What exactly do you mean when you pray these words of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘your will be done on earth as in heaven’?

I want you to turn the clock back to 1950. (We all remember that year, don’t we?) Imagine we’re in church. Now, who comes to the altar to make their communion? Only those of us who’ve been confirmed. And what, according to the old Prayer Book, has to have happened before we were confirmed? We’ve had to memorise the old Prayer Book Catechism. And what was in the Catechism? Amongst other things, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer – and the Ten Commandments. So before we could go up to that altar, we had to know something of what to believe as Christians, how to pray as Christians – and how to behave as Christians. And, we had to have reaffirmed our baptismal promises publicly in Confirmation. One of those promises was ‘Dost thou in the name of this child promise obedience to God’s holy will and commandments?”. And in 1950 we would have heard the Ten Commandments or the Summary of the Law read out near the beginning of every Communion service.

I want us now to return to 2009. How many of you can recite all Ten Commandments?  …………..All that by way of introduction. 

Now listen carefully to a rather solid quote from Eugene Peterson, the author-translator of that version of the Bible known as ‘The Message’. He writes:

“…[in the Church nowadays] the three-personal [Divine Trinity of] Father, Son and Holy Spirit is replaced  by a very individualised personal Trinity of my Holy Wants, my Holy Needs, and my Holy Feelings. We live in an age in which we have all been trained from the cradle to choose for ourselves what is best for us….we enter adulthood with the working assumption that whatever we need and want and feel forms the divine control centre of our lives. The new Holy Trinity. The sovereign self expresses itself in Holy Needs, Holy Wants, and Holy Feelings. The time and intelligence that our ancestors spent on understanding the sovereignty revealed in Father, Son and Holy Spirit are directed by our contemporaries into affirming and validating the sovereignty of our needs, wants and feelings. My needs are non-negotiable. My so-called rights, defined individually, are fundamental to my identity….”

Ouch. And why do I get echoes of the Garden of Eden story here, with God saying  – ‘You may eat from every tree in the garden, but not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die’ and the serpent saying ‘Of course you will not die. God knows that as soon as you eat it, you eyes will be opened and you will be like gods knowing both good and evil’.

The insidious shift from God-centred to me-centred religion and spirituality and ethics, where each of us sets our own rules, and the Ten Commandments and others like them become the ten or so suggestions, not all of which need be attempted.

True, from time to time we hear, or even recite, the mantra ‘There’s too much talk about rights, and not enough about responsibilities’. Yes, indeed, but immediately we say that, we’re on a different playing field from the one Eugene Peterson describes. Because what exactly are those responsibilities to be, and where are we to derive them from? And very soon we find ourselves having to talk about the claims of morality on our obedience. We may be free, but we realise it’s not a freedom to decide for ourselves what right and wrong will be, but rather a freedom to choose between what is right and wrong, independently of us – a freedom, that is, to obey or disobey. We’ve acknowledged we have a conscience which limits our autonomy. 

Now that conscience needs to be formed, and informed. People’s consciences can lead them in a bewildering variety of contradictory directions. For example, the Aztecs conscientiously practised human sacrifice. Good intentions are necessary, but not enough; hell is paved with them.  

There are various options about where we as beings with a ‘conscience’ can derive morality from. 

The first and most obvious for Westerners is the Judaeo-Christian tradition, in which the obedience of the conscience is not just to moral law but to God, the author of the law, and the voice within the voice of our conscience. (And doing wrong becomes ‘sin’.)

In Judaism, the 10 Commandments and the various laws and commandments scattered through the Old Testament become the 613 commandments of the Torah, with the sublime simplicity of the Shema as its climax: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and your strength’, to which the Rabbis added the verse from Leviticus, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’.  

Jesus and the New Testament writers didn’t repudiate this tradition; they assumed its validity, but reshaped it. Jesus repeated the Rabbis’ summary of the Law, and reaffirmed in one way or another all the 10 commandments, except one – the Sabbath commandment. And explicit or implicit in the teachings and example of Christ are principles which can shape our behaviour if we so choose. Most of this can be found foreshadowed in the Old Testament. Jesus’ moral teaching differs from that of the Old Testament only in two ways: in what he leaves out from it, and in his focus on motive – doing the right thing for the right reason. But he also left his disciples with one new commandment: ‘Love one another as I have loved you’. The toughest of the lot. 

So the question ‘what would Jesus do?’ is a good and necessary question, and a helpful one for individual Christians to ask, so long as we’ve spent time reflecting on the Scriptures, especially the Gospels, and on our own experience of trying to obey God’s will. But that question will only take us so far, because the moral issues we meet in our modern context may be far removed from those rising in Biblical Palestine – though of course many issues are identical because human nature remains basically the same. We do however need to draw on the tradition of the Church as it has reflected over many centuries and in many different contexts on what it is to ‘obey God’. Love is indeed the fulfilment of the moral law, yes, but love is seeking the good of the beloved – and how do we establish what that good is?

