First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
26 June 2005
The Lord's Prayer
I am here this morning with a few words about the Lord's Prayer. Not much about what it means or how others construe it, but what it has meant and means to me.
Some of you know, but for years and years I didn't go to church, or would go on those special occasions. This in a guy who sang in the choir down the street, at Christ Church. But when my family moved to Newton, and my voice changed, that was it.
About one year before we moved here from Ithaca, though, the bombing occurred in Oklahoma City. I could not comprehend it; my thinking could not account in any way for what some person had done to all those other people. It seemed to me that there was evil loose in the world far beyond my power or comprehension. But then in the week following the terrible event, on the television there were funeral services broadcast from the churches and synagogues in the city. I watched people being together, comforting one another, but also clearly finding comfort in the service itself. And I would hear the prayer repeated.
Ann and I joined a church soon after, First Presbyterian, and felt warmly welcomed. A dinner group that we became part of, choir for me, and then baptism, being splashed with the water and looking out, seeing the congregation, feeling the joyful peace.
We moved from Ithaca in 1997, and after months of looking, visiting, spending some time at one church or another, we wound up here, to our great joy. I was away on the west coast one weekend, and Ann was here in First Church, as it happened to be the Harvard Square Sunday when the churches have service together. She told me about it afterward, and how she thought we should go together.
We started attending regularly, and the more we did, even as the church was moving deeper into the sorrowful time of Allan Hoppe's final illness, we felt welcomed. We joined, we wound up on committees, task force, deacon... and a new group of friends who get together for dinner.
And from time to time, I might be asked to read during the service. I have to tell you, when I do, I just feel the words coming up out of me, resonating with everyone in the church not through any power of mine, but theirs, the words of the scripture.
And every Sunday there would be the Lord's Prayer, the one we all prayed together, out loud.
And I would sometimes say it at other times too. When I was away, and needing some comfort, or when I was troubled by something, and even once I think just because I felt good, and thankful.
I don't know quite when I started, but I think it was during one of my journeys, when I was away from home, and starting a new day in some other place, I was standing in the shower and just said it, the prayer. I felt cleansed and at peace, baptized and grateful. That has become my practice, part of my daily life, a comforting way to say at the start of each day God, do with me this day as you will, and I am grateful, Lord I am grateful.
I am grateful for how that prayer accompanies me on my travels and seems to keep foiinding me in the most out-of-the-way places. When I went to North Korea several years ago, the group I was traveling with attended a church service in Pyongyang, and I was able to buy a Korean Bible there afterwards. Here it is.
I was very interested to notice, when I compared them, that the North Korean Bible uses polite honorific language in addressing the Lord, but the South Korean Bible uses the humble deferential form, which places God higher in the linguistic heaven, and the speaker relationally lower.
A few years ago, Ann and I joined some friends and went to France for two weeks The first week, we were in the village of Evelle, not too far from Dijon where they make mustard and also wine. Next to Evelle was the even smaller village of Baubigny, and I walked over there one day, and went into the church. A very small building, sort of tucked into the hillside, cool and dark within, out of the light and heat. I sat in a pew, reached forward and picked up a Bible, and opened it. To the Lord's Prayer. So I copied it down, not really knowing French. But my father does, and he taught me to say it, or at least to read it:
Notre
Pere, qui es aux cieux,
que
ton nom soit sanctifié,
que
ton regne vienne,
que
ta volonté soit faite
sur
la terre comme au ciel.
Donne-nous
aujourdhui
notre
pain de ce jour.Pardonne-nous nos offenses
comme
nous pardonnons aussi
a
ceux qui nous ont offensés.
Et
ne nous soumets pas a la tentation,
mais
délivre-nous du Mal.
Car
c'est a'toi qu'appartiennent
le
regne, la puissance et la gloire,
pour
les siecles des siecles.
And then just two weeks ago on my way to Seoul Korea I purchased the book Will in the World, about Shakespeare and his time. There were some illustrations, photos of gloves, such as those Shakespeare and his father made, or the queen, Elizabeth, or other notable figures. Also, a horn book, the wooden tablet with the lambskin writing surface used in the schools. A primer, with the alphabet at the top, and as I looked at the picture I realized, the Lord's Prayer for the text!
Jesus said, don't make a show of your prayer, just say this one. The Father knows already. And He said, Here, take this, eat and drink, and I am with you. And we do each month, as his welcoming gesture enfolds us. For me, this is where it started, the church; with Christ reaching out in simple words and gestures to us. Words and gestures that we repeat every week, or month, or day.
