OUR FATHER…

This week we began the season of Lent. For me lent is a time where I try to focus increasingly on prayer. I’ve been thinking a lot about the practice, as well as reading what others had to say. Recently other people have also been asking questions about prayer.

For example this week I got this question:

“I really like to pray, but I don't know if what I pray is what God wants and desires for the person I'm praying for, or myself, and I just always feel like I'm going against God. … how does one pray?"

Asking “How does one pray?” is a question that has been asked for thousands of years. Just take a look at Luke 11:1 “Now it came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, when He ceased, that one of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.” Even those who lived day in and day out with Jesus still had trouble understanding how to pray!

Before we get into how… I think it’s important to talk about why… there are innumerable reasons to pray. Stop and think for a second before reading… Why would one pray? Come up with a reason in your mind…

I can think of a few reasons:

Ephesians 3:14-19 – It strengthens our relationship with God

A person prays, said Augustine, "that he himself may be constructed, not that God may be instructed."

Luke 22:39-41 – Avoid Temptation

Luke 10:2 It empowers us to see God’s will

Soren Kierkegaard once wrote: “the true relation in prayer is not when God hears what is prayed for, but when the person praying continues to pray until he is the one who hears, who hears what God wills.”

and empowers us do it (look at the next command of Jesus in Verse 3)

Prayer is really practical! As St. Thomas More once prayed, "The things, good Lord, that we pray for, give us the grace to labor for."

Ephesians 6:10-20 - Warfare

One of my favorite quotes about prayer comes from Karl Barth who wrote, "To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world."

Matthew 6:45-46 It Grounds us

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, “A day without morning and evening prayers and personal intercessions is actually a day without meaning or importance.” I love that!

Requests – Philippians 4:6

“God,” said Pascal, “instituted prayer in order to lend to His creatures the dignity of causality.” That’s a really cool idea to me!

I’m sure there another hundred reasons to pray, but these are a good start I think… Let’s now look on HOW to pray.

For me understanding how to pray BEGINS with looking at how Jesus responds to the request, “Lord, teach us to pray”. Go back to Luke 11 look at verse 3 and following:

Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us day by day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
For we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us.
And do not lead us into temptation,
But deliver us from the evil one.

This prayer is the basic prayer of all of Christianity stretching though all denominations, and traditions!

(This prayer is also recorded in Matthew 5… in fact that whole chapter is a great place to look for how to approach prayer!)

To Understand the LORD’S PRAYER (what the prayer above is often called). One has to look at the prayer which Jesus seemed to expound upon.

At the time of Jesus there was a prayer in use called Kaddish or The Sanctification. It goes like this….

Magnified and sanctified be his great name in the world He created according to His will.

May He establish His kingdom during your life and during your days, and during the life of all the house of Israel, speedily and in the near future.
And say Amen.

Can you see any Parallels?

• Sanctifying the name of God
• Request For God’s kingdom to be established

This prayer follows a pattern seen though out the teachings of Jesus.

Jesus frequently takes an established part of the religion, and tweaks it.

Another example of this is how Jesus changes the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9, this is the most basic creed of Judaism!) in Luke 10:27 by adding a passage from Leviticus 19:18 to create a Creed based on loving both GOD AND OTHERS!!

Jesus adds a few things into the Our Father…

The most obvious additions are requests for

Bread, Forgiveness, and Protection from temptation… and the addition of the word Father.

The part of this that actually strikes me the most is the way that Jesus transforms this prayer into a prayer for GOD AND OTHERS!! It adds the OUR, and makes requests that deal with the day to day struggles of us and our neighbors. It’s a prayer that is both Horizontal and Vertical… and is a deeply personal prayer.

Let’s look at the LORD’S PRAYER or the OUR FATHER as it is sometimes called again… At each line think about the way that Jesus crafts this prayer to reflect our place as CHILDREN TOGETHER IN THE FAMILY OF GOD.

