A Prayer that Unites

"The Lord's Prayer" or the "Our Father" is likely the best known and most used expression of the Christian Faith. Go to most churches, well it used to be so, and you will find this prayer repeated. There will be differences and all, but you will recognize it.

An LA Times Piece by Connie Kang helpfully reflects on the centrality of this prayer to the Christian Community. More than any creed or faith statement, this brief prayer that Christians believe Jesus taught his disciples, summarizes the foundational ideas of the Christian Faith.

Best known in its King James Version of Matthew we all know it well:

Our Father which art in heaven,Hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come,Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,but deliver us from evil:

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.

Kang interviews F. Dale Bruner, who has written in some depth on this prayer, Fuller's Clayton Schmit, and Father Guillermo Garcia, a professor at Mount Saint Mary's College in Los Angeles. I appreciated what Garcia has to say here about the prayer:

"When I say, 'Our Father,' it's for me a real reconciling prayer," said Father Guillermo Garcia, a professor at Mount Saint Mary's College in Los Angeles. "It's also my prayer for my own Catholic Church, that we will become more inclusive and less exclusive, that we will learn from our brothers and sisters, both within the Christian faith and outside the Christian faith."

Such a prayer is needed on the part of all branches of Christ's Church.

Although I understand why it's become trendy to omit the Lord's Supper in Worship -- it seems traditional -- like Clayton Schmit I find it distressing.

Schmit observed that some Protestant churches that used to include the Lord's Prayer regularly in Sunday worship have taken to omitting it. The trend, and the omitting of other church creeds, distresses him.

"When we omit such things, we are missing the opportunity to speak words that are in harmony with all Christians of all places, even of all times," he said.

There are few expressions of faith that can gather us together, it is a shame to ignore it's message.