M.O.D. ~ Pray
Pray for his kingdom to come always and everywhere.
Many Christians don't pray other than during worship. Some may have a routine of saying a table grace or bedtime prayer. But it's not uncommon for me to hear Christians tell me they don't know how to pray.
As with each mark of discipleship, prayer is a gift we are given by God that needs nurturing and practice. When asked to teach people to pray, I start with the Lord's prayer. It says it all. I've recently been researching the Jewish roots of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples. There's much more to it than we might take for granted when we piously bow our heads and fold our hands.
Jesus' prayer is messianic. It's the longing for the kingdom to come. More so, it's the expectation and affirmation that the kingdom is coming presently. The best example of this is the phrase, "Give us today our daily bread." Scholars aren't exactly sure how to translate the Greek word that we typically translate as "daily", because it doesn't appear anywhere else in ancient literature. But recently some scholars, such as Amy-Jill Levine to name one, suggest that a more accurate translation of "daily" is actually "tomorrow's". Give us TODAY the bread of TOMORROW.
By this petition we are not being greedy. We're not asking for an abundance of food and provisions. Here Luther doesn't teach the full meaning in his catechism, empasizing instead God's role as our trustworthy provider of our needs. Rather, tomorrow's bread is the messianic meal, the banquet God will host with all people when the messiah returns on the last day. We are praying, "Bring it, Jesus!"
What's more, when we pray for God's will to be done and for God to forgive debts AS WE FORGIVE our debtors, we are asking to participate in the kingdom's coming. In this regard, Luther gets it right. He says that God's kingdom is coming whether we do anything about it or not, but we pray that it may come also to us. Or more accurately, through us.
Praying messianicly joins us in Jesus' mission. That's why he says to us in scripture that whatever we ask for in his name will be given to us. The kingdom is coming, and God wants us involved. So when we pray to get involved in it, of course God will grant it!
The final mark of discipleship is prayer, but specifically learning to pray messianicly. We anticipate and acknowledge God's kingdom coming through us by the power of Holy Spirit to reveal Jesus' presence. Thus the final mark of discipleship brings us full circle back to the first mark, that of worship. Praying is a way of life, a way of living WORSHIP 24/7/365.
2 comments:
Thanks to teh wonders of technology, Paul Mussachio couldn't add a comment here. So he emailed his thoughts to me. (I recently switched to Beta and had to lose all my team members for this blog. I'm working out the kinks)
Any way, here's what Paul says:
“It’s helpful to think of the phrase ‘Give us this DAY our DAILY bread” by thinking of the Jewish concept of the ‘day.’ ‘Day’ in the Jewish calendar starts at sundown and goes to sundown. I often approach the “day” as something that starts from sunup to sunup. But this idea of “day” in the Jewish calendar starts now and leads into tomorrow. So when we pray for “daily” bread, we mean that which provides us sustenance for now and into tomorrow, just as Amy J-L indicates. When God sent manna to the Israelites in the Wilderness, it arrived when they awoke the next morning, after they had eaten the quail that night.
I also like to think of “Bread” as a metaphor for that which we need so desperately—the reign of God. If we look at the Hebrew for “manna” we see that it means “What is it?” Taking some liberties with the Lord’s prayer and “bread”, we can pray for our “daily what-is-it, our daily manna.” What-is-it that we need today?
(RPM had more to add later. Again he emailed them to me. Hopefully you can now post comments here. Let me know if you have trouble).
I remember doing a class on prayer a few years ago, and I read heavily from the Large Catechism and other sources on prayer. What I came up with was something similar to this:
Luther didn’t care where you started for prayer (i.e. how you prayed and what you prayed for). What he cared about was
1) God wants to hear our prayers as supported by various biblical verses (so we serve, praise, obey and thank the God who wants to hear us, the God who cares about what’s on our minds/hearts), and
2) as you prayed, you were drawn further into God’s promises for you.
So you may have started out with: Lord, it’d be really nice to have a Lamborghini – and as you went along (so Luther’s idea goes), you end up leaving your wants and praying for what God wants --- Lord, though I don’t have a Lamborghini, I’m glad you give me life everyday, no matter if I screw it up or live in your commandments.
I see this as working in Living WORSHIP this way: by praying we are actually molding and aligning our thoughts/feelings/behaviors to values and priorities in line with the reign of God. We are drawn up into the reign of God through prayer.
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