Hallowed Be Your Name
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
April 26, 2020
Scripture Reading
Matthew 6:1-13
1 “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.
2 “Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
5 “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
7 “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. 9 Pray then like this:
“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
10 Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread,
12 and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
Last week I began the sermon with a miniature “State of the Union” full of updates about our church. Here are two quick updates to the update: first, the baby who had a due date last week, was born right on time, and mother and baby are well, and second, the two healthcare workers who were suspected of having coronavirus were tested and cleared. They are not sick, which is great. One final thing to mention: we now have Zoom video Sunday schools for children, youth, and adults. The links to those videos come in our emails. We encourage you to participate.
We’re spending six weeks teaching through the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew’s gospel, which divides nicely into six shorter phrases or sentences. This morning, we focus on the phrase “hallowed be your name.”
Introduction
I love that line in v. 2 about the trumpet. “Thus, when you give to the needy,” Jesus says, “sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others.” Some think that perhaps a trumpet was used to announce times of giving and fasting. Others suggest it could have been a metaphor, like tooting your own horn (Carson, Matthew, Expositor’s Commentary). Regardless, the point is the same: don’t love attention from men when you serve the Lord.
A former pastor of mine told me a story of a politician giving to a shelter where my pastor used to work. He didn’t so much mind that she showed up with an entourage and cameras because her organization had given a lot of money, and documenting the gift, and even celebrating it, wasn’t necessarily wrong. What bothered my friend was the hypocritical nature of it—that when the cameras rolled, she expressed care for the children, and when the cameras shut down, so did her affection.
Perhaps you’ve seen this sort of hypocrisy before. Maybe you’ve been a victim of it, a pawn in someone else’s self-promotion.
The Lord’s Prayer and the surrounding passage show us that when we don’t know the affection of God the Father, we scramble to find affirmation in a thousand other ways, sometimes with trumpets, sometimes with TV cameras and large checks. And this week we can make the theme more specific: when we don’t hallow God’s name, we hallow our own.
1. Upward
That word “hallow” is, at the same time, both familiar and unfamiliar. We say it in the Lord’s Prayer but don’t always have a context for what hallow means. I’ll read v. 9 again.
9 Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. . .”
The beginning of the Lord’s Prayer, just like the beginning of the 10 Commandments, invites us to look upward. We look up to our creator, the one who made us.
To hallow something is to regard it as special, even holy. It’s to set something apart from everything else. The Genesis account of creation and the fourth commandment tell us to set apart the Sabbath as holy (Gen. 2:3; Ex. 20:8). We are to treat the Sabbath as special. That’s also what it means to hallow God’s name, to set his name apart as special, as holy. It means to regard his name in distinction.
And what about the word “name” in the phrase “hallowed by your name”? A person’s name in the Bible is more than their actual name, as my name is Benjamin. A name is one’s reputation, one’s character, one’s worth. This prayer is asking God that his character and worth and reputation would be regarded as special, as holy, as weighty.
I’ll key on that phrase weighty for a moment. One of my favorite pastors uses the analogy of a solar system when speaking of God. He equates God to the sun, which has all the size and the mass to have the gravity to hold all the planets of the solar system in their orbits. If the sun should stop being the sun—if the sun should lose its weight—then all the planets would fly out of orbit, which would, of course, disastrous.
God, in all his power and all his glory, is like the sun. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us to look upward and regard God as the center of our solar system, lest all the planets of our life—all the little details and big details—fly into chaos.
Maybe you feel that right now, like the planets of your life have flown out of orbit. I don’t want to be unnecessarily harsh. The times we live in are extraordinary, so some disturbance and chaos make sense. But I wonder if for many people the pandemic as caused you to reflect on whether God is at the center of your solar system. If so, that’s not a bad thing. It’s a gift. It’s grace to behold the one whose gravity can hold you when everything else would fail.
2. Inward
This leads to the next point in the sermon. First, the Lord’s Prayer invites us to look upward to hallow our Father’s name. Second, it invites us to look inward.
The other week my phone reminded me to visit Messiah college for a track and field meet to watch one of our senior college students compete in a decathlon. The decathlon is a two-day competition where you do ten events. The track meet was sadly, of course, canceled.
That phone notification and this sermon passage reminded me of April in 2005, so some fifteen years ago. In April of 2005, I’m in the final few weeks of my final semester of my final year of college. I competed on the track and field team, and in the middle of practice, my track and field coach calls me over.
