Abba Father God, Bless your holy name.

Let your reign come now, Let your desires be carried out.

Bring your peace to birth, As in heav’n, so on Earth

Give us bread, daily; Free us, as we free.

When the way is hard, Be our guide and guard.

Your rule, power; and praise Reign supreme, always.

via The Lord’s Prayer – Mennonite Style

Related posts:

1. Living Out the Scripture: The Lord’s Prayer
2. Practicing Re-Collection (or Centering) Prayer
3. Stations of the Lord’s Prayer (A Worship Resource)

Dive! is a documentary about dumpster diving, but it is about much more than that as well. It is about the hunger crisis in our nation, and world. It is about the amount of waste that we pile into our landfills at an alarming rate. It is about the realities of consumerism’s over-consumption and the impact this has in our day-to-day lives. But of course, this is all told while watching Jeremy and company dive in dumpsters.

As a documentary film it is well done. It is about 45 minutes long and not only holds the attention, it is both creative and provocative. There are a variety of statics drawn up using food items found in the dumpster, a great soundtrack (from Jeremy’s band Jubilee Singers), and lots of creative editing along the way. There are a number of intriguing interviews, and compelling research to go along with the issues this short film documents. The filmmaker obviously did his homework.

One thing that I find compelling about the film is that it is personal. Jeremy’s family and friends are involved, it is a glimpse into their actual lives. It is a personal film, a personal call from someone who is responding the best way he knows how. It’s not the kind of high brow morality that calls you to live a certain way while it’s obvious that the prophet isn’t doing it him or herself (and isn’t this one of the tensions in Gore’s film on global warming? All the audience knows that he flies all around the world piling up more carbon waste than many Americans will in a lifetime). There is no such thing in this film. So the film is close, it feels like something I can actually take part in, rather than something more abstract and distant like global warming. And surely, responding to the details of Dive! is in line with being conscious of the devastation of global warming.

Refreshingly, the film’s response doesn’t involve consumerism! Unlike so many “change the world” gimmicks, you don’t actually have to buy anything to respond to this film. In fact, there is no suggestion anywhere in this film that one should buy this or that in order to respond to hunger and waste, in fact, if there is a response it is to start buying less, scaling back, being careful of what it is you buy, what packaging it’s in, and making sure that you use what you have instead of throwing it away. Of course, another response is to become a freegan and start your own dumpster diving cohort.

Finally, one other thing I love about this film is that a genuine conversation takes place through the movie. It starts out with Jeremy and his friends dumpster diving, but over the course of the film you see that he is struck by the amount of waste they continue to find, this in conjunction with the growing food crisis that was all over the news last Autumn really woke Seifert up to what was happening in the world. He told me over the phone, “In the physical act of jumping in a dumpster and eating waste something happens, the reality strikes you of what is taking place.” This caused a kind of outrage for him. After quoting the answer to his question “What kind of society creates this much trash?” from Dr. Timothy Jones, “The kind of society that would waste this much food is one that doesn’t value the earth or the products it produces. It’s in our own personal detriment to continue the process,” Seifert told me that what needs to be regained is a sense of wonder and awe towards creation. Abraham  Joshua Heschel said, “Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.”Getting that wonder back is essential. For Jeremy, “If you have that sense of awe and wonder and you see it being abused and mangled there’s that sense of outrage that leads to response.” And the rest of the film traces some of the personal response that he and his friends undertake.

Response? : Eat Trash

There are many things that can be done in response to what you learn in this film, but Here’s what he writes in his own words about response:

For me, an important first step to really caring about the issue of food waste was hopping in a dumpster, bringing home the food, and eating it. Eating trash is a subversive act. It goes against a culture of over-consumption and gratuitous wastefulness. Experience that initial rush, shame, fear, and exhilaration of “stealing” trash and eating it will change you in good ways.

Second, I think it’s important to go to your local grocery store and ask what they do with their food waste. They might not tell you. Or they’ll dodge the question by listing organizations to which they donate. Ask them about all the FRESH food–meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables. Ask them if they would be open to allowing you to pick this food up and bring it to a nonprofit that serves the needy. Do all of this with a pleasant tone, big smile, and servant’s heart.

