When I was a kid, I remember doing a skit in church about the Lord’s prayer. It started with me starting the Lord’s prayer and then God interrupting and asking questions. I remember the beginning particularly…
Person: Our Father, who...
God: Yes?
Person: Don't interrupt me! I'm praying.
God: But you called me.
Person: Called you? I didn't call you. I was praying. Our Father who art in heaven...
God: There, you did it again.
Person: Did what?
God: Called me. You said, "Our Father who art in heaven." Here I am. What's on your mind?
The skit goes through the whole prayer- God interrupts after each line and comments on what the prayer means. It’s a little funny at times, but mostly it’s challenging because it serves as a reminder that we often treat prayer as a one-way thing that we have to get through. Words we say without expecting a response.
The Lord’s prayer is a great example. We pray these words week after week, often reverting to the version we knew best as a child. But do we ever stop and think about the words? Do we ever pause after the amen and wait to see if God is answering us? Do we even understand what we’re doing when we pray these words? Why do we pray them?
Jesus uses this prayer as a way to teach the disciples to ask for what they need, and couches this lesson in a larger one- As and it will be given, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you. This is a lesson in self-advocacy and in asking for what we need. To be clear, Jesus wasn’t teaching the disciples a specific prayer, but rather a WAY of praying.
We’re the ones who have taken the words directly from the gospel and turned it into a specific prayer. I don’t think that’s what Jesus intended. The disciples asked Jesus to teach them HOW to pray, not what exact words to say. I feel like Jesus was providing a general outline for how prayers should work.
This prayer, and the words that follow it, are couched in parent language- “Father” hallowed by thy name… if your child asks for an egg, giving good gifts to your children, etcetera. This is no coincidence, but rather a reminder of the parental nature of God. God is a loving parent who wants the best for God’s children.
Last week we discussed God as a mother, this week, God is a Father. Either way, the language is intentional- reach out to God the same way you reach out to a parent, and God will respond the same way you’d respond to your child asking for a fish. The greeting Jesus chooses for the prayer then, is about reminding us that God is like a parent who wants good things for their children.
But of course, the prayer goes on beyond the greeting. This is not a “Hi God, Bye God” situation. Prayers generally ask for things. In the Lord’s prayer, these requests are both big and small. Big: Asking for God’s kingdom to come to earth. Small: asking for daily sustenance. By teaching us to ask for both types of things, Jesus is reminding us that our prayers are more than just about us.
Of course, we should pray for the things happening in the world and want our world to look more like God’s kingdom. We want earth to look more like heaven- but as I remind us each week, we are answers in part to the prayers we offer, so we have to be willing to do the work of making the earth a bit more heavenly. We have to be the ones who bring a little of God’s kingdom into the world.
And yes, we also want to be sure that we’re sustained. We cannot do the work of bringing god’s kingdom to earth if we are hungry or tired. So we can and should ask for sustenance. I love the adage, “you cannot pour from an empty cup.”It reminds us that we can’t give to others if our own stores are so low we cannot function.
We cannot take care of others if we aren’t taking care of ourselves. But that goes beyond the physical. On a spiritual level, we cannot forgive others if we aren’t willing to forgive ourselves and accept forgiveness. So Jesus reminds us that we are forgiving and forgiven.
Returning to that skit on the Lord’s prayer for a moment, One time that God interrupts the person praying, God says “Praying is a dangerous thing. You could end up changed, you know.” And I think perhaps that’s the entire point.
I don’t believe that prayer changes God. I think that prayer changes the pray-er. Author C.S. Lewis is credited as saying “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.” And I think that’s the point entirely. Praying changes us. It changes our perspective. It reminds us that we aren’t alone. And it reminds us that we are active participants in the answers to the prayers we offer.
When Jesus taught us to pray, I don’t think he intended for our prayer to become something we memorize and recite. And yet that’s what we do. I also don’t think that’s a bad thing. Familiar prayers are comforting and give us a sense of commonality and community, Younger generations learn them and they have a connection to those who have come before and those who will come after. This prayer has been prayed for centuries and has been included in written liturgy since at least as far back as the 1500s. So I’m definitely not saying we should just stop doing the Lord’s prayer.
But I think we can always take a moment to reflect on why we do what we do. I think remembering the original context of this prayer can help us to do more than just say the words out loud because we know them by heart. I think the Lord’s prayer can serve as both an outline for our own prayer practice and a connection to fellow Christians throughout history. I think it works as a place to start a longer prayer or as a way to close a prayer in a way that everyone knows the words. By sharing this prayer together in worship, we’re making our hopes public and communal- we’re moving beyond the page and into the world.
We can also take this prayer into our daily lives in a way that does serve as an outline. We can greet God as a loving parent, commit to doing our part to bring God’s kingdom to earth, ask for what we need, reflect on how to help others, and come to terms with our own mistakes. In doing so we pray the way Jesus taught us, even if we don’t use the exact words.
Amen