Prayer as Imprint: (re) Learning to Pray the Lord's Prayer (pt. 2)

“There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.” Kate Chopin (19^th century writer)

Here is my translation of Matt 6:9-13 –

Our Father, the one who is in heaven;

Let your name be holy.

Let your kingdom come.

Let your will become [reality] on earth as it is in heaven [already].

Give to us today our food for the day.

Forgive us our debts just as we ourselves have forgiven our debtors.

Don’t lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. 

What does this text assume to be true?  What does this prayer suggest about God?  What does this prayer believe to be true about us?

Our Father:

Assumes that prayer is a community activity.  This does not mean that one always has to pray in the company of others (Jesus’ instructions in 6:5-8 suggest both individual and corporate prayers), but it does force the pray-er to reflect on the meaning of “our.”  God is never simply “my father” or “his father” or “her father” or “their father”; God is our father.

Assumes a relational framework.  Many of us are turned away from addressing God as “father” because of our own experiences within our families.  But Jesus’ model is supposed to be read as an invitation to participate in God’s family.  We embody this ethos when we value community and experience authentic relationship with God.

The One who is in heaven

God doesn’t merely relate as “our father”.  God relates as “Our father who is in heaven.”  In other words, this clause distinguishes God as unique among fathers. 

This address is then followed by three petitions addressed directly to God.  All of these are requests for God to usher in fully the promised new reality of an age of salvation.  Yet implicit in each request is a bold and daring shift in the pray-er’s own allegiance.  To pray each petition is to invite God to work in our lives so that each pray-er begins to embody the values of God’s reign that adumbrate the new age that is coming through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.

1) Let your name be holy.

God’s name is holy.  This is a request for the day in which God’s holiness and majesty will be fully and rightfully acknowledged by all creation.  It is a commitment to show God’s name holy in the present through the sort of life that we live.

2) Let your kingdom come.

Jesus came to announce the age of salvation—the kingdom of heaven (4:17).  This is a plea from a pray-er fully aware of the frailty of the present age.  Jesus has ushered in the first fruits of the future, but there is more to come.  It is a prayer for God to consummate his kingdom in its totality.  As this petition is prayer, the pray-er is also committing himself or herself to the values and ethos of the kingdom as taught and lived by Jesus.  Jesus’ followers are to live as people from the future who leave clues for those longing for a better life.

3) Let your will become [reality] on earth as it is in heaven [already].

This request fill outs the previous two.  What does it look like for God’s name to be recognized as holy and for God’s kingdom to come?  God’s will and intentions will be manifest in the totality of his creation.  The ethos of the Kingdom of heaven will be the ethos on earth.  Of course, to pray this line is to commit oneself to living out God’s will in the present in anticipation of God’s decisive action.

The prayer ends with three requests on behalf of the pray-er.  These serve as prayers for persons whose lives involve the mission of God.  Implicit in each request is profound trust in and recognition of God as the source of life, protection, and salvation.  Also each request is also a commitment to embody the very thing that it requested.

Give to us today our food for the day.

This is a simply request for food for the day.  Life starts and stops here.  We begin to embody this value however through becoming generous people.  To receive from God is to give to others.

Forgive us our debts just as we ourselves have forgiven our debtors.

Forgiveness is the key to community and maintaining genuine and life-changing relationships.  It is vital to read this request for forgiveness from God as a commitment to practice and model forgiveness within the community of faith as well as toward those outside of the community.

Don’t lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

To follow Jesus is to participate actively and fully in God’s mission.  Jesus did not come to create a static or stationary institution.  He came to unleash a movement that would embody the ethos of God’s kingdom and carry its message to the ends of the earth.  To live this way is to live dangerously.  Thus, one must pray a prayer of protection for deliverance from the evil one (the Devil) and from temptation. 

Why do we need to pray this prayer with audacity and faithfulness?  Because God desires to imprint his character on us so that we can leave his fingerprints and handprints in the world to serve as clues for others?

God doesn’t need us to make a “difference in the world” but to make the world different. God imprints us so that we can leave his imprint on others.

Are you the type of woman or man who can pray the Lord’s Prayer?  Or better, do you want to be the type of man or woman who can pray the Lord’s Prayer and embody it?

What would your life look like if you prayed the Lord's Prayer as truly lived it out?

© 2015 Brian D. Russell

Read Part one: Praying Audaciously: (re)Learning to Pray the Lord's Prayer.

Praying Audaciously: (re)Learning to Pray the Lord's Prayer

What does it mean to pray audaciously?

 

“Fortune favors the audacious.”  Erasmus (15th century priest, humanist)

“Audacity has made kings.”  Unknown.

“Every great advancement in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.” John Dewey

"Audacity augments courage; hesitations, fear." Publius Syrus (1st BC Roman author)

"Success is the child of audacity" Benjamin Disraeli (19th British PM)

"In every artist there is a touch of audacity without which no talent is conceivable" Von Goethe (1749-1832)

All of these quotations would fit well into a motivational speech.  When we think of leaders, a spirit of audaciousness and boldness is often found in persons who perform at high levels. 

