Let's Hear it for the Lord's Prayer

Luke 11:1-13

Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil. For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours now and forever. Amen.

Each Sunday we thank God that Jesus, in addition to his supreme role as savior of the world, was also a teacher. He taught us how to pray.

The Lord’s Prayer is recited each day by billions of Christians around the world. For many, the Our Father precedes the Hail Mary on the Rosary as an expression of personal devotion and contrition.

The Lord’s Prayer is probably the first memorization exercise for Christian children. 

When I was a pre-schooler, my parents thought the theology of the Lord’s Prayer was too dense for a four-year-old. They taught my brother Larry and me to say a simpler verse:

Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Very quickly Mommy and Daddy realized the notion of dying in one’s sleep might be terrifying for a child. They didn’t realize that the five-year-old girl next door, one of the first in the neighborhood to be exposed to television advertising, had already taught us a more comforting version:

Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
Alka-Seltzer’s what to take.

Even so, my parents quickly replaced the Now I Lay Me with the Our Father. Each night Larry and I – and our younger siblings as they came along – recited the prayer in the Presbyterian/Methodist traditions of our parents.

Our Father which 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.
Lead us not unto temptation
But deliver us from evil.

And being good Protestants, we’d finish the prayer with words that do not appear in Matthew or Luke:

For thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory forever. Amen.

Just how a sentence Jesus never said got into the prayer is a mystery to me, although I suspect my friend Harland Getts – the Southern Baptist Air Force Chaplain I worked for when I was fighting the Cold War – got it right. 

“Probably some dumb monk got carried away when he was copying the text,” Harland said, the closest he came to acknowledging the Bible might not be completely inerrant. I recall thinking that it would have been a nice break if the dumb monk had also left out a commandment or two.

I suppose I have been reciting the Lord’s Prayer in one form or another nearly every day for the past six decades. My parents actually made Larry and me kneel by our bedside every night to pray it aloud, although that practice dissipated when the two of us couldn’t be near each other without tickling, jabbing, giggling, squealing, and wrestling. After that, we were told to pray silently and keep our hands to ourselves.

Gradually the words of the Lord’s Prayer were mysteriously modified. When the New York State Baptist Convention began supplying pastors for our little church, we began saying “debts” rather than “trespasses”.

I don’t recall being taught what the words of the Lord’s Prayer mean and for the most part Larry and I had to work that out, along with other secrets of life, on our own. There was an exegetical joke that circulated in the third grade:

Kid One: Did you know God has a name?
Kid Two: No. What?
Kid One: You know: Our Father in Heaven, HAROLD, be thy name…

It was one of those kid jokes I never got, like the one that went around kid-dom when Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe: “Didja know when Joe DiMaggio hits a home run now he STAYS home?”  

None of the kids knew why this was funny, and by the time I figured it out, Joe and Marilyn had been separated for years.

But life and truth are confusing when one is a kid, and they don’t get a lot clearer when one grows old.

As I was thinking about what I would say about the Lord’s prayer this week, I tried to look at it analytically.

There are some scholars who say the prayer is an amalgamation of the teachings of Jesus throughout his ministry. Many of these scholars doubt Jesus ever called his disciples together to teach the prayer in one fell swoop. 

I’m not sure that matters much. Even the Jesus Seminar, famous for casting doubt on the recorded words of Jesus, has concluded that the phrases of the prayer are authentic summaries of Jesus’ teachings. 

The Jesus Seminar concluded that the words of the prayer most likely to be authentic are the first: “Our Father.” Jesus would have said “Abba,” which was an affectionate term for a male parent akin to “Daddy.”

My dear friend the late Dr. Ray Jennings, who I have missed these many years, thought it was hilarious when the politically correct church he joined edited the opening phrase of the prayer to make it gender inclusive: “Our Mother/Father.”

“Isn’t that rich?” asked Ray, who held a doctorate in theology. “The only words in the prayer the Jesus Seminar thinks Jesus really said, and this church changed them!”

Jesus, of course, was gender inclusive throughout his ministry. But when he prayed, he said “Daddy.”