Bring a copy of THE GOOD SAMARITAN ACT….download here.

Third, you’ll need a place to bring the food, so you’ll have to locate a shelter or food bank in your area that could use the food. This is where logistics comes into play. They’ll need to be able to immediately use or temporarily store fresh food….shelving space, refrigerators, freezers. This step actually happens at the same time as visiting your local grocery stores. You will probably need a letter from the shelter or food bank stating their needs, requesting donations, and naming you or your family/friends/organization/church as the volunteer designated to pick up the food.

The feedback from the film showing was tremendous. People seemed to love it. There was great conversation afterwards and a number of people felt like this is the kind of thing a lot of people can relate to and connect with.

I highly encourage you to find a screening near you or pick up the film for yourself and show it to your faith community, it will be well worth every minute.

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Related posts:

1. Global Warming Video and Blue Guys?
2. The Divine Commodity by Skye Jethani (A Review)
3. Use Terra Pass to Help Reduce Emissions

Then after reading the article “Guardians of Their Smiles” in the NY Times we decided to change the privacy settings on our family photos on flickr. It used to be just a site for photos that I took but more and more it is just photos of our family, so I feel that the added privacy is not a bad idea. In the article a woman using flickr to post photos of her daughter discovered that her daughter’s photos were being used in a malicious way on another social networking site.

Now, I am no alarmist and I am not about to get all privacy this and that on you, but I appreciated the question my friend Fernando put to me on twitter: “it’s about giving people control over their “digital destiny.” How will the stuff we post hit our kids future relationships?” And this is really it for me. Not only do we not know what it’s like to have our entire lives archived online, we are the ones choosing what to post and what not to post for the public. As I described above, I wrestle with how much to hold back, and how much to announce to the world. I don’t have other people posting my life online for me as many parents (including yours truly) do these days. So I think it’s not a bad idea to slow down, reflect on the questions at hand, and consider limiting family-sharing stuff to friends and family.I think it’s fine to post some things publically, as I’ve shown here with the photo above, so I’m really thinking more in terms of something like flickr acting more like an archive than shared note here and there. I’ll leave the archiving up to my daughters when they’re ready to do it themselves (Lord knows Google’s got a nice archive on me).

What do you think? How have you navigated these questions?

Advertisement: http://convergentfriends.org/feed/ Visit Convergent Friends

Related posts:

1. 2000 pictures on flickr
2. Flickr-Slidr Slideshows for Your Blog (And UK Pictures)
3. flickr: Don’t Cross Beams With Vimto

This is an extended version of what I preached on Sunday morning November 1, 2009

Last week we began a new set of conversations, where we are exploring what I’m referring to as, in keeping with other Quakers and Anabaptists, the Disciple’s prayer. This stresses the point that it is for those of us who consider ourselves followers of Jesus, his disciples. Last Sunday we reflected on the prayer as a mission statement; it contains within it both the spiritual and the physical, prayer and action, contemplation and movement.

This week we move into the first of three cords, or sections, that I have compressed the prayer into. Surely, there are many ways that this prayer can be broken down, it is most often framed around six petitions: three for God and three for the disciples – us (McClendon 156). But for our purposes, and the time we have to cover this, a cord of three is appropriate. The Disciple’s Prayer is a cord of three in the following way:

The first strand, “Our Father in heaven, may your name be held holy, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.” It is about a reorientation within a new community, what should be called a new family that is organized around the Father and his kingdom.

The second strand, as I see it, is: “Give us this day our daily bread,” or as some translators stress, give us enough bread for today. This strand concerns our ethics, how we live out our lives, and how our lives impact others. We take only enough, so that there is enough for others.

