Do you all know what a tort is? Tort … T-O-R-T … no E on the end; I’m not talking about those wonderful little German or Austrian pastries. A tort is a civil wrong that causes harm to another person, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the wrong. You leave a puddle of milk on the floor of your grocery store knowing it’s there, then someone slips in it and injures themselves: you have committed a tort. You speed through a stop sign, collide with another car, and injure the driver: you’ve not only broken the law, you’ve committed a tort.

A million years ago when I was in law school studying the law of torts with Professor Bill Lynch of blessed memory, I was introduced to the superhero of Anglo-American civil jurisprudence: the ordinary, reasonably prudent person, often called “ORPman”. ORPman’s super power, as you can tell from his name, is ordinary, reasonable prudence. His conduct is the standard against which allegedly tortious behavior is judged. His conduct is always sensible, never outrageous, not too timid, nor too bold. He is not a coward, but neither is he an excessive risk-taker. His expectations are rational; he is not demanding, but neither is he a doormat.

If ORPman were a grocer, he would never leave a puddle of milk in the dairy aisle. If ORPman were a driver, he would never pilot his automobile through a stop-sign controlled intersection without stopping or at high speed. ORPman would never do anything out of the ordinary, anything unreasonable, or anything imprudent, so ORPman would never pray the prayer Jesus taught his disciples in today’s gospel lesson. There is nothing ordinary, reasonable, or prudent about the Lord’s Prayer!

We know this right away: Jesus instructs his followers to address God as “Father.” Now, the Gospels were written in Koine Greek, but we believe that Jesus taught in Aramaic, the common tongue of Palestine in the First Century. Every once in a while, the writers of the New Testament let an Aramaic word slip into their writing. As a result, we know that in his personal prayer Jesus addressed God by the Aramaic word “Abba.”[1]

It is likely that this is the word he used in the instruction in today’s gospel text.

This was (and still is) extraordinary! There is no record of any of Jesus’ contemporaries addressing God directly as “Father” or teaching others to do so. Jewish prayers and writings of Jesus’ time never address God in this way and seldom describe God as “Father.” When they do, it is as the father of Israel the nation or as father of the universe, as in the prayer known as the Kaddish. To address God personally as one’s father is a very different thing.[2]

Furthermore, the Aramaic (and Hebrew) word for “father” is “av” or “ab.” “Abba” is what we would call a “diminutive” or “familiar” name. To address one’s father or mentor as “abba” is to do so not just personally, but intimately, with affectionate but respectful familiarity;[3]

to address the most powerful force in all of existence this way is outrageous. Nonetheless, apparently someone was paying attention to Jesus because we know from Paul’s letters that the Christians addressed God as “Abba” in their prayers.[4]

Jesus continues his unreasonable teaching with an instruction to praise the holiness of God’s Name and then make the first petition of the prayer: “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done….” This is about as imprudent a request as one can imagine. In fact, it’s not a request; it’s a command. In both Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels, the verbs in all of the petitions in the original Greek of the Lord’s Prayer, save one, are in something called the aorist imperative (and that exception is in the negative aorist subjunctive which functions as an imperative).

We don’t have an aorist tense in English, so it’s really hard to translate; it’s usually put into the future tense, but in the imperative mode it has a present tense sense to it: “this will be done in the future and it is to be completed in the present.” In other words, “Do this thing and do it now!” As usually translated into English, these petitions sound open ended: “Thy kingdom come … sometime. They will be done … sometime.” But the Greek original in this aorist imperative tense is more like, “Thy kingdom come. Now! Thy will be done. Now!”

And one more Greek geeky, grammar-y point … these are third person imperatives. In Greek, the third person imperative functions to emphasize the order; it’s like raising your voice. “Do this AND DO IT NOW!” Talk about imprudent! Jesus has taught us to address God in this personal, familiar, even intimate way, and then tells us to order God around, and not just order God around, but to shout at God!

