Monthly Archives: February 2009

please take care of me

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“You aren’t going to leave me, are you?”

When you are getting to know someone too good to be true, you have questions.  You acknowledge their greatness. You ask them for help. You acknowledge your weakness.

Then, after all that, as you are starting to relax a bit, you are suddenly seized with fear. What if they aren’t going to stick around? What if they aren’t going to follow through? What is they are going to be like everyone else we have ever known in our lives who sometime, someday, doesn’t come through?

We get so used to people who don’t keep their word, who let us down. We are familiar with the feeling of betrayal, of abandonment, of disappointment. We watch every leader we know prove to be human, at best.

And so, having made all our requests known, we stop and we say

“Don’t lead us into temptation.”

“Do deliver us from evil.”

God, please don’t bring us this far and leave us. Don’t bring us through the week and into the weekend and then leave us alone, facing temptation.

Don’t do to us what you did to your own son.

There it is.

We want to be able to trust God but we somehow can’t.  We look at what happens to people who follow him, who even are Him, and what we see undermines what we think should happen.

Jesus was led into the desert to be tempted by the devil. By the Spirit. Just two chapters ago. And Jesus survived the direct testing. Now he says, “Ask the Father not to do the first part with you, and to just do the second part.”

Maybe we don’t have to understand the theology to say these words. Maybe we just have to give voice to our fears.

that is really hard

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Jesus says that we are to ask God to forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors.

Unless, of course, he says that we are to ask God to forgive our trespasses.

That used to be the clear way to distinguish between low church and high church, by whether we say “debts” or “trespasses”. And, ironically, in the struggle to decide which to say, many people were reminded of the difficulties between debtors and those who trespass against us.

And in the middle of this prayer, while asking for forgiveness, we remember why we need it so much.

Jesus says that there is some relationship between our asking God for forgiveness and us forgiving other people. We are to ask for forgiveness and, it seems, tell God to forgive us in the same way–as–we forgive others.

I once heard someone say that we expect people to respond the way we would respond. We use our motives to assess their motives. Thus, people who cheat assume that everyone would cheat. People who don’t take anything seriously assume that everyone is that flexible.

People who choose to hold back forgiveness will assume that God is that way, too.

“I forgive them but I’m watching closely for them to mess us again.”

“I forgive them but I’m keeping track.”

Notice a very careful word choice.

Choose.

Many people struggle to forgive people who have intentionally hurt them deeply. “I’m trying to forgive, but it’s hard,” they say. And then they worry about how this passage, worry that unless they forgive, they will be punished, but not knowing how to forgive.

It’s for us that this prayer exists.

Though he links the two conditionally, he first allows us to ask for forgiveness. As we remember his forgiveness, forgiving becomes easier.

Not easy, but possible.

enough for today

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Sometimes context doesn’t matter. Things seem clear by themselves. At face value.

Like a request for bread. What could be more simple? “Give me food today. (Please).”

For the people hearing this prayer for the first time, the request was only partly about the future or about today. It had everything to do with the past.

Israel was in the desert, having left Egypt (with God’s assistence). They were, they thought, without food (though they did have flocks of animals with them.)

They fussed about being without food. And God gave them manna. It was some kind of seed or flake or something that could be ground and made into bread. It showed up every day. Well, every day but one every week.

On that day, on the sabbath day, they didn’t get any manna. But on the day before, there was enough for two days.

Six days out of seven for forty years. It was an incredible number of every days. It was an incredible amount of daily bread.

For Israel, wandering in the desert, the prayer that Jesus taught reflected their experience. Every day, each day, the bread for that day and no more. You had to go collect it, but you couldn’t save it.

Every morning there was faith. Every morning there was food.

I wonder if the daily asking was a way to remember complete dependence? I mean, we aren’t exactly in the desert. We aren’t exactly in need of daily provision. We have plenty of everything.We could almost ask for bread every two weeks, just as a way to acknowledge, on payday, that we are working hard to earn our daily bread.

For Israel, in the desert, it wasn’t about their great jobs, their hard work. It was about a faithful God daily giving bread.

your kingdom

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There are many debates about what the kingdom of heaven means in Matthew, about when it starts, about what Jesus means when he says “repent because the Kingdom is at hand.”

I wonder why we wonder so much? Why do we care so much about having exactly the right interpretation?

Is is because we want to be kings of understanding your kingdom? Is it because being right will make us special?

—

Jesus, did you know how much we love to be the most right one, the most understanding one, the most humble one?

Of course you knew. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have made surrender so high on the list of things to talk to our Father about.

“We pray that your kingdom will come–that what you want will be done here on earth, the same as in heaven.”

That’s how you told us to pray about kingdom.

—

Here’s why I think that he told us to pray that way, and told us to say “we pray” rather than “I pray.” He wanted us to be in clusters when we said these words, in community. And he wanted us to have to talk about God’s kingdom coming with people who know how much we want our kingdom, or even my kingdom.

I  get pretty confident about my understanding. I can stake out what I think. And then when there are eight people around me, who know me well, hearing me talk about wanting God’s kingdom, there is an instant credibility check.

And when we together are asking that the Father’s desire happen here as well as in heaven, we have to look each other in the eye and say, “That means in us, between us, among us, within us.”

Not my kingdom. Not our kingdom. Your kingdom.

I guess that’s pretty clear.

we pray that your name will always be kept holy

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I realize, Father, that I don’t know exactly what hallowed means. And so for all the years I’ve been praying this prayer, I’m not sure I understand, exactly.

So does it mean that you want me to ask you to keep your name special and set apart? Does it mean that you want me to affirm that your name is special, to affirm that I don’t take lightly the fact that I get to call you Father?

Because I want to affirm that, I really do. But I have to acknowledge that I sometimes take for granted that I’m actually talking to You.  I mean, I just starting talking as if you aren’t God.

It’s not that you don’t want relationship. It’s not that you don’t invite me to a conversational relationship. It’s more that I start talking as if you couldn’t do anything about what is going on. Complaining without remembering that I’m not talking to the complaint department, I’m talking to the owner directly. Venting to a friend who has also suffered without remembering that you are the friend with really big muscles. Whining without asking. Asking without believing. Believing without doing. Doing instead of trusting.

There are always shades of not remembering that you are holy, pure, not confined to my motives. And yet, you aren’t waiting to trap me in my misstatements, you are wanting to help me remember.

David almost always got this right. In his prayers he would complain or lament or identify the problem, but he would always come back to acknowledging you.

“How long will you forget me Lord” at the beginning of Psalm 13 becomes “Then I will sing to the Lord because he was so good to me.”

So help me remember who you are and why that can encourage me.