The third stand, certainly related to the previous two is: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.” This strand is related to the resurrection, that is the sphere of Christianity that is about witnessing to the risen Christ, the part of Christianity that is truly struggling with the world to cultivate and create its own new world here on Earth. As Christians we live in the light and reality of God’s resurrection power, and therefore we live out an alternate reality, one that is as a result of God’s forgiveness and spiritual guidance. We can forgive others, because we are ourselves forgiven! Even more to the point, own forgiveness depends on us being people of forgiveness! And we confess our struggle to live out the new world among so many temptations to break step with God’s kingdom and go at it alone.

These three stands, the reorientation of a new worshiping community, the embodied, ethical strand of the daily and mundane, and the resurrection strand rooted in the in between times, i.e. the compost, with us living and breathing the witness of God’s good news, includes the whole cosmos. This is why I said last week that this prayer contains within it the entire mission and practice of the Christian church. Everything is summed up in this prayer, everything we need to be formed in the likeness of Christ, to become his disciples is located within this prayer, after all it is the Disciple’s prayer.

Now James McClendon pushes this a step further showing how this entire prayer involves creation. In other words the “heaven and earth” of this prayer. I think that it’s worth quoting the whole thing because I know many of you are deeply connected to concerns of creation. McClendon argues that each of the petitions, whether you break it up into six as he does, or take the three cord approach that we have, engage creation. He writes this:

“The first three petitions (the hallowing of the name, the coming of the rule [or kingdom], the doing of the will of the Father) are framed round with the inclusive components of creation, “earth” and “heaven.” These petitions exemplify one great condition for answered prayer, namely that we pray as God wills that we pray. Not only does Jesus as God’s own Son teach this prayer; the petitions declare the divine creative purpose: a creation at peace (shalom) with its Creator, a creation that fulfills the divine rule, a creation that blesses God who is its blessing. ‘On Earth as in heaven’ implies that this threefold petition is not only the Disciple’s Prayer, not only Jesus’ Prayer: it is the prayer of Mother Earth herself in the purpose of God the Father. [The second of the three petitions are uniquely for the disciple’s (there is no evidence that Jesus himself prayed this prayer). They presuppose sin, and sin as rupture between human beings (“our debtors”) and between us and God (“our debts”) and they presuppose the risk of the earthly journey (“lead us not into...”) and the tension of the last days, with the threat that lies at creation’s chaotic margins (“the evil one,” or simply “evil”). Yet the petitions ask for created and creative wholeness in such a time - for a network of forgiveness binding up the wounded world, for a lacing together of souls and bodies sustained by shared (eucharistic and ordinary?) bread, for a providential leadership guiding a pilgrim church through its earthly journey (“save us from the time of trial” in the version of the Consultation on Common Texts).]

But In sum McClendon says, “the Disciple’s Prayer presumes a hearer God deeply involved with the organic and inorganic world, a holy God who blesses the created order with his own presence, a nurturing God who cares about the baking of bread, a healing God who mends the ruptures of social fabric for our good, a guiding God who leads Christians through the narrow passages of time that precede the end. To acknowledge the listening presence of such a God is to acknowledge God’s prior presence in creation to feed and heal and guide and bless.” (McClendon 156).

Therefore, I think this prayer deals with the whole cosmos. When we dare to say the words, “Our Father” this is the Father whom we are talking about, and praying to. The one who is located near and far, the one who is concerned with the mundane, and the one who cares deeply about the cosmos and groans for all of creation to be at peace again.

—-

When we approach this first strand, this prayer, “Our Father, in heaven (or in the heavens more accurately), may your name be sanctified, made holy, worshiped for how good you are, we have to admit that it is only with fear and trembling. It is with pure audacity that we step out in faith and say, “Our Father.”

I personally find difficulty in saying the words, “our father.” I have two fathers, both of whom I have had very different experiences with. The father I grew up with, my step-father, was a very hard man to live with, and while there are some good memories and I love him deeply, much of his memories remain tainted by the last portion of his life. He was deeply depressed for all of my teenage years, and yet refused to get help. He was angry most of the time, and was very physical in his anger. So when it came to me turning 18 my parents had no problem getting me out of the house, I couldn’t wait to get out from under his dark cloud. He committed suicide a week before thanksgiving in 2003.

