Читать книгу Ultimate Allegiance - Robert D. Cornwall - Страница 6

Prayer stands at the center of the Christian experience. At its simplest, prayer is a conversation between a human being and God, but surely it is more than this. Prayer, after all, takes a wide variety of forms, both simple and elaborate. While prayer has a vertical dimension, uniting human beings with the divine, it also has a horizontal dimension. As with the two great commandments, our prayers link us to God and to neighbor. If taken seriously, prayer is more than simply telling God what we humans want to have done on our behalf (or on the behalf of a friend or relative). It is a statement of trust and commitment, by which we declare our ultimate allegiance to the God who receives our prayers. There is something subversive about such a prayer, for it puts us in a position to engage the world in which we live in freedom from the ordinary constraints of culture. That kind of prayer can be empowering and world-changing, for it allows us to see things from a different perspective – a divine perspective.

Prayer that is subversive is prayer that engages “the powers that be.” As Walter Wink puts it:

Those who pray do so not merely because they believe certain intellectual propositions about prayer’s value, but because the struggle to be human in the face of suprahuman Powers requires it. The act of praying is itself one of the indispensable means by which we engage the Powers. It is, in fact, that engagement at its most fundamental level, where their secret spell over us is broken and we are reestablished in a bit more of the freedom that is our birthright and potential (Wink, The Powers that Be, p. 181).

Prayer is a foundational practice of the Christian faith, one that connects human beings to the one who holds our ultimate allegiance. Prayer allows us to respond to the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, who has invited us into a covenant relationship that transforms lives and worlds. As we do so, we join with Peter, who declared to the religious leaders of his day: “We must obey God rather than any human authority” (Acts 5:29). When we acknowledge our allegiance to God, we will find the source of our identity and the freedom to live lives that reflect that identity.

There is, for Christians, no clearer expression of this allegiance than the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. It is a prayer that has been passed down from one generation to the next. For some it has provided a model prayer, and for others it is a prayer to recited, weekly and even daily. The Didache advised believers to recite it at least three times each day. Of course, it’s possible that a prayer that gets recited this regularly can lose its value and meaning. It can, that is, become just words repeated as if by rote. And yet, the very durability over time of this particular prayer, brief as it is, suggests that these words transcend time and cultures, inviting each new generation to consider to whom they owe their allegiance, and in whom they find their purpose in life. Indeed, this prayer continues to be, for so many, the foundation upon which a relationship with the living God is built.

Therefore, as beautiful and inspiring as its words might be, the Lord’s Prayer remains at its very essence a subversive prayer. It is a pledge of our allegiance to God, one that challenges our world views and our loyalties. It does so by connecting us with the one who empowers and guides us through life.

I approach this traditional but subversive prayer from a certain context. I serve as pastor of a Disciples of Christ congregation that prays this prayer each week, but then this was true as well of the Episcopal Church in which I grew up and first encountered the Christian faith. There was, however, a period in my life when I worshiped in less formal settings, in congregations that rarely if ever recited the prayer. These communities may have looked to the

prayer for a model, but for these communities true prayer came from the heart and therefore it was to be extemporaneous. To pray one set of words, even if biblical, simply made no sense, and could even be seen as the precursor to the uttering of vain repetitions.

Perhaps it is a reflection of my own background that led me to reflect upon this prayer in the course of a series of sermons. I had begun to wonder what these words meant. If prayer leads to theology and to action, then what was it that I was praying? What did Jesus intend for his followers to take from this prayer? Having made the decision to focus on the Lord’s Prayer, I laid out a series of six sermons. Each sermon lifted up one of the petitions that comprise the prayer, with a final sermon focusing on the doxology that closes out the traditional prayer shared in worship. Although this was a Lenten series, the final two sermons were preached on Palm Sunday and Easter, and thus reflected the events commemorated on these two hallowed days of the Christian year. The Palm Sunday sermon focused on the issue of temptation, which seems appropriate considering the context of Palm Sunday. The final sermon came on Easter Sunday, and it too seemed to fit nicely with the day in which it was preached. What better day to focus on a doxology than the day of Resurrection? The original context for those two sermons may not be as visible in these revisions, but it is helpful to know the background.

My hope is that this series of reflections will prove helpful to those who seek to deepen their own understanding of this prayer. For those readers who are preachers, perhaps this series will stir in their imagination the possibility of a similar series. It is possible that the reader will, like the author of this series, be surprised at what lies behind and between the words we recite. In my case, I discovered that the prayer of Jesus is much more politically focused than I expected — and I’ve read widely in books by John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and Richard Horsley, which lift up the political elements of the gospel stories. Nonetheless, the encounter with the prayer was insightful and challenging. It is my hope that the reader will also be challenged by what is found both here and in the prayer itself. May the reader find the prayer to be both spiritually enriching and deeply practical, whether the prayer is used as a model or one that is recited — from the heart — with great regularity, perhaps as often as recommended by the author of the Didache.