When my step-grandmother MaryBeth
died, she hadn’t been married to my grandpa for very long. I think it was only ten or twelve years
since they’d eloped to Reno. So, there
were a lot of people at her memorial service that I didn’t know. My mother and father were there, and my mom’s
brothers, and a few cousins—we loved MaryBeth and thought of her as ours. But the majority of those in the church were
her friends and relatives and descendants from the period of her first, and
far-longer, marriage. Which was just a
little awkward.
That awkwardness extended to the service
itself. It wasn’t liturgical worship, of
the sort we do here. It was one of those
kind-of-formless events we’ve all been to where the content depends heavily on
the members of the congregation having something to contribute. And most of us aren’t really good at coming
up with words that would do justice to the meaning of a human life, or the
mystery of its ending, or the experience of remaining behind. So we sat there, feeling the import of the
occasion, not really sure whether we were qualified to speak, or what to say.
Until the pastor stood up and led
us in the Lord’s Prayer. Then, suddenly,
we all knew what words to speak. And
during the time that it took to speak them, we were united. As we were praying I looked around and could
see that I wasn’t alone in feeling the presence of something greater, something
that embraced us as we were in that moment, in our sadness and embarrassment,
and yet which open a window through which love, and memory, and hope could
come.
The Lord’s Prayer is always there
when you need it, when something true and beautiful needs must be said and
nothing else is coming through. And it
helps that almost everyone knows the words, or close enough to be able to fake
it. Maybe that’s why we’re so attached
to whichever version of it we know best.
Many of the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke contain words
from Matthew that the copyist must have put in because he thought they been
left out by accident: “in heaven”…”your will be done on earth”…”but deliver us
from evil.”
But there’s no escaping the fact
that this prayer has, from the time of writing the New Testament, existed in
two different versions. Or that any
version of it we might know is just one of many English translations of one of
two quite different Greek texts that are themselves translations from Aramaic. So the true power of the prayer does not come
from having memorized the right words in the right order. When the disciple asked, “Lord, teach us to
pray,” Jesus didn’t begin by saying “repeat after me.” What makes the Lord’s Prayer what it is, is
the faith with which it was first spoken.
When we say it, we are not speaking the words that Jesus spoke, but we
are joining his religion.
The Lord’s Prayer can unite us
because it comes from the understanding that we are already One. It begins “Our Father” because we are all one
family, all children of one God. It is
the prayer of one who us divided by warring empires, and knows that the glory that
the empires claim belongs to God alone. It
is Jesus’ prayer for a new kind of empire that brings us together, not from the
top down, by violence and coercion, but from the inside out, with truth, and
justice, and love.
And just in case we think this
kingdom is a castle in the air, the Lord’s prayer goes on to ask that the lives
that we live now, today, be transformed into outposts of that kingdom. It asks for bread enough for, and to be free
from the anxious struggle to get more for tomorrow. It asks for forgiveness, that flows from God
in the measure that we ourselves can let go of our resentments and what we
think we are owed. It is a prayer for the
grace to continually renew our relationships in the knowledge that we are equally
imperfect, and equally deserving of respect.
And it is a prayer that knows that
to live in this way often comes at a cost.
When we give up trying to be proved right, we’re liable to be found
wrong. When we drop the pretense of
being invulnerable, our vulnerability is there for everyone to see. When we no longer strive to be on the winning
side, we run the risk of being counted among the losers. Jesus’ prayer doesn’t romanticize this
possibility ending up a victim. It knows
that it is real, and asks to be spared.
When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we
are not simply repeating words and phrases that Jesus told us to remember. We are praying with Jesus, carrying on the
prayer that he prayed. We are praying
that his vision will be our vision, that his hope will be our hope, his mission
our mission. And we are praying for his
faith that whatever happens, however much it might seem that our prayers are unanswered,
our hopes dashed, our cause rejected and lost, God does live, and hears, and
knows, and will vindicate what is worthy in us at the last.
On July 8th my daughter Risa
and I went to our annual Giants game.
The team was limping back into San Francisco after a disastrous road
trip which had dealt their hopes to repeat as champions a severe blow. But as the game began I felt the stirrings of
hope. Maybe this would be the night when
the tide turned, the game in which the unseen powers of baseball would start
smiling on San Francisco again. Tim
Lincecum was on the mound, and looking like the pitcher he used to be, striking
out one New York Met after another.
Buster Posey got to the Mets young star pitcher Matt Harvey early, with
a two-run shot to center field in the first.
But in the sixth inning the kind of
sloppy play in the field that has sunk the team all season led to two Mets runs,
and the game went into the eighth tied at 3.
And there it stayed for eight more innings. Again and again the Giants got men on base,
once they even had them loaded, again and again we stood and clapped and
cheered until our voices were hoarse and our hands were sore, and again and
again we failed to get the one timely hit that would send us all home
victorious, and maybe break the curse that lay over their season.
Risa and I had come to the game on
the ferry from Larkspur Landing, so we were stuck there until the final out. And as inning followed inning, and the crowd
grew smaller and smaller, and midnight came and went, the final victory began to
feel less and less important. When the
Mets scored the go-ahead run on a fielding error in 16th inning, and
the Giants couldn’t answer, of course I was disappointed. But I was also thankful: thankful, for
everybody’s sake that it was finally over; I was thankful for the pluck of my little
girl, and for a story she will never forget; thankful to the players of both
teams, who had played so hard, for so long; thankful for camaraderie of the
other fans who remained to the end; thankful to the couple that gave us their
seats on the ferry so Risa could lie down with her head on my lap to go to
sleep; thankful that when my wife called my cell after waking up alone in the
house at 1:30 in the morning, I could tell her we were on the ferry coming
home.
The Giants didn’t win that night,
and the ebbing tide of their season didn’t turn. But I had an initiation into something more precious
than victory—the mysterious, undying, unconditional love of baseball fans for
their team. God didn’t spare Jesus the
cross, but he raised Jesus from the dead, and exalted him as Lord of the
kingdom that is already here, if we only know how to see. Jesus lives, so we know that Jesus was
praying the right prayer, for the right things, in the right way. Jesus lives, so now when we pray his prayer, he
prays it with us, not for his sake, but for ours. Jesus lives, and this makes the Lord’s
Prayer, and our every prayer--even the abject, inarticulate cry for help--a
prayer of thanksgiving.
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