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The Lord's Prayer

 The Lord's Prayer

We're half way through the Sermon on the Mount. We have discovered that it isn't a list of moral directions, tasks for us to fulfil or ideas for good living for us to aspire to. They are impossible demands, because they demand us to be perfect. And then Jesus tells so to go into the iner room and pray.. and the prayer he gives us is the Lord's Prayer. 
The Lord's prayer is short of effusive praise, has no real requests for persoal stuff, doesn't mention people who are ill or have needs, doesn't pray for world peace or justice.

God is Father whose name is holy.
We pray his kingdom to come.
We pray that on this earth his will may be done.
We ask for just enough - bread for the morning ... that is just to get us tomorrow.
Then we acknowledge that we need to be forgiven, but that we can only be forgiven if we are selves are willing to forgive. That's a significant couple of sentences which is amplified and reinforced by what Jesus says after the the prayer.

And then we pray to be kept from temptations and delivered from evil, or the evil one.

And that's it.

We don't pray for fine weather, or health or wealth. The whole prayer is focussed on God, and on what we need to enable us to be focussed on God. God is Father and his name is holy. We need just enough to get by and to be forgiven and forgiving people, protected by God. We wait for the kingdom in longing and hope, and for God's will to be manifest. It's all about God and what we need to be to be God centred.

It's simle enough to explain in that way... but the implications are earth shattering. This prayer assumes we wil want to be forgiving people who are happy with just enough, day by day. 
Tere's no manifesto for changing the world, or the demand for commitment to social action. Just the demand, or maybe expectation, that we will live simply as God's children, looking for the kingdom and witnessing to the need for God's will to be done in earth ... not that we will rush around and organize the kingdom's arrival or insist on actions to implement the will of God. By implication, I think, we celebrate the coming kingdom and we allow God's will to be done in us. And we rest in the protection of God from evil ( though not  from the changes and chances of life, with it's accidents and upsets).

There is an austerity of living and and an abundance of life running parallel in the Lord's Prayer. This, Jesus seems to be telling us, is how you make sense of being holy, being perfect, being upright and faithful to God. It's so simple... yet demands everything of us.

The Lord's Prayer demands we are God focussed.



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