But audaciousness sounds awkward in the context of prayer, doesn’t it?  But why?  Have we so domesticated prayer that we now miss its raw power as the audacious communication of created beings with their Creator?

Let’s read a prayer that is used so often in worship that too many of us miss its provocative and bold message. Hear anew the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples in Matthew 6:9-13:

Our Father, the one who is in heaven;

Let your name be holy.

Let your kingdom come.

Let your will become [reality] on earth as it is in heaven [already].

Give to us today our food for the day.

Forgive us our debts just as we ourselves have forgiven our debtors.

Don’t lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.  Amen. (my translation into modern English)

I want to suggest that this prayer is not a piece for rote memory and mindless repetition as it is so often reduced in our communities of faith.  Instead this pray is an invitation to a life of audacious petition and conversation with God.

As we think about the Lord’s Prayer there are several burning questions for us to think about:

What kind of person does God imagine me to be by inviting me to say this prayer?

What sort of person do I need to become to pray this prayer?

What does it say about God that He invites us to pray this prayer?

Jesus began his public ministry with the announcement: Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. (Matt 4:17).  In other words, the essential core of Jesus’ message is a call to (re)align with the new age of God’s mission to bring recreation and renewal to His Creation.  Jesus offers this prayer as a new prayer for a new day.  Jesus is looking for persons to serve as his disciples.  This prayer points to the ethos of the kingdom that he is inaugurating through his life, death, and resurrection.  This prayer is not about impressing others with eloquent words or babbling on incessantly as though rhetoric and many words could manipulate or force God into action.  Rather this prayer models a bold and direct (even audacious) approach to prayer with God.  Jesus is looking to build a movement that will change the world.  It begins with changed disciples--disciples who have been shaped and molded into disciple makers.

Audacious prayer is needed for followers of Jesus to be shaped into the world changers that God seeks to unleash.

The prayer Jesus gave to his disciples assumes a familial or relational view of God. God is a "father" rather than a despot, Lord, prince, rock, generic god, etc.

The prayer that Jesus gives his followers assumes community. It's our father and not "my" "his" "hers" or "yours." Ponder this deeply.

The prayer Jesus teaches is one that boldly asks for God to act to consummate his Kingdom fully.

The prayer Jesus teaches assumes that its pray-ers desire to live and embody God’s kingdom so that God can manifest His name through them.

The prayer Jesus teaches assumes that God cares about the basic needs of those who seek to live for God’s kingdom. This includes the base line provisions for the day—namely food.

The prayer that Jesus teaches assumes a community where forgiveness is practiced. Note that forgiveness shows up in the prayer itself and is reinforced immediately after the end of the prayer: Matt 6:14 “For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.”

The prayer assumes that God desires to guide and protect God’s people from temptation and that God’s people actively resist entering into temptation.

“Audacious prayer, which perseveres unflinchingly and ceases not through fear, is well pleasing unto God,” wrote Luther.

Are we ready to pray audaciously to the God who loves us and steadfastly acts for our greatest good?

© 2015 Brian D. Russell

Skills for Reading Scripture: Context(s)

Skills for Reading Scripture

There is no substitute for learning to read the text carefully and closely. Each of us can gain competence in this practice. Reading the Bible may be compared to a trip to the ocean. Like the ocean, the Scriptures have various levels and depths of meaning. The reader must decide whether to be satisfied merely with observing the ocean from a chair on the beach, dipping one’s toes into the shallows, or heading out far from shore. If one only enjoys the ocean from one particular spot, much will be missed. It is vital for us as readers to venture as deeply as possible into the biblical passages we are studying and to learn to view them from a variety of perspectives in order to experience them in all of their richness. Just as the ocean runs from the shallows along the shore to the unfathomable depths of the Mariana Trench so the Scriptures offer us as much depth as we desire. How deeply do we want to explore the Scripture?

Reading in Context

The key to understanding any passage in the Bible is learning to read it in its literary context. Reading Scripture is a dance between the reader, the text, and its wider context. Like a dancer who must maintain awareness of both the music and her partner, the wise reader must keep in view both the discrete details of the passage of Scripture being studied and the wider movements of the passages surrounding it. In biblical interpretation, context is everything. By literary context, we mean several interlocking levels.

First, the primary source of evidence for understanding the meaning of a passage is its immediate context. In most cases this will be the text that we are studying and the paragraphs immediate before and after it. For example, if we are studying the Lord’s Prayer (Matt 6:9-13) it is important to observe that it occurs within a block of teaching that focuses on prayer (6:6-15). The verses immediately before the Lord’s Prayer contrast it with prayers that emphasize many words and religious formulas and the verses after it focus on the necessity of forgiveness. Our reading of the Lord’s Prayer must be informed by and account for these elements.