When I say our father, I confess that I flinch, I stutter and hesitate.

My “real” dad, is almost the complete opposite of my step-father. I’ve only seen him angry twice. I only got to see him every other weekend growing up, so the four days a month I spent with him were much more focused around on hanging out, laughing, building things and having fun together. I looked up to my dad a lot, he’s a fantastic guitarist, seriously one of the best I’ve ever seen, he’s a great artist, he’s friendly, very funny and the life of the party. I know what it’s like to want to imitate my father. But other than those 4 or 5 days a month, I wouldn’t see him. We didn’t really talk on the phone, and if I needed him on the other days of the month that I wasn’t with him, there was a real good chance I wouldn’t see him. I remember frequently feeling let down.

So I confess I carry all of this with me when I say “Our father.” And I can understand why people may have a difficulty with this part of the prayer.

And this father business is difficult anyways, God surely isn’t a burly man, with a big gray beard, smoking a pipe and reading the Sunday times. I often think it would be far easier for me to begin this prayer with, “Our Mother, who is in heaven…” And maybe you are in a similar place, or maybe you’re experience with earthly fathers is completely unlike mine. And while I have been known to slip in the extra words “Our Father and Mother in heaven,” and while I am completely comfortable thinking of God as neither male nor female, and as both, I think it is important to not skip over this “Heavenly Father” business too quickly.

When my daughter and I together before she goes to bed, I am reminded that I am accountable to live not as my earthly fathers, but our heavenly one. And in both my successes and failures as a dad, I have a Father in heaven who will forgive, and who shows a better way. Being reminded of this with my daughter on my lap doesn’t let me off the hook, but gives me hope that we can and should strive to imitate our father in heaven. And I find it comforting that L and I share this same heavenly father.

—-

In Jesus’ offering us this prayer, he has invited us, his disciples, into a different kind of relationship with God. In Matthew 3 Jesus is baptized in water by John, Jesus’ father, YHWH, had come to watch and participate in this important event. Immediately after Jesus’ baptism, his father says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Something like this appears three of the Gospels. Jesus invites the disciples to relate to his father as their own. It is an invitation to enter into a new community, a new family with God, the God of creation, the one who is even concerned with all the cosmos, the one concerned with the nitty-gritty of everyday life.

In Jesus’ time there was a Jewish prayer called the Qaddish that most scholars believe Jesus fashioned at least some of his prayer after. That prayer goes like this:

Exalted and hallowed be his great name in the world,
Which he created according to his will.
May he establish his kingdom in your lifetime and in your days,
And in the lifetime of the whole household of Israel,
Speedily and at a near time.

What is interesting about this prayer is certainly the places where Jesus changes parts of it, where he edits it according to his own mission. But for our purposes the first line is most important. It reads, “Exalted and hallowed be his great name in the world…” It is detached, it is worshipful, but it is not intimate, it is not personal. Compare this to our prayer, “Father, Our Father, in heaven, may your name be sanctified.”

Not only is the relationally signified by the word “Father” but it is a collective partnership. It is as invitation to participate in the work of the Father when we say the word “Our.” It draws us in as participants with God, intimate with the one we call Father. This is our divine Father, the one who looks after every lost sheep, who welcomes back the estranged, who forgives the offender, who longs for the redemption of all of creation.

And in our day this makes praying, “Our Father” even more difficult. Not only do many of us struggle with the whole Father bit, but we struggle with this possessive pronoun “Our.” We resist the collective and communal. We resist identifying with something bigger than ourselves. We have our reasons, whether it’s because we don’t like those people over there, we don’t like the things that they like, we don’t make the time, or whatever the case maybe. There are plenty of reasons (some good and some not as good) for why we don’t keep ourselves involved in this community called church.

