Protestants call it "The Lord's Prayer." Catholics call it the "Our Father". Catholics end it where the Scripture does and Protestants keep going "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory. Some of us say forever and others say forever and ever. Churches in the conservative Reformation tradition - Lutherans, Episcopalians, and us United Methodists, too, say "trespasses." Churches in the radical Reformation tradition - Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, say "debts." But these are small differences, and essentially it is the same prayer for all of us, it is quite possibly the most famous prayer in the world's history, prayed by the greatest number of people, and prayed most often - and it is what Jesus taught us to say when we pray.
It's a treat to be filling the Christ Church pulpit this morning because it's given me a chance to pay attention to this prayer in a way I don't normally do. It's put me in touch again with how profound this prayer is, and how if we pray it with sincerity and commitment it puts us in community, gives us purpose, and addresses our physical, psychological, and spiritual needs.
The very first thing this prayer does -- with its very first word -- is put us in community. The prayer starts out with "Our Father", not "My Father".
In our time it is the word Father that has attracted attention, and it certainly is a problem to give the idea that God has only a male gender identity. Later in the service we'll use a version of the prayer that comes from New Zealand and refers to God as both Mother and Father. We know that who God is, is a matter of richness far beyond the capacities of human concept and speech and any way we describe God is going to be limited and inadequate. I think in the end this issue will be handled to most peoples' satisfaction.
But the word that hasn't caught our attention, and we haven't dealt with, is the word "our."
In the Mediterranean world Jesus lived in, community was far more of an assumption than it is in ours. When Jesus encountered the outcasts of life - the lepers, the blind, - he moved to restore them to membership in the community. As the movement grew, when he encountered other outcasts - the tax gatherers, the "sinners" - all the poor people who couldn't keep kosher according to the laws of Leviticus - he sought to incorporate them into the new community he was creating.
The theme of community continues after Christ. When people hear the good news presented to them by St. Paul, whole households call themselves Christian. From this our tradition of infant baptism derives, the recognition that babies are part of families and communities, and that the baby's environment is going to make a huge difference in how the baby turns out. St. Paul builds on the community theme by calling the Church the Body of Christ, and calling each of us members of this Body.
The Lord's Prayer is a community prayer, and when we pray it, we address God with the word "our" signifying we are praying as part of a community.
About 500 years ago a great cultural change took place in Europe when the age called the Enlightenment began. In a way unprecedented in human history, the individual was emphasized. We have gained tremendously in creativity as the unleashed power of the individual gave us great advances in science, in art, in literature, and even in religion. The Protestant Reformation reflected this movement and people started to think about a more individual relationship with God. The Baptist movement emerged which believed that only adult individuals could be believing Christians. Hymns and songs emerged which reflected this unprecedented individualism. People began to speak of Jesus as a "personal Lord and Savior". The word "me" and "my" showed up in hymns - "he walks with me and talks with me and tells me I am his own."
But somehow along the way, the pendulum swung too far. Extremists of individualism now attack community around the world. In Chiapas, Mexico and other areas where land is owned by communities of Native Americans, community ownership is under attack so that mineral rights can go to a wealthy few. In the United States, the Social Security program is under attack by those with a visceral hatred of a community's way of taking from the strong to protect the weak, believing instead that all individuals should be self-sufficient and live in old age with little but what they were able to save in their youth.
The Lord's Prayer calls us back from extreme individualism to community. We begin the prayer with the word "our". When we pray the Lord's Prayer, we are praying as part of something bigger than ourselves, as part of a community, as part of a family, as part of a group of people who have a claim on each other. In the entire prayer, there may be no word that is more important.
The second thing this prayer does is give us purpose and direction. After addressing our father, our mother, our loving parent in heaven, we pray that God's kingdom will come and God's will be done.
This is really a bit surprising, isn't it! When do we get to the part that's about us and what we want? When do we get to the part where we ask to be relieved of pain, or when we ask for a relative's health to be restored, or when we ask for a really nice Christmas present this year, just like we used to? There's a time and a place for such prayers - Jesus prayed a personal prayer once, the night before he was arrested, when he prayed that this cup might pass from him - but the personal petitions don't show up in this prayer.
This prayer is about the will of God - and that it may be done - not only in heaven, but here on earth. This prayer gives us far more than a new toy or even health. This prayer gives us purpose and direction for our lives. This prayer assumes God is doing something on this earth - not just the individualistic "changing the world one life at a time" but doing something with groups and institutions and nations and social systems. This prayer assumes we want God's reign to be more and more real. When we pray "thy will be done" we are praying that everyday realities in the outside world will be different.
Every four years United Methodist delegates come together in a General Conference. They pass resolutions about how things can be improved - in the natural world, in families, in our social communities, our economic communities and our political communities. These resolutions aren't just an opinion poll - they are prayerful attempts to define how we see God's will being done on earth as it is in heaven. They aren't perfect - surely each of us would find some we disagree with - and Reconciling Congregations like ours are pained by some General Conference statements on homosexuality -- but taken together it's a tremendous witness to the nation and to the world.
Some United Methodists aren't happy about the work I and others do at the General Board of Church and Society in Washington. They don't like it that we have a lobby arm that attempts to influence Congress and public opinion. They don't like it that we try to influence the country to make these resolutions come true. But if they're not happy, perhaps they haven't prayed the Lord's Prayer recently. Thy will be done, it says - and right here on earth as it is in heaven.
Now that we've prayed for God's will to be done, we get to address our needs, and the prayer has something for us physically, psychologically, and spiritually -- so that we are nourished to do God's will.
Physically, we find ourselves asking that God "give us this day our daily bread."
Well, actually we could ask for something a lot more elegant than bread, couldn't we? A nice charcoal-broiled steak on a back yard grill perhaps? Or an elegant dinner at the best restaurant in town? Wouldn't that be worth praying for? When I first came back to Christ Church after Saudi Arabia a group of us went out for brunch after church on Sunday. That really would be worth doing again. These are great ideas - but we don't find them in the Lord's prayer.
No, the Lord's prayer doesn't get to the "nice to have." It focuses on what we need. We need some bread, something to keep our bodies going - but for a purpose -- so we will have energy to do God's will. So it will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
We seek bread to nourish us physically, and we seek something to nourish us psychologically, for it's hard to seek God's will effectively if we are not psychologically whole. "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."
As we carry the guilt of things for which we have not been forgiven, and carry the burden of things for which we have not given forgiveness, we are like computers whose every move is slowed because we have too many open programs draining away our energy.
I read once that no person is really a grown-up until they have forgiven their parents.
The prayer for forgiveness is a prayer for healing, because it addresses the wounds we have caused and the wounds we have received.
Our world has many zealots who imagine themselves seeking God's will but who have never really prayed the Lord's Prayer. Enthusiasts for one cause or another seek to impose their morality on everyone. Zealots murder doctors who perform abortions because they say life is important to them. Excuse me? One thing you can pretty much count on: the unforgiving are also the unforgiven. They often imagine themselves specially called to help God and God's kingdom, but until they are willing to pray, "forgive us, as we forgive", they hinder, not help God's will.
On the path to God's will being done on earth, bread nourishes us physically and forgiveness nourishes us psychologically. The prayer Jesus gives us now moves to the last important clause, and here we seek spiritual nurture. "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil"
A recent issue of Time magazine described scientific advances in mapping the brain. Articles announced that scientists had found the centers of our brains where spirituality is located. It turns out that the spirituality they had in mind was most akin to what we would call meditation. If you really do meditation right, it alters your consciousness and if you are attached to electrodes, parts of your brain light up on a scientist's computer screen.
Meditation is a good thing to do and has a lot of benefits, but it's not the spirituality that the Lord's Prayer addresses. The Lord's Prayer addresses the spirituality which nourishes us against temptation and evil.
We don't hear the word "evil" used much in our secular world because it's such a "religious" word. But in my work helping develop a trauma curriculum for clergy, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of evil, and the definition I keep coming back to is that evil is the abuse of power. Think about anything you want to which is evil in your mind and you will find at its core the abuse of power. Child abuse, domestic violence, rape, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, war, holocaust - in every case, there is power, and there are those who abuse the power to inflict violence on others. All of us have some degree of power over others in some circumstances, and therefore all of us are tempted to abusive evil.
Our culture puts us in a fog with the idea that temptation is about rich foods or passing pleasures. But temptations to evil are temptations to abuse our power.
If we have made a commitment in a relationship, whether the relationship of husband and wife, lovers, or parent and child, each of us is vulnerable and each of us has power, and we have a capacity to abuse that power and betray that relationship.
If we have children, if we have subordinates on the job, if we have customers, if we are in an information booth or collect tickets, or serve on a police force or the military, we have power over other human beings and there is the possibility of abusing it. All of us therefore have the capacity of evil, and it is a temptation to abuse the power that we have.
And so we pray that we not be led into temptation.
And then we pray for deliverance from evil. If evil is associated with the abuse of power, then the bigger the concentration of power, the greater the potential for evil.
The genius of our nation's founders was that they recognized this, and created a government with checks and balances to keep anyone from getting too much power. They would have agreed with Lord Acton's statement, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Since our nation was founded, however, other centers of power and abuse have grown up. Multinational corporations have done great things, but without checks and balances on their power, they become one with the "powers and principalities of this present darkness" to which St. Paul referred. Corporations are like fire, which does tremendous good when controlled but becomes a death-dealing inferno when let loose. Philip Morris and other tobacco companies deliberately added substances to make cigarettes more addictive, and lied to the public about it. The United Methodist Church is calling for a boycott of Philip Morris' Kraft Foods operations because profits from the foods enable Philip Morris to continue its death-dealing behavior. Oil companies have been accused of the torture and deaths of native populations near their wells and pipelines in Burma, Indonesia, Nigeria and Colombia. And last week labor organizations filed suit against the Coca-Cola Corporation, accusing the local bottler in Colombia with organizing death squads.
Why do we have to hear about such things in church, where we have come to renew our relationship with Jesus Christ? Because Jesus asked us to pray for deliverance from evil, and we need to understand evil and how it works.
This is serious business. It is a matter of life and death. It is not just world affairs, but lives and souls and eternity. Evil has the capacity of stopping the kingdom of God in its tracks. And so we pray that we may be delivered from it.
We say the Lord's Prayer every church service. We say it by rote. We say it from memory. It has the treasured sound of familiarity. But it's the opposite of a meaningless prayer; its concerns are soul sized. When we pray this prayer, we put ourselves in community, a community of others who care that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We ask God for the very most important things - not the nice to haves, but the essentials: bread to nourish our bodies, forgiveness to make our relationships whole, and, above all else, God's presence to strengthen us against temptation and evil.
But shall we end on the word "evil"? Protestants say no. We are uncomfortable ending the Lord's Prayer with "deliver us from evil." It's abrupt and it's depressing and it's incomplete. And so we add the ancient ending that puts it all in context. In the end, God is in charge and that will never change. "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory; for ever and ever. Amen."