Archbishop Stephen preached during the service of Evensong on 7 March 2025, which also marked the start of the Lord’s Prayer Tour of the north of England. The sermon follows in full.
‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’ – Matthew 6. 10
When I was ten years old my parents bought me a guitar for my birthday.
I was already taking piano lessons at the time so had a little bit of musical knowledge (though, sadly, no great aptitude for the piano and no great passion to practice). But the guitar enthralled me. We were on holiday in Spain with another family, and the Dad played the guitar. I sat and watched him play. He started to teach me.
Now the guitar is probably the easiest instrument to play badly. Almost anyone with a reasonable sense of rhythm can soon learn a few chords and start to make a half decent noise and, if others are prepared to sing along, even bang out what passes for a tune.
Like every instrument, skill, practice and commitment is required to play it well. But there also has to be desire. What made the guitar different to the piano for my ten-year-old self was that I wanted to play it.
My birthday fell during the last few days of the holiday. I badgered my parents and although fearful that it might be a sort of musical holiday romance that would wear off when I got home, they gave in and I got my first guitar.
Fifty-six years later, hardly a day goes by when I do not pick up my guitar and play. I never got to be much of a guitarist. But I find it hard to think of any other thing in life that has given me such joy.
However, 10 years old, when I got home, armed with the few chords I’d already learnt and eager to learn more, I quickly made another important discovery. In order to play the guitar, you first have to tune it! And in order to tune it, you need something to tune it to.
The bass string of a guitar is tuned to E. Therefore, a standard way of tuning a guitar is to play E on a piano and then twist the knob at the end of the neck of the guitar where the E string is secured until the two notes, guitar and piano, play together. In tune with each other. If you have no piano (we did) then you need a tuning fork, or nowadays various electronic devices and apps are available which tell you when the guitar is in tune, but for the most part it is done by ear. And once one string is in tune, all the others can be tuned to it.
The will of God, the good purposes of a good and loving God, God’s good purposes for the whole creation, for this earth and for everyone and everything in it, is like a single beautiful, clarifying note played and resonating throughout the universe.
Everything else is tuned to it. Or at least it can be and should be. Making it so is the missionary challenge of the gospel and the invitation of God’s kingdom.
Consequently, we observe and delight in the astonishing beauty and order of the Creation. We even find ourselves speaking of the ‘music of the spheres’ and don’t find it difficult to use a word like ‘harmonious’ to describe the universe.
And as I’m sure you will have observed at an orchestral concert, as the players come on stage there is, at first, a cacophony of noise as each player tunes their instrument individually. Then the person playing the first violin ascends the stage. She plays a single note. Everyone else in the orchestra tunes to it. Then from the unifying simplicity of this single note, the most amazingly, beautiful and complex music is played.
So, what I want to say to you is that the universe, the whole creation are held together in harmony by the single note of the will of God, played throughout the ages by the Holy Spirit and from which everything else is tuned. The music is complex and beautiful. But it is held together, it is held in tune and we are part of it.
And our lives only find their full meaning and purpose, and we only find the fulfilment we long for, when we are in tune with God, playing our lives in tune and in time with God’s life.
In this sense, we are the orchestra of God, each with our contribution to make, whether we play the cello or the kazoo or the penny whistle.
But unlike everything else in creation, we have choice about it. The trees, the rivers, mountains and stars are in tune with the God because they just are. So too the simplest and very complex animals. An oyster or an octopus. Even animals, like us, feel pain and even fear, do not have the moral choices we have to choose to inflict pain and for no reason, to create fear. We are different. We can hear the note of God’s clarifying beauty and ignore it. Or stick our fingers in our ears. Or deny its existence. Or explain why it is just one of many notes and not to be taken too seriously. Why, we can even play our own music instead.
This has consequences. We can see them all around us. But God gives us the yardstick – the tuning fork – whereby we can measure life.
This is liberating. We can be set free from thinking our own will, and our own stubborn and selfish desires are the be all and end all of life.
We can even come to understand that life is supposed to be lived in harmony with others as well as with God. We are therefore called not only to be in tune – but to play!
