These meditations were written by the Rev. Susan E. Ostrom as part of the devotional material produced for the E-Source - an electronic newsletter of the Toppenish United Methodist Church. This material is fully protected under international copyright law. Permission to reproduce and use within a local church setting as a devotional aide is granted, providing that no wording is changed, and that appropriate credit is given. Kindly send an e-mail statement about the use of the material to Rev. Ostrom.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.
MEDITATIONS ON THE LORD'S PRAYER
The prayer begins with Jesus addressing God "Our Father. I don't think the Father implies that this is the only way to ever address God, but it does tell us that we can come to God with the confidence of children going to parents. Elsewhere Jesus says "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." (Jn. 4:24) As spirit, God is beyond such things as gender. No one title for God can begin to capture all that God is. That is why, in our worship, I try to use, through prayers and hymns, a variety of images for God. Take the time to look through the Bible for the many ways that God is described. A good place to start is with the Book of Psalms. For example, in Psalm 18 God is described as "my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer, . . . my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold." Go on to Isaiah 66 and God is compared to a mother with a young child: "As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you;"
So as a devotional exercise, open your Bible and flip through it looking for titles for and/or descriptions of God. Keep a pad of paper handy and make a list. How does this expand your image of God?
We move on to the phrase "who art in heaven." Our usual thought is that heaven is up in the sky somewhere, and so we imagine God "up there" somewhere looking over us. At least some of this concept comes from the early Hebrew concept of heaven. In fact, that is why a lot of churches (including ours) were built with the sanctuary on an upper level, as if being higher physically were somehow closer to God. I would challenge that for us now. When God came to us in the person of Jesus, God was incarnate, or made flesh. That means God was among us as one of us, which is a pretty amazing idea. He is not far off somewhere, but as close as our breathing! I would suggest that heaven is where God is -- and God is with us and among us. Heaven is not so much a physical place as a spiritual idea. May God be with you this day!
"Hallowed be thy name" is the next phrase in the Lord's Prayer. Hallowed means holy, and holy means to be separate. A holy space is one set aside for a special purpose. So God's name is set aside as something sacred and special. The third commandment tells us not to take God's name in vain. That's a commandment pretty much ignored by a lot of people in our society. They use God's name as casually as they use other words. They use God's name to express their displeasure at some event or person. Yet each Sunday, we pray that God's name will be hallowed, or set aside as something special. It seems to me that to hallow God's name certainly has implications for the language we use throughout each day. People in Bible times believed that names were powerful things, and not to be used lightly. We've lost that sense, maybe especially when it comes to God's name. Watch yourself, or if you are going to be really serious about this, invite someone with whom you spend a lot of time, to keep track of how often you say "God, it's hot" and it is clear you are not truly addressing The Holy One.
I also believe that we can take God's name in vain, we can un-hallow (is that a word?) God's name without ever using the actual name of God. We violate God's name when we tell a joke that depends on putting down another to be funny. We violate God's name when we yell at the driver who cut us off in traffic or our spouses or children for irritating us. We violate God's name any time our words hurt instead of healing.
In a more positive light, we hallow God's name when we speak words of love, when we take the time to listen to someone who is hurting, when we raise our voices in a song of praise.
So, the thought for the day for each of us, is does our language take God's name in vain or does it hallow God? Hmmm.
The next section of The Lord's Prayer to consider is "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." These two phrases are parallel thoughts, or two different ways of expressing the same idea. God's kingdom comes when God's will is done on earth. It is also worthy of note that thus far in the prayer the focus is on God and how we can worship, serve, and honor God -- not a shopping lists of our needs and desires. That will come, but if prayer begins with a focus on God it puts our own needs and desires in perspective. I wonder what our lives would be like if the primary focus in them was doing God's will rather than our own wills? I don't mean that as a guilt trip on you or anyone else: we all struggle to put God first. But one of the benefits of prayer is that it helps to orient us to God. A lot of times we think of prayer as a way of getting God's attention when actually it is the other way around. God has been working in our lives all along and when we pray it is because God has finally gotten our attention!
Let God's will be done in Toppenish and Buena and Zillah and wherever you are, this very day!
The next phrase to consider in The Lord's Prayer is "give us this day our daily bread." It is reminiscent of the Hebrew people's gathering of the manna on a day by day basis. As you may recall, they could not gather more than one day's worth at a time, except just prior to the Sabbath when they could get two day's worth. They had to trust God to provide one day at a time. So too Jesus, in this prayer, asks for bread one day at a time. It is hard for me, and I suspect most of us, to think on such a short-term scale. Few people now get paid at the end of each day. We get paid once a month, or maybe once every couple of weeks, or for farmers once a year (when they get paid at all, but that's another story!) So we think long range, and there is much that is good about that. But even though our culture is radically different from the one Jesus lived in, this part of the prayer is a good reminder to us that trusting God is a daily thing. Sometimes, quite honestly, it is a minute by minute thing. Probably most of you who will read this don't have to trust God minute by minute for daily bread, that is physical sustenance. But you may have to trust God a minute at a time for faith to deal with a difficult problem at work, for love to respond to a difficult person, for hope to continue as you watch the pears drop off the tree because there is no point in harvesting them after storm damage.
