The hindrances to prayer...

Can I do it? Will it work? What is it worth to me? What will it cost me? 

With good help, we can do it. It works in many ways, not always how we think it will. Its value is inestimable. It is costly - better yet, a wise investment yielding a number of returns.

So where do we get good help?

In Matthew's gospel, the Lord's Prayer is found in the middle of The Sermon on The Mount, which is the most famous and most poignant sermon ever recorded (by Jesus of course). More than anything, this sermon (Matthew 5-7) drives us inward, looking beyond and beneath the shallows of mere human behavior and into the realm of thought life, motives, core values and attitudes, internal disciplines and authentic spirituality. Specifically, the Lord's Prayer is part of Jesus' instruction on prayer and fasting, bracketed by explicit instruction on giving to the needy and storing up treasure in heaven. This is the crux stuff of life with God. So in Matthew's gospel, the Lord's Prayer is part of a larger teaching - part of a sermon.

In Luke's gospel, the Lord's Prayer is an answer to an appeal. One of the disciples says to Jesus, "Lord, teach us to pray, just as John [the Baptist] taught his disciples." This event happens shortly after the experience at Martha and Mary's house. Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer is somewhat abbreviated. While the differences in context and content trouble some people, let me encourage you to remember that Jesus traveled and taught in city after city and village after village for 2 or 3 years. It is quite likely that he spoke similar or identical messages in numerous different places. The gospels are enough for us, but they are surely not comprehensive. John finishes his gospel by reminding the reader that if everything Jesus did or said was written down, the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written. So Luke's is a little different from Matthew's and it is contextualized differently.

So in a context of a great sermon, or in answer to the disciples' plea to teach them how to pray, or perhaps a dozen different times, Jesus taught them these words:

Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed by 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 debts,
as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom and the power
and the glory forever.
Amen

Our Father who are in heaven

Our Father in Heaven - Our Father who art in Heaven - Our Father which art in Heaven

I always learned it as "who". There must be a Greek answer to this! Could it be like: debts and debtors vs. trespass and trespassers?

Actually, the Greek text is "pater hamor ho en tois ouranois", which literally means, "Father of us the in the heavens," or, implied, "Father of us the [one] in the heavens." Five hundred years ago, when the King James Version was written, "Our Father who art in heaven" would have been an accurate translation in the appropriate vernacular.

More modern translations loose the Elizabethan (or whatever queen or king) language and try to translate in today's language. The New International Version says "Our Father in heaven," leaving out the "who art" or the "which art." Both translations are accurate. One, for better or worse, sounds like Shakespeare. The other like you and me. Every translator in every time and place has two challenges. First, to do the literal work of deciphering word meanings and then the bridge building work of shaping the words into sentence structures that are common to the day.

Luke's gospel, by the way, is simple. It just starts out, "Pater," or "Father."

By the way, Jesus would likely have said "Abba," which is the Aramaic word for father. Some have suggested that Abba is actually a more personal word like dad or daddy. According to Mark's gospel, Jesus refers to God in the garden of Gethsemane as Abba ho Pater, or Father the Father, or Daddy the Father. Since Jesus primarily would have spoken Aramaic, he probably said Abba, Abba, and Mark probably translated it once into Greek (Pater) for the Greek reader to understand better.

So let's break this down word by word. We ask today, "Please, Lord, teach us to pray."

Our

Not my Father, but our Father. He prays this in the plural. He teaches us to pray in the plural.

What does this imply? I believe he's teaching us to pray, to think, to view our spiritual lives in a communal sense. While this is hard for an American culture that builds more fences and better garage doors, every day, Jesus never intended for the Christian faith to be lived in isolation or as a personal, socially disconnected experience of God.

Even more than communal, the Christian way is a family experience.

Romans 8:15-17 speaks to being children of God

Galatians 4:4-6 no longer slaves, but sons and heirs

We are children of God. Jesus starts the prototypical prayer by reminding us that not one of us is an only child. As much as we might be bugged by our siblings and as much as being a part of a huge family might be messy and inconvenient, we are called into a "one another" experience; loving one another, forgiving one another, bearing with one another. As Ken Olsen puts it, "The first word out of my mouth puts me in relationship." I would only add that the first word out of our mouths put us in relationship.

So can I pray for me to my Father? Of course. Jesus does, and I don't think the Lord's Prayer was intended to be in any way prohibitive of singular or personal prayer. We have a host of Psalms (again, prototypical prayers) where David and other writers pray for themselves. As I turned to Psalms looking for examples, my finger went directly to Psalms 22, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" words uttered both by David and Jesus.