Our Father in heaven,

Think about the spirit of adoption, and how we are now Son’s and Daughter. We pray this prayer WITH CHRIST HIMSELF, and THE HOLY SPIRIT!

Hallowed be Thy name.

Does our heart truly set God’s name Apart?
Thy kingdom come.
Are we living for Thy Kingdom of My kingdom

Thy will be done
Do we truly give God sovereignty over all our lives and Communities

On earth as it is in heaven.
God’s kingdom is something that BREAKS INTO THE DAY TO DAY!! Today!!

Give us this day our daily bread.
Pray this for others as well as for yourself! That’s what the “US” is all about

And forgive us our trespasses,
As individuals, and as a community!

As we forgive those who is trespass against us.
Are you really asking this? Let the sword cut both ways!

And lead us not into temptation,

Is sin something you really want to be free from… Do you want to see your neighbor free. Remember the US!

But deliver us from evil.

In ALL FORMS… Let this prayer be “the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”

Try praying this prayer everyday… I personally have an alarm set on my Cell Phone for 4PM everyday where I pray this prayer before I bring my concerns of the day before God.

Remember: Ultimately Prayer is grounded in doing it!

How do we learn to pray?

Mother Teresa answers, "By praying — If you want to pray better, you must pray more."

One Final thought by Eugene Peterson: ““Be slow to pray. Praying puts us at risk of getting involved with God’s conditions…. Praying most often doesn’t get us what we want but what God wants, something quite at variance with what we conceive to be in our best interests. And when we realize what is going on, it is often too late to go back.””

A Prayer

Ich bete wieder, du Elauchter

"I am praying again, Awesome One.

You hear me again, as words
from the depths of me
rush toward you in the wind.

I’ve been scattered in pieces,
torn by conflict,
mocked by laughter,
washed down in drink.

In alleyways I sweep myself up
out of garbage and broken glass.
With my half-mouth I stammer you,
who are eternal in your symmetry.
I lift to you my half-hands
in wordless beseeching, that I may find again
the eyes with which I once beheld you.

I am a house gutted by fire
where only the guilty sometimes sleep
before the punishment that devours them
hounds them out in the open.

I am a city by the sea
sinking into a toxic tide.
I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown
had poisoned my mother as she carried me.

It’s here in all the pieces of my shame
that now I find myself again.
I yearn to belong to something, to be contained
in an all-embracing mind that sees me
as a single thing.
I yearn to be held
in the great hands of your heart–
oh let them take me now.
Into them I place these fragments, my life,
and you, God–spend them however you want"

–Barrows and Macy, trans. 1996. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. Riverhead Books.

Fasting:

Throughout my Christian life I have learned that there are many practices that people have used thought history to grow closer to God and to become more like Christ. We have been going though a series of these “disciplines,” Many of them are very easy to understand why one might want to do them.

(e.g. Reading scripture is valuable because it tells us about so many things God has done, promises to do, and connects us into the lives of countless people seeking to seek God in ways that still resonate with us today. Prayer is valuable because it is connects us with God in some very tangible ways.)

I think one of the hardest “disciplines” to understand is the practice of fasting. It’s even hard to define:

· According to the dictionary fasting is:
“To abstain from food.” Or
”To eat very little or abstain from certain foods, especially as a religious discipline.”

· Medical Science says a fasting is assumed to be happening after obtaining from food for 8–12 hours.

· Catholics have a weekly “fast” of one hour before the Mass.

· Some people fast from things other then food or drink, others say that’s not a true fast

· Eastern and Oriental Orthodox faiths fast from meat and dairy 2 times a week and for huge sections of the church calendar.

· Catholics fast from meat on Fridays during lent.

· Paul talks about abstaining from sex with your spouse for periods of time by mutual consent for prayer. Some call these sorts of things fasts! 1 Corinthians 7:5

· Can you think of any other fasting examples?

