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          Yesterday was April Fool’s Day, and today is the first day of Daylight Savings Time. As if that’s not confusing enough, I gather that some of you may also think that it’s Groundhog Day. Lately it seems like whenever you come to church, someone is saying the Lord’s Prayer in a foreign language, and someone else is preaching about it. And today is no different!

        But not to worry; you haven’t been imagining things. We have had four consecutive sermons on the Lord’s Prayer, and you’re about to hear the fifth and final installment of our Lenten sermon series. 

        So, how has it been for you? Has the Lord’s Prayer come alive for you in new ways? Have you thought about whether the Lord’s Prayer is important to you and, if so, why? Or has our somewhat scholarly approach taken away some of the magic of the prayer for you? Has it left you wondering why we still say the Lord’s Prayer in worship every week? Or are you longing for the good old days when you could just come to church and say the Lord’s Prayer without thinking about it?

        Well, I hope you’ve actually enjoyed thinking about it, and that you’re willing to join me this morning in thinking about it a little more. I’d like to talk about how what we call the Lord’s Prayer is really our prayer. But first let’s do a little review, because we’ve covered a lot of ground over the past four weeks:

        Among other things, we’ve acknowledged how much we don’t know about the Lord’s Prayer, including whether Jesus actually prayed it. Whatever it was that Jesus said when he told his followers to “pray like this,” what we now think of as the Lord’s Prayer represents centuries of additions, interpretations and revisions by everyone from Gospel writers and early church leaders to English royalty and church reformers.

        Reflecting on the content of the prayer, we’ve discussed how it calls us to recognize our hunger for God while trusting God to meet our spiritual and physical needs. We’ve talked about the contrast in the prayer between “Abba” and “hallowed be thy name,” and how that reflects a tension we often feel between the intimacy of God and God’s transcendent otherness. And we’ve discussed how the Lord’s Prayer challenges us to think about our language for God—Father? Mother? Father and Mother?—and how to say the prayer together when some of us may prefer different names for God and something other than the prayer’s traditional, old-English pronouns.

        In planning this sermon series, we set today aside to focus on the role of the Lord’s Prayer in liturgy and community. In terms of liturgy, I can tell you that the Lord’s Prayer has always been an important part of Christian life. In the early days of the church, it was taught to converts near the end of their three-year period of catechesis. Two thousand years later, it remains a standard worship element in Christian churches all over the world, and it is often central to rites of baptism and communion. Most of us who were raised in the church grew up saying it. Some of you have said that the Lord’s Prayer is a “touchstone” for your faith, and that worship feels incomplete without it.

        But I think there’s at least one more reason this prayer is so powerful, and it has to do with community. More specifically, we can find it in three little words:

Our

Us

and

we

as in: “Our Father and Mother”; “give us this day our daily bread”; “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”; “lead us not into temptation”; and “deliver us from evil.”

        Why are these first-person pronouns in the plural rather than the singular? Why “our” instead of “my”? Why “us” instead of “me”? And why do I think that makes a difference? Let me begin with a story:

        As some of you know, I receive regular medical treatment for chronic pain in my left shoulder. The treatment involves the use of needles—lots of needles—and it’s quite unpleasant, but it seems to be helping. So, I try to be disciplined about seeing my physical therapist and, after a couple of years, we’ve developed a good, mutually beneficial relationship: While he pokes tiny needles into the triggerpoints of my muscles, we talk about all sorts of things, especially politics and religion and his family. Actually, he does most of the talking, since I am usually lying on my stomach or my right side. But in between my grimaces and groans, I listen and try to help him reflect and think through things.

        Recently my physical therapist told me a story about his prayer life, which I found all the more interesting because he—I’ll call him “T”—is Muslim.  For most of his adult life, Islam has not been important to him, but a year or so ago he began taking Friday afternoons off so he could say weekly prayers at a local mosque. A few weeks ago, he was having a particularly busy Friday, and by the time he arrived at the mosque, the sermon was over, the prayers had been said, and pretty much everyone had left. Still, he did the ritual cleansing and went into the mosque and knelt down on the floor to begin praying.

        Now, as I understand it, the Friday congregational prayer is one of “the most important devotional practices of Islam.” The Quran says that praying the Juma prayer with a community of faith relieves Muslims of some other religious obligations. It also brings them great heavenly rewards. So here “T” was—in a mosque, ritually cleansed and spiritually ready to pray the prayer—and all alone.

        But then an amazing thing happened. Not 10 seconds after “T” began  praying, he felt someone kneel down beside him. Then he heard another man’s voice praying with him. “T” and this other man completed the prayers together and then shook hands and exchanged a traditional greeting. This mystery prayer man then said goodbye, and went on his way.

        My physical therapist told me this story because he was so moved by what this man had done. He was sure the man had already said Friday prayers with the congregation but, upon seeing “T” arrive late, had gone back into the mosque so “T” wouldn’t have to pray alone.