And so when we pray, “Our Father,” when we dare to say those words, we are allowing ourselves to be reoriented around a heavenly father who has formed a community of worshipers. This community is shared by a broken people and people on the mend alike. Those struggling to find our way, struggling to worship, and make sense of a chaotic world. Those of us seeking to find beauty in the mundane, to carve out of creation a piece that belongs to us, and to share that beauty, and love with those in the world who need it.

When we say, “Our Father” we confess that we cannot do it on own, even though we keep trying we recognize our inadequacy. It is a confession that we need the help of the father. That we ourselves need to be reoriented, renewed, and that the only way to find it is within God’s new family, with Jesus at the head. It is a confession that we live and pray in community. Friends, this is an audacious suggestion, it is a daring act in our times. Everything we know, hear, and do strives against this.

It is also ridiculous to suggest, especially if we look back at other prayers in Jesus’ time like the Qaddish, that we can have intimacy with God, that we are truly God’s children. But when we dare to pray this prayer, Quaker James Mulholland writes, we have to have the courage to pray it as God’s children. How do we pray this prayer as children?

I know that when I was a kid the worst thing my parents could say to me, the thing that drove a stake in my heart more than any other thing they could say or do, was that I had let them down. I didn’t hear this often, but when I did, I was totally crushed. I wanted the approval of my parents, I wanted to imitate them and be like them. For them to say that I was unlike them, I had shamed them, or let them down, was exactly the opposite of what I most deeply desired. When I broke trust with my parents their names were profaned, the trust I had with them was broken.

And so when we pray “Our Father” we dare to say we are going to act as God’s children. I like what Clarence Jordan, a farmer and New Testament scholar once said:

“You don’t take the name of the Lord in vain with your lips. You take it in vain with your life. It isn’t the people outside the church who take God’s name in vain. It’s the people on the inside, the nice people who would never dare let one little cuss word fall off their lips – they are the ones many times whose lives are totally unchanged by the grace of God” (Mulholland 37).

And so when we pray this, we have to see ourselves as having an intimate relationship with God as his children, and we set out to live that way.

And we should be careful to remember that as Children, as Christ’s disciples we are acting out in his name. To act out in the name of someone in the ancient world “was to exercise that person’s power and authority. To call on the name of someone was to put oneself under that person’s protection and command” (Dunn 620).

This is why we should think of the opening of the disciple’s prayer as reorienting our entire world. Everything else in this prayer follows from “Our Father.” That is, everything in this prayer follows from the assumption that we together as a worshiping community, answer to the one Father of heaven and of earth. When we pray this we are praying for help to imitate God, to want what God wants, to live as Jesus lived, and to respond to others in a way that witnesses to the reality of the resurrection in our own lives.

—-

In closing then, St. Augustine wrote “we imitate who we adore.” This prayer leads us into adoration and declares that God’s name be sanctified. Above all else! Not our own, not our agendas, or our church’s, or even our country’s, but God’s alone. “Father, your name be sanctified. May your name be the horizon through which all is judged, all is made right, where justice and peace will kiss!” And this is where God’s name and the politics of his kingdom collide. We are children of this kingdom, a kingdom unlike other kingdoms. And because we are it’s children, we are also a part of it’s legacy, it’s extension in the world. So when we say “your name be sanctified,” we ask in what ways can we help to honor God’s name. When we pray for God’s kingdom to come, we see ourselves as a part of the answer to that prayer.

So then, every time we pray this prayer, every time we call on “Our Father” the one near, the one far, the one who is bringing his kingdom to earth, we prayer for the powers of the world to come unhinged, for God to move, for the powerless to win, for the world to be turned right-side up again. When we pray for God’s kingdom to come we pray for peace to prevail, for righteousness to emerge from the rubble, for justice to be delivered for all who are oppressed. When we pray that “Our Father’s” kingdom come, we recognize that we are children of that kingdom and should be helping bring it along. NT Wright says, “We must risk ‘Our Father’ then, if we are to be the people through whom the pain of the world is held in healing light of the love of God.”

[In closing] Praying these words then is a ridiculous act, it requires that we are unmasked and made whole. It is a call for complete reorientation and a submitting to one father and one kingdom. It is the first strand, the strand of the worshiping community who gives everything over to their Father.