This is not the ordinary, or reasonable, or prudent way to deal with a deity, especially not the maker of heaven and earth, the creator of all that is, seen and unseen. ORPman would not do this! This is is dangerous stuff. From the earliest days of Christian worship, when the faithful are invited to recite the Lord’s Prayer, the priest calls attention to that danger. In the Greek liturgy, metá parrisías tolmán: “with boldness and daring.”[5]

In the Latin mass, audémus dícere: “we make bold to say.”[6]

And in our own Book of Common Prayer, “And now, as our Savior Christ has taught us, we are bold to say….”[7]

In Frederick Buechner’s meditation on the Lord’s Prayer he writes:

In the Episcopal order of worship, the priest sometimes introduces the Lord’s Prayer with the words, “Now, as our Savior Christ hath taught us, we are bold to say…” The word bold is worth thinking about. We do well not to pray the prayer lightly. It takes guts to pray it at all. We can pray it in the unthinking and perfunctory way we usually do only by disregarding what we are saying.

“Thy will be done” is what we are saying. That is the climax of the first half of the prayer. We are asking God to be God. We are asking God to do not what we want, but what God wants. We are asking God to make manifest the holiness that is now mostly hidden, to set free in all its terrible splendor the devastating power that is now mostly under restraint. “Thy kingdom come . . . on earth” is what we are saying. And if that were suddenly to happen, what then? What would stand and what would fall? Who would be welcomed in and who would be thrown the hell out? Which if any of our most precious visions of what God is and of what human beings are would prove to be more or less on the mark and which would turn out to be phony as three-dollar bills? Boldness indeed. To speak those words is to invite the tiger out of the cage, to unleash a power that makes atomic power look like a warm breeze.[8]

Annie Dillard also underscores the danger of prayer in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk:

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.[9]

That is the greatest danger of prayer, that it may “draw us to where we can never return,” that it will change us in some irrevocable manner. Indeed, that is the purpose of prayer according to the Danish philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard: “The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”[10]

My grandfather was a life-long Methodist Sunday School teacher and he once told me, “Never pray for something you’re not willing to work for.” The late Pope Francis said, “A prayer that does not lead you to practical action for your brother — the poor, the sick, those in need of help, a brother in difficulty — is a sterile and incomplete prayer.”[11]

That’s why I’m not sure that Mr. Buechner is entirely correct when he says that, in the Lord’s Prayer, “we are asking God to be God.” Yes, we are doing that, but that’s not all we are doing. These petitions, these commands that God’s kingdom come and God’s will be done are really not directed at God. They are, as I said before, in the third person. As American Baptist pastor Nathaniel Erickson writes, “When we read the Lord’s Prayer, we have to ask who is the expected agent responsible to bring about” the coming of God’s kingdom and the doing of God’s will.[12]

It turns out, it’s us. Erickson answers his own question:

These petitions function like boomerangs: the directive force lands not on God, nor on the abstract notion of “God’s name/kingdom/will,” but on the prayers themselves! Jesus gives the command to those he is teaching to pray, and they re-give it to themselves over and over again.[13]

So how do we do that? How do we usher in God’s kingdom and tend to the doing of God’s will?

The answer to that is simple, but also impossible: we do so by the way we live our lives. That’s an easy answer to say, but it’s over-broad and gives us no direction, nothing to actual do, nothing to get done. So let me take a cue from recent events and offer just one action to take: Get political. Vote! Then keep after those elected to do their jobs.

You may have heard that the IRS has changed the rule about political involvement by churches and pastors: we may now endorse political candidates without fear of losing the church’s tax exempt status.[14]

I have publicly pledged not to do that and our bishop has issued a “pastoral word” admonishing our clergy not to do so. She wrote:

While the IRS may now allow political endorsements from religious leaders, that is not the path we will walk. We believe the Gospel is inherently about the people — it speaks into our real lives, systems, choices, and relationships. It will necessarily challenge the status quo and structures that seek to marginalize or harm people. It will often be political in the truest sense — of and for the people — but it must never be reduced to a party line, platform, or partisan agenda.[15]

I couldn’t agree more: the Gospel stands over against our political processes as a critique and a judgment.

If it is to speak into real lives, systems, and choices, if it is to challenge the status quo and our social structures, then it is we who must speak and we who must challenge. Our prayer of “They kingdom come, thy will be done” demands that we do so, not by endorsing candidates, but by weighing them and their actions against the mandates of Scripture. By voting for those who measure up, and by taking to task those in office who fail to meet the Biblical standard.

For example, in Leviticus, the Law of Moses commands, “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”[16]

In an election, which candidate or party is most likely to treat immigrants and refugees in this way? If an officeholder is promoting policies in opposition to this principle, call them, email them, write a letter to an editor. Take them to task!

The prophet Micah told us that God’s will is that we do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.[17]

I think that, as a Christian who has prayed for the coming of God’s kingdom, I am required to cast my vote in a manner that reflects that. Thus, it matters in an election which candidate’s and which party’s policies come closest to doing justice and loving kindness. And if current government policies are not doing justice and promoting kindness, I have to speak out or my prayer that God’s will be done is meaningless.

Jesus said that in the Kingdom of Heaven the Father blesses those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome strangers, clothe the naked, take care of the sick, and visit those in prison, and turns away those who fail to do such things.[18]

I believe these are not simply personal, but societal obligations and that we should, therefore, support and vote for candidates and parties who will institute, maintain, and fund governmental programs which accomplish these things.

A few years ago, Ike Silver, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, wrote:

In a deeply divided [society], talking politics can inspire dread, prompting many of us to avoid sharing our views altogether. Faced with the prospect of saying the wrong thing or starting an argument, “staying out of it” often feels like the safest move.[19]

Perhaps keeping quiet is what an ordinary, reasonable, and prudent person would do, but the Lord’s Prayer does not permit a follower of Jesus to do so. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “As much as the Christian would like to remain distant from political struggle, nonetheless, even here the commandment of love urges the Christian to stand up for his neighbor.”[20]

ORPman, that superhero of Amerian tort law, would not pray the Lord’s Prayer: it’s way to risky! But we do; we take the risk and we incur the obligation. First, we pray for the coming of God’s kingdom and the doing of God’s will, then we strive for it and we do it. That’s how prayer works. Amen.

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This homily was offered by the Rev. Dr. C. Eric Funston on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, July 27, 2025 to the people of Harcourt Parish (Episccopal Church of the Holy Spirit), Gambier, Ohio, where Fr. Funston was guest presider and preacher.

The lessons for the service were Genesis 18:20-32; Psalm 138; Colossians 2:6-15,16-19; and St. Luke 11:1-13. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.

The illustration is a cartoon generated by ChatGPT.

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Notes:
Click on footnote numbers to link back to associated text. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Scripture are from the New Revised Version Updated Edition.

[1] See Mark 14:36

[2] See Wyatt Houtz, Jürgen Moltmann on Replacing the Our Father prayer with the Abba Dear Father, from 2009 Emergent Village Theological Conversations,The PostBarthian, undated, accessed 24 July 2026

[3] Edward Sri, A Biblical Walk through the Mass (Ascension Press, :Newark, NJ:2011), page 124

[4] See Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6

[5] The Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, undated, accessed 25 July 2025

[6] Tridentine Mass, Liturgies.net, undated, accessed 25 July 2025

[7] The Book of Common Prayer 1979, Holy Eucharist, page 363 (emphasis added)

[8] Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words, now at Lord’s Prayer, FrederickBuechner.com, March 27, 2023, accessed 25 July 2025

[9] Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (HarperCollins, London, 1984), pp. 40-41

[10] Soren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits: An Occasional Discourse: On the Occasion of a Confession: Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, Chapter 2 (1847)

[11] Pope Francis, Angelus, Vatican.va, St Peter’s Square, Sunday, 21 July 2013, accessed 25 July 2025

[12] Nathaniel J. Erickson, Translating the 3rd Person Imperatives in the Lord’s Prayer, Part 2: the one praying is responsible, NT Greek Et Al, October 17, 2024, accessed 25 July 2025

[13] Ibid.

[14] Daniel Burke, Bob Smietana, and Jack Jenkins, IRS says churches can now endorse political candidates, NPR.org, July 8, 2025, accessed 25 July 2025

[15] Anne B. Jolly, A Pastoral Word from Bishop Jolly on Church and Public Witness, Dohio.org, July 11, 2025, accessed 25 July 2025

[16] Leviticus 19:34

[17] Micah 6:8

[18] Matthew 25:32-46

[19] Ike Silver, When Political Discussions Get Heated, Is It Best to Just Stay Out of It?, Kellogg Insight, July 8, 2022, accessed 25 July 2025

[20] Quoted in Lori Brandt Hale and Reggie L. Williams, Is This a Bonhoeffer Moment?, Sojourners, February 2018, accessed 25 July 2025