LD 46-47, I Peter 1:13-2:3 "Learning from Father" Scott Hoezee

Within the nucleus of every cell in your body (and you've got a staggering number of cells inside you) is a copy of your genetic code. Strung out along twenty-three chromosomes is your DNA, a twisting double-helix of sugars and phosphates creating a long sequence of four basic chemicals called adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine (or A, G, C, and T for short). The sequential order in which all those As, Gs, Cs, and Ts follow one another and alternate with one another is the most basic unit of what goes into who you are.

But it has taken a long time even to begin writing down the full sequence. Even though there are only four basic chemicals in the code, the full string consists of no less than 3.1 billion chemical units. Just writing out that entire sequence of AGCTGCATAC and so forth requires as many pages as are in 13 full sets of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. It is outrageously complex--an entire universe of information so vast that it clogs up the memory banks of huge computers.

It is the universe within you. And that entire universe of data is inside you not just once or twice but countless millions of times--that mind-bogglingly long string of 3.1 billion chemicals exists inside the center of your every cheek cell, brain cell, blood cell, saliva cell. If a doctor wants to check your DNA, all she needs to do is swab the inside of your mouth, check one pin-prick of blood, or take a look at a single strand of hair. All that complex information is in every one of those places and more besides.

We open with this today because in some ways both the Lord's Prayer and the words we just read from I Peter have to do with what could be called our spiritual genetics. The wonderfully complex code in your every cell determines who you are as a human being. But believers have an additional set of genetic codes, Peter says. There is a new genetic seed that has been sown into us and it has made us children of the heavenly Father. And if what goes into our physical make-up is richly complex, so is what makes God your and my Father.

We are now chips off the divine block. In verses 23-25 Peter cleverly combines some imagery by which he highlights the kind of "new birth" we receive through Jesus. In verse 23 Peter says that the seed that determines who we are spiritually is not a perishable, physical seed but an imperishable, divine one. It's the Word of God itself.

In most of the New Testament the Greek word for "seed" is sperma, from which we derive the English word "sperm." A human, biological seed is what first went into creating the genetic code of each of us. Of course, today we know that the man's seed provides just half of the information for that 3.1 billions-long chemical code, the other half coming from the woman's egg. But in the ancient world it was believed that the man supplied everything--the woman's womb was just the receiver and incubator.

But in I Peter 1:23 Peter does not use the typical Greek word of sperma but uses a more unusual and rare word: spora, from which we get the word "spore," which is a word that reminds you of plants. The spores of a dandelion wafted along on the wind are what transfer dandelions from your neighbor's yard to yours! This is an agricultural image, as is Peter's next line about grass and flowers. Yet he is also talking about being "born again."

It seems Peter is deliberately combining biology and agriculture to convey that in Christ we are made every bit as new as when first we were physically created in our mother's womb. But the way by which this new birth comes does not involve biology but the farmer-like planting of God's Word in our hearts. In a way this passage is reminiscent of Jesus' discussion with Nicodemus.

Jesus told him he had to be born again, and so Nicodemus poked a little fun at Jesus' rhetoric by pointing out that a senior citizen like himself was not quite able to crawl back into his mommy's tummy! "I can barely get into and out of a taxi anymore and you want me to go back into a womb!" Long about the moment Nicodemus said that (quitely chortling to himself at his own cleverness), a gust of wind whistled through the porch where Jesus and Nicodemus were sitting. Jesus raised a hand to the air and said, "Did you hear that? The wind blows from places we don't know to places we can't see. The Holy Spirit is like that. It's a mystery but when the Spirit blows into your heart, depositing the spore of God's gospel Word, you are made into an all new person. It really is a new birth."

The fact that we can call God "Father" is a clear indication that we are all new people. We've been genetically re-wired along a billions-long string of spiritual information. We've been changed at a most fundamental, bedrock level of existence, right down to our every cell, as it were. And because we've been changed, we pray. We pray "Our Father." We don't pray because we have to. We don't pray because anyone has ordered us to pray. We pray to our Father for the same reason an infant cries out to its mother when hungry, hurting, or scared. What else can we do? To whom else would we call? It's a reflex.

