In August, I had been reflecting upon the Lord's Prayer. The goal for me was to bring my own thinking to bear upon one of the most oft said prayers in the Christian tradition. I recognize that many have gone before me and many will come after me. But I find it helpful to engage prevalent Christian scriptures and prayers at different times in my life, because it allows me to see how I have changed. As I make another round of Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutical spiral I notice how my reading of the same text has progressed and matured depending on my current disposition. When I came to the last line of the prayer however, I began to face a kind of blogger's block because the themes of this last line are so difficult. Matthew 6.13 puts it: "and do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil." Luke's version of the prayer only includes the first part, "and lead us not into temptation." On the surface it appears to be a straight forward request to avoid temptation and deliverance if we do have to face evil. The difficulty arises as we face the fact that people who follow God in the biblical narrative inevitably also are led into contexts and environments of temptation and testing, e.g. Job and even Jesus himself. How are we to reconcile their lives with this prayer?

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I tend to read the Proverb chapter for each day of the month.  It works out well as there are 31.  In any case, Proverbs 17 ends with two of my favorite lines in the whole corpus:

He who restrains his words has knowledge, And he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. Even a fool, when he keeps silent, is considered wise; When he closes his lips, he is considered prudent. Proverbs 17:27-28

I guess I love this proverb so much because it is so true for me.  Sometimes I find myself speaking out of my unedited inner stream of consciousness.  Sometimes this works out okay, but sometimes there is little in there worth saying really.  Lately I can ramble on and on about my anxiety about the impending job hunt as my PhD dissertation is finished up this Spring.Where will we live next year?  Can we afford to live there? Do you need a PhD to be a barista at Starbucks? 

In the end, I've done everything I possibly can to prepare myself for an academic teaching career and in many ways this website is part of expressing what I'm about.  But, and here is where this Proverb's wisdom comes to the fore, talking about it all the time does little if any good.  In fact, the best thing I can be doing right now, as I've found time and time again, is to pray the Lord's Prayer.  That is why I've been reflecting on it these days.  I often get stuck on the "Your kingdom come and will be done" bit or the "Give us this day our daily bread."  I find that this helps bring out a cooler spirit as this proverb exonerates. 

Of course, total silence is not really what I think this Proverb is about.  Rather, it seems to me that it's about restraint and editing.  Graceful speech is the virtue.  Being careful with our language is the key. Although this blog falls well short at times, I think that is, more than anything, why I continue to do it.  It forces me to edit my speech and decide more carefully what to communicate and how.  My goal is that this practice will spill out into the rest of my speech and communication. Maybe someday I'll cultivate that cool spirit this proverb talks about.

I once heard Dara O'Briain, an Irish comic, do a few minutes of stand up on the Lord's Prayer. He specifically joked about the word Jesus uses in Matthew 6.12, "trespasses."  Was trespassing a huge problem in Jesus's day?  Were Jesus and the disciples often traipsing across other people's land ticking off local farmers?  Did they not have fences back then?

In some ways I agree with Dara, although for different reasons. For me, this line is one of the most difficult parts of Jesus's prayer by far: "And forgive us our trespasses as we have forgiven those who trespass against us."  The language here may seem uncommon, or overly specific. This has led some modern English language versions of the bible to translate the word Jesus uses here, opheilema more generally as sins. Jesus's language however, is actually quite interesting to reflect upon.  The word opheilema, although traditionally translated as trespasses, also connotes the meaning of a debt or an obligation in a financial or moral sense.  By investigating this word's meaning more broadly we can begin to understand the full implications of Jesus's call to pray forgiveness.  

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Just previous to the Lord's Prayer Jesus specifically tells us that we need not pray loudly or repetitiously because God already knows our needs before we pray. What then, does the third line of his paradigmatic prayer mean? Why should we pray "give us this day our daily bread?"  

Part of the difficulty with how we approach this part of Jesus's prayer depends on what we believe prayer is as well as what it does. 

What I am suggesting here is that a recovery of the notion of a habit of faith is deeply important to how we understand the Lord's Prayer. We pray not because God knows or does not know what we need, but because it is important that we demonstrate our faithfulness consistently. Prayer is therapeutic in this sense, but it is not just therapeutic. It is rather part and parcel to any discussion of our transformation into the kind of beings God desires us to be.

