Last week I stopped before the Lord’s Prayer in the prayer of consecration. This week, I’m going to send you all a teaching I’ve used elsewhere on the Lord’s Prayer rather than “reinvent the wheel.”
(Here’s a link to that paper on the Lord’s Prayer.)
But that teaching doesn’t speak terribly well to the corporate use of the Lord’s Prayer, so I have a few things to add.
As I suggest in the teaching, I do not believe that Jesus taught us this prayer as a prayer to “say” as one thing, but as an outline for a whole life of prayer. The Lord’s Prayer includes everything we need for a full life in intimacy with the Father. If you break it apart, phrase by phrase, you can use it to guide your time in the “prayer closet” from beginning to end.
But it works just as well if you use it in pieces, and this is one of the great dangers of being part of a liturgical church. We have grown up thinking of worship as something that has a beginning and an end, and a bunch of pieces in the middle, and you start at the beginning and keep going till you get to the end. And this is not worship. This approach can be a great detriment to worship, and we do it with the Lord’s Prayer just as much as we do it with the Eucharist. (You’ll recall that I talked about the need to make room for folks to pause along the way, so that they can comfortably stay with God in the part of the service where they meet Him, back in #8.)
The Lord’s Prayer needs just as much room for “waiting on the Lord” in one spot or another as does the whole liturgy, and this has deep repercussions for the use of it in corporate worship. I know that many times I get hung up on one phrase or another, and while my mouth continues to keep pace with the congregation (I have a different obligation as a leader of worship) my heart stays with “Thy Kingdom come!” or some other phrase for a long time.
So this is where my heart is these days with regard to the use of the Lord’s Prayer in the Eucharist.
First, we need to allow our neighbors to stop and stay with a word or phrase that catches their heart, for as long as they need to stay there. Not that we shouldn’t go on, but we need to make room for folks to tarry.
Second, I would love to see us make time during some services to take the Lord’s Prayer one phrase at a time, and really pray each phrase, and expand on it, and let the whole weight of the Lord’s Prayer have its way with us. Not every week, but every once in a while.
Okay. Enough of that. What follows is my teaching on the use of the Lord’s Prayer as a means to intimacy with the Father. (Here’s another link.)
In Him,
Jeff
