Rev. Dr. Anna Robbins on The Lord’s Prayer
In this chapel sermon, Dr. Anna Robbins invites listeners to reconsider the Lord’s Prayer beyond a routine liturgy, and instead as a personal surrender that reshapes how we live. Anna traces a line from quiet prayer to Gethsemane, and from there to lives marked by costly obedience. Anna explores how the kingdom takes root through our surrendered lives.
About Rev. Dr. Anna Robbins
Anna Robbins serves as President of Acadia Divinity College and Dean of Theology at Acadia University. A respected theologian with an international profile in culture, ethics, and public theology, she is widely sought as a speaker, teacher, and commentator. She appears regularly on podcasts and writes for both scholarly and popular audiences.
Anna holds degrees from Carleton University, Acadia University, and a PhD in Theology from the University of Wales. An ordained minister with the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada, she served in several churches before spending 12 years on faculty at the London School of Theology, consulting with organizations such as Theos, Christians in Politics, Tearfund, the London Intestate for Contemporary Christianity, the Evangelical Alliance, and the Baptist World Alliance.
Since returning to Nova Scotia in 2012, she has held several leadership roles at Acadia Divinity College, including Academic Dean, Director of Doctoral Studies, Vice-President, and founding Director of the Andrew D. MacRae Centre for Christian Faith and Culture. She holds the Dr. Millard R. Cherry Chair of Theology, Ethics and Culture and serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of Theological Schools.
Anna continues to write, travel, and speak with a passion for helping people engage faithfully and thoughtfully with contemporary culture, and lead with strategic vision. She lives in Wolfville with her husband, Peter, their son, David, and their Goldendoodle, Gatsby.
Show Notes
About the Gordon Lectureships: The J. Dorcas Gordon Lectureship was established in June 2017 by the Knox College Board of Governors to honour Dr. Gordon's 18 years of service as Principal and her commitment to theological education. The lectureship provides a forum for exploring current trends in theological thinking and practice, fostering rigorous debate on issues vital to the church and academy.
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Transcript
[Introduction]
Welcome to the Ministry Forum Podcast, where we believe that you are not alone in your ministry journey. I'm The Reverend John Borthwick, your host coming to you from the Center for Lifelong Learning at Knox College. Here, we connect, encourage and resource ministry leaders all across Canada in the joys, the struggles and everything in between. I love that I get to do this work, and most of all that, I get to share it with each and every one of you. So thanks for giving us a listen today. Whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting out, this podcast is made with you in mind.
[John Borthwick]
Welcome to the Ministry Forum Podcast. Today's episode comes from Knox College chapel, where we were privileged to welcome the Rev Dr Anna Robbins, President of Acadia Divinity College, and Dean of Theology at Acadia University. Dr Robbins was our guest speaker for our inaugural J. Dorcas Gordon Lectureship. Later in the day after chapel, she delivered a lecture entitled to see, or not to see, a theology of the future. If you're interested in listening to the lecture, you can find it in our show notes.
Anna is a theologian with a wide reaching voice in culture, ethics and public theology. She's an ordained minister with the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada, and before returning to Nova Scotia, she spent 12 years on faculty at the London School of Theology, working alongside organizations like Theos, the Evangelical Alliance and the Baptist World Alliance. At Acadia, she served as Academic Dean, Vice President and Founding Director of the Andrew D. MacRae Center for Christian Faith and Culture. She currently holds the Dr. Millard R. Cherry Chair of Theology, Ethics and Culture, and serves on the board of directors of the Association of Theological Schools.
In this sermon, Anna takes us into the Lord's Prayer, specifically the petition, “Your kingdom come your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” But this isn't a lecture about Greek verbs or escha…, See, I can't even say it eschatological frameworks. It's something more unsettling than all of that. Anna asks us to consider, what happens when this prayer stops being liturgy and starts sounding like Gethsemane? When the words we've prayed so many times begin to make demands on us that we hadn't anticipated. She traces a line from the quiet room Jesus describes in Matthew, through the garden where he prays, not my will but yours. To the altar, where Archbishop Oscar Romero gave his life, and she invites us to ask, where heaven and earth might be reconciled in our own surrendered wills. It's a sermon for ministry leaders who know the temptation to manage the kingdom rather than pray for it, and who sense that faithfulness may look less like a rival and more like obedience. Here's The Rev. Dr. Anna Robbins at Knox College Chapel.
