We began last week a four-part sermon series on the Lord's Prayer, which, though many of us know it by heart, still contains so much that we have yet to incorporate into our praying and our living.

This is the prayer Jesus taught in response to his disciples' plea: "Lord, teach us to pray. " It is a short distilled prayer made up not of magic words and phrases, but of words which form and inform the contours of our praying. This is the prayer that still teaches disciples of Jesus Christ HOW to pray, and how to live.

Those of you who were here last Sunday remember that we began at the beginning with the phrase: Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Abba in heaven. Our God-intimate and universal, familiar and awesome, personal and holy-holy parent of us all, each and every one of us, hallowed be your name.

That phrase, "hallowed be Thy name," may roll off our tongues if we've grown up saying it, but hallowed is hardly an everyday word. You see, we may think we know what we're saying, yet not know much about it at all.

I like the prayer of the little boy who was overheard in church, earnestly praying: "Our father who art in heaven, Harold be your name." I bet someone named Harold was a lot more familiar to that little boy than hallowed.

What is Jesus trying to teach us here? What is he trying to help us understand when he says: "Here's how you pray. Say: abba-in-heaven, may your name be hallowed, holy, may your kingdom come, may your will be done. " This is really a big clue to everything that Jesus was trying to show us, not just in this prayer, but in the whole of his life and ministry. Holy name of God, kingdom of God and will of God all go together. Jesus is trying to teach us how to understand that the God who gave us birth and life wills us to be part of his new kingdom.

When you pray, say: "Abba in heaven, may your name be hallowed, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven-here on earth, where we live, as it already is in heaven, in the holy reality of your design and intent. "

Now, I warned you last week that there's a lot packed into these few short, deceptively familiar phrases. There's layer upon layer of meaning, worthy of a whole lifetime of study and intimacy. There are numerous references back to Hebrew scripture, which, of course, would have been immediately obvious to those first disciples, if not to most of us. Packed into this little prayer, as I said last week, is the summary of the Messiah's Good News, and the whole of God's agenda.

I want to go back for a moment to this business about Abba, father, for it really contains the link to today's probing of kingdom and will. We emphasized last week the intimate nature of that word "abba," daddy, and today I want to add another dimension, as well. When Jesus calls God "father," he is also harking back to Moses. Remember Moses, Prince of Egypt, the one saved and called by God to lead the people out from slavery in Egypt? In the book of Exodus, God tells Moses to say to Pharaoh: "Thus says the Lord: 'Israel is my son, my firstborn; let my son go, let my people go, that they may serve me. '"

God is saying: these are MY people. I created them. They are to be free, so that they might serve, not your purposes, Pharaoh, but mine. Jesus knew that the fatherhood of God conveyed not only intimacy with God, which is so much in vogue in our day, I might add, but also freedom, liberation, and then, you see, participation in the saving work of God's kingdom. Let my people go, that they might serve me.

So watch out, folks. This prayer which Jesus gave to his disciples as the template for how to pray, right from the start drafts us into the service of God's agenda for the world. Some of us might long for prayer to be an activity that takes us out of the world, into some sort of disembodied, spiritualized realm of sweetness and light. But this prayer points us in a different direction. Right back to where we started. Terra firma. "Disciples," he says, "you need to pray for your will to be lined up with God's will. So that what you long for on this earth is what God longs for. That you understand that being my disciple means that you are now a citizen of a kingdom such as this earth has never seen."

Some of you may remember the slogan "the personal is political." I think I may still have a button somewhere that proclaims that. And, while we may locate that slogan in the '60s or the women's movement, it's actually apropos of our prayer here, as well. Abba in heaven: may your name be holy, your kingdom come and your will be done. Politics has crept into Jesus' prayer when we weren't looking!

Now, I'm going to confess to you here a fantasy that came to me as I was writing this sermon. It is that at this point, the choir would spontaneously break into Handel's Messiah. Not the whole thing, but just that rousing part about kingdoms: "the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. And he shall reign forever. . . ." It would be so Holly-wood, but also it would rescue me from the perils of mentioning politics from the pulpit.

But don't worry. I'm not going to endorse anybody today, but the point is this: the way we are to hallow God's name, to keep it holy, isn't just about what we say with our lips or pray in our hearts. Nor is the emphasis on the hallowing of God's name just a way of discouraging profanity. We're talking Kingdom here. Jesus shows us that we are to hallow God's name in our living, in the stands we take, the choices we make, the sacrifice we offer.

A Bible study on the Lord's Prayer from the World Council of Churches asks: if we understand prayer to mean an opening of ourselves to God, a willingness to commit ourselves to that for which we pray, what do we risk when we pray for God's kingdom and God's will to be done on earth?

What do we risk when we pray to be lifted into God's agenda, God's work, God's plan, God's scenario? This is so different from how we usually pray, isn't it? If we're honest, don't most of our prayers start and end with our agenda? We pray for ourselves and our needs. We often pray for more of what we already have. And when we pray for God's will to be done, aren't we often just asking God to do what we think God should do?

Friends, it's not that those prayers are wrong or always inappropriate. It's just that Jesus asks us to start from another place. Next week, we'll get to what we're asking for ourselves-daily bread and forgiveness. But first, first, we petition God to do God's bidding. God in heaven: may your name be hallowed, your kingdom come and your will be done.

God's will for this world is that the kingdom come on earth. That the poor hear some good news for a change. That those who've been held captive are set loose and those who haven't been able or haven't wanted to see what's going on take a good hard look. And all this, because the time of God's favor has begun in our midst!

Yikes! Is this what we thought we were signing up for? What do we risk when we pray as our Lord Jesus taught . . . our privilege, our wealth, our self-centeredness, our apathy, our complacency with the way things are. . . . When we pray as Jesus teaches, we give ourselves over to God's intent for his children, for the whole of his creation. In claiming God as father, in vowing to hallow his name, we implicitly agree to take on his will for this earth and its peoples.

Listen to this description of what we're taking on from N.T. Wright, a preeminent New Testament scholar: "What does it mean for us to pray this kingdom-prayer? It means, for a start, that as we look up into the face of our Father in Heaven, and commit ourselves to the hallowing of his name, that we look immediately out upon the whole earth that he made, and we see it as he sees it. Thy Kingdom come: to pray this means seeing the world in binocular vision. See it with the love of the creator for his spectacularly beautiful creation; and see it with the deep grief of the creator for the battered and battle-scarred state in which the world now finds itself. Put those two together, and bring the binocular picture into focus: the love and the grief join into the Jesus-shape, the kingdom-shape, the shape of the cross. . . ."

Says Wright: "We are praying, as Jesus was praying and acting, for the redemption of the world; for the radical defeat and uprooting of evil; and for heaven and earth to be married at last, for God to be all in all. And if we pray this way, we must, of course, be prepared to live this way."

Let me close this morning with the prayer of another child, this time a little girl, working to learn the Lord's Prayer by heart. She folded her hands and closed her eyes and bowed her head and prayed: "Our father. Our father. Thy kingdom come. Amen."

She might not have had all the words, but bless her heart, she got it right. May the Lord Jesus teach us how to pray and how to live. Amen.