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News & Happenings
September 5 Sunday Worship at 10am
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July 25th: "It's All You Need to Know"
Luke 11: 1-4
Last September the Wednesday night Study Group read The Lord's Prayer for Today. Together we discovered that this prayer does not say what most think it says. As Fredrick Buechner wrote, "We do well to not pray this prayer lightly". The reality is too often we do pray this prayer lightly and in so doing, lose sight of its depth and meaning.
The Lord's Prayer is probably the best known prayer. People turn to it all the time. Sadly too often we really don't hear what we are praying. Maybe we don't want to hear what this prayer says because it says more than we think it does. The truth is the Lord's Prayer is challenging and provocative.
I once had a Sunday school class of middle school youth rewrite the Lord's Prayer. They wrote this:
Our Father in heaven holy is your name.
You will reward us when we follow you here and in heaven.
Forgive us our wrong doings and we will forgive others.
Help us to resist temptation and save us from evil.
You are our reward, our power and our glory forever and ever. Amen.
I believe while being well intended these youth distorted the prayer's meaning. They focused the prayer on themselves instead of God, neighbor and the world. We could be tempted to excuse this as an act of middle school youth who given their age and development tends to be on them. I do not believe that thinking this way is accurate. I suspect it is more a statement about the culture in which they and we live, which means their perspective was not much different than most people; for we tend to focus on ourselves.
The Lord's Prayer speaks to our souls, our total being, the totality of who we are. It speaks to our hungers, thirsts, grief, loves and hopes. It also affirms our limitations and our longing for something more, something deeper. It does this through its corporate petitions. The language of this prayer is first person plural which tells us this prayer is about more than the individual praying it. This is why it is important to pray this prayer as part of a faith community.
The Lord's Prayer tells us that we can never fill our own needs. It affirms that we need to look beyond ourselves to God's grace, love and mercy. It affirms our responsibility to offer this love, grace and mercy to the world. As Matthew Skinner writes; "God's forgiveness of us serves as a stimulus for us to recognize our need to forgive those indebted to us" again and again. (Feasting On the Word, pg. 287).
The Lord's Prayer is all we need to know about faith and our relationship with God. It affirms our dependency and need for God. The phrase "give us this day our daily bread" reminds us that we are dependent on and called to rely on God for what we need. Matthew Skinner reminds us that this phrase can also be translated, "give us this day our necessary bread." This understanding leads to our asking, "Given all we have, all that consumes our lives, what is it really necessary?" Taken seriously this is a struggle which can lead to our questioning the way we live; a struggle that most do not want to enter.
When we say, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" we are affirming the importance of our commitment to what God desires. What does God desire? As the prophets remind us, God desires justice; which is different than charity. Bill Moyers explains the difference.
Charity is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a
social order in which if individuals choose not to be charitable,
people will not go hungry, unschooled or sick without care.
Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth;
justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance.
Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table.
If taken seriously, the Lord's Prayer leads to true salvation; that is peace and healing for all of who we are, for the whole community and the whole of creation. Whether we recognize it or not, this is something we need. As William Carl III writes in The Lord's Prayer for Today:
In the 21st century the Lord's Prayer, especially its second set of petitions, reminds us
in a truly incarnational way of our responsibility for the world,
the environment and those who are helpless.
When spoken from the depths of our need for solidarity with the poor of the earth
whose voices have long been silent,
the Lord's Prayer proves to be a profoundly liberating prayer.
Called to prayer, we are summoned not to passivity but to activity;
not to indifference about evil in and around us,
but to passion for justice, freedom and peace in the whole creation.
Again the use of the first person plural reinforces that we pray not just for ourselves and those we love. We pray for all.
The early Church added these words, "For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen." The belief is these words were added as an affirmation of God. Amen means "I agree", "so be it." These words also help us remember the order of things. They serve as a reminder that our relationship with God is not an equal relationship. God is God and we are the people. We are called to partner with God, but we do not being about the kingdom of God. God does and has done that. The kingdom is present, but all too often we don't recognize it. The Prayer of Affirmation that we use often as a Response of the People affirms this.
May we continue to trust in your promise of a time when swords will
be beaten into plowshares, when you will wipe away every tear from
your children's eyes, when pain and death will be no more.
May we give our lives in service to that vision,
living with and for others as if the promise were already fulfilled.
"Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." This is our hope and our fear, isn’t it? God's will be done on earth is exactly what our world needs. As William Carl III wrote in The Lord's Prayer for Today;
With postmodern, post-Christendom secularism on the one hand
and radical fundamentalism and runaway global evangelism
that sometimes ignores social justice on the other,
the Jesus prayer patterns for us a way to avoid
both narrow sectarianism and patriotic triumphalism.
It lifts us beyond a saccharine "me and Jesus" religion
that threatens to turn us in on ourselves in narcissistic naval gazing.
It saves us from ourselves if we truly listen to it and heed its advice.
As challenging as it is, we need this prayer; for the words of comfort and promise it offers, and also for the prophetic word that guides and challenges us as we seek to be faithful to a God who heals, sustains and renews all. This prayer calls us out of ourselves, back into God's world, which is exactly what we need. If you agree, I invite you to join me in saying, "Amen. So be it, I agree."
Let the people say, "Amen."
