Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, he shares a few words of warning, that also serve as a kind of reminder that the God they worship, is not like the pagan gods. In context, the introduction to it is, when you go to the pagan temples down the street, what you’ll notice is the priests, when they try to get Zeus’s attention, they utter long prayers, elaborate prayers and Jesus says don’t go on and on, thinking that God will listen to you just because you have a lot to say. The shortness and brevity of this prayer is very much on purpose, God invites us to communicate, but we don’t have to go on and on, we can get to the point, not saying we don’t want to verbally processed and be real, verbal processing takes a while. Jesus is thinking in terms of rhetorical persuasion doesn’t work on God, he’ll respond to you more if you butter him up first.
When Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, in Luke chapter 11, the disciples come up to him and ask him and he gives them a model prayer that’s similar to this one in Matthew, but also different, it seems for Jesus, this model prayer could actually take a few different verbal forms, but the core importance was this sequence of ideas that could be expressed in a few different sets of words and it’s the template that Jesus wants to pass on, the same ideas, but slightly different wording, but the shortness is part of its meaning. The themes of the prayer are dripping with Hebrew Bible language and imagery, prayer in Judaism is about habit and repetition and ritual in the best senses of all those terms. Prayer is something you do morning, middle, day and evening and you weave into the fabric of your life, reciting ancient prayers and making them your own.
Jesus would have uttered this prayer hundreds of times throughout his life and his time with the disciples and that he would adapt the wording based off of whatever the needs of the day. There’s something about these sequence of six ideas, that the God of Jesus is my Father, that I am anticipating and waiting, yearning for the arrival of his Kingdom and his will, that his reputation is restored, I’m asking for just enough for each day, I’m recognizing and naming that I fail to live up to Jesus’ ideals, even my own and also that every day is going to present me with choices, that will test my faithfulness to God and to others, there’s something about that sequence that I need to remind myself of every day, multiple times a day to live in the story.
Liturgy and liturgies are practices, rituals, routines, they are something that you do that do something to you. What makes liturgies religious, what makes rituals spiritual, is not that they just plant ideas in our heads, it’s that they are actually inscribing a desire in our heart for some certain end. These love shaping practices, then really get at the very core of who we are, because we are what we love. To use a metaphor, think of these liturgies as calibration technologies, they bend the needle of our hearts like a compass, but when such liturgies are disordered, aimed at rival kingdoms, they are pointing us away from our magnetic north in King Jesus. We don’t think our way through the world, we imagine our way in the world and if we are going to take seriously how our habits are formed, those habits are caught, rather than taught, which is why practices sort of shape us.
The ancients appreciated that we are aesthetic beings, we are very much shaped by what we imagine and the imagination is a core faculty of the human person, but it also means we are embodied beings, we are material beings, our bodies are integral to our identity, which is why bodily rituals, to kneel when we confess our sins, to raise our hands in praise and thanksgiving, to receive a blessing with open hands, all of those physical acts are