Sermons
July 5, 2026 (Proper 9)
How to Do It
Matthew 6:9-15
Awhile back I bought some books from a friend of mine who has a sort of continuing online garage sale going. These books had belonged to his grandmother, who passed away a couple years ago. They were mostly “how-to” books; one was intended to teach knitting, crocheting (which I already know how to do), and other handcrafts.
Most of us have “how-to” books in our kitchens; they’re called cookbooks—I even have one that is titled How to Cook Everything.[1] When I was a kid my mom took up drawing and oil painting, and she had a book called How to Draw What You See.
Nowadays you don’t even have to buy a book to learn how to do something: on YouTube and other platforms there are “how-to” videos to watch. I learned how to make really good pizza from a YouTube channel called “Sip & Feast,”[2] and have learned quite a bit of watercolor technique from other channels.
It isn’t clear to me whether “how-to” books, other than cookbooks, are selling as well these days as they used to, but the whole idea of others teaching us, whether directly and in person or through media of various kinds, still seems to be incredibly popular. That popularity was spoofed years ago by Monty Python’s Flying Circus in a short sketch called “How to Do It,” in which Graham Chapman, Eric Idle (in drag), and John Cleese hosted a TV program purporting to teach all kinds of things, from playing musical instruments to ridding the world of all known diseases.[3]
In Jesus’ day, it was common for a group of disciples to ask their teacher for a lesson on prayer. Just before Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, the disciples ask Jesus, “Teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”[4] I don’t know that there’s any record of what the prayer John the Baptist might have taught his followers was, but it seems from this that he did, and maybe Luke was aware that it happened, if not of its specific content. In Matthew, of course, instruction on prayer is included in the “Sermon on the Mount,” rather than being a response to someone asking Jesus to teach them to pray.
Christians have argued for centuries whether Jesus intended us to say this prayer as he gave it, or if it’s meant to be a model, just to help us construct our own prayers. Growing up, as I mentioned last week, we learned the Lord’s Prayer, but we didn’t say it together in worship, and I don’t remember whether we were taught to say it as part of our own prayers, or whether we were taught not to repeat it in our personal prayers.
Fence-sitter that I sometimes am, I feel like it’s valuable both as a model and as a prayer to be repeated as it is. But why this specific prayer and not any of the others that are in the Bible, like the prayer of Jabez[5] or any of the Psalms?
I think the reason might be the same one that prompts us to revere the Ten Commandments, even if we believe the rest of the Old Testament Law no longer applies to us.
The 20th chapter of Exodus, in which we find the most familiar version of the Ten Commandments,[6] begins with, “Then God spoke all these words.” After the Ten are given directly from God, the people tell Moses, “Don’t make us hear from God like that again; let him speak to you and then you can tell us what he said. Hearing God’s voice is frightening and it may kill us.”[7] So only the Big Ten are given directly from the mouth of God; the rest are mediated through Moses.
And the Lord’s Prayer comes directly from Jesus—the Son of God, or in John’s Gospel the incarnation of God in human form—while other prayers are mediated through human beings.
Like I said, I do think the Lord’s Prayer is valuable to Christians both as a model, and as a prayer to repeat regularly in private and in public worship.
We could look at each phrase of the prayer individually—as I have done in the past when I preached a seven-week series on it. But I’m not doing that this time. Instead, let’s think about how praying the Lord’s Prayer regularly, or making it the model for building our own prayers, focuses our minds, hearts, and lives in a particular direction.
I mentioned the prayer of Jabez. There are two major differences between it and the Lord’s Prayer, leaving aside the fact that Jabez was a minor figure in the Old Testament, whose only claim to fame appears to have been this prayer, while Jesus is…well…Jesus.
First, the prayer is totally individualistic. “Oh that you would bless me and enlarge my border, and that your hand might be with me, and that you would keep me from hurt and harm!” It’s all about me, me, me. My blessings, my border, my protection and prosperity.
In contrast, whether we pray the Lord’s Prayer by ourselves or during worship, it’s a corporate prayer. There is no “I” or “me” in it, only “we” and “us.” Everything we ask for, we ask for in community—it’s not give me my daily bread; it’s make sure all of us are fed.
The other thing the Lord’s Prayer does that the prayer of Jabez does not is focus us on God—on who God is and what God might like to have happen.
Jabez only addresses God as “you” in the context of what God can do for him. The Lord’s Prayer begins by calling God “Father”—perhaps behind this is the Aramaic Abba, a child’s name for their parent. We ask that God’s Name would be made holy—the question of whether the Name is inherently holy, whether God makes it such, or whether this is about how we relate to the Name is unanswered. We request that God’s will be done, that God’s reign be realized on this earth (not that our own territory would be expanded) as it already is in heaven.
That all happens before we ever turn to asking for anything for ourselves.
As we pray the Lord’s Prayer these days, we include a phrase not found in Matthew’s or Luke’s versions. It is included, in a slightly simplified form, in the version found in the early church life and worship manual called the Didache,[8] which dates to just after the New Testament writings were all finished: “…for Yours is the power and the glory forever.” (The Didache also explicitly commands that the Lord’s Prayer be said three times a day.) That last line is based on a prayer attributed to David in 1 Chronicles 29.
Adding that line means that focus on God brackets the prayer. We start by calling God “Father” and reminding ourselves of God’s holiness; and then after we ask for God to help us with our daily needs, with forgiveness for ourselves and others, and for protection from trials and evil, we again give praise to God.
The Lord’s Prayer is important to us because it was given to us directly from Jesus himself. It’s important because when we ask for God to meet our daily needs, we are asking not just for ourselves individually, but for our whole community, if not for our whole world. And most of all, it’s important because it focuses our attention on God, on who God is, on what God might want to have happen in this world and in our lives.
Reminds me of another verse from Matthew 6, a verse we’ll hear again here in a couple weeks: “Strive first for the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”[9]
[1] How to Cook Everything: The Basics, by Mark Bittman, the New York Times food editor (at the time; I don’t know if he still is). This is an abridged version of the full book of the same title, but without “The Basics.”
[2] The owner of this channel is an Italian-American gentleman named James Delmage, and he and his wife have published a cookbook by the same name, which I have in my Amazon wishlist (which I mostly keep so I don’t have to re-look for things I want when I’m ready to order them).
[3] https://youtu.be/tNfGyIW7aHM?si=4grF1yfk2RzMNi8E
[4] Luke 11:1-4
[5] 1 Chronicles 4:10
[6] There’s another version in Deuteronomy 5:1-22, presented as Moses reminding Israel of the commandments they received at Mount Sinai. The main difference in the two has to do with the Sabbath commandment; Exodus calls us to remember the Sabbath because God created everything in six days and rested on the seventh, while Deuteronomy says to observe the Sabbath because we were once enslaved and never got a day off, until God liberated us from our enslavement.
[7] This is obviously my paraphrase of Exodus 20:19.
[8] The full text of the Didache may be found online at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0714.htm.
[9] Matthew 6:33