Second, each passage has a wider context in the book in which it occurs. To get a sense of the book context take a few minutes to read the introductory notes in the Common English Study Bible to the book you are studying and observe the outline of the whole. This will help you to gain an understanding of the role that the smaller passage with which you are working plays in the overall message of a book. Again looking at the Lord’s Prayer, we may observe that it falls within a larger segment (6:1-18) that serves to warn against public acts of piety (almsgiving, prayer, and fasting) as a means to gaining rewards from God. Widening our lens a little more, we may observe that this text falls within a larger block of teaching materials known traditionally as the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:1–7:29). In this material Jesus is training his disciples for the ministry of announcing the good news of the kingdom of heaven (Matt 4:17–11:1).

Reading in context is vital as a guard against misreading the meaning of a passage. A truism about reading in context is this: “A text without a context is a pretext.” Apart from reading a passage of Scripture in context we may easily make a text say what we desire for it to mean rather than to hear the message that the text itself wants us to hear. The wise reader must remember this: Read an individual text in light of its literary context. This practice alone will keep us from many errors.

There are other contexts that the wise reader will also be attentive to as time permits. First, information on the historical context or background can help us to gain a richer appreciation of a passage of Scripture. The study notes in this Bible will draw the reader’s attention to important historical details. In addition, readers may find it helpful to use a bible dictionary or a full-length commentary. For example, in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, Paul mentions opponents who are harassing the Philippian Christ followers (e.g., 1:28, 3:2, 3:18). Who are these opponents? Is there one group or are there several different opponents? What is the nature of their opposition? Answering these questions would provide helpful historical background for understanding Paul’s words to the Philippians.

Second, readers need to be aware of related texts that the passage we are studying alludes to and/or other passages that may allude to our text. Psalm 8 is a text that models both of these situations. Psalm 8 is a hymn of praise to the Lord. It reflects on the status and mission of humanity in light of the majestic nature of God. Psalm 8:6-8 focuses on the stewardship role played by women and men over creation. The psalmist clearly has in mind the creation story in Genesis 1:1–2:3. If we are going to fully comprehend the message of Psalm 8, we will need to study how the psalmist interprets uses the material from Genesis. The savvy reader will also want to know that Hebrews 2:6-8 quotes Psalm 8:4-6. If we are going to understand the full biblical meaning of Psalm 8, we will need to be aware of how the author of the book of Hebrews deploys Psalm 8 in his letter.

Reading with the Big Picture in Mind

Reading the Bible as Christian Scripture also involves understanding each individual passage and book within the overall context of the Bible as a whole. The Christian canon of sixty-six books links the Old and New Testament and proclaims an overarching narrative when viewed as a whole. We may observe the following framework that holds the discrete elements of the Bible together: Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus the Messiah, Church, New Creation. The Bible begins with the story of the Creation of the world (Gen 1–2) and ends with the description of a future New Creation (Revelation 20–21). The biblical story opens with a very good world and ends with the recreation of very goodness. In between these bookends, we find the biblical story of the salvation of the people and all creation. The need for salvation is first described in Genesis 3–11. This section of Scripture describes the fundament problem in the world: human alienation and sin. This problem has fractured the very good creation described in Gen 1–2. God responds to this problem by calling a people for himself through whom he will bless all nations (Gen 12–Malachi). This people is named Israel. God calls Israel’s ancestors in Gen 12–50. He rescues them from slavery in Egypt and establishes a covenant relationship with them as a means of preparing them to serve as a people of blessing to the world, and leads them through the wilderness to the promised land of Canaan (Exodus–Deuteronomy). Joshua­–Esther narrate Israel’s life in Canaan, its times of obedience/disobedience, exile, and return. The wisdom books (Job–Song of Songs) include the prayers of God’s people and their reflections on the good life within God’s creation. The Old Testament ends with the Prophetic books. The Prophets (Isaiah–Malachi) serve to call God’s people back to their roots as the holy redeemed people through whom God will bless the nations and they also envision a radical future act of salvation. The New Testament opens with the four Gospels, which tell the story of the Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Jesus announces the inbreaking of God’s future and fulfills the hopes and expectations of Israel’s Scriptures. Jesus’ death and resurrection marks the climax of God’s saving work and serves to announce the final victory of God. Acts–Rev 19 tells the story of the Church under the power of the Holy Spirit witnessing to all nations about the good news of Jesus. Revelation 20-21 brings the story full circle by envisioning the full consummation of God’s victory in a New Creation.

The wise reader keeps in mind this broader story as a means of understanding much smaller portions of the Bible. Again a balance must be maintained. To focus only on this broad summary risks missing the many nuances that individual biblical books and passages within them offer. If we only focus on the big picture we may flatten out the Bible by forcing its individual pieces to conform to our assumptions about the big picture. But to focus only on the specific details of smaller passages runs the risk of missing the overall message of the Bible. It is like having all of our clothing piled randomly in a closet without any discernible organizing principle. The big picture serves as hangers and dividers to make sense of our wardrobe. The wise reader will be aware simultaneously of the broader narratives and themes of the Bible while also hearing the witness of the individual passage under current consideration.