It starts each day with the prayer, and for a long time that was enough. Enough to say I am in Your hands, God, and I am grateful, and Please Lord deliver us from Evil.
I am slow many times, and I have to admit it took me a long while before anything else happened. The Lord's Prayer became part of my daily routine, I suppose, and always was a welcome part of the Sunday service here at First Church. But it came to me as something of a shock when I realized the Prayer was saying something else to me. There was the part about forgiving us our trespasses, and I was eager and ready and hopeful for that to happen, but what exactly did it mean to forgive others their trespasses?
Quite some time ago, it seemed that perhaps that part of the prayer was right for a way to think about Oklahoma City. And then 9-11, on the day after, facing a room full of undergraduates not knowing what to say, so I mentioned the Lord's Prayer, and that I was feeling that I wish I knew who had done that evil thing to the people in New York, and on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, and the other one in Washington. But in a way I did know, and I knew they were dead.
I remember saying something about how one way to go would be to try to get even. But in Ancient Athens, at a certain point the culture moved away from a tribal pattern of vengeance and vendetta to laws, the Solonic Code, and the funeral oration as a way to express the pain and sorrow and gratitude for the lives of those who have died or been killed. There is a moment like that in the Old Testament, and in a classical Korean text as well. In the Remains of the Three Kingdoms, Samguk yusa, a man returns to his home and finds the plague spirit in his bed with his wife. There was evil in his house, but instead of reaching for a weapon, he turned away, danced, and sang a song. The spirit came out and bowed down to him and acknowledged the beauty of his act, and swore never to return to that place again. The place, the kingdom, was protected forever after.
Now, there are those who read the story in a literal way and say, Well, if that had been my woman! But it was the plague spirit, and far more likely that in the original text we have a description of a ritual, not an episode from some desperate TV series.
But the Lord's Prayer is also about daily life, about personal things. Forgive us our trespasses; forgive me mine—as I forgive those who have trespassed against me. How do I do that? I wondered. Try to find the fellow who stole my camera, years ago? Tell him it's ok, I have a new camera. Digital! So there! Or get on the phone with the oil company that seems so callous in its treatment of my parents, after their forty years of being customers? And tell them, it's ok?
I have to be careful about such things, and not take personally the things that people sometimes say or do, to me or the people I care for.
No, it wasn't this. Trespass against me. What's that about?
A little answer, an idea occurred to me, I think it was just a while ago, in our CE class, on the Lord's Prayer. Somehow our conversation led me to think of being ready to forgive other drivers what I have in the past taken as their deliberate attempts to cut me off, to move into my lane, into my stretch of road, to jump my light from their side, or run too long past the red from theirs...
Well I started trying that. The usual thing, of smiling and waving someone forward; of not speeding up to block some person creeping in from the side; other things too. Odd thing was, I had the sense of changing slightly in other ways as well, being quicker to smile, or laugh, or pick up the thread of someone else's story, or reach into my pocket and give the guy on the corner intersection a buck.
Now I know you can tell, I am not describing a process of analysis, of logical examination moving from one thing to another. It feels more like a series of small jumps in my understanding; not a leap of faith; maybe I could call them small hops of faith.
But here I am now, sharing these thoughts with you, and about to tell you, there was another one of these hops, recently. I realized that if I am forgiven by God, as I feel that I am, and as Jesus told us we all were, and as the disciples told us too, then for all my trespasses against others, and against myself, I can forgive me too! I can forgive myself.
Some part of me, maybe the son of the New England soil part, keeps wanting to say No No No. You are not worthy.
Jesus said, we are forgiven, and as a sign of it, he left us with His prayer. It's a kind of give-and-take. We honor God, in the opening of the prayer, and we look forward to the coming of the kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven. We ask for bread, and forgiveness for the trespasses we commit, the wrongs we inevitably commit in the necessary course of our daily lives. Forgive us, we say, as we will commit ourselves to forgiving others for the hurts, large or small, deliberate or unintentional, they may cause us to feel as the product of living with other human beings in society.
God reaches out to us through the words of his son Jesus, in His prayer. He calls to us, and brings us closer. And I feel myself drawn closer. I feel Jesus reach out to and through all of us. I see him extend his arms wide, and speak these words through us, on Sunday mornings. That smile, that welcome he gives us into the love that God has for us all, and the loving forgiveness that God has already given to us:
God speaks to us in The Lord's Prayer.
I try to hear. Each day I do.
Listen.
© 2005, Dave McCann