When we pray for daily bread, we are remembering it is appropriate to ask for the basic necessities in life, but we are also remembering that trusting God in all arenas of life is something we have to do each and every day.
As we move on through The Lord's Prayer, the next line to consider is "And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."
Forgiveness is such a tough subject, and to consider a linkage between God's forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others only makes it tougher! It is one thing to talk about forgiveness and quite another to do it, so I feel quite cautious in making blanket statements about how to forgive. If you have been wounded deeply by someone, and most of us have in some way, then you know how very difficult it is.
I have a couple of thoughts about this line in The Lord's Prayer. The first is that faith in Jesus Christ is not just about feeling good about myself. The Christian walk is a tough one, and forgiving those who have harmed us is part of the challenge. To receive God's forgiveness for my sins is certainly a piece of the Christian faith, but that very forgiveness then calls me to pass it on. Jesus said the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love each other. One way to think about all this is to picture our relationship with God as a vertical line and our relationships with each other as a horizontal line. They intersect, to form a cross. Faith is not complete without both lines, both loving God and loving each other, or receiving God's forgiveness of us and then our forgiving of others.
The second thought is that I am not capable of forgiving others all on my own. I have to have God's help. That Jesus included a prayer for forgiveness in this model prayer suggests to me that he knew very well that humans couldn’t forgive all by themselves. Forgiveness takes a great deal of prayer. Sometimes I start the forgiving process by asking God to forgive me for my inability to forgive. I can't stay there, but it is a start. Then I move on to ask God to help me to forgive.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."
Wow. There's a thought for us in this troubled time. How many times have Christians prayed that God would deliver us from evil, and yet how often do we think about a connection with our own temptation. I am certainly tempted right now to pray that God deliver us from evil as if that evil is entirely outside of me. Yet as I consider this next section of the Lord's Prayer, it strikes me that these are not two separate phrases but all part of one thought.
Many translations of the Bible say "deliver us from the evil one." It seems pretty clear to me that this implies that we be delivered from Satan. Certainly when Jesus was being tempted in the desert, he was tempted by Satan, who is the personification of evil. If you read the story of those temptations in Luke 4, you will see that Jesus was tempted, not by clearly bad things, but by good things which could be used in the wrong way.
Over the years, we in this country have perceived various people as the evil one: Adolph Hitler, Sadaam Hussein, and now perhaps Osama Bin Ladin, to mention a few. We pray to be delivered from the evil they perpetrate. Yet as I look at The Lord's Prayer, it seems to me that Jesus' focus was not so much on how other people's evil operates, but on how evil works within us and how we are tempted by that evil.
Certainly the attacks of September 11, 2001 were evil. But perhaps at this point our focus should be on the temptation to evil that faces us as we consider a response. We must not allow someone else's evil to push us into evil. We've seen a bit of that already. People attack others who are of Middle Eastern descent. For reasons I can't quite imagine, they make bomb threats. In the name of patriotism and a united stand, those who have a different approach are criticized or keep silent for fear of seeming unpatriotic. It is tempting to assume that war is the only possible response rather than first looking to peaceful ways to respond to the attack, and using war as the last resort.
Now of all times, let us pray "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."
"For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen."
So we come to the last phrase in the Lord's Prayer. If you have ever been to a service at a Catholic Church, you may have noticed they do not include this phrase. To most Protestants it often feels incomplete. Actually, in this case Catholics are more Biblical than we are, because this phrase is not in either version of The Lord's Prayer in the Bible. (Check it out at Luke 11:2b-4 and Matthew 6:9-13.) You may have a footnote that indicates that ancient authorities added the phrase about the kingdom, the power, and the glory.
In all likelihood, Jesus did not include these words in the prayer. The early church added them on as a fitting doxology, or thanksgiving, to the prayer. As you know, Jesus did include in the prayer a petition that God's kingdom come. He began his ministry by announcing that the kingdom of God had come near. These words are an appropriate ending to this prayer for they pull us back to a reminder that it is God's kingdom that we focus on.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, the plight of our nation has been at the forefront of our minds. That is well and good. We are united in a new sense these days, and that also is a good thing, as long as we remember that united does not mean uniform and we continue to respect a variety of viewpoints. As Christians, however, we need to remember that first and foremost in our minds and hearts, is God's kingdom. Certainly we can and should be loyal to our nation but we must never confuse any earthly kingdom with God's kingdom.
So it is, we end The Lord's Prayer with these words: "For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory." And then we say "amen." which means so be it, or let it be so, or just YES!