We'll spend more time on this when we get to the part about daily bread in coming weeks. But for now, let me just acknowledge that praying for myself is not only allowable but good.

Still, we need to lean back toward the "our" versus the "my" because of the hyperextension of the "my" in our surrounding culture, which constantly threatens to suck us up in its myths and mistakes.

Our Father, which art in heaven…

Father

We are taught to pray, "Our Father."

What does Father imply. Again, we are children of God. Why does Jesus tell us to pray to the Father instead of the Son or the Spirit? I think it's because Jesus came to reunite us with his Heavenly Father and our Heavenly Father. As some authors have said, Jesus came to reconcile us to God and to heal the Father wound; in a sense, to re-parent us toward a new kind of health and maturity. This is especially true for those who have suffered in the first go round with parents who fell far short of providing a healthy context for emerging maturity.

Even if we feel we had strong, healthy parents, the goal of human parenthood is to prepare us to be independent of our parents. After all, we'll grow up and make our own way. And our parents will die or have died. God's parenting goals are different. He wants us to grow up into a healthy dependence on Him and a healthy interdependence on others. He has no intention of dying and has no desire to see us grow independent from Him. So Jesus wants us to know His Father, love His Father and pray to His Father.

Does that mean we can't pray to Jesus? Or to the Spirit? I'm assuming they're all on speaker phone. I often pray to Jesus, thanking Him and expressing my love. And I often pray to the Spirit, especially to fill me with power and wisdom, to heal me and to speak through me. But the greatest part of my prayer life is to the Father, through the Spirit (who intercedes for us even when we can't form the words) and in the name of the Son. The name of Jesus Christ is like our password, or like the combination that unlocks the doorway to God's throne room. It's in the name of the Jesus, through the Spirit, that we can enter boldly into the Father's presence.

By the way - why not mother? Well, Father is the language we're given and scripture refers to God in masculine pronouns. But since man and woman were created in God's own image, we have to assume that the best of masculine and feminine traits are born from God's very own self. God is, I hope we all know, the ultimate Father and Mother, and we can also assume, for lack of being told otherwise, that God is not a sexual being at all. Most of us assume that the male-female thing is part of the created order of this realm and not characteristic of the other realm. While God is surely Father and Mother, Jesus said, Our Father who art in heaven, so that is what we say.

Who Art In Heaven

Jesus came to earth in the flesh, dwelling with us. The Holy Spirit is apparently God's omnipresent wingspan, so to speak, and the Spirit was hovering over the surface of the earth even before the earth took on order and life. The Father, however, is relegated to the throne. It doesn't feel right to limit the Father to the throne room, and it's possible that the idea of God's throne is more a statement of authority and dominion than of geography or furniture. Still, this prayer, "Our Father who art in Heaven," gives us a lifeline to a better, more lasting place, Heaven. It's good for us, when we're perplexed, to be able to call on a lifeline outside the realm of this studio audience - someone in a position of infinite knowledge and absolute perspective.

And, of course, we're reminded that, in light of our standing as children in the Father's family, our real home is there, not here.

Sitting next to the Father is the Son. Again, it's hard to imagine what physical manifestations might represent this truth. It's hard for us to imagine One God finding expression in three persons. Whatever it looks like and however it can be true, we're invited to fix our eyes, our hearts, our minds on that image, even though we have no real idea if our facsimiles looks like the real thing.

Revelation, Chapter 4:

After this I looked and there before me was a door standing open in the heaven. And the voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, "Come up here and I will show you what must take place after this." At once I was in the Spirit and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian. A rainbow, resembling an emerald, encircles the throne. Surrounding the throne were twenty -four other thrones, and seated on them were twenty-four elders. They were dressed in white and had crowns of gold on their heads. From the throne came flashes of lightening, rumblings and peals of thunder. Before the throne, seven lamps were blazing. These are the seven spirits of God. Also before the throne there was what looked like a sea of glass, clear as crystal.

In the center, around the throne, were four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back. The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying eagle. Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under his wings. Day and night they never stop saying:

"Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come."

Whenever the living creature give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne, and who lives for ever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down and worship him who sits on the throne, and worship him who lives for ever and ever. They lay their crowns before the throne and say:

"You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being."

Those images sound big and beautiful and awesome. With that much in mind, I can survive this relatively puny place with the little beasties who live here, until I'm called home.

Our Father is in heaven. Our Lord has gone to prepare a place for us, so that where he is, we may be also.