Do we have the audacity to pray “Our Father in the Heavens?

Related posts:

1. Mission and the Disciple’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13)
2. Resources for Studying the Disciple’s Prayer (Matthew 6 and Luke 11)
3. Christian Books on Being a Father and Family

Here is the text from my sermon this morning.

How many of you have prayed this prayer before (at least once)? How many of you pray it often? What has been your experience with the prayer?

My hope is that we can renew our interest, gain an interest or learn new ways of thinking about and applying the prayer in our lives. Hopefully, we can see that within the simplicity of the prayer there is a deeply revolutionary way to view our relationship with God, with others and with the world. And that no matter what we take away from this set of discussions around the prayer, that we may gain tools for our own spiritual formation.

My own history with the Lord’s prayer is a mixed bag. I grew up going to a Catholic school and mass pretty regularly, I learned the prayer as a young boy and when I said it I meant it like any prayer. I wouldn’t have said that it was or was not meaningful because it was memorized. One of my favorite parts of Catholic mass was when it came time to say the “Our Father.” Catholics have it right, they see it as a communal prayer because when we would say it, we would all hold hands together and in unison begin, “Our Father who art in heaven…”

After my family began going to the local charismatic church things changed and I lost touch with the prayer. There in that community what was important was the ability to speak (and pray) spontaneously prayer as led by the Spirit. For many in churches like this saying something written down, whether it was a prayer (or a sermon), was equal to not being led by the Spirit. It was as though the Spirit could not guide you all week long, you really had to wait until that moment for the Spirit speak. This along with the fact that I was in rebellion against my Catholic upbringing didn’t want anything to do with it at that time in my life. [I’ve since changed my view and think a life of habit is just as important].

—-

Then in seminary things changed for me again. I remember being in a class called, “Jesus the Missionary,” with two professors who have had the most influence on my thinking, the class was about looking at Jesus’ practices within his culture as a model for how we as Christians might interact as the church in the world. Instead of seeing Paul as the first missionary, we assumed that Jesus’ incarnation qualified him to be the first “Christian” missionary. So if that’s the case, why not learn from him?

I remember having one of those ah-ha moments. It dawned on me that the Lord’s Prayer was really more than just a simple prayer to be memorized and prayed on Sunday mornings. It actually contains within it the entire mission and practice of the Christian church. My thought was, what if a church community took the Lord’s Prayer as its mission statement? What would Christians look like? How would they act?

You know, every church has a mission statement, some are really long, some are short and to the point. Here are some examples:

First: Our vision is to be an Acts 2 and Acts 16 Christ-centered community in the diverse and beautiful landscape of our city.  We believe Acts 2:42-47 provides a vision of what it means to be a church of community and vitality.  Acts 16 provides a vision of the life-changing power of an urban and diverse church.  We long to unite people from all walks of life and backgrounds under the transformational power of the love of Christ.  Transformed lives…transforming lives!!

Our desire is to be a church whose doors are open to everyone living in, working in or visiting our great city — a church that truly reflects the diversity that makes ours a great city. Wherever you are on your spiritual journey, whether you’re just beginning to investigate Christianity or you already have a mature relationship with Jesus, we’re here to help you take the next step spiritually and to offer you a place where you can be as involved as you choose.

Second: “Living out the way of Jesus in missional communities, announcing the arrival of his kingdom, working for measurable change among the oppressed.”

And here’s one I really like: Camas Friends: To love God and love people.

But I wondered, “what if a church adopted the Lord’s Prayer as its mission statement?” What if we sought to live out this prayer on a regular basis; praying it, and living it, what would our communities look like? So for me it became a rubric, or paradigm for understanding the Christian life. As I pray these petitions, I can’t help but also reflect on the question: Am I living this? Am I helping to answer this call? Am I creating a roadblock for this prayer to be answered. I like to say, the prayer for daily bread, is a prayer for us to become givers of daily bread. Therefore, what would it look like if we saw ourselves as a new family with God as our father, what if we sought to sanctify God’s name with our lives, what if we lived in the reality of Christ’s kingdom come, what if we sought to only have enough of what we need for today, what if we were people who literally forgave people’s debts, and what if we confessed our need for forgiveness and our weakness to give into temptation?