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Ever since I became a Christian some ten years ago I have been deeply interested in the relevance of Christian practices to contemporary life. I recognized that although I had come to the place in my own life and circumstances to begin inquiring into what Christian life entailed, I felt that Christian churches could greatly enhance their relevance to people's lives and practices in order to make it more clear just why living in a Christian way was credible and valuable. Initially I inquired with the pastors at my church about why they sang the songs they did and why they preached in the way and at the times that they did. It was nothing new ten years ago to deconstruct church practice and teaching in the name of relevance to people. What I've come to see is that this line of questioning goes back to the prayer of Jesus, "Your kingdom come..."

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What is a God? What constitutes deity? These are old questions and ones which are addressed by an old saint of the Christian church, Anselm of Canterbury who gives us this notion that God must be that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Given that to exist is greater than to be merely thought, Anselm concludes that God must surely exist. Much time has been spent on Anselm's argument both in the past by his immediate contemporary Gaunilo, as well as in contemporary theology and philosophy which I won't rehearse here. But it bears noting that when we begin to pray, Jesus teaches us to state this obvious point: God is greater than anything we can think or say. This is the condition for speaking about God at all. For Anselm, one of the best names for God is "that than which nothing greater can be conceived." In this sense, Anselm's name for God simply echoes the Lord's Prayer itself, "Our Father, who is in heaven."

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It seems to me that the best theology begins and ends in prayer.  Even if prone to traversing a series of rabbit trails along the way, people who talk about God are inevitably left wondering whether there is any difference between their self-understanding and the God who beckons them from beyond themselves.  Do we assume that the voice in our heads, our conscience for instance, is somehow God speaking to us?  Sometimes maybe they coincide, but how do we know and how do we negotiate the space between ourselves and God? 

An interesting film that explores this problem indirectly is Stranger than Fiction, starring Will Farrell, Dustin Hoffman, and Emma Thompson.  Farrell plays a seemingly nondescript tax man for the IRS until he begins to hear the voice of Emma Thompson narrating his life in his head.  As it turns out Thompson is in fact writing a book and by some unexplained quirk in the universe, her narrations exactly coincide with Farrell's life.  He hears what she writes. In the beginning of the film however, Farrell has no idea where this voice is coming from and so sets about trying to find out who the narrator is and what it all means for his lonely existence.  He eventually ends up in the office of a literature professor played by Dustin Hoffman explaining his predicament. In response to Hoffman's charge that he might be schizophrenic, Farrell replies:

 "No, no, it's not schizophrenia. It's just a voice in my head. I mean, the voice isn't telling me to do anything. It's telling me what I've already done. Accurately, and with a better vocabulary."  - Stranger than Fiction

I suppose Farrell's quest in this film is a bit about the difficulty with prayer.  We speak and voice what is going on inside of us, our needs, hopes, longings, and everyday chit-chat, but then we have to wait for that voice with the better vocabulary to break in with something beyond what we might conceive or say.  Ultimately the goal, as Farrell himself acts out in this film, is to bring the voice of our life in line with God's.  The choice Farrell is given once he realizes the narrator's genius, is how best to live out the narration which transcends the overt appearance of one meaningless day after another. 

When it comes to prayers, the Lord's Prayer is probably one of the more ubiquitous prayers said by Christians.  Almost as many as have prayed it have written about it and I suppose I want to keep up that tradition in order to reflect more deeply upon the task of theology today and why prayerful theology is so vitally important.  

By way of introduction to a few posts to follow, let me firstly comment just a bit on the Lord's Prayer itself. We call it the Lord's Prayer, because it is attributed to Jesus as the "how to," do-it-yourself prayer he told us to follow.  It always strikes me how many prayer books we now have which go well beyond this one prayer.  This includes denominational prayer books which do offer substantial practical details for common worship, but also the more kitchy Prayer of Jabez and popularist stuff which seems to come out each year in Christian bookstores.  I suppose a rule of thumb for me concerning any prayer guide is the degree to which it follows the pattern of the Lord's Prayer.  It seems simple, but this prayer is said so often that I think we easily lose the sense of it's wonder and unique power.  Like so much fo the Christian tradition, it is like a joke told too many times.  It's lost its timing and punchiness.

You can find the Lord's Prayer in two books of the bible, Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:2-4.  They are virtually the same in each book, however Matthew's ends with what most scholars believe to be an addition which some translations like the New Revised Standard have now left out and others put in italics to let the reader know it's most likely been added in at a later date: "For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen."   Matthew's version of the prayer is as follows:

Matthew 6:9 "Pray, then, in this way: 'Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. 10 Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us this day our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen."

For the next few weeks, I'm going to follow the prayer line by line, not so much exegetically, but more theologically in terms of what I've said above concerning the need to bring our language in line with God's and how this is even possible.  I in no way mean to be exhaustive here and hope this may inspire you to read it again in its full context of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount.