A Moment Aside --- 27 May 2020

Jesus, Divine Physician, come to our aid!
Heal us, O You who love humankind!

   Do you ever wonder about the Lord's Prayer? Well, the one we all memorized from our childhood is not the one found in the Scripture. Here is the prayer Jesus taught found in Matthew 6:9-13: 

Our Father in heaven,
    hallowed be your name.
10     Your kingdom come.
    Your will be done,
        on earth as it is in heaven.
11     Give us this day our daily bread.
12     And forgive us our debts,
        as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13     And do not bring us to the time of trial,
        but rescue us from the evil one.

A little different from our usual prayer. However it is not so different. Luke 11: 2a-4 is this:

Father, hallowed be your name.
    Your kingdom come.
3     Give us each day our daily bread.
4     And forgive us our sins,
        for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
    And do not bring us to the time of trial.

A good bit shorter, although it carries the same ideas. Both versions do not have the ending Doxology "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever." 

So what do we do? For me, I'll continue to pray the Lord's Prayer as I learned it, for it speaks to my heart. How?

• It calls God "Father" which is a special relationship. I know this is a tough one for those who's relationship with their father here was troubled. Please don't let that stop you. You can even insert "Mother" there since God has no gender.
• It praises God by "hallowing" God's name. This could mean blessing, praising, revering, making special, or simply stating that God's name (which can mean all that God is) is particularly good for us to know.
• It asks God to bring about the Kingdom with all that means - justice, peace, forgiveness, intimacy with the Divine, and unity with all that exists. It means much more than the political rule of some person.
• It asks for daily bread - all that we might need today. It asks for our "bread of the day" referring to the Day of the Lord and all we need to come to that day as God's people. Is it lunch or is it Holy Communion. The answer is "Yes, and more!"
• It asks for forgiveness and the grace to forgive as we have been forgiven, which is pretty hard to pray for when you think about it.
• It asks that we might not be put to the ultimate test. Now, I don't know how to take that. Are we asking to have God exempt us from the time of trial... when God did not exempt Jesus? Are we asking for grace to endure whatever trials we might face, and not just financial/medical/political stuff. I mean the real trials: Who am I in the face of all creation? Who do I say God is? I don't know. It might be so.

In any event, keep praying this prayer - however you learned it, in whatever language you learned it in. Say it every day! Mean it every time!

     I once asked a wise man, a Christian teacher, how to pray. His answer was simple and incredibly profound; he said "Want to." When you pray as Jesus taught us, want to pray and want to pray those words.