I want to suggest that this prayer is really not the Lord’s Prayer at all, neither is it the “Our Father,” it is the as the Quaker Elton Trueblood and others (McClendon) call it the Disciple’s Prayer. It is our prayer, the one we are to pray and the one that is meant to truly shape our prayers and how we practice our faith.

It is easy to avoid the interconnectedness of prayer and action, contemplation and movement, listening and response. We too often draw a line between what we believe and how we act. I think the Disciple’s prayer is the very thing that can help to remedy this dichotomy: What if we prayed this everyday, not just with words, but with our very bodies? What if we sought to not only pray this but to answer its call? So when we pray for God’s kingdom to come, we look for ways to join in God’s work to bring that about.

And so I will do my best to refer to this prayer as the Disciple’s Prayer so that we can be reminded that this is our prayer.

Question: I wonder, can the Disciple’s Prayer have meaning for all of you like it has for me? I don’t know but I hope so. I hope you can find within in it the words, the movements and the patterns you need to help you, as Stanley Hauerwas says, “live as you pray,” or as someone wrote on my facebook page: “The life I live is the prayer I pray.” [A Challenge to pray this daily from now until the end of November].

—-

My guess is we all pray, some of us pray more than others, and even for those of us who are pretty skeptical about whether or not God really “answers” prayers we all have made petitions to God. Even Lily likes to pray. At dinner, Lily will remind us to pray before we start eating and often, she’ll interrupt us and ask us to pray again (sometimes she does this two or three times). She likes to pray when she’s going to bed (we always say the Disciple’s Prayer together) and she even asked Emily to pray with her in the middle of the night a few days ago when she woke up startled.

And while we all pray, many of us do not regularly pray the words of this prayer. I want to encourage you to be creative with this prayer, make it your own. There are many ways to use the words of this prayer: through the repetition of Lectio Divina, broken up with queries like we did this morning, we can use it as a basis for the themes we pray for. The structure can be a guide to how to prayer and what to pray for. I am convinced that Jesus actually meant for us to pray this specific prayer (though some disagree on this point). Not only is it the prayer he taught his disciples upon request, but every rabbi in his time would have had their own prayer that would mark his disciples from others. We know from Luke 11 that even John the Baptist had taught his disciples a specific prayer (and there are others like the Qaddish).  Now this isn’t the kind of thing that if you don’t do it, then well, you’re not a good Christian. We’re not dealing with that kind of guilt ridden spiritually. All it means to say that Jesus meant for us to pray this prayer is that he knew how important prayer is, and how formative it can be. So either way, even though I’m convinced that Jesus actually meant that when we pray we should pray the prayer he taught to his disciples, I’m even more convinced that we are meant to live out that prayer as a community formed by the heart of its petitions.

He also knew that prayer is hard work, just look back to the scene in the Garden of Gesthemene: there we find Jesus sweating blood and his disciples sawing logs. Prayer takes serious perseverance, It takes practice and presumes a lot. It presumes that we have a prayer to give, that we have the courage to offer that prayer, and that God is a hearing God (McClendon 155 #2). Sometimes this is too much to ask. I have gone through many times in my life when I had no prayer to offer, when I didn’t have the courage to offer my prayer, or when I assumed God was in fact not listening.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas says that:  “Some things are too important to be left up to chance.  Some things in life are too difficult to be left up to spontaneous desire – things like telling people that we love them or prayer to God.  So we do them out of habit.  Thus in church we generally do the same things over and over again, week after week, telling the same stories and singing the same songs.”

I’ve been really getting into Leo Tolstoy’s writings lately and am thoroughly loving it. I came across a very short story of his called “Alyosha: the Pot.” It’s about a young boy who takes the place of his older brother as servant to a large wealthy family. He does this on his father’s demand so that he can help raise money to support his family. Tolstoy describes Alyosha as someone who does whatever he is asked without ever questioning why, and does it to the best of his ability. He runs here, he runs there, answering everyone’s bidding and never thinks twice about himself (even to the extent that he losses the only true love he ever experienced). This story is very much about his deep desire to please others even to his own detriment.  And then in the middle of the story he writes this:

“Alyosha did not know any prayer and had forgotten what his mother had taught him. But he prayed just the same every morning and every evening, he prayed with his hands crossing himself” (Tolstoy).

Alyosha’s prayer is completely silent – there are no words – but it’s not without content. Now I don’t know about you rather I’ve often felt I had no words to offer in prayer. I don’t think that Tolstoy mentions this prayer to somehow ridicule his simple ignorance but to hold up Alyosha’s faith, that even though he had no words, or could not get the words right, he went through the movements of prayer.

For Quakers we can easily relate to a prayer with no words, a movement and a posture that we practice that we try to make a habit. One where we listen for Christ’s guidance in the present moment. And even though we are silent, we know that we are praying, that we are practicing our faith, that the movement of being still in the silence can be for us a genuine expression of faith. [Sometimes other Quakers do better at this habit]

And I think this is what we’re getting at when we talk about praying out of habit, not leaving it up to chance that we will get it right in the heat of the moment. We need help going through the movements, knowing the language to use, knowing just how to pray and what to pray for. This is what the disciple’s prayer is for. It is our way of being like Alyosha and desiring prayer so much that even though he wasn’t sure what words to say, or whether he had it right, he prayed the only prayer he knew. [Sign of the cross]

There have been many times when I was like Alyosha and “did not know any prayer and had forgotten what my mother taught me,” and then I remembered the words, “Our Father, in the heavens, may your name be sanctified…” This is our prayer. It is our gift from Jesus. It is our prayer when we have no words.

It is also our prayer when we are tempted to have too many words or when we want to bend the words to our own selfish desires. Quaker pastor James Mulholland writes in his book “Praying Like Jesus” that this prayer can act as a muzzle that helps to simplify and redirect what we pray for. It helps to strip our hidden selfishness we often have within in our prayers. There are many ways we pray there are prayers of self-interest, self-preservation and self-righteousnessIt protects us from what Emily calls “Propaganda Prayer.” The other day we were praying before dinner and I said out loud, “God, help us to be good for mommy, to not give her a hard time, and help around the house.” How many of you have done something like this? That’s propaganda prayer.

If you’ll notice there is no I, Me, or Mine in the disciple’s prayer, it is just ‘our’ and ‘us.’ We pray for God’s kingdom to come, not our own, we prayer to our father, we pray that we together might have the bread we need, that our debts will be cancelled and that we will not fall into temptation.

The prayer reorients the me within the Our and Us. It reminds us that we are a part of a global community, a global family who have prayed this prayer for thousands of years. And that together, the church is called to make a difference in this world. This is our mission, to sanctify God’s name by praying as well as living out this prayer.

Instead of all those other prayers we are so often tempted to pray: the prayer of self-preservation, the prayer of self-righteousness, the prayer of self-interest or even the propaganda prayer, this is, we can trust, indeed a sincere prayer. It is the movements, the language, the patten, and the mission that we as Jesus’ disciples have been taught to practice.

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You are invited to journey with us this next month and discover if you can make the Disciple’s prayer your own.

You are invited to practice praying this every day, or as regularly as you can. Let the prayer be a reminder of the journey we are on together, and begin asking yourself the question – how can I (and we) be formed and transformed by this prayer?

What would it look like for this to become our prayer and  mission?

[Photo by Andreanix]

Related posts:

1. Resources for Studying the Disciple’s Prayer (Matthew 6 and Luke 11)
2. The Audacity of Praying “Our Father.” Matthew 6:9-10
3. Practicing Re-Collection (or Centering) Prayer