Probably the most basic and primary way in which we learn to be in tune with God and in which we learn how to play is simply to say the Lord’s Prayer: to say the prayer that Jesus taught us and to mean it, for the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t just teach us how to pray but how to live. It is the song of heaven on earth, the very words Jesus himself gave us. Indeed, Jesus introduces the prayer by saying, somewhat enigmatically, your Heavenly Father knows what you need before you ask him, to which we might reply, ‘Well if he knows what we need before we ask him, why bother to ask then?’
The answer is, because we don’t know. We don’t know how to live. We don’t know how to pray. We don’t know what to ask for.
In this sense, the whole of the Lord’s Prayer is an education in desire, it is the way we tune our hearts and lives. And at the very heart of this prayer which is the heart of all prayer are these words, ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.’
Prayer therefore is not trying to change God’s mind, not getting enough signatures on the prayer petition, but placing ourselves in right relationship with God and asking God to change our minds, so that our lives may reflect his life – on earth as in heaven.
That is why I am going on this tour across the north of England because we need to learn what this prayer means because our world is in a mess, and our world needs to get in tune. And it’s particularly lovely that this evening we’re starting this tour and celebrating this prayer in song and in music, because, as St Augustine may have said, ‘When we sing, we pray twice’, and I am very grateful to Lucy Walker for the beautiful setting of the Lord’s Prayer she has created for us.
So let me finish with another piece of music: the Alleluia chorus from Handel’s Messiah.
Halfway through the exultant shouts of Alleluia, the music shifts and the note of triumph is offset by a moment of profound solemnity as the chorus sings these words from the Book of Revelation –
‘The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ’ (Revelation 11:15).
This one verse sums up all that I want to say.
Echoing the music of the heavens, the song of the angels, and that single note from God to which the whole universe is tuned and which we are called to play, all God’s purposes, the whole biblical narrative, the whole Christian faith, is declared as the work of God to restore all things in Christ so that ‘the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of God.’
These same ideas are summed up even more succinctly in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Your kingdom come on earth as in heaven.’
In Christ, God is gathering everything together into a new creation, or let us now think of it as a new piece of music.
In Christ, everything about heaven comes to fill the earth, like light flooding a darkened room, like the most beautiful music – a single note and a single voice and then a whole great orchestra and choir in which each of us has a part to play.
A few years ago, a piece of footage of people singing the Alleluia chorus became something of an Internet sensation. It was one of those flash mob, pop-up events. It got millions of views.
If I remember correctly, it begins in a crowded shopping centre. People are milling around. Sitting at tables, eating and chatting. Others are shopping, looking in windows, going about their business.
Then someone stands up.
From somewhere – a recording? – we hear an organ play. The person starts to sing. The opening line of the Alleluia chorus. Just that repeated word: Alleluia.
Then someone else from across the shopping mall stands and echoes back that single word. Alleluia.
At an adjacent table, others stand and join in.
Then more and more.
People who are passing by stop to enjoy the music.
A parent reaches out for their child’s hand.
An elderly woman wipes a tear from her eye.
I myself remember watching it on my computer for the first time and weeping. It is so beautiful, people in the shopping mall becoming a choir, an orchestra.
Others rise up.
The music builds and builds.
Soon, amid the ordinariness of everyday life, and arising from it, seemingly without any prearrangement or rehearsal, as if it’s just happening, as natural as the rays of the sun and the movement of the breeze, a whole choir has emerged, has risen out of the crowd, and has, at the same time, made the crowd into something else, and is singing this great hymn of praise.
In this beautiful bit of impromptu, but of course, actually, very carefully prepared musical theatre we see a lived-out demonstration of what happens when we say the Lord’s Prayer because it’s impossible to say it on your own. You join your voice with the voices of the saints and angels in heaven. You join your voice with every other voice that says this prayer across our world. The opening word is Our, which immediately puts you in relationship with everyone else who is saying this prayer.
And moved to tears when we see this vision we also long to hold those we love, because we see God’s Kingdom in among us.
This is what happens when we say the Lord’s Prayer. We are changed, and the world is changed through us. The words of Jesus and the will of God become our wills and our words.
Perhaps our service books should carry a health warning: be careful about saying this prayer, it will change you; and please don’t say it, unless you are prepared to change.
