As I started work on this, i was asked by a lady who meditates daily about prayer. “I don’t get it,” she said, “God knows everything anyway, so why bother?” Calvin called prayer “the chief exercise of faith.”We pray the Lord’s Prayer, in its form in Matthew, every week in our liturgy here.. Part of me is glad, as it gets into our very bones, but part of me fears that the words roll off our tongues into some indefinite mental and spiritual ether.So it is a bit of a jolt to read a shorter version, a stripped down verison in Luke this morning
Notice that Jesus both praises God but asks for very real and need physical help. Jesus praises in his holy name but moves quickly to pray for the coming of God’s kingdom, God’s way, method, practice, will to be visible and clear here and now, in this world. Notice the boldness of the prayer with all of the commands, all of the imperative mood. Luke’s shorter version also has a good mix of the spiritual and the down to earth in the prayer for forgiveness.
I always have a hard time with lead us not into temptation. The same word could be testing or trial. Some read it with an end time flavor of the tribulations of the end. Some read it as please don't lead me into a situation I cannot handle.
The Christian life is framed in the story of the love of neighbor of the good Samaritan and the love of God and neighbor of the prayer. Prayer mobilizes action. It is not a passive substitute for action, but it is a ple for the resources in the world to converge on something beyond our control or capacities.Without prayer, charity work is threatened with burnout. Without prayer, the church is another public service organization.with prayer the church can present itself as the body of christ with hands extended to a hurting situation to help soothe and even heal hurting people.
Luther said we need to pray the Lord’s Prayer because we are only partly seeing the kingdom of God but are fully at home in the realm of the devil.So, we continue to need a divine hand to help us up when we slip or fall.Douglas John Hall writes that we are to be preserved from trials as we are the playthings of all sorts of evil and implicated in evil to an extent far too devastating for our consciences to contemplate apart from the presence of divine compassion.
One of the dangers of our tradition is that we can come to see the only proper prayer as being formal prayer. Look at how quick and informal the version of the Lord’s Prayer is in Luke: it is really a series, a checklist of imperatives directed at God. Place the words of Colissians into prayer practice. do not let anyone or any method get presented to you as the proper, the superior way to Pray: formal and well-crafted prayer, charismatic prayer, meditation. Just as we should not tell somehow how they should communicate with their love, we cannot dare to present one prayer practice as the template for anyone to follow precisely.Don;t let the words aobutthe immense power of prayerduissuade you from praying or worrying that the form or content of your prayer, even the state of our own collective soul is to blame ofr unanswered prayer.Look at the good disposition Jesus imagine with god, not some divine grammarian looking for a slip.(check PTS on LP)
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