The Lord’s prayer isn’t about my wishes or your wishes. It is about God’s wishes for us. It’s a prayer in the plural. Give us. Forgive us – as we forgive those indebted to us. Do not bring us into trial. It’s a prayer for the community, by the community, to the God of community.
This prayer – that Jesus taught his disciples and still teaches us – is a communal touchstone, a grounding point for aligning us with God’s vision and God’s agenda for the world. All should be fed, all should be forgiven sins and debs. All should be protected.
It is a prayer that is powerfully political: God’s kingdom is not ours, and yet it is, in fact, defined by our feeding, our forgiving, our protecting, and our welcoming. Let that kingdom come.
Let us recall that the only reason we are still paying attention to this prayer is because these very same disciples believed that Jesus is risen from the dead. That means that life, not death, is God’s agenda. Life is mark of God’s reign.
This message is excerpted from “Dear God, thank you for…” by Anna Madsen in the July/August 2021 Gather magazine. Today is the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost.
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