gathering in light

Quaker Life Magazine published an article of mine called “The New Quakers: A Faithful Betrayal?” in their January/February 2010 issue. A number of people have asked for me to share it with them so they could read it, so I checked with the editor of QL, Katie Terrell, and gave me permission to share it here with all of you. You can download the .pdf file here. » Read the rest of this entry «

Of the many things to be considered today the thing that stands out to me as I sit down to write this is the film we watched this evening called “The Power of Forgiveness.” Four of us from our meeting traveled to St. Luke’s Episcopal in downtown Vancouver to watch this documentary on various (difficult) acts of forgiveness and how various religious (and non-religious) people have thought about the practice. The film discusses a number of different people who have wrestled with very difficult crimes against them. From the 2006 Amish school shootings in PA, to September 11 and even Auschwitz this film covers a lot of ground with a complex topic, but in a way that makes it real and palatable.  » Read the rest of this entry «

Adrian Halverstadt, a Quaker pastor, asks this question on the QuakerQuaker forum boards:

I have been thinking a lot about open worship these days. Many of the larger evangelical Friends churches no longer practice open worship in their big venues for many reasons. I guess I am searching for a contemporary definition of open worship and ideas for how other large congregations incorporate their concept of open worship into their weekly big event(s).
What canst thou saith?

Here are my initial thoughts and response that I posted there but thought I’d also put here because I deeply believe that the Quaker way of worship could be beneficial for those of you in other church traditions as well (I’ll be particularly interesting in your thoughts on this subject). » Read the rest of this entry «

I am preparing my discussion for our Sunday morning meeting for worship and am thinking a lot about what Kester Brewin calls “wombs of the divine,” and creating the necessary space for something new to be born over time (See his book Signs of Emergence) It’s kind of a preference for evolution rather than revolution, or rather it sees evolution as the slow revolutionary process of change. Then I came across this quote (which mirrors Mark 2:27): “Our structures must serve us, not us serve them.”

This is an appropriate quote for all of us in the church, but especially, I think, for Quakers to observe. With so much discussion recently on whether or not some of our more longstanding institutions, meetings, and publishing outlets up for grabs these days because of smaller numbers, smaller budgets, and less interest or energy. With so many looking at the bottom line, I can’t help but think that we need to step back, stop, and contemplate the point above. What does this really mean for us?

Brewin writes:

“Only if I am still. Only if I have stopped what I was doing to listen and hold my breath and enter some spiritual apnea and wait. The perception of the new step will come only to those brave enough to stop dancing the old. The realization that we must descend this low peak will come only to those prepared to stop and take stock of their position. We fear that if we stopped for a week, a month, a service, a moment, we might be forgotten, or lose our momentum, weaken our profile, appear ill-thought-out and failing. So we feed the ecclesiastic furnaces our burned-out wrecks: tired leaders, disillusioned ministers, fatigued congregations – marshaling them to dance longer, march faster, pray harder, cry loud in earnest for God to come, come, COME and batter our hearts into change.”

What Brewin is essentially calling for is that we return to our own practicing of silent waiting, but with a fresh perspective as to why we are doing it, what we are waiting and hoping for. Or conversely, maybe our stopping and waiting is the opposite of silent waiting, maybe we need to stop with the quiet and really say what is on our hearts and minds. In either case, something needs to give. Who has the courage to stop dancing the old?

One of the things my favorite (fake) newscaster Stephan Colbert says on a regular bias is that “Major media has a well-known liberal bias.” And this is definitely something many people believe. This perspective has cropped up again recently all over the web, and yes on The Colbert Report has helped, with the new Conservative Bible Project. The ridiculous (and copy-cat) assertation that this project intends to make is that the bible has “a well-known liberal bias.” And as ridiculous as it may first appear I think they are actually right, but not in the way they think.

It seems to me that we could easily consider that major network news and papers such as the NY Times are not in fact liberal at all but rather conservative in that they all seek to put reality “as it is” on display. That is, all major network news from MSNBC to FOX seek to expose or reveal what is happening “out there.” After all isn’t that what news is supposed to be? The opinion section or segment is sectored off for a reason. “News” tries to relay information about reality, about what happened that day, or that week, in your neighborhood and around the globe. It may also seek to expose what is true about this or that issue, person, event, etc.