Be very careful with this word ‘love’. It can mean so many things, and today it’s reduced all too easily to a feeling.  When I prepare a couple for marriage there’s always an interesting moment when I quote Bonhoeffer’s words, ‘you are getting married because you love one another. After the wedding you love one another because you are married.’ And I explain that that’s the meaning of the wedding vow they’re about to take – a willed commitment to love the other. Most engaged couples more or less understand this, but Bonhoeffer’s words come as a visible shock to some who have reduced love to a feeling. (Interesting discussions can begin at that point.) Love relates to intention, to motive, to sacrificially seeking the good of another. Having said that, we still have to discover what that good is. And what about justice – economic justice, criminal justice, civil justice, social justice – love writ large, as justice is sometimes described, embodied in the patterns and systems by which we are to relate lovingly to one another in society? 

The difficulty is how to draw on the centuries-old wisdom of the Church without falling into the hands of the unholy tribe of holy lawyers, in other words how to avoid falling into legalism.

It’s a misunderstanding of Judaism to think of it only as a religion of laws. But there’s no doubt that its central focus is on law, with the best and worst consequences of that. How, for example, faced with the 613 commandments of God in the Torah, do you manage to keep the main thing the main thing? As Jesus pointed out.

Islam also is essentially a religion of divine law. That is its strength and its claim. Its classic expression is shari’a law. Muslim migrants and missionaries are bringing Islam into the moral vacuum and relativism of Western society where, increasingly, anything goes. The West has gone morally soft – but societies can’t exist long term without an overarching value system, without a moral paradigm, and so we are in transition to something new. Will it be Islam? – a question increasingly discussed in Europe today. Some of you may have seen two programmes recently on TV. One was ‘White Girl’, a drama about a young English girl moving towards the certainty and security of Islam out of a dysfunctional lapsed Catholic family. The other was ‘Make me a Muslim’, a documentary series about how a group of English adults tried out for several weeks what it was like to live as Muslims. At least two of them found a structure emerging in their lives which they valued, and they may well be continuing as Muslims today. I am certain of this: the Church will not withstand the challenge of Islam unless it recovers its moral core. Yes, Christianity is a religion of redemption and forgiveness by a God who loves us unconditionally. But He still calls for our obedience.

So what is our Christian moral core? Anglicans and many other Christians believe in a three-fold authority in establishing Christian truth – including truth about what is morally right and wrong – first and foremost Scripture, then Tradition (the Church’s 2000 years-long reflection on living by Scripture), and Reason, ‘sound learning’ applied to Scripture and Tradition. The trick is to keep the moral core simple enough for the ordinary Christian to grasp and apply, flexible enough to apply in all the different circumstances of life (no easy task), coherent enough so that one part is not in conflict with another, and provisional enough to take account of human fallibility (Popes, wise as they often are, are not infallible, and Brazilian Cardinals it seems are not only fallible but also far from wise). 

The early monastic Fathers had a crack at distilling, pulling together this moral core, and Pope Gregory the Great, faced with the challenge of how to Christianise Barbarian Europe, used the Fathers’ deep spiritual perceptions to come up with the list of the Seven Deadly Sins – the root sins from which all others flow and which bring spiritual death. By the way, how many of you can name all Seven Deadly Sins? A few weeks ago the Vatican tried to update this list for today’s world by adding seven ‘new’ deadly sins with a social dimension, including polluting the environment and being obscenely rich. This valiant attempt was trivialised and dismissed in a grubby DomPost editorial gloating over Catholic priestly paedophilia, and then sermonising from its own pulpit without saying where it derived its values from or whether the anonymous writer actually lived up to them.

It’s interesting to note the attempt of Hans Kung and others to formulate a ‘global ethic’ alongside and balancing the universal declaration of human rights. There’s no doubt there are significant moral values universally held, mostly deriving from religious roots of different traditions. Secularist moral systems are of little help. In a totally materialist world view, moral conscience is either inexplicable, or reduced to ‘evolutionary’ explanations in which ethics arise from factors like the yuk response to excreta or the sharing of food resources within a biological group.) 

Globally we are moving into a century of converging crises: financial, economic, population growth, peak oil, and climate change. In the face of this we will risk massive social breakdown, at global, national, regional and local levels – not tomorrow, but it is a risk we will have to face in the future. A week ago I attended a day-long meeting at Te Papa on ‘Resilient Communities’ It was put together, with the help of local bodies, by a number of groups concerned about what will be Greater Wellington’s response to these converging crises. Sadly, the Church was largely absent from the meeting, both on the floor and in the presentations ‘up front’ (though the Trinity was invoked in the closing prayer – in Maori – a nod to the tangata whenua). The whole meeting was a refreshing repudiation of the culture of the other Holy Trinity, ‘my Holy needs, wants and feelings’. It wasn’t quite so clear what the ethics of ‘resilient communities’ is to be grounded on, or where the inner resources are to come from for our transition to the very different life-style which the future will demand of us.

I believe they have to come from this: the Christian Scriptures. As Eugene Peterson says, 

‘Without this text, firmly established at the authoritative centre of our communal and personal lives, we will founder. We will sink into a swamp of well-meaning but ineffectual men and women who are mired unmercifully in our needs and wants and feelings.’ 

Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ, as Jerome said many centuries ago. And how can we know the will of God except through Christ? What do you mean when you pray these words of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘your will be done on earth as in heaven’? What exactly do you mean?

A sermon preached in St Alban’s Anglican Church, Eastbourne, on 15 March 2009 by the Revd Canon Peter Stuart

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