Sermon in Chapel of Oriel College, Oxford, 6.00 pm12th June, 2005.
‘An hearty desire to pray’: The Lord’s Prayer
Today’s collect suggests that we have been given ‘an hearty desire to pray.’ But even if we take that statement at its face value and agree that it is true, we are left with the (very open) question, how do we put such a ‘desire’ that is ‘hearty’ (from the heart, the seat of our whole being, and not just our feelings) into words. From the very beginnings of Christianity, through its many ages and cultures, the answer has nearly always been what was soon called to call the Lord’s Prayer. Right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5-7), we find Jesus directing us in how we should pray (Mt 6:9-13). And as early as the third century, a North African theologian called Tertullian, who eventually went so charismatic that he forsook the rest of the Church, put it in a nutshell by describing it as a ‘summary of the gospel’.
The trouble with the Lord’s Prayer is that it is so familiar that it slips off the tongue; and Jesus warns against precisely this tendency himself. But there is another danger, too, which is to get hung up on which version is used. I remember a small international conference at my house in Fareham, when we would each recite the prayer in our own tongue: English, Welsh, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian – with someone putting Latin in for good measure. The short rhythms of the prayer merged together over those days, as if we were united in aspiration, if we were not united in sound. Yes, familiarity can breed contempt, but I’d rather people know it off by heart than not know it at all: the version used from the Prayer Book was itself the result of a long series of vernacular texts going right back to Anglo-Saxon times – even with Henry VIII insisting on the translation, ‘suffer us not to be led into temptation’, which Archbishop Thomas Cranmer deftly altered to ‘lead us not into temptation’ the moment that monarch was out of the way.
How can we see the prayer as a ‘summary of the gospel’? As Louis MacNeice used to say, ‘in any poet’s poem the shape is half the meaning.’ For us that means being struck by the prayer coming in two main parts, the first of which is about God, his name, kingdom and will, leading into the second, which is about us, our food, forgiveness, and protection. What makes that shape so ‘gospel-centred’ is that we begin with God – whereas if we were to write a prayer, the chances are that we would put our own needs and desires (not always the same thing) first. ‘O Lord, help me not to do my Finals without proper revision’; or perhaps more to the point for me, ‘deliver tomorrow’s post-bag from containing a letter of complaint that ends with those wonderfully bullying words, “I look forward to hearing from you soon”.’
But we don’t start there. We start with God. Not very obvious, of course, because often my ideas are so vague and ill-formed, that I don’t get anything like a picture of God until I reach the end, and have first gone through the name, the kingdom and the will; and only then on to bread, forgiveness, and temptation. We have to start somewhere, and because the Christian faith is not just about us, we start with God, who is ‘our Father’, not mine only; which makes the point that, however turned in on ourselves we can be, every prayer is a prayer of the whole Church, especially this one. Lancelot Andrewes, the great early seventeenth century Anglican preacher, described it uniquely as ‘the prayer of charity’ (meaning ‘love’), because it comes direct from Christ himself, whereas all other prayers are ‘the prayers of nature.’
What, then, of the name, the kingdom and the will? These are ways of describing God: the name is God in himself, beyond us, known to us in Christ; the kingdom is God in his eternal purposes, the ‘long game’ of creation, of which we are a part, and of which Christ is the inauguration; and the will is what applies directly to us, in our daily discipleship, as we struggle to come to terms with the gap between what we want and what he wants, including those many occasions when we probably only know what that will is when we have done it in some small way; and Christ is that will. And, as if to link those three opening points of reference, the name, kingdom and will, with the second part of the prayer, which is specifically about us, bread, forgiveness and protection, ‘on earth as is heaven’ (and I’m afraid that all the versions in the ancient tongues mean ‘on earth’, not ‘in earth’, but never mind!) is not just about doing the will, on earth as in heaven, but with hallowing the name, and heralding the kingdom, on earth, as it is in heaven.