The problem then isn’t the object of news, the events that transpire, but rather our interpretation on that reality. What gets relayed about the “truth” is where things get a little tangled up (to say the least). Thus in my mind, it’s not that some news is good and some is bad, instead the point is to realize all interpretation is slanted, all interpretation of reality runs through a filter (our own or someone else’s) and thus has a bias. In other words, all news is opinion to some extent. The question becomes for much of how media is handled in this country, which kind of interpretation will sell better, or that tells me what I want to hear the most? Which source, according to me, interprets those events in a way that makes sense to me, connects with me intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, etc?

On the other hand, it seems like very little of what passes as “news” is “progressive” (I admit to be taking some liberties with this term “progressive”). I am taking “progressive” here to mean not taking reality at face-value, what it is, but rather what it should be. Progressive in this way means owning up to the fact that it is embedded in an interpretation of reality, and that it is putting it’s best presentation forward in a compelling way. Here then “conservative” signals trying to tell the events of the day “objectively,” and pretends to report without (subjective) interpretation, and certainly both “conservative” and “liberal” media are guilty of this. In both cases, on the right and left, these modes of relaying information are rooted in the Enlightenment, a kind of “Just give me the straitght-up facts Johnny” mentality that conceals its own embeddedness.

So what is the “progressive” alternative? I take much of blogging, zines, and other subcultural forms of communication to be more progressive (laying outside both liberal and conservative). This is because these forms of media, while they are often upfront already about their biases and influences, just read the about page on virtually every blog for instance, but they are often more interested in imaginating another society, an alternative way of approacing this or that situation, and offering critique of the status quo. And that’s what is so threatening about these progressive forms of “news,” and cultural re-writing. It isn’t content with leaving reality where it is, or concealing its biases (a position that threatens those still pretending to be objective) but pushing it along, changing it, subverting, in the name of some other narrative.

(I am not on the other hand insisting that we should not read/watch major news networks, just that we recognize and are upfront about theirs, as well as our own, positioning.)

Now that I’ve said all that, I can return to the real point of this post and make my hypothesis: the problem with the Bible for those in the conservative Bible project is not that it is either conservative or liberal, but that it is progressive in this manner. In this way it exceeds the categories, continues to be re-interpreted afresh and challenge the status quo of reality. My reading of Jesus is that he is especially active in this regard. Scripture puts forth an alternative vision of reality, an entirely different way of living and approach one another, politics, economics, society, religion, etc. It is not an upside-down viewpoint as so many like to say, it is instead present the world as it should be, or right-side up. And for those who have an interest in stability, safety, and maitaing power “the way its always been” the Bible can be rather unsettling. Jesus’ message was unsettling even for his own followers, we should expect that 2000 years removed from that we will still find people trying to dodge the society that Jesus sought to put in place. And this will bother more than just one side of our polarized society.

[Image from Chris233]

While I was researching for a recent sermon I came across some great quotes on poverty from 18th Century Quakers. One thing I loved was that the section on plainness and living an unfettered life is right next to the section about caring for the poor. These two things, how we live and what we produce and consume, and interrelated to whether others have enough or not.

Here are few quotes I dug up from the Old Quaker Disciple on poverty:

“With respect to the poor amongst us, it ought to be considered, that the poor, both parents and children, are of our family, and ought not to be turned off to any others for their support or education; and although some may think the poor a burthen, yet be it remembered, when our poor are well provided for, and walk orderly, they are an ornament to our society; and the rich should consider it is more blessed to give than to receive, and that he who giveth to the poor, lendeth to the Lord, who will repay. Written in 1718 “(198)

“As mercy, compassion, and charity, are eminently required in this new covenant dispensation we are under; so, respecting the poor and indigent among us, and to see there be no beggar in our Israel, it is the advice of this meeting that all poor friends be taken due care of, and none of them sent to the town or parish to be relieved; and that nothing be wanting for their necessary supply; which has been according to our ancient practice and testimony. And it has long been of good report, that we have not only maintained our own poor, but also contributed our share to the poor of the respective towns and parishes wherein we dwell.” Written in 1720 (198).

What are our communities writing (and doing) today about this very issue?

I came across this old Mennonite rendering of the Disciple’s Prayer and love it.

Abba Father God, Bless your holy name.

Let your reign come now, Let your desires be carried out.

Bring your peace to birth, As in heav’n, so on Earth

Give us bread, daily; Free us, as we free.

When the way is hard, Be our guide and guard.

