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The Lord’s Prayer...

This prayer is precious to us. We learn it early. It holds us together. When I’m at weddings and most of the folks haven’t been in a church... in a really long time if ever, they still know this prayer. I’ve heard three year olds praying this prayer confidently in church. My 88 year old grandmother was praying this prayer with a hospice nurse as she died. We know this prayer. We say this prayer. We speak it alone, we say it together. Millions of times a day, in thousands of languages, Christians pray this prayer.

We pray this prayer over and over and over and over. Why? Why do we say it every Sunday? Didn’t God hear it the first time? Why do we teach it to our children? Did God miss it the first billion and a half times he heard it. What is it about this prayer that has us saying it over and over. What are we saying? Do we know what we’re doing? Do we really know what we’re doing?

Annie Dillard, in her book, Teaching a Stone to Talk, wrote

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

Do we really know what we’re doing?

Our Father, who art in heaven, or moving into this millenium: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven. We begin by taking our sights away from ourselves and declaring our trust is in God. This prayer is an act of humility. God you are greater than I am; God your way is best; God I will follow where you lead. Do you really want to say that? Do you really want to say, “Okay God, you’re in charge?” It’s a little scary. Remember, God in Jesus came up with things like, “Love your enemies.” Sell everything and follow me.” Or Greater love has no one than to give up their life for a friend.” Are you sure you want God to be in charge? Can we live what we pray? Are we willing to listen that completely and trust that much? Maybe that’s one reason we pray this prayer so much and so long…It could take a lifetime to actually mean what we’re praying.

The Lord’s prayer begins with an act of humility. Of giving up...of letting go. And then it gets hard. “Give us this day our daily bread, or some texts read, “Give us our bread for tomorrow.” Okay, that seems easy enough. I live around the corner from a Cub Foods. The average American grocery store contains more than 30,000 items. I think I could find something there, actually, the hard part would be deciding what to get from among the 15 varieties of ketchup. But then again, if I can’t find what I want I have things at home in the freezer too. It seems a pretty easy prayer to answer. Except for one troublesome word… “our.” “Our daily bread…”

There is nothing in the Lord’s Prayer about me or mine. And if “Our” relates to “our Father,” then we’re praying for everyone who calls God, “Father,” and everyone God considers a child. So, “our daily bread” becomes a bit more complex. To pray “give us today our daily bread,” is to pray that Feed My Starving Children becomes obsolete. It is to pray for refugees in Sudan, for flood victims in China and those suffering from drought in East Africa... anyone who doesn’t have what they need to live. It is overwhelming to pray for the needs of “Our Father’s children.” This is an impossible prayer. It is a prayer that depends not on me making it to Cub this afternoon, but on God’s kingdom coming to all of us.

Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses…our sins. And there’s that word again: “our.” Yes this prayer is about my trespasses. I do want to be forgiven for wanting to shoot my teenage kids on occasion or for things I say without thinking. It is about my trespasses. But it is, once again, bigger than that. Forgive us our trespasses. Can we repent for sins that we commit as a community or a nation or a culture. Can we repent as a people for things we do that hurt the poor or damage the earth? And perhaps even harder, can we forgive those who sin against us…. Us… our community or our race or our gender or our nation. Can we forgive terrorists of all kinds? Can we listen to people who don’t agree with me? Our culture has become so divided... so angry. I’m right you’re wrong.. I’m good, you’re bad. Can we forgive those who sin against us? Those who are separated from us? Do we want to? Do we really want to pray this?

The third of the petitions about “us” calls on God to lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. You and I each live with temptations to turn away from God, and a evils that can mess up our lives. And we include those prayers with the prayers for temptations to exclude others to end, for children caught up in drugs and alcohol to find sobriety, for anyone who’s ever considered suicide to find the strength to live. “Our temptations.” The temptations and evils that plague all humans. Once again it is a far reaching prayer... well beyond my life or my family. It is an impossible prayer. And we need God to answer it.

The Lord’s prayer asks us to look up to God in humility...”You’re in charge God” then out to our world and all it’s needs. We pray it so much, in the hope that we CAN pray it. But, it would be overwhelming to pray it again and again and again and again, unless we trust the one we pray to. And it’s in trust that we end the prayer. “For the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours forever.”

We are the persistent friend that comes at all hours and knocks and keeps on knocking because we know the one inside can and will get up to help us. We trust that God will help us. I love this story we heard today about the friend at midnight, who comes and knocks and knocks and knocks. Today we’d do it by phone, but it’s still obnoxious.

Then Jesus says, I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

Because of his shamelessness the friend will get up. “Get up” is another weak translation. The word used is not get up. It is rise up. The same root as the Greek word for resurrection. Because he’s willing to ask the friend rises up to give him what he needs. Because we need so much and are so willing to trust and to ask, Jesus will no less than rise from the dead to give us what we need. And so we ask.

The Lord’s Prayer is a powerful, fearsome, impossible prayer to pray. And only God can help us. And so we are shameless asking God to change the world, and to change us.

 

May you find in God a friend that you can approach with anything. May you trust enough to ask shamelessly for the impossible. May your prayers open you up to all God’s children, and may God bless you with the answer to your prayers.

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