What is remarkable about the Lord’s Prayer is that so many people have recited it over two millennia without allowing it to seep into their brains or to have the slightest impact on their conduct. 

How can one continually pray to abide in God’s will, to forgive others, and to be rescued from evil thoughts and deeds, and still be a hateful, vindictive, xenophobic, racist, homophobic, ageist, and sexist jerk? 

How could Thomas More and Henry VIII pray the Our Father daily while burning and beheading those who had sinned against their biased beliefs and their  megalomaniacal     goals? Young Josef Stalin was a seminarian heading for the priesthood in his native Georgia. What was he thinking when he prayed the Our Father? Where did the greatest mass murderer of the twentieth century go wrong?

I suppose it’s all a matter of compartmentalization. Many of us put our spiritual life in a compartment quite separate from our physical lives. Hugh Sidey, who covered the presidency for TIME magazine from 1957 to 1998, reported President Kennedy knelt by the bedside every night and prayed the Our Father – presumably, at times, just after he had shagged a White House secretary or intern in the same sheets. (May he rest in peace.) 

One of the most moving scenes in Godfather III is when Michael Corleone, a stalwart of the church who knew the words of the Our Father, confesses his sins to a Roman Catholic Cardinal:

“I betrayed my wife,” Michael begins hesitantly, weeping. “I betrayed myself. I killed men and I ordered men to be killed.”

Breaking down, Michael sobs, “It’s useless.” But the Cardinal urges him to go on.

“I killed …” Michael continues “…I ordered the death of my brother. I killed my father’s son.” Sobbing, he repeats: “I killed my father’s son.”

The Cardinal, who in the film represents the future Pope John Paul I, is temporarily stunned.

“Your sins are terrible,” the Cardinal says, “and it is just that you suffer. Your life could be redeemed.”

But the Cardinal understands how sinners keep their spiritual quest separate from their physical desires.

“I know you do not believe that,” the Cardinal says before making the sign of the cross and offering the weeping Michael an empty absolution. “You will not change.”

One suspects that Don Michael Corleone, who in Godfather I stood as godfather at his nephew’s baptism while several who had sinned against him were violently extinguished rather than forgiven, was not paying attention to the words of the prayer he knew so well.

One of the reasons we Baptists don’t pray rosaries is that we have an aversion to “vain and repetitious prayers” because Jesus said not to do it (Matthew 6:7). And one could make a case that Michael (and JFK and Henry VIII and Josef Stalin) said the prayer so repetitiously they forgot to listen to it.

But Baptists know – even if we won’t admit it – that we sometimes don’t listen to our prayers either. We prefer to pray extemporaneously, often inserting the needless qualifier “just” into our petitions, e.g., “Lord, we just pray that you would just look down upon us and just bless us and keep us and we just pray for the Episcopalians and Methodists and others who just don’t know they are unsaved …”

Whether Jesus taught us the Lord’s prayer in one sitting, or whether he scattered its golden nuggets throughout his parables and sermons, the lesson seems clear enough:

When you pray, don’t forget to whom you’re talking: the Creator of the Universe, whose name is too holy to utter in vain repetitions.

When you pray, remember your desire that the beloved community Jesus came to proclaim, God’s realm of unconditional love, will be a reality in all that you say and do, now and when you pass over to the other side.

When you pray, ask God to forgive your sins, and remember that God will find it easier to forgive you when you forgive all the slights, slurs, injuries, betrayals, and evil things people do to you.

When you pray, ask God to give you the strength and self control to resist temptation of any kind – sexual, financial, social, even gustatory.

When you pray, ask God to forgive you and overlook the sinful messes you make. 

And when you pray, plead with God to keep the devil far, far away from you.

The God who loves us enough to do all that is certainly entitled to all the praise we can muster. Whichever dumb monk added the final line of the Lord's prayer did the right thing: for God's is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. 

As Port Chester resident Ed Sullivan once said on national television, Let’s hear it for the Lord’s Prayer. 

And when you hear it, be sure you're listening.

Amen.