Colossians 2.6-19, Luke 11.1-13
The Sixth Sunday after Trinity, 27 July 2025
Austwick, Clapham
In these troubled times we’re living through, God might seem far away.
In these broken times, how we long for God’s healing. In these restless times, how we long for God’s peace. In these days where what was solid seems to be disintegrating before us, how we long for some divine direction which will stop us from heading down blind alleys, or rabbit holes which lead to hatred.
Will God help us when it hurts? Will God help us bring an end to the massacre of innocents? Can God show us how to overcome those things which divide us, how to escape our cycles of condemning and being condemned? Will God guide us into ways of goodness and hope?
How we long to find a way to ‘shorten the distance between ourselves and God’. [1]
The good news is that there is a ‘way’ to do this, and a ‘how’. The way is Jesus and the how is prayer.
Jesus taught us a prayer to help us enter into a different way of knowing, an alternative way of perceiving reality. A way which removes all boundaries, barriers, and divisions between ourselves, God and others.
It is very simple, the way he taught it.
When we begin our prayers with ‘Our Father who art in heaven,’ this gives us a sense of God beyond; a God in whom, and for whom, ‘all things in heaven and on earth were created’. A God we can be confident in, for he is fully invested in us and in all his creation.
When we then dare to pray ‘Thy kingdom come’, this encourages us that God is to be found, within us, and inside the life of this messy world.
And so, strengthened to believe that God is indeed active here and now, we can confidently pray, ‘Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’.
St Paul wrote that ‘in Jesus all things hold together’. And in his prayer, Jesus teaches us that heaven and earth do hold together. The Lord’s Prayer has, at its heart, the reconciliation of all things.
The Lord’s Prayer does not express weak hope: it’s full of faithful expectation that God is acting, and will continue to act in a world which is as fractured and fractious today as it was in Jesus’ time.
It is precisely in this world of people divided, of creatures harmed, and land and seas despoiled, that Jesus develops his radical unifying and inclusive vision of the kingdom of God. With all his heart he longs to bring all people and things together as one, beloved and cherished and dignified in him.
In the holy city Jesus cried out his heart’s longing, ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem… how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you were not willing!’ Jesus’ desire is for the unity of the world: for people to ‘come from east and west, from north and south, to eat in the kingdom of God,’ as he said.
Jesus wants us to remember Isaiah’s ‘wolf living with the lamb, leopard lying down with the kid’, and the Psalmist’s vision of all living things united in worship: ‘Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds . . .Young men and women alike, old and young together… praising the Lord!’
For Jesus women and children are first in his kingdom. He embraces the leper and, as he throws down the tables of the money changers, he welcomes the outcasts and the ritually unclean: ‘The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them’.
Notice how so many of Jesus’ sayings are about overcoming separation, loss and division. He evokes a world where things once separated, now joyously come together:
The woman is reunited with her lost coin. The shepherd once again embraces his sheep.
The yeast is mixed with the flour. The vine is joined to the branches.
The birds come to roost in the branches. Things old and new are to be treasured.
The enemy is to be loved. The prodigal is restored to his father.
The wounded Jewish traveller rests in the healing arms of a hated Samaritan.
God’s will is to be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable.
The kingdom is both now and not yet, here and still to come.
The most significant sign of Jesus’ inclusive kingdom is the meal at which Jesus eats with tax-collectors and sinners. At his open table everyone, regardless of shame or status, has an honoured place. Breaking bread with all, Jesus shows his readiness to overturn barriers and break social taboos; to unite.
These ideas came from a place of prayer and contemplation, which were at the heart of Jesus’ life and practice. The good news for us, in these broken times is that, if we find a place of prayer and contemplation, and pray the way that Jesus taught us, then we can go back into the world empowered to ‘love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind, and with all our strength’; to join him in his healing and reconciling work.
When we pray ‘Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’, then we show our intention to join in God’s work of healing divisions, bringing things together, and making peace. For these things start with our heart.
When we ask ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’, we show we understand what it means to be forgiven, and that God who unconditionally loves us, will help us to love and forgive others.
To the Colossians Paul wrote, ‘As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.’
Faith in Christ does not mean us escaping this wicked world. Rather the opposite; God wills for us to grow and flourish in his love right in the middle of this muddled world.
God longs for us to walk with him, outwards from our place of prayer, to help him bring peace where there is conflict, unity where there is division.
Beginning with prayer, our very lives can help shorten the distance between the world and God.
Notes
[1] A revision of I know this is the way the world is, because Donald Trump told me / Lord, teach me how to pray, preached in Somerset, 2016; substantially based on the chapter ‘Jesus the mystic’ in Andrew D. Mayes, Another Christ, Re-envisioning ministry, and his discussion of ‘shortening the distance between ourselves and God’. See original sermon for all bible references.