But it's also a mystery fraught with the complexities of a fallen world and of our own confused, mixed-up, broken selves. We've been changed, saved, adopted into the divine family but because we're not home yet, there are also many things of which we need to be mindful when we pray. So for the balance of this message I want us to think about prayer in general, saving some nitty-gritty specific aspects of prayer for the rest of this sermon series. But I want to ask what it means that we open our prayer by calling God "our Father in heaven" even as we bless and hallow that Name.

Our Father in heaven. As N.T. Wright says, this is how we open our prayer and yet it is also the place we want to end up. Our Father in heaven is not just the place we start but is also our highest goal; it's the starting line and the finish line all in one. We want this Father. We want to be closer to him than we feel sometimes. So we reach out to him in prayer. We hear snatches of his voice now and again and so in prayer we answer back to the voice we thought we heard. We see patches of his divine light shining around this or that corner of life, and so in prayer we run to the light. By the Spirit we feel now and again the embrace of a love that has already taken hold of us, and so in prayer we hug God back--we tighten our grip on the hand first extended to us in baptism and now leading us every day.

But we dare to call God our Father only because Jesus told us it was all right to do so. If he hadn't told us that, then it would be merely audacious to presume we could address God in so familiar and cozy a way. For instance, unless you had very good reasons for thinking it was OK to do, you would not waltz into the Oval Office, see the President of the United States seated behind his stately desk, and then casually call out, "Hey there, Bill!" You'd want a solid reason to think such a level of familiarity was both warranted and welcome. But the president, for all his prestige, is finally just a fellow human being. Things get a wee bit magnified in this regard when you're talking about God himself!

But we dare to call God "Father" because Jesus invited us to do so. He told us it would be OK. But he also reminded us to follow up this term of warmth and endearment with the words, "Hallowed be your Name." He's our Father and wants us to call him such, but he's still the Holy One of the galaxies. Every time we open the Lord's Prayer, we span the curious tension of addressing a God who loves us the way only a father can and yet One who alone holds all the cosmic power.

Somewhere within that dynamic tension is the essence of this prayer. It soars into the heavens and yet it as earthy as a father-son relationship. It's little old us with all our quirks, foibles, and needs in the presence of a God whose grandeur makes angels shudder. Seen the right way it should be clear that when we pray to this great God, everything else in our prayer should be shaped by the fact that it is this God's presence in which we're praying.

That's more important to keep in mind than we sometimes realize. All too often prayer becomes mostly about us (or at least about what God can do for us). It's what I need, the pickle I'm in, the desires I have that set the agenda. "Dear God, get me out of this, solve that, supply such-and-such, watch over so-and so." Now in one respect these kinds of concerns are the proper content of prayer. God wants us to tell him what bothers us, distresses us, afflicts us.

In fact, he rather insists that we do not hold back. That was a lesson not lost on the Old Testament psalmists, many of whom all-but screamed into the divine face, lobbing laments, pleas, and even criticisms of God into the precincts of heaven like hand grenades. As we've noted before, the very act of making requests of God is a sign of our trust.

If your son or daughter is in trouble, is confused, needs help, your dearest wish as a parent is that the kid will come to you (as opposed to seeking help from friends or, even more hurtfully, from some other adult whom the child apparently trusts more than you). You want the child to seek your advice or help because it is deeply gratifying when that happens. It says a lot about a parent-child relationship if the child can be honest enough to ask for help while demonstrating his or her belief that you have what it takes to supply the help.

So also with God: he wants us to petition him. He wants our hearts to be open to him as signs of honesty, trust, and faith. But God also wants to mold those same hearts. In fact, the Lord's Prayer is supposed to do just that. After all, where did this prayer come from? Well, of course it came from Jesus, but why did he give it? Because the disciples asked Jesus how to pray. So Jesus prayed in front of them. And in so doing Jesus gave not only a prayer to repeat but he laid open his own heart for all to see.

If I could listen to you pray, I'd learn a lot about you. And I don't mean listening in on the kind of prayer you might utter when opening a Mission Emphasis banquet or at the start of a Friendship Guild meeting, I mean overhearing the kind of prayer you whisper when the door is shut and no one else is around. I mean the kind of prayer in which you lay out to God the concerns you'd never dare raise your hand about at an evening service when I'm soliciting prayer requests from the congregation.