What is fasting?? I’m not really going to worry about defining it. There is no mandate in scripture that says anything like “all people must fast.” If it did I can understand why someone might get anxious about figuring out what it is and is not. Today I want more to look at its practical application.

When we look through the Bible we can many purposes a fast is used for:

• Ezra 10:6 - Mourning
• Ester 4:16 – intercession
• Daniel 9:3 – Prayer
• Joel 2:15 – Community
• Jonah 3:7 – Repentance
• Luke 2:37 – Worship
• Acts 13: 1-3 – Decrement
• Matthew 4:1-4 - Obedience

The question for me is can’t we do all of these things without fasting??

Of course we can… but I think fasting forces us to deal with the Body part of us as well as the spirit. We are deeply affected by our bodies. What we think, how we feel, how we serve these are all deeply intertwined with our bodies. If we want to serve God with our whole self we need disciplines in our life that deal with our bodies too.

As Scot McKnight says: “Fasting is a physical condition in which all the disciplines can occur.”

To understand what I mean by this try putting the word “body” in front (e.g. Body Mourning, or Body Repentance)… does that make any sense?

Difficulties with fasting:

• Isaiah 58:3-7 – Trying to bribe God into helping… or pleasing him
• Matthew 6:16 – Putting on a show
• Fasting can be distracting, we can think about food the whole time – but what does that show us…. Could fasting act as a mirror into our hearts as well?
• It can be done at the wrong time Matthew 9:14-17
• It can become a “technique” (i.e. fasting becomes a form of magic to attain certain benefits, or simply a steroid to your prayer life)
• The focus can easily shift to what it’s doing to your “Spiritual Life” rather then a biblical perspective. In my humble opinion fasting is what happens when a child of God surrenders their entire person -- heart, soul, mind, spirit and body – to Abba.

I have personally tried fasting in a number of different ways, I’d be happy to talk about my experiences with it sometime if anyone wants.

Check out these pages for more information on fasting:

http://www.ccci.org/growth/growing-closer-to-god/how-to-fast/index.aspx

-This one is a great one on HOW to do it.

http://www.biblebb.com/files/tniv/FASTING.TXT

- A list of verses on fasting

http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2007/04/fasting-a-thesis_comments.html

- Read the comments hear for a good discussion

http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/pr_fasting.aspx

- Orthodox fasting rules. I tried to live these last year! Very challenging!!

My Ten questions on Fasting:

As I began thinking about this I came up with TEN QUESTIONS about fasting... if anyone wants to take a stab at them that would be awesome!

1. In our culture many people seem to have trouble understanding why anyone would really do it. The benefit in doing it is much less tangible then that of prayer, reading scripture, or many other spiritual disciplines. Why would anyone fast?

2. I see many examples of fasting in the world today used to raise awareness. For example Desmond Tutu's involvements in a hunger strike for change in Zimbabwe. [The Story] Where did this practice come from? Are there any good examples of this in church history?

3. Fasting is generally thought of as refraining from eating food, or drink. However I know that our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters fast twice a week from Meat and Dairy. Is this a true fast?

4. As far as you know did the practice of Fasting in Islam come from the Judeo-Christian practices Mohamed came in contact with or were there other precursors in the area?

5. What fasting practices did the early church fathers?

6. There seems to be a tie between "monastic" life and fasting. How did this connection develop?

7. Jesus often talks about fasting in the gospels, what were the fasting practices like in the ancient near east during the time of Christ?

8. I know a number of people who are very skeptical of the practice of fasting. They believe it can function as a stand in for a more "real" spiritual practice, and can make the faith more formulaic and less organic. What would you say to someone who thinks this way?

9. Depriving oneself of food as a "spiritual practice" seems counter intuitive to many in the west. We have a very platonic understanding of the world. How is what we put in our body relevant to how we are in relationship with God?

10. Fasting can be a very intimidating practice. I'm not sure where one might begin. There are many things to consider: heath implications, what to fast from, how often, and how to do it in a way that helps you grow closer to God. What are some good resources about how to fast?