goodness, your reputation of the true and perfect God.

Look what it says after this: May your kingdom come and you will be done, on earth as it is in heaven—May your perfect goodness come to reside, be made manifest, break-in, shine through, restore and reorder every square inch of reality back to the way things ought to be, the way you desire them to be. So much so that when we look at heaven and we look at the earth, we won’t be able to tell the difference.

This is what this prayer is telling us to pray. There will be a day when what God desires for things and the way things are will be one and the same. One day, God’s name will be fully, unreservedly holy without exception or remainder.

This leads us to admit a kind of sad irony to how we pray the Lord’s Prayer. We recite the Lord’s Prayer, and it is so commonplace for many of us—so much for me, that I have caught myself yawning. Have you (no judgment)?

And I will be honest: Part of me would have been much more content if I just carried on reciting this prayer in the same thoughtless, boring, safe way. Why? Because thoughtless faith easily becomes selfish faith. And thoughtless faith does not bother to notice. Deep down, it does not want to.

I can recite this prayer, as I so often have, and my big takeaway from the prayer, if I think about it at all, is that God is in heaven. This world is awful and hopeless, so God wants me to go to heaven. So, God forgives me of my sins and promises to provide for all my needs, which is really convenient because, you know, have you seen the price of gas and groceries lately?! And that’s it. Amen.

And so, for many of us Christians, we can sing worship, delighted with how we get to escape earth and go to heaven, missing our calling that we are invited to bring heaven to earth, to live in such a way on earth as it is in heaven. We are called to make God’s name holy.

If this is what this prayer is saying, I’ll be honest with you: far from yawning at this prayer, we should ask ourselves: do we dare say this prayer?

One of the Ten Commandments is “You shall not take God’s name in vain,” and that is not referring to the words that come out of our mouths when we hit our thumbs with a hammer. It is whether we who know of God, who confess God, take seriously what that means with the way we live our lives. Have we taken God’s name in vain by reciting this prayer and refusing to live it?

The fact is sometimes we pray for God to answer our prayers, and the answer he gives is us. Be the answer to this prayer. Brothers and Sisters, will we make God’s name holy?

Do we dare to live this prayer?

Let’s pray.