March 10, 2023

Teach us to pray…

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus’ disciples ask their teacher, with a bit of jealousy, “John the Baptist gave his disciples a prayer, why can’t we have our own prayer?” (Luke 11:1-4) Obviously disciples of various teachers were comparing notes, and Jesus’ disciples felt under-resourced.

Regardless of their intent or attitude, Jesus consented with what we now call the “Lord’s Prayer,” or the “Our Father.” Or at least a form of it. Matthew records Jesus giving a different form of this prayer in Matthew 6:9-13. Some manuscripts of Matthew include a conclusion, “For the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours forever. Amen.” It is conjectured that a scribe in the early centuries of the Christian church added this because this is what was said in their church at the end of that prayer. We know this was used in churches very early, as a document written about the same time as the New Testament directs people to “Pray the ‘Our Father’ three times a day.” This appears to replace the three times of prayer required in Judaism at the time, morning, noon, and night.

A I continue to reflect during Lent on our common spiritual practices, I turn our attention to the Lord’s Prayer. We pray the Lord’s Prayer once a week in our Sunday worship service. We pray it in connection with our invocation, a prayer asking God’s Spirit to empower and sanctify our worship service. Our invocation often ends by asking God’s Spirit to guide or teach us like Jesus guided and taught his disciples.

Here is the prayer as we pray it in our church.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread. 

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

Don’t let the brevity of this prayer fool you. It covers a great deal of territory. So much so that many through the centuries have agreed that this prayer is “a summary of the whole gospel.” In those six lines we do six different things: 

First we identify God as our holy, eternal creator.

Second we pray for God to reign on earth, the way God reigns in heaven. And when this happens, we declare what that will look like in three ways.

The resources of the earth will be distributed in such a way that everyone one has what they need, their ‘daily bread.’

We will constantly confess our failings to God, and will be forgiven for them. So we will extend that grace by forgiving those who wrong us.

God will help us resist the temptation to be selfish or unjust, and guide us to live righteously. 

Finally we assert that God is truly the only God, and having no equal, is the only God we serve.

After we pray the Lord’s Prayer together, we either respond in praise or begin to proclaim God’s Word. When we respond to the reading and preaching of God’s word, we do so in one of three ways. We confess where we have fallen short and ask for God’s forgiveness and assistance to live more in line with the gospel. Or we pray for more equitable distribution of God’s creation, and a healthy life for all people. Otherwise, we pray for the dignity of all people and that they be treated justly and equally. We often do more than one, and when we celebrate at the Lord’s Table we do all three.

We then conclude our worship service inviting the blessing of our God upon us as we leave to live as Jesus’ disciples in the world that week. The Lord’s Prayer is not just a part of our worship, it helps us understand our worship service from beginning to end.

The Lord’s Prayer is more than a prayer we have been given to pray. This prayer teaches us both how to pray and why to pray. In doing so it helps us assess our lives in relationship to our God, our world, and ourselves. The Lord’s Prayer is often taken for granted, an often overlooked gift. I invite us all this Lent to reconsider all it has to teach us in this season. 

~ Pastor Todd