If I could listen to you pray day in and day out, I'd learn what kinds of things plague you, worry you, bring you joy, bring you tears. I'd figure out after a while whether your thoughts tend to be centered primarily on your immediate circle of family and friends or whether your thoughts range far enough afield as to include prayers for the nations. I'd hear whether or not you pray for the things in the bulletin and so might be able to make some conclusions as to how prominently Calvin Church figures into your thinking. Our prayers reveal our hearts.

Jesus' prayer reveals his heart, too. The Lord's Prayer shows the way Jesus thought. It shows his singular focus on the kingdom of God. It reveals his never-ceasing sense of the Father's presence as well as Jesus' unhappy awareness of the fact that he was walking the streets of a world in which people are routinely hungry (give us daily bread); a world in which injustice flows like a mighty river through the middle of this world's kingdoms (may your will be done on earth). The prayer revealed that Jesus knew that spiritually speaking we are not alone in this universe (deliver us from the evil one) even as it showed how aware Jesus is that we all tend to sin but that grace is stronger (forgive us our trespasses).

This is the lens through which Jesus viewed the world. On Jesus' lips this prayer is a reflection of who he simply is. On our lips, however, this prayer shows us who we should be and need to be if we are to lead God-like holy lives the way Peter urges us to do as children of the heavenly Father.

In other words, again as N.T. Wright says, when you call God your "Father," you are boldly opening yourself up to adopt the Father's perspective. Sometimes people talk about prayer as an exercise in "centering down," of focusing the powers of heart and mind to concentrate on a single point. It's just you and God in an intimate, quiet conversation. But in actuality when you pray "Dear Father," you are not narrowing down the confines of your world but expanding them. You are bringing your heart into the wide expanses of God, of God's desires for the cosmos, and of God's often surprising ways of getting things done.

You see, in the ancient world of Jesus the father-son relationship was a bit different than it sometimes is now. It may have involved love and nurture then even as we hope it does now, but at that time this relationship also had an apprentice quality to it. A son learned from his father--he learned a trade, learned lessons that would chart the son's life course. Even in comparatively recent times this was true. If your family's last name was "Cooper," it was because your father was a barrel-maker, a cooper, and you, as a son, would soon be learning this trade from him. The same was true of people whose last name was "Smith," or "Tailor," or "Baker." A vital part of the father-son relationship, therefore, was the son's learning to call out to his stronger, wiser, more experienced craftsman father for help if something went wrong or if it was not clear what the next step needed to be.

The Bible's most poignant illustration of this comes from the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus was scared. The way ahead looked dark and quite probably perilous. Jesus faced an uncertain choice and so he naturally called out for his Father. He had to check in to see what was next. "Father! Is it this cup I must drink?" The Father's reply in Gethsemane was paradoxical, surprising, and finally devastating. But the Son followed the Father's lead.

All in all we're probably too casual in letting the words "Our Father" trip off our tongues! In prayer we need to be checking in with the Father to see if we are perceiving things the way he does. We're checking the course of our lives against the course the Father would like to map out for us, and as with Jesus it's possible the route could have some surprises. We pray to God for what we need. But we also pray to God for what God needs us to be if we are going to bring his kingdom more fully to bear on this world. We call out to the heavenly Father whose name alone is holy, and the reason that name alone is holy is because he's got the whole world in his hands and he's got plans for that world--plans that include you but which are far more expansive than just you or any one of your prayers.

The DNA chemical sequence that goes into making each of us who we are is staggering in complexity. The fact that all of that information is stored in every cell of your body blows the mind. It is the universe within. But what goes into making God our heavenly Father is likewise staggering. It, too, represents a whole universe made possible through the shed blood of the Lamb and the gospel seed that sacrifice brings into our hearts.

Every time you call out to God as your Father, you invoke that reality, that alternate universe that lives in your heart--a universe called "the kingdom of God." It is that reality that sets our agenda in prayer and in all life. It is that reality which represents the dearest gift God's grace gives. We participate in that reality through prayers to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God and Father of each one of us. What a mystery! What a gift! Our Father in heaven, O dear Father: hallowed be your name forever and ever. Amen.