Your rule, power; and praise Reign supreme, always.

via The Lord’s Prayer – Mennonite Style

This is an extended version of what I preached on Sunday morning November 1, 2009

Last week we began a new set of conversations, where we are exploring what I’m referring to as, in keeping with other Quakers and Anabaptists, the Disciple’s prayer. This stresses the point that it is for those of us who consider ourselves followers of Jesus, his disciples. Last Sunday we reflected on the prayer as a mission statement; it contains within it both the spiritual and the physical, prayer and action, contemplation and movement.

This week we move into the first of three cords, or sections, that I have compressed the prayer into. Surely, there are many ways that this prayer can be broken down, it is most often framed around six petitions: three for God and three for the disciples – us (McClendon 156). But for our purposes, and the time we have to cover this, a cord of three is appropriate. The Disciple’s Prayer is a cord of three in the following way:

The first strand, “Our Father in heaven, may your name be held holy, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.” It is about a reorientation within a new community, what should be called a new family that is organized around the Father and his kingdom.

The second strand, as I see it, is: “Give us this day our daily bread,” or as some translators stress, give us enough bread for today. This strand concerns our ethics, how we live out our lives, and how our lives impact others. We take only enough, so that there is enough for others.

The third stand, certainly related to the previous two is: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.” This strand is related to the resurrection, that is the sphere of Christianity that is about witnessing to the risen Christ, the part of Christianity that is truly struggling with the world to cultivate and create its own new world here on Earth. As Christians we live in the light and reality of God’s resurrection power, and therefore we live out an alternate reality, one that is as a result of God’s forgiveness and spiritual guidance. We can forgive others, because we are ourselves forgiven! Even more to the point, own forgiveness depends on us being people of forgiveness! And we confess our struggle to live out the new world among so many temptations to break step with God’s kingdom and go at it alone.

These three stands, the reorientation of a new worshiping community, the embodied, ethical strand of the daily and mundane, and the resurrection strand rooted in the in between times, i.e. the compost, with us living and breathing the witness of God’s good news, includes the whole cosmos. This is why I said last week that this prayer contains within it the entire mission and practice of the Christian church. Everything is summed up in this prayer, everything we need to be formed in the likeness of Christ, to become his disciples is located within this prayer, after all it is the Disciple’s prayer.

Now James McClendon pushes this a step further showing how this entire prayer involves creation. In other words the “heaven and earth” of this prayer. I think that it’s worth quoting the whole thing because I know many of you are deeply connected to concerns of creation. McClendon argues that each of the petitions, whether you break it up into six as he does, or take the three cord approach that we have, engage creation. He writes this:

“The first three petitions (the hallowing of the name, the coming of the rule [or kingdom], the doing of the will of the Father) are framed round with the inclusive components of creation, “earth” and “heaven.” These petitions exemplify one great condition for answered prayer, namely that we pray as God wills that we pray. Not only does Jesus as God’s own Son teach this prayer; the petitions declare the divine creative purpose: a creation at peace (shalom) with its Creator, a creation that fulfills the divine rule, a creation that blesses God who is its blessing. ‘On Earth as in heaven’ implies that this threefold petition is not only the Disciple’s Prayer, not only Jesus’ Prayer: it is the prayer of Mother Earth herself in the purpose of God the Father. [The second of the three petitions are uniquely for the disciple’s (there is no evidence that Jesus himself prayed this prayer). They presuppose sin, and sin as rupture between human beings (“our debtors”) and between us and God (“our debts”) and they presuppose the risk of the earthly journey (“lead us not into...”) and the tension of the last days, with the threat that lies at creation’s chaotic margins (“the evil one,” or simply “evil”). Yet the petitions ask for created and creative wholeness in such a time - for a network of forgiveness binding up the wounded world, for a lacing together of souls and bodies sustained by shared (eucharistic and ordinary?) bread, for a providential leadership guiding a pilgrim church through its earthly journey (“save us from the time of trial” in the version of the Consultation on Common Texts).]

But In sum McClendon says, “the Disciple’s Prayer presumes a hearer God deeply involved with the organic and inorganic world, a holy God who blesses the created order with his own presence, a nurturing God who cares about the baking of bread, a healing God who mends the ruptures of social fabric for our good, a guiding God who leads Christians through the narrow passages of time that precede the end. To acknowledge the listening presence of such a God is to acknowledge God’s prior presence in creation to feed and heal and guide and bless.” (McClendon 156).

Therefore, I think this prayer deals with the whole cosmos. When we dare to say the words, “Our Father” this is the Father whom we are talking about, and praying to. The one who is located near and far, the one who is concerned with the mundane, and the one who cares deeply about the cosmos and groans for all of creation to be at peace again.

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When we approach this first strand, this prayer, “Our Father, in heaven (or in the heavens more accurately), may your name be sanctified, made holy, worshiped for how good you are, we have to admit that it is only with fear and trembling. It is with pure audacity that we step out in faith and say, “Our Father.”

I personally find difficulty in saying the words, “our father.” I have two fathers, both of whom I have had very different experiences with. The father I grew up with, my step-father, was a very hard man to live with, and while there are some good memories and I love him deeply, much of his memories remain tainted by the last portion of his life. He was deeply depressed for all of my teenage years, and yet refused to get help. He was angry most of the time, and was very physical in his anger. So when it came to me turning 18 my parents had no problem getting me out of the house, I couldn’t wait to get out from under his dark cloud. He committed suicide a week before thanksgiving in 2003.

When I say our father, I confess that I flinch, I stutter and hesitate.

My “real” dad, is almost the complete opposite of my step-father. I’ve only seen him angry twice. I only got to see him every other weekend growing up, so the four days a month I spent with him were much more focused around on hanging out, laughing, building things and having fun together. I looked up to my dad a lot, he’s a fantastic guitarist, seriously one of the best I’ve ever seen, he’s a great artist, he’s friendly, very funny and the life of the party. I know what it’s like to want to imitate my father. But other than those 4 or 5 days a month, I wouldn’t see him. We didn’t really talk on the phone, and if I needed him on the other days of the month that I wasn’t with him, there was a real good chance I wouldn’t see him. I remember frequently feeling let down.

So I confess I carry all of this with me when I say “Our father.” And I can understand why people may have a difficulty with this part of the prayer.

And this father business is difficult anyways, God surely isn’t a burly man, with a big gray beard, smoking a pipe and reading the Sunday times. I often think it would be far easier for me to begin this prayer with, “Our Mother, who is in heaven…” And maybe you are in a similar place, or maybe you’re experience with earthly fathers is completely unlike mine. And while I have been known to slip in the extra words “Our Father and Mother in heaven,” and while I am completely comfortable thinking of God as neither male nor female, and as both, I think it is important to not skip over this “Heavenly Father” business too quickly.

When my daughter and I together before she goes to bed, I am reminded that I am accountable to live not as my earthly fathers, but our heavenly one. And in both my successes and failures as a dad, I have a Father in heaven who will forgive, and who shows a better way. Being reminded of this with my daughter on my lap doesn’t let me off the hook, but gives me hope that we can and should strive to imitate our father in heaven. And I find it comforting that L and I share this same heavenly father.

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In Jesus’ offering us this prayer, he has invited us, his disciples, into a different kind of relationship with God. In Matthew 3 Jesus is baptized in water by John, Jesus’ father, YHWH, had come to watch and participate in this important event. Immediately after Jesus’ baptism, his father says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Something like this appears three of the Gospels. Jesus invites the disciples to relate to his father as their own. It is an invitation to enter into a new community, a new family with God, the God of creation, the one who is even concerned with all the cosmos, the one concerned with the nitty-gritty of everyday life.

In Jesus’ time there was a Jewish prayer called the Qaddish that most scholars believe Jesus fashioned at least some of his prayer after. That prayer goes like this:

Exalted and hallowed be his great name in the world,
Which he created according to his will.
May he establish his kingdom in your lifetime and in your days,
And in the lifetime of the whole household of Israel,
Speedily and at a near time.

What is interesting about this prayer is certainly the places where Jesus changes parts of it, where he edits it according to his own mission. But for our purposes the first line is most important. It reads, “Exalted and hallowed be his great name in the world…” It is detached, it is worshipful, but it is not intimate, it is not personal. Compare this to our prayer, “Father, Our Father, in heaven, may your name be sanctified.”

Not only is the relationally signified by the word “Father” but it is a collective partnership. It is as invitation to participate in the work of the Father when we say the word “Our.” It draws us in as participants with God, intimate with the one we call Father. This is our divine Father, the one who looks after every lost sheep, who welcomes back the estranged, who forgives the offender, who longs for the redemption of all of creation.

And in our day this makes praying, “Our Father” even more difficult. Not only do many of us struggle with the whole Father bit, but we struggle with this possessive pronoun “Our.” We resist the collective and communal. We resist identifying with something bigger than ourselves. We have our reasons, whether it’s because we don’t like those people over there, we don’t like the things that they like, we don’t make the time, or whatever the case maybe. There are plenty of reasons (some good and some not as good) for why we don’t keep ourselves involved in this community called church.

