Lord, Teach us to Pray

The life of faith is often characterized as a journey. In the Christian tradition we are welcomed into the household of God through the waters of baptism, and our liturgical heritage proclaims that our baptism is completed in death. In between our initial spiritual awareness and our death, we journey. We try to follow in the ways of Christ, we wrestle with doubts, we have clarity of purpose and seasons of confusion. As we live and grow in faith, the community of the church helps us find companionship for our journey through friends and spiritual practices that equip us along the way.

The season of Lent into Easter, during the lengthening of days of spring, is intended to help us be mindful of our spiritual journey. The church slows down with more time for worship and quiet reflection. From one to 40 we count the days remembering the 40 years the Israelites wandered in the wilderness and the 40 days Jesus spent in the desert fasting while the Great Tempter tested him. We use this Lenten season to be mindful of God’s sacrificial love for us by attending to the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.

This year the Lenten Devotional booklet and the Sunday morning sermons will focus on the Lord’s Prayer. The disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, and a variation of the Lord’s Prayer recorded in the Gospels has been used regularly in corporate worship and personal devotion ever since. Its familiarity is comforting when prayed beside a hospital bed or in a home where death has come. Spoken as if in one voice in corporate worship is powerful evidence of the Spirit unifying us for God’s good purposes. However, sometimes things we know so well by heart lose their deep significance and meaning when we can repeat them almost without thinking about the meaning of the individual words or phrases.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas writes: “By praying the Lord’s Prayer we are being made into a people whose journey is a sign to the world that God has not abandoned the world to its own devices but is present as a people on the move… To be a Christian is to have been drafted to be part of an adventure, a journey called God’s kingdom.”

So come journey with us in worship and devotion through the season of Lent as we prepare for Easter’s hope and glory. Come enjoy the adventure of probing the deep meaning of the Lord’s Prayer anew so that we better understand the coming of God’s kingdom for our time and in our future.

Grace and Peace,