        Whatever the man’s intention, he had helped “T” come to know the truth that Mohammed, the Jewish patriarchs, Jesus and the writers of Luke and Matthew knew all along: Prayer said in community empowers and enriches those individuals who pray and, at the same time, strengthens the community.

        Judaism also reflects this reality. Like the “Lord’s Prayer,” most Jewish prayers are said in the first-person plural (“us” rather than “me”), and a formal Jewish prayer service requires a minyan, a quorum of at least 10 adult men.

        So powerful is the act of praying together that it doesn’t necessarily matter if the people who are praying profess different faiths, speak different languages or offer different prayers. If you’ve been to the Western (or Wailing) Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, you know what I mean. At just about any time of day or night, people go there to pray. They pray alone and silently or quietly; they pray in groups; they pray in Hebrew, Yiddish, English and any number of other languages. The pray-ers may be Orthodox Jews or Christians; they may be agnostic tourists; they may be American Jews celebrating a bar mitzvah. Some pray-ers stuff written prayers into narrow chinks in the wall. But wherever they come from, whatever their faith or language, whatever their politics and needs and hopes, this ancient, contested and sometimes violent setting unites them in prayer because they all pray to the same God.

        The central prayer of Christianity is also a community prayer. We call it the Lord’s Prayer, but in fact it is our prayer. According to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus did not say, “This is my prayer,” but rather “pray like this.” If this prayer belongs to anyone, it belongs to us; Jesus gives it to his followers. And Our Prayer is a communal prayer from the very first word: OUR. For all the discussion of whether we should say “Father,” “Mother,” “Father and Mother” or something else all together, I’ve never heard anyone dispute the word “our.”

        Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not talking about grammar, but about our essential human identity. Our Prayer is a powerful prayer; Our Prayer is an important prayer precisely because in its very first words it reminds us who we are; it puts us in our blessed place. Notice the first-person plural there: it reminds us who we are.

        You see, I may be quite secure in knowing that God is my Father/Mother/Creator. But when I say in prayer with you, the “OUR Father,” I am acknowledging that God is also your Mother, that we all are children of God. And that makes us sisters and brothers! When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we are declaring that we are family. We are claiming our common identity and expressing it in collective worship. We are acknowledging our innate dependence on God, our shared responsibility to do God’s will, and our common desire to build God’s kingdom here on earth. Even when we pray the Lord’s Prayer alone, its pronouns make it a prayer of solidarity with all God’s people: the entire human community.

        In the words of contemporary theologian Daniel Migliore:

        “The Lord’s Prayer is emphatically a we prayer, a prayer that we utter as members of the people of God rather than as isolated individuals. We pray as a community and on behalf of all humanity and, indeed, of all creatures. Not a trace of individualism is evident in this prayer. There is no search for personal salvation apart from the renewal of the life of the whole creation. The Lord’s Prayer is thus a prayer not of individualistic piety but of solidarity in suffering and hope with the entire groaning creation.”

        With that in mind, I find it helpful to remember that Jesus said to “pray like this.” Don’t be like the “hypocrites” who pray loudly in public, Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount; don’t be like the Gentiles who use lots of fancy words. Instead, Jesus said, pray with humility, remembering that all people have the privilege of going to God in prayer. And don’t think you have to tell God everything, Jesus says. Just remember to put your trust in God, and to pray for the needs of all people.

        To pray the Lord’s Prayer, says theologian Henry French, “is to pray on behalf of all persons because all persons, whether they know it or not, are in relationship with God. . . . . To say ‘our Father’ is to stand together with all people, particularly with those who suffer, yearning for God’s future while anticipating it now.” To pray the Lord’s Prayer is to commit ourselves to God’s “radical inclusiveness.”

        When we think about the Lord’s Prayer this way—as OUR prayer, a prayer of solidarity, a prayer that celebrates community—in all its diversity—are the exact words (or even language itself) that crucial? Many of you have talked about how wonderful it has been to hear the Lord’s Prayer in the native languages of some CCC members. Well, at the chapel services of Wesley Theological Seminary, worshippers are encouraged to pray the Lord’s Prayer in the language of their choice. I can tell you that it makes for a beautiful sound.

        As we prepare to pray this special prayer today, I encourage you to think about the language we use not so much in terms of inclusive language—certainly we could never come up with enough images or words to even begin to capture the awesomeness of God. Instead, think about expansive language, of words that might liberate us to expand our sense of who God is. And perhaps we all need to try to let go of our attachment to words. After all, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, God knows what we need before we even ask. And as Paul says in our scripture from Romans, God knows our hearts, and the Spirit helps us pray with “sighs too deep for words.”

        As we say Our Prayer together, may we pray with new awareness of our brothers and sisters here. May we pray with new gratitude for our sisters and brothers in those “other” churches. May we pray with renewed solidarity for our immigrant and refugee brothers and sisters; for our sisters and brothers who are hungry and homeless; for our brothers and sisters who sometimes are excluded from family gatherings because of race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation or physical ability; for our sisters and brothers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, the Sudan, New Orleans and all over the world.

        And as we pray, let us remember: We are the children of God and this is Our Prayer.

        Amen.

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