And so when we pray, “Our Father,” when we dare to say those words, we are allowing ourselves to be reoriented around a heavenly father who has formed a community of worshipers. This community is shared by a broken people and people on the mend alike. Those struggling to find our way, struggling to worship, and make sense of a chaotic world. Those of us seeking to find beauty in the mundane, to carve out of creation a piece that belongs to us, and to share that beauty, and love with those in the world who need it.

When we say, “Our Father” we confess that we cannot do it on own, even though we keep trying we recognize our inadequacy. It is a confession that we need the help of the father. That we ourselves need to be reoriented, renewed, and that the only way to find it is within God’s new family, with Jesus at the head. It is a confession that we live and pray in community. Friends, this is an audacious suggestion, it is a daring act in our times. Everything we know, hear, and do strives against this.

It is also ridiculous to suggest, especially if we look back at other prayers in Jesus’ time like the Qaddish, that we can have intimacy with God, that we are truly God’s children. But when we dare to pray this prayer, Quaker James Mulholland writes, we have to have the courage to pray it as God’s children. How do we pray this prayer as children?

I know that when I was a kid the worst thing my parents could say to me, the thing that drove a stake in my heart more than any other thing they could say or do, was that I had let them down. I didn’t hear this often, but when I did, I was totally crushed. I wanted the approval of my parents, I wanted to imitate them and be like them. For them to say that I was unlike them, I had shamed them, or let them down, was exactly the opposite of what I most deeply desired. When I broke trust with my parents their names were profaned, the trust I had with them was broken.

And so when we pray “Our Father” we dare to say we are going to act as God’s children. I like what Clarence Jordan, a farmer and New Testament scholar once said:

“You don’t take the name of the Lord in vain with your lips. You take it in vain with your life. It isn’t the people outside the church who take God’s name in vain. It’s the people on the inside, the nice people who would never dare let one little cuss word fall off their lips – they are the ones many times whose lives are totally unchanged by the grace of God” (Mulholland 37).

And so when we pray this, we have to see ourselves as having an intimate relationship with God as his children, and we set out to live that way.

And we should be careful to remember that as Children, as Christ’s disciples we are acting out in his name. To act out in the name of someone in the ancient world “was to exercise that person’s power and authority. To call on the name of someone was to put oneself under that person’s protection and command” (Dunn 620).

This is why we should think of the opening of the disciple’s prayer as reorienting our entire world. Everything else in this prayer follows from “Our Father.” That is, everything in this prayer follows from the assumption that we together as a worshiping community, answer to the one Father of heaven and of earth. When we pray this we are praying for help to imitate God, to want what God wants, to live as Jesus lived, and to respond to others in a way that witnesses to the reality of the resurrection in our own lives.

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In closing then, St. Augustine wrote “we imitate who we adore.” This prayer leads us into adoration and declares that God’s name be sanctified. Above all else! Not our own, not our agendas, or our church’s, or even our country’s, but God’s alone. “Father, your name be sanctified. May your name be the horizon through which all is judged, all is made right, where justice and peace will kiss!” And this is where God’s name and the politics of his kingdom collide. We are children of this kingdom, a kingdom unlike other kingdoms. And because we are it’s children, we are also a part of it’s legacy, it’s extension in the world. So when we say “your name be sanctified,” we ask in what ways can we help to honor God’s name. When we pray for God’s kingdom to come, we see ourselves as a part of the answer to that prayer.

So then, every time we pray this prayer, every time we call on “Our Father” the one near, the one far, the one who is bringing his kingdom to earth, we prayer for the powers of the world to come unhinged, for God to move, for the powerless to win, for the world to be turned right-side up again. When we pray for God’s kingdom to come we pray for peace to prevail, for righteousness to emerge from the rubble, for justice to be delivered for all who are oppressed. When we pray that “Our Father’s” kingdom come, we recognize that we are children of that kingdom and should be helping bring it along. NT Wright says, “We must risk ‘Our Father’ then, if we are to be the people through whom the pain of the world is held in healing light of the love of God.”

[In closing] Praying these words then is a ridiculous act, it requires that we are unmasked and made whole. It is a call for complete reorientation and a submitting to one father and one kingdom. It is the first strand, the strand of the worshiping community who gives everything over to their Father.

Do we have the audacity to pray “Our Father in the Heavens?

Here is the text from my sermon this morning.

How many of you have prayed this prayer before (at least once)? How many of you pray it often? What has been your experience with the prayer?

My hope is that we can renew our interest, gain an interest or learn new ways of thinking about and applying the prayer in our lives. Hopefully, we can see that within the simplicity of the prayer there is a deeply revolutionary way to view our relationship with God, with others and with the world. And that no matter what we take away from this set of discussions around the prayer, that we may gain tools for our own spiritual formation.

My own history with the Lord’s prayer is a mixed bag. I grew up going to a Catholic school and mass pretty regularly, I learned the prayer as a young boy and when I said it I meant it like any prayer. I wouldn’t have said that it was or was not meaningful because it was memorized. One of my favorite parts of Catholic mass was when it came time to say the “Our Father.” Catholics have it right, they see it as a communal prayer because when we would say it, we would all hold hands together and in unison begin, “Our Father who art in heaven…”

After my family began going to the local charismatic church things changed and I lost touch with the prayer. There in that community what was important was the ability to speak (and pray) spontaneously prayer as led by the Spirit. For many in churches like this saying something written down, whether it was a prayer (or a sermon), was equal to not being led by the Spirit. It was as though the Spirit could not guide you all week long, you really had to wait until that moment for the Spirit speak. This along with the fact that I was in rebellion against my Catholic upbringing didn’t want anything to do with it at that time in my life. [I’ve since changed my view and think a life of habit is just as important].

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Then in seminary things changed for me again. I remember being in a class called, “Jesus the Missionary,” with two professors who have had the most influence on my thinking, the class was about looking at Jesus’ practices within his culture as a model for how we as Christians might interact as the church in the world. Instead of seeing Paul as the first missionary, we assumed that Jesus’ incarnation qualified him to be the first “Christian” missionary. So if that’s the case, why not learn from him?

I remember having one of those ah-ha moments. It dawned on me that the Lord’s Prayer was really more than just a simple prayer to be memorized and prayed on Sunday mornings. It actually contains within it the entire mission and practice of the Christian church. My thought was, what if a church community took the Lord’s Prayer as its mission statement? What would Christians look like? How would they act?

You know, every church has a mission statement, some are really long, some are short and to the point. Here are some examples:

First: Our vision is to be an Acts 2 and Acts 16 Christ-centered community in the diverse and beautiful landscape of our city.  We believe Acts 2:42-47 provides a vision of what it means to be a church of community and vitality.  Acts 16 provides a vision of the life-changing power of an urban and diverse church.  We long to unite people from all walks of life and backgrounds under the transformational power of the love of Christ.  Transformed lives…transforming lives!!

Our desire is to be a church whose doors are open to everyone living in, working in or visiting our great city — a church that truly reflects the diversity that makes ours a great city. Wherever you are on your spiritual journey, whether you’re just beginning to investigate Christianity or you already have a mature relationship with Jesus, we’re here to help you take the next step spiritually and to offer you a place where you can be as involved as you choose.

Second: “Living out the way of Jesus in missional communities, announcing the arrival of his kingdom, working for measurable change among the oppressed.”

And here’s one I really like: Camas Friends: To love God and love people.

But I wondered, “what if a church adopted the Lord’s Prayer as its mission statement?” What if we sought to live out this prayer on a regular basis; praying it, and living it, what would our communities look like? So for me it became a rubric, or paradigm for understanding the Christian life. As I pray these petitions, I can’t help but also reflect on the question: Am I living this? Am I helping to answer this call? Am I creating a roadblock for this prayer to be answered. I like to say, the prayer for daily bread, is a prayer for us to become givers of daily bread. Therefore, what would it look like if we saw ourselves as a new family with God as our father, what if we sought to sanctify God’s name with our lives, what if we lived in the reality of Christ’s kingdom come, what if we sought to only have enough of what we need for today, what if we were people who literally forgave people’s debts, and what if we confessed our need for forgiveness and our weakness to give into temptation?

I want to suggest that this prayer is really not the Lord’s Prayer at all, neither is it the “Our Father,” it is the as the Quaker Elton Trueblood and others (McClendon) call it the Disciple’s Prayer. It is our prayer, the one we are to pray and the one that is meant to truly shape our prayers and how we practice our faith.

It is easy to avoid the interconnectedness of prayer and action, contemplation and movement, listening and response. We too often draw a line between what we believe and how we act. I think the Disciple’s prayer is the very thing that can help to remedy this dichotomy: What if we prayed this everyday, not just with words, but with our very bodies? What if we sought to not only pray this but to answer its call? So when we pray for God’s kingdom to come, we look for ways to join in God’s work to bring that about.

And so I will do my best to refer to this prayer as the Disciple’s Prayer so that we can be reminded that this is our prayer.

Question: I wonder, can the Disciple’s Prayer have meaning for all of you like it has for me? I don’t know but I hope so. I hope you can find within in it the words, the movements and the patterns you need to help you, as Stanley Hauerwas says, “live as you pray,” or as someone wrote on my facebook page: “The life I live is the prayer I pray.” [A Challenge to pray this daily from now until the end of November].

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My guess is we all pray, some of us pray more than others, and even for those of us who are pretty skeptical about whether or not God really “answers” prayers we all have made petitions to God. Even Lily likes to pray. At dinner, Lily will remind us to pray before we start eating and often, she’ll interrupt us and ask us to pray again (sometimes she does this two or three times). She likes to pray when she’s going to bed (we always say the Disciple’s Prayer together) and she even asked Emily to pray with her in the middle of the night a few days ago when she woke up startled.

And while we all pray, many of us do not regularly pray the words of this prayer. I want to encourage you to be creative with this prayer, make it your own. There are many ways to use the words of this prayer: through the repetition of Lectio Divina, broken up with queries like we did this morning, we can use it as a basis for the themes we pray for. The structure can be a guide to how to prayer and what to pray for. I am convinced that Jesus actually meant for us to pray this specific prayer (though some disagree on this point). Not only is it the prayer he taught his disciples upon request, but every rabbi in his time would have had their own prayer that would mark his disciples from others. We know from Luke 11 that even John the Baptist had taught his disciples a specific prayer (and there are others like the Qaddish).  Now this isn’t the kind of thing that if you don’t do it, then well, you’re not a good Christian. We’re not dealing with that kind of guilt ridden spiritually. All it means to say that Jesus meant for us to pray this prayer is that he knew how important prayer is, and how formative it can be. So either way, even though I’m convinced that Jesus actually meant that when we pray we should pray the prayer he taught to his disciples, I’m even more convinced that we are meant to live out that prayer as a community formed by the heart of its petitions.

He also knew that prayer is hard work, just look back to the scene in the Garden of Gesthemene: there we find Jesus sweating blood and his disciples sawing logs. Prayer takes serious perseverance, It takes practice and presumes a lot. It presumes that we have a prayer to give, that we have the courage to offer that prayer, and that God is a hearing God (McClendon 155 #2). Sometimes this is too much to ask. I have gone through many times in my life when I had no prayer to offer, when I didn’t have the courage to offer my prayer, or when I assumed God was in fact not listening.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas says that:  “Some things are too important to be left up to chance.  Some things in life are too difficult to be left up to spontaneous desire – things like telling people that we love them or prayer to God.  So we do them out of habit.  Thus in church we generally do the same things over and over again, week after week, telling the same stories and singing the same songs.”

I’ve been really getting into Leo Tolstoy’s writings lately and am thoroughly loving it. I came across a very short story of his called “Alyosha: the Pot.” It’s about a young boy who takes the place of his older brother as servant to a large wealthy family. He does this on his father’s demand so that he can help raise money to support his family. Tolstoy describes Alyosha as someone who does whatever he is asked without ever questioning why, and does it to the best of his ability. He runs here, he runs there, answering everyone’s bidding and never thinks twice about himself (even to the extent that he losses the only true love he ever experienced). This story is very much about his deep desire to please others even to his own detriment.  And then in the middle of the story he writes this:

“Alyosha did not know any prayer and had forgotten what his mother had taught him. But he prayed just the same every morning and every evening, he prayed with his hands crossing himself” (Tolstoy).

Alyosha’s prayer is completely silent – there are no words – but it’s not without content. Now I don’t know about you rather I’ve often felt I had no words to offer in prayer. I don’t think that Tolstoy mentions this prayer to somehow ridicule his simple ignorance but to hold up Alyosha’s faith, that even though he had no words, or could not get the words right, he went through the movements of prayer.

For Quakers we can easily relate to a prayer with no words, a movement and a posture that we practice that we try to make a habit. One where we listen for Christ’s guidance in the present moment. And even though we are silent, we know that we are praying, that we are practicing our faith, that the movement of being still in the silence can be for us a genuine expression of faith. [Sometimes other Quakers do better at this habit]

And I think this is what we’re getting at when we talk about praying out of habit, not leaving it up to chance that we will get it right in the heat of the moment. We need help going through the movements, knowing the language to use, knowing just how to pray and what to pray for. This is what the disciple’s prayer is for. It is our way of being like Alyosha and desiring prayer so much that even though he wasn’t sure what words to say, or whether he had it right, he prayed the only prayer he knew. [Sign of the cross]

There have been many times when I was like Alyosha and “did not know any prayer and had forgotten what my mother taught me,” and then I remembered the words, “Our Father, in the heavens, may your name be sanctified…” This is our prayer. It is our gift from Jesus. It is our prayer when we have no words.