There is such an intricate unity about this prayer, as if it were at one and the same time so simple in its shape, with its different parts relating to each other, and also so rich and complex, because it can apply to every single human experience. Here the prayer locates us in time: bread for today, forgiveness for yesterday, and protection from temptation and evil in the future. Our need at the moment is for nourishment, just as it is for forgiveness for what has been, and hope in the future not to go astray, either committing wrong, which is temptation, or experiencing it, which is evil. As these three petitions hit us more and more, there is a sense of being increasingly aware of our own fragility, set as we are in time, a fragile commodity, which can be used wisely, or frittered away, as well as (perhaps more commonly) over-used, abused, exploited, and milked for every conceivable opportunity to ‘get’ and ‘receive’. The other kind of e-mail which gets me is when everyone seems to be telling that they live busy, hectic lives, because their lives are hectic and busy!
So this second part of the prayer is not about the tyranny of the personal organizer. But it is about a sense of self-realism. Daily bread is first and foremost about physical necessities, but not luxuries (or ‘dainties’, as our Elizabethan forebears used to put it); it then moves beyond that into the Bread of Life (Jn 6:35), the spiritual bread, food for our souls, never to be neglected; and, by extension, many writers across the ages like Augustine applied it also to the eucharist. All this is gospel: the bread is bound by the demands of the gospel. By the same token so is forgiveness, for if we are forgiven by God, we must also forgive others; and here one notes that in Matthew’s Greek text, the past tense is used – ‘as we have forgiven’. It is almost as if our own forgiveness is dependent on our capacity to extend it outwards from ourselves. Lancelot Andrewes, wise pastor of souls that he was, debunked the naïve view that one can ‘forgive and forget’: it is impossible to forget – but we can forgive, even if it takes time. And if daily bread does not bring us face to face with the sheer scandal of world poverty, then forgiveness of others certainly makes us aware of those forces, those histories, those rivalries, those misuses of power in the world that not only keep millions permanently hungry but cause international war. So misused bread and ‘unforgiveness’ bring us to temptation and evil. Here we can argue till the cows come home about whether evil is personal or not. Eastern Christians, relying directly on the Greek, tend to see evil as ‘the evil one’, whereas those of us who are heirs of the Latin versions of antiquity as translated at the Reformation see it as ‘evil’. Since the prayer is at its richest when interpreted in as comprehensive a way as possible, perhaps it needs to mean both – the force of evil, and the experience of it in all its forms. Rowan Williams often tells us that to pray for deliverance means praying to be freed from the power of the lie – the lie that the devil tries on us that God is out to get us, whereas in fact, as this very prayer teaches, he wants to feed us, forgive us, and nourish us in paths that will help us through the trials and evils of this world.
‘And finally’, as the news bulletins would say, there is the doxology, about the kingdom, the power and the glory. Perhaps there has been some confusion about whether to say it or not. Never part of the earliest texts of Matthew’s gospel, it was nevertheless added, for the simple reason that no self-respecting Jew (and the majority of first-generation Christians were Jews) could possibly pray without ending by giving glory to God, and no other. Eastern Christianity latched on to this, and so did Reformation Christians, who knew the Greek texts well, and who were anxious not to ascribe glory to the inherited institutionalized Church against which they were ‘protesting’ in any case! The Prayer Book sometimes has the doxology, sometimes not, probably partly because of the survival of old Latin musical versions that never used it. All modern English version include it, and the Roman Catholic Church as an ecumenical gesture joined the rest of Christianity after the Second Vatican Council in adopting it as well.
Those who have ‘an hearty desire to pray’ have looked at the Lord’s Prayer as they have looked at the gospels, and have been able to use it as a mirror by which they can see themselves – but themselves made, and found restored and forgiven, in God himself. And the wonderful truth about speaking to you tonight about it is that this unique prayer, this ‘summary of the gospel’, this ‘prayer of charity’, will continue to provide sustenance for Christian discipleship until the end of time.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