Coach McGuire says, “Benjamin, there’s someone here who wants to talk to you.” I ask, “Sure. Who’s that, Coach?” Coach says they are doing a long article for the university’s alumni magazine, and a reporter needs someone to speak with, and he thinks I’d be the perfect person to write the feature story about.
I think, Really? That’s strange. In five years no one has ever wanted to write anything about my athletic prowess at our Division 1 school. But then I think, Huh, now that you mention it, Coach, it probably is about time for someone to write about how great I am. Let’s sound the trumpet and get the TV cameras.
So I ask the reporter what the article is about, which was a mistake. They wanted to write about a walk-on athlete who, throughout his athletic career, never became anything more than a walk-on athlete. In other words, they were writing an article about a student-athlete who, during his athletic career, never got one penny of athletic scholarship because he wasn’t good enough, but this same athlete—for some bizarre reason—never quit. And since they couldn’t understand why anyone would ever do that, they thought it would make an interesting article. “So,” the reporter says to me, “may I ask you a few questions?”
That conversation wouldn’t have simply been embarrassing; it would have been crushing to me if Jesus had not changed my life in the middle of college. If the total of my athletic achievements were highlighted as an anti-example of being a great athlete, that would have crushed me.
Even still, the article was hard for me to receive, but in the Lord’s hard but good providence, he encouraged me to hallow not my name but his, a name far more worthy than my own and a name far more able to give stability and joy than my own.
As the Lord’s Prayer invites us to look upward, it also invites us to look inward. So I ask you, in what ways are you hallowing people and accolades that are not God, and what effect is this idolatry having upon your life? It’s in uncomfortable question, no doubt. But the passage invites me to ask it.
3. Outward
Perhaps you’ll answer the question better as you look not only upward and inward but also outward. Consider those around you and what accolades your circle of friends and coworkers and family hallow. I say that because as much as this passage is about prayer, it’s about discipleship. Discipleship is a fancy word for following or pattern imitation. Note how Jesus says he wants us to consider those around us,
. . . when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets . . . . But when you give to the needy [and he goes on] . . . And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. . . . But when you pray [and he goes on]. . . And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this [and he goes on to give the Lord’s Prayer]. (Matthew 6:2–9a)
This passage is about discipleship. This is about pattern imitation. What cultural forces, what materialism, what consumerism, are calling to you saying, “hallow me”? And in what ways is your heart listening? What does your heart give gravity to? Where your treasure is, there your heart will also be, as Jesus says a few verses later (Matthew 6:21).
Hallowing God’s name means looking upward, inward, and outward. So far, the outward look I’ve described is negative—“don’t be like them,” Jesus says. That is an outward look to see how others around us act.
As we close, I want highlight another look outward, a more positive one. I mean the outward look of evangelism that comes from hallowing God’s name. Consider again the phrase before us: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”
God is already holy and special. God already has a gravity and weight that anchors the solar system. The Lord’s Prayer does not teach us to pray that God would become weighty and special and holy. He already is. We pray that people everywhere would regard him as weighty and special and holy. To pray “hallowed be your name,” is to ask God to bless the world with an overwhelming sense of who he really is.
Let me read a verse from a letter Peter wrote. Peter was a close follower of Jesus and a leader in the early church. He wrote this to suffering Christians,
[I]n your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you (1 Peter 3:15).
That phrase of “regarding as holy” is the same word used in the Lord’s Prayer for hallowing. Peter tells suffering Christians that we are to set apart God as holy in our hearts—the upward look that leads to an inward look. And we are to do this for the sake of the outward look of telling others about how awesome Jesus is. Peter wants people to so live and so love and so honor our holy God that the nations will ask us to tell us about our God.
Friends, God wants us to think about the pandemic differently than the world. As society collectively struggles to know what belongs at the center of our lives, Christians have a wonderful opportunity to show them God’s worth and value, and how having God at the center of your life is not simply the right thing, but it’s a good thing for you because it holds all the details of your life in their proper orbit. Christians have a chance to show forth the stability that comes when God is at the center.
Conclusion
As Jesus taught this prayer, do you know what would have shocked his Jewish audience the most? Not the hallowing of God’s name. They got that. In the Bible, God is transcendent and holy and set apart and weighty.
The most socking part was calling him Father. Scholars will tell us that references to God as our Father in prayer do not exist in Judaism before Christianity. What is shocking about this prayer is that the holy one, the hallowed one, welcomes us in as a Father because of the gospel.
And we need both of these: a father whose arms are strong and weighty and powerful and a father whose arms are loving. When we pray that God’s name is hallowed in our hearts and around the world, we are not asking that God would become our slave master but our Father.