[Anna Robbins]
Well, I suspect that most of us in this room have perhaps preached on the Lord's Prayer, if not you've certainly heard more than one sermon on the Lord's Prayer. We've explained its Greek verbs, we've mapped its eschatology. But I wonder how many of us have prayed it in a moment when the answer might undo our plans.
Lent is a season when the church slows down enough to hear what this prayer has been saying all along. We pray, week after week, in Church throughout the year, your kingdom come, Your will be done. But in Lent, those words begin to sound different. They no longer feel like liturgy. Perhaps they feel more like Gethsemane.
When Jesus teaches us to pray, Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, he assumes something unsettling. Heaven and Earth are not yet aligned. This is an incongruity between God's reign and our regimes between the lamb's authority and the logic of power, between self-giving love and self-protecting dominance. And we pray these words so often in gathered worship that they risk becoming smooth, familiar, almost harmless. We imagine the disciples praying them together. We pray them together, perhaps every week or close to it. But in Matthew's Gospel, immediately before this passage, Jesus has said something culturally reorienting. He offered something different. He said, When you pray, go into your room and shut the door. Now I am well aware that there is in the narrative a disjunction in the original text between instructions about prayer and the giving of this prayer. I recognize that. But I find it interesting that if we were to read it canonically, that these passages this narrative illuminates what these words might mean, what if we thought of this as a unity? What if we saw the Lord's Prayer not first as a public affirmation, but as a private surrender? What if, before this prayer is proclaimed in the assembly, it is whispered in the quiet place, the setting and posture matter. Jesus is not primarily correcting the form of the prayer. It's motivation. As Craig Keener observes, what is at stake is not the structure of prayer, but the heart behind it. Jesus is confronting prideful, performative religiosity, and in that light, this then, is not a prayer for the self-sufficient. It is prayer for the desperate. Keener writes that the Lord's Prayer belongs to the broken, to whom Jesus promises the blessings of the kingdom. It's for those who recognize that the world is not as it should be, and only God can set it right. It recalls for us his earlier words in the sermon, Blessed are the poor in spirit, only those who know that there is something wrong can pray this honestly.
So when we pray Your kingdom come, we're not asking for minor improvement. We're asking for a full renovation, for a different order to invade this one, and that order is not neutral. To capture the offensiveness of Jesus' message, we must let its radical demands confront us with the ferocity they would have carried for those first hearers. The Kingdom Jesus proclaimed was Grace, but not worthless. Grace, not cheap grace. It was a grace that transforms the meek and crushes the arrogant, the religiously and socially satisfied. This prayer destabilizes. It disrupts. It assumes that heaven is one thing and earth is another, and it assumes these two are not yet reconciled. But here is perhaps the first shock, the place where heaven and earth can be reconciled is not in a senate chamber or a court or a university or even in a war. It's in a human will. That's why Jesus sends us into the room. Your kingdom come, where? Your will be done where? Before it's global. It has to be personal. We often imagine Jesus telling us to pray, your kingdom come into my heart. He doesn't phrase it that way, God's horizon is far wider. And as one writer puts it, this is a prayer asking God to restore to order at his will all that is lying waste upon the face of the earth. It's cosmic. It includes families and communities, universities and hospitals, cancer wards and slums, forests and oceans, nations and neighborhoods. Yet it is never less than personal.
Luke records Jesus saying that the kingdom of God is in your midst. It doesn't come by observable spectacle. You can't point and say, there it is. It begins where a will is surrendered, where a speck of yeast grows, where a seed falls on good soil. Thy kingdom come through me. This is offensive because it dethrones, it topples our petty kingdoms of envy and rivalry and security and reputation. It challenges our subtle attachment to influence, maybe not so subtle in the contemporary form. It confronts our instincts to secure outcomes. It means that before we pray for heaven to fix the world, we allow heaven to reorder us, and this is where the Lord's Prayer must be read in the shadow of another prayer. In Gethsemane, Jesus prays not my will, but yours be done. The line He taught his disciples becomes the line he must pray under pressure and notice what happens. The cup does not pass. The circumstances do not change. The cross remains.
The prayer does not collapse the incongruity between heaven and earth, but it creates a bridge. In that moment, Heaven's obedience and Earth's anguish meet in one person, Jesus becomes the place where God's will is actually done on earth. Not through making stones into bread, or through seizing power by summoning angels, but by laying himself down the lamb reigns by being slain.