It is also our prayer when we are tempted to have too many words or when we want to bend the words to our own selfish desires. Quaker pastor James Mulholland writes in his book “Praying Like Jesus” that this prayer can act as a muzzle that helps to simplify and redirect what we pray for. It helps to strip our hidden selfishness we often have within in our prayers. There are many ways we pray there are prayers of self-interest, self-preservation and self-righteousnessIt protects us from what Emily calls “Propaganda Prayer.” The other day we were praying before dinner and I said out loud, “God, help us to be good for mommy, to not give her a hard time, and help around the house.” How many of you have done something like this? That’s propaganda prayer.

If you’ll notice there is no I, Me, or Mine in the disciple’s prayer, it is just ‘our’ and ‘us.’ We pray for God’s kingdom to come, not our own, we prayer to our father, we pray that we together might have the bread we need, that our debts will be cancelled and that we will not fall into temptation.

The prayer reorients the me within the Our and Us. It reminds us that we are a part of a global community, a global family who have prayed this prayer for thousands of years. And that together, the church is called to make a difference in this world. This is our mission, to sanctify God’s name by praying as well as living out this prayer.

Instead of all those other prayers we are so often tempted to pray: the prayer of self-preservation, the prayer of self-righteousness, the prayer of self-interest or even the propaganda prayer, this is, we can trust, indeed a sincere prayer. It is the movements, the language, the patten, and the mission that we as Jesus’ disciples have been taught to practice.

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You are invited to journey with us this next month and discover if you can make the Disciple’s prayer your own.

You are invited to practice praying this every day, or as regularly as you can. Let the prayer be a reminder of the journey we are on together, and begin asking yourself the question – how can I (and we) be formed and transformed by this prayer?

What would it look like for this to become our prayer and  mission?

[Photo by Andreanix]

I’m still (slowly) reading through Simone Weil’s book “Gravity and Grace” for part of my daily time of reflection. Here are a couple great quotes I’ve recently come across dealing with obedience and caring for others.

We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing, which we are unable not to do, but, through well directed attention, we should always keep on increasing the number of those which we are unable not to do (39).

‘I was hungred, and ye gave me meat.’ When was that, Lord? They did not know. We must not know when we do such acts. We must not help our neighbour for Christ but in Christ. May the self disappear in such a way that Christ can help our neighbour through the medium of our soul and body. May we be the slave whom his master sends to bear help to someone in misfortune (40).

To be only an intermediary between the uncultivated ground and the ploughed field, between the data of a problem and the solution, between the blank page and the poem, between the starving beggar and the beggar who has been fed (41).

I’ve dabbled in the past with reading some of Weil’s writings, but it wasn’t until I heard Quaker historian Carole Spencer speak at Friends Association for Higher Education that I wanted to get back to her writings. Spencer spoke in part about the deeply Christian mystical experiences of people like Simone Weil, Meister Eckhart, and Madame Guyon and I realized that something of their spiritual experience they had I wanted.

One thing I really like about “Gravity and Grace” is the brief chapters, each with short, almost poetry-like, statements or reflections based on whatever theme the chapter explores. Some of those themes are: Gravity and Grace (as in the natural laws of the universe and how it contrasts with the grace of God), Void and Compensation, Renunciation of Time, To Desire Without An Object, Love, Evil, The Cross, The Impossible, etc. Within each of these reflections Weil takes a variety of perspectives, and dives a mysticism that is rooted in the great tradition of the via negativa and aesthetic life. I appreciate her attention to human suffering and need, and her own life story is rich enough to really ground what she writes with the weight of lived experience.

I have found her reflections to be grounding for me. I’ve often shied away from the mystical, preferring instead a spirituality of the physical. During Spencer’s talked this past summer I became even more aware of my own propensity to avoid this part of the spiritual life and slowly, meditatively reading through Weil has been one of the ways I’ve been trying to level out my own spiritual practice.

I would recommend Weil to you as well, especially if you’re interested in mystical reading. Because of the way this particular book is broken up it’s works well for this kind of reflective reading, and I continue to be challenged, refreshed, and made more aware of God’s presence in ways that are new to me.