"Hallowed be your name." Our first impulse is to think that this prayer has to do with us. Somehow we have to hallow God's name. We ought to worship and live in such a way that God's name is hallowed. The Heidelberg Catechism acknowledges that, but it's decidedly secondary. First of all, says the catechism, the prayer means "help us to truly know you, to honor, glorify and praise you. . . ."

When we pray "hallowed be your name," we are not asking anything of ourselves; we are asking something of God. In effect, we are asking God: "Be God, here and everywhere. Let your blazing glory shine in the world. Let your awesome power and love be felt and experienced by everyone. Let everything in the universe vibrate with the beauty of your holiness. O Abba, God, let the whole world know who you really are."

You see, one of the great lessons of the Lord's Prayer is that true prayer is God-centered. We implore God that our lives might revolve around him like the planets around the sun. We pray that we might fulfill the very purpose for which we were created. We beg for God's name to be hallowed because when God's name is hallowed, the whole universe is perfectly balanced and wonderfully whole. We pray for God to lift us out of our petty preoccupations, our self-centered pursuits, our sitcom mentality. We implore God to melt with the blazing beauty of his holiness the banal fog in which we pass our days.

But there's even more to it than that. This is an eschatological prayer, as so much of the Lord's Prayer is. By "eschatological," we mean that it is oriented to the future. It prays for God's final victory. "Hallowed be your name" looks forward to a day when the whole universe will be luminous with the holiness of God, when God's love will be whole-heartedly returned and God will be worshipped and adored by all his creatures---when, as Psalm 96 says, all the nations will "Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness; tremble before him, all the earth. . . . let the sea resound. . . . Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them; let all the trees of the forest sing for joy." Then shall our prayer be answered. "Hallowed be your name!"

"Hallowed be your name" means that we look for the day when ordinary life will be transfigured with holiness, when even the most common human activities will glow with glory, when everyone and everything will be "Holy unto the Lord!"

In our Scripture for today, Daniel was a man who loved, worshiped, and prayed to the one true and holy God, and it showed in the excellence of his life. That's right where his enemies laid a trap. They knew his habits of prayer, but they also knew his commitment to them and to the holy God to whom he prayed. The trap worked---they knew Daniel well---but it failed when Daniel's holy God would not let him perish in the lions' den. In the end, God hallowed his own name by saving Daniel, and God received the praise of none other than the king of Babylon.