Isaiah 5:13-25
Psalms 26, 28, 36, and 39
1 Thessalonians 5:12-28
Luke 21:29-38
In
the Episcopal order of worship, the priest sometimes introduces the Lord’s
Prayer with the words, “Now, as our Savior Christ hath taught us, we are bold
to say…” The word bold is worth thinking about. We do well not to pray the
prayer lightly. It takes guts to pray it at all. We can pray it in the
unthinking and perfunctory way we usually do only by disregarding what we are
saying.
“Thy
will be done” is what we are saying. That is the climax of the first half of
the prayer. We are asking God to be God. We are asking God to do not what we
want but what God wants. We are asking God to make manifest the holiness that
is now mostly hidden, to set free in all its terrible splendor the devastating
power that is now mostly under restraint. “Thy kingdom come…on earth” is what
we are saying. And if that were suddenly to happen, what then? What would stand
and what would fall? Who would be welcomed in and who would be thrown the Hell
out? Which if any of our most precious visions of what God is and of what human
beings are would prove to be more or less on the mark and which would turn out
to be phony as three-dollar bills? Boldness indeed. To speak those words is to
invite the tiger out of the cage, to unleash a power that makes atomic power
look like a warm breeze.
You
need to be bold in another way to speak the second half. Give us. Forgive us.
Don’t test us. Deliver us. If it takes guts to face the omnipresence that is
God’s, it takes perhaps no less to face the impotence that is ours. We can do
nothing without God. Without God, we are nothing.
It
is only the words “Our Father” that make the prayer bearable. If God is indeed
something like a father, then as something like children we can risk
approaching him anyway.
Lynn Mather
(Excerpts taken from Listening to
Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner)