Genesis 18.20-32; Colossians 2, 6-19;Luke 11.1-13

A mother had been teaching her three-year-old daughter, Caitlin, the Lord’s Prayer. For several evenings at bedtime, Caitlin would repeat after her mother the lines from the prayer. Finally, she decided she could manage without her mother’s help.

She did really well, and got through the prayer word perfect, until she reached a certain phrase: “Lead us not into temptation,” she prayed. She continued “but deliver us some E-mail. Amen.”

There are other stories about children not quite understanding what they were praying. Here are some more - whether real or apocryphal I’m not sure -

“Give us this steak and daily bread, and forgive us our mattresses.”
 
“Our Father, who are in Heaven, Howard be thy name.”

“Our Father, who art in Heaven, how didja know my name?”

“Give us this day our jelly bread.”

But all these raise the questions about whether we really know what we are praying when we pray the Lord’s Prayer.

People get uptight about which version to use; neither of the two most used versions, of course, are the exact words of Jesus, but we tend to become quite passionate about the words with which we are most familiar, and I know that some people become really quite upset or annoyed when what we have come to know as the traditional form is not used.

Words are important for people, I know, but we mustn’t become so hung up on which version we use that we pay no attention to what it is that we are praying. It’s all too easy to rattle off the words we say without really thinking about what we are saying.

It’s a problem that has been around for many years. St Benedict was on a journey on horseback. He passed a peasant walking on the road.

“You’ve got an easy job,” the peasant said to Benedict. “If I became a man of prayer, I too could travel around on horseback.”

“You think praying is easy,” replied the saint. “If you can say one ‘Our Father’ without any distraction, you can have my horse.”

“It’s a bargain,” said the peasant. And he closed his eyes and began: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come . . .”
He stopped suddenly and look up “Can I have the saddle and bridle too?” Benedict got to keep his horse.

When we know a prayer so well, it’s easy to become distracted from it.

So, lets’ think a bit about what we are praying. Luke’s version is shorter than the one we find in Matthew. Prayer in Luke’s Gospel is very important. At key moments in Jesus’s life, we see him praying.

He was praying following his baptism when the Holy Spirit came down in the form of a dove. He prayed in the wilderness for 40 days before his ministry began. At various point, we’re told he withdraws to a deserted place to pray. He prays before he chooses the Twelve disciples. He is praying at the time of the Transfiguration. He prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, and even on the cross itself.

Prayer underpins all that he does. So it’s not surprising that the disciples, who have observed this, ask him for help with their praying. How do we pray? They want to know. Teach us.

Father - Abba - Daddy. Prayer is first and foremost about a relationship with God. This prayer starts in that place. There’s been considerable debate about whether Jesus intended to teach his disciples a specific prayer or whether his words were intended to be a pattern for prayer. Many people use it in both ways.

It’s all too easy to see prayer as asking God for things - make Mummy better, don’t let it rain today, and so on - but, if we look at this pattern of prayer, nowhere is that type of prayer found. There is no intercession. That comes later but it’s worth noting here.

The start of the prayer is about relationship with God, and it is through prayer that this relationship grows and deepens. Jesus constantly paid attention to his relationship with God the Father through prayer.

It is God’s name that is to be hallowed - made holy. So often we want to put ourselves at the centre of our world and of our prayers, but Jesus’s prayer is always directed at God. God’s holy name - we think of the echoes of the Ten Commandments - do not take the Lord’s name in vain.

We think of the fact that God doesn’t tell Moses his name; all he gives is I am who I am, which later the Israelites use as a name for God - Yahweh. We think of the holy and mighty God we see in Isaiah’s vision in the temple - God’s train fills the temple and angels cry holy, holy.

In antiquity a name meant far more than it does today. A name was taken as summing up a person’s character. Going back to God’s name and what he told Moses - any name would have signified a limitation of God; only the words I am who I am would enable God’s character not to be shrunk. The holiness of God is not something to be taken lightly.

And the next bit of the prayer again focuses on God and God’s will. Your kingdom come. It is God’s kingdom we seek, not our own. It’s all too easy to mis-use power to build up our own little kingdoms whether they are at home, at work, in our families, or somewhere else. It’s an all-too common trap for clergy and ministers to make their churches their kingdoms rather than God’s.

But what we do we mean when we pray for God’s kingdom? God’s kingdom is a place of mercy and justice, of liberation, of giving the least honoured people in the world an honoured place.

God’s kingdom is a place where no one goes hungry, where enemies dwell together as friends. The coming of God’s kingdom sums up the whole of Jesus’s life and message. But again at the heart is God. For that kingdom to truly come, God needs to be at the heart of our lives too.

Give us each day our daily bread. The verb form used implies that we are asking God to keep giving us our bread every day, a continuous action, though the word translated ‘daily’ is rather obscure and no one is entirely sure that that is the correct translation. It’s about what we need in order to live. Jesus’s prayer is not asking for the superficial extras, but for what we need. But more than that, this part of the prayer is recognising our dependence on God for our needs.

It’s something that is so often forgotten in this materialistic world in which we live. There is an enormous difference between what we need and what we want.This prayer recognises that God is the source of all that we need. It’s a recognition that without God, we would have nothing.

And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. Forgiveness has always been at the heart of God’s good news. If we expect God to forgive us, then we too are expected to offer that same forgiveness to others. There’s nowhere that says it’s an easy thing to do. It wasn’t easy for God, either, and led to his letting go of his Son in order to bring about our forgiveness. 

A lack of forgiveness causes resentment, bitterness, anger. A lack of forgiveness leads to the opposite of liberation as we become bound up with the wrong that has been done to us. A lack of forgiveness binds both the one who has done wrong and the one who is wronged.

Our forgiveness springs from the grace of God, not from anything we can do to earn it - we are called to imitate that in our lives.

Do not bring us to the time of trial. Exactly what this line means is debated. Some think it refers to the end times, when there will be great disruption before God achieves the final victory; others think that the translation should be more along the lines of do not test us, O God. That raises all sorts of questions about if and how God does test us.

Lead us not into temptation is the translation we are probably most familiar with. But even what we mean by that is debateable. Do we mean “don’t allow any temptations to get in our way” or do we mean “don’t let us fall when we are being tested”?

I’ll leave you to think about that one for yourselves.

We’ll be using words based on this prayer of Jesus later in our service. Let us pledge ourselves now to think about what we are saying when we pray it today not just to rattle it off without thinking.