Archbishop Oscar Romero was not at first a revolutionary. He was cautious. He was careful, perhaps like many of us, some even called him timid when he was appointed Archbishop of San Salvador, many in power were relieved he was not expected to cause trouble. But then priests began to be murdered, and peasants disappeared, and violence against the poor became impossible to ignore, and slowly, painfully, Romero began to change. He did not seize political power. He did not organize an uprising. He did something far more dangerous. He began to preach the gospel. Plainly. He spoke the names of the disappeared. He called soldiers to obey God rather than unjust commands. He refused to remain neutral in the face of suffering. He knew it would cost him. The night before he was killed, he said, If they kill me, I shall rise again in the Salvadorian people. The next day, while celebrating the Eucharist, he was shot at the altar. Now from one angle that looks like a failure, the Kingdom did not overthrow the regime, and violence did not cease, but in that moment at the altar, Heaven touched earth, not through domination or control, but through a man who had learned to pray, not my will, but yours, and meant it. Romero's life and stories still inspire. They still challenge and they still rebuke.
This is how the Kingdom comes on earth as in heaven, and perhaps this is why our prayers sometimes feel ineffective, not because the Kingdom has failed, but because we have tried to answer the prayer with the tools of the earthly kingdoms. We've equated effectiveness with influence, or influence has allowed we've allowed it to measure our value and our worth. We have preferred visibility to vulnerability. We have trusted corridors of power. It's surprisingly easy for Christians to confuse the kingdom of God with the work of our hands. We organize around it, we strategize for it, we defend it. Sometimes we even try to secure it. We turn the kingdom into national agendas of power and coercion. But the kingdom doesn't arrive because we have managed it so well. If it depended on our competence, it would have collapsed long ago. We serve the kingdom, but we are not the kingdom. We witness to it, but we don't produce it. This is why it's so striking that when Jesus speaks about the kingdom, he doesn't first say, build it. He says, Pray for it. On earth as in heaven, if only, heaven's will not done through domination, which seems to be the way of this world. In heaven, God's will is done freely and joyfully. There's no coercion there. The pattern of Heaven is not control, but love. Love unhindered, love surrendered, love victorious. So when we pray for heaven to come, but resist cruciform surrender, we widen the gap instead of bridging it. Jesus is not teaching us how to force God's Will on an unprepared world. In Matthew's context, God favors the humble who trust Him, rather than in their own strength, the kingdom belongs to those who endure persecution, who bear fruit, who find a pearl of great price and sell everything they have, to buy it. Who seek first God's righteousness, those who long for God's will in the future must live consistently with that longing in the present, which brings us to Lent. Lent brings us back into that room, back, perhaps into the garden, back into the place where this prayer is no longer abstract theology, but existential obedience.
Your will be done. We are dethroned. This is what it feels like. We're not in control. There are no guaranteed outcomes. We might lose influence. We may not see the kingdom and its fullness on Earth in our lifetime, Moses led people towards a promised land and never got to enter faithfulness is not measured by a rival, but by obedience. And yet, this is not a small or a timid prayer. It's audacious. It asks God to repair the world, to take what is broken and set it right, to take what is ugly and make it beautiful, to weave tragic tales into redemption stories. In the face of invasions, it asks for heaven to invade Earth, and that invasion begins wherever a disciple dares to pray and mean not my will. Every time that happens, a bridge is formed. Heaven touches Earth again in flesh. So the summons is not first to seize power nor retreat into piety. It's to go into the room, shut the door, to let our little kingdoms fall, to pray and to mean your kingdom come in me, Your will be done through me, and then magnify that as we pray, it in community. To rise then, as Jesus did, and walk in the way that prayer requires. And yes, the incongruity remains. Heaven and Earth are not yet fully one. We know there is a now and a not yet. Some days they seem further from one another than we could imagine or ever want. But every act of cruciform obedience is a real, if quiet, invasion of Heaven's order into Earth's disorder. Jesus didn't teach us this prayer so we could admire it or recite it, but mean it and live it. He taught it so we would become the place where it is answered. And so today, dare to pray it. Dare to mean it. Dare to let your life become the prayer. Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as in heaven. Amen.
[John Borthwick]
Thanks for joining us for the Ministry Forum Podcast today. This concludes our sixth season of the podcast. If you've just started listening to us, now is the time to go back and listen to episodes you've missed from the previous five seasons. We'll be back in September with our seventh season. Enjoy your summer, Ministry Forum audience.