REFLECTION FOR OPEN PRAIRIE UCC – SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 29th, 2019
Today I’m
thinking about
The Lord’s Prayer.
Did you know that The Lord’s Prayer appears in two different places in the bible?
In different forms?
We usually recite the longer version from the gospel of Matthew, but before we get to that, let’s look at the shorter one in the gospel of Luke:
Sometimes it’s helpful to pay attention to the context of a passage, but in Luke’s version there isn’t much to set the scene:
Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” And he said to them, “When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.”
Luke 11:1-4
That’s it!
So, the prayer according to Luke skips a lot that we are probably familiar
with, and has no formal ending. No “for thine is the kingdom”, no “the end”, no
“amen”.
I want to make a few points
about the individual elements of the prayer, but all of these are duplicated in
Matthew’s version too,
so I’ll wait until we get there.
But I would like to mention one thing. Did you notice that the prayer said, “forgive us our sins”? In our weekly service we usually say ‘debts’ or ‘trespasses’, but here it says ‘sins’. I looked up this verse on my computer, which has many different translations of the bible, and they all use the word ‘sins’ in this verse.
If you’ll indulge me for a
moment, I personally don’t like saying ‘forgive us our debts’ because I feel
like I should pay my debts. I don’t want to be forgiven for my debt. But
it would have made more sense to them, because in the Jewish society, some
debts were forgiven on a 7-year cycle and some happened every 50 years, which
was called Jubilee. But our society is not like that, and I’m uncomfortable
saying “forgive us our debts”. Not even in just a financial sense – for example
if I was rude to you – if you were talking and I told you to “shut up”, would I
be in your debt for that? Not really. But have I trespassed against you?
YES!
So that’s why I say ‘forgive us our trespasses’. (but I’m okay with ‘sins’, too!)
OK, enough about ME.
Let’s move on to the gospel according to Matthew.
Matthew records a longer
version of the Lord’s Prayer as part of the Sermon on the Mount. The entire contents
of chapters 5 through 7 are one long series of teachings by Jesus, and in this version
we can gain some insight by looking at the context.
Right before this, He had been talking about giving to the needy, and He
says something about giving in secret. And He says, “your Father who sees in
secret will reward you”.
Right after this prayer, He talks about fasting. And He says, “that your
fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your
Father who sees in secret will reward you. “
Don’t even start to think that’s a coincidence, because this is how the prayer in between those passages begins:
Matthew 6:5-15
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
“This, then, is how you should pray: “‘Our Father in heaven,
- hallowed be your name,
- your kingdom come,
- your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
- Give us today our daily bread.
- And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
- And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’
For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
Ok, let’s think about what we
are really praying for.
If you break it down, we are praying three requests for God,
and then we make three requests for ourselves.
First, we ask that “hallowed be
your name”.
The word ‘hallowed’ is probably not in our everyday vocabulary, but it means
Holy. We want God to stay Holy in the minds and hearts of his people.
Then we ask for “your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven”.
Have you ever really thought about that?
A lot of Christians seem to be just waiting to die so they can go to heaven, but none of the writers of the New Testament ever talk that way. Or seem to think that way. They take the opposite view, asking for God’s Kingdom to be established here, in the world.
And then we ask that His will
be done here on earth as it is in heaven.
That’s similar to the verse before, in that we are praying for things to happen
here on earth. In This World.
So, we asked for three things on God’s behalf; His Holiness, His Kingdom, and His Will.
Then we ask three things for ourselves:
The first is to have enough
food to last another day.
Is He trying to teach us to live one day at a time?
If I had enough fuel in me to last until tomorrow, do I really need much else?
Maybe shelter and clothing and community would be nice, but we don’t really
need much to make it through one more day.
If that isn’t enough for you, concentrate on the word us, “Give us
today our daily bread”. The earth is plentiful and bountiful, and there should
be enough for everyone. If anyone is starving anywhere in the world, then
something is out of balance.
but let’s get back to thinking about ME… (smile)
If I already have enough to
last until tomorrow, what else do I really need today? Well, I don’t want to do
any damage to anyone else, so I am asking forgiveness if I have done any harm. This
translation used the word ‘debts’, but other translations I checked used
‘trespasses’, or ‘sins’, or ‘offenses’, in different combinations, and that’s
where our weekly prayer gets divided about which word to use.
Anyway, no matter what word we choose, I think we all know what He means, and
forgiveness would definitely be one of the top three requests I would make. On
a daily basis!
So, that was me not wanting to
do harm to others, but I also
don’t want any spiritual damage to happen to me, so I pray for
protection against temptation, and to be protected from evil.
These three are the simplest, most essential requests I can think of!
We usually add a closing line, “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever”, but I don’t really know where that comes from. Jesus doesn’t even add an ‘amen’ to it, He jumps right into a lesson about forgiveness.
Since we are probably not as familiar with those verses, I‘ll read them again:
Matthew 6:14-15 (NIV)
For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
One of my favorite bible teachers is N.T. Wright. He says,
“What I think is going on here pastorally is this; the same facility inside ourselves which opens to give forgiveness to somebody else (the open-heartedness which says, and means, ‘I forgive you’) is the same door in our hearts that is open to receive God’s forgiveness”.
That door needs to stay open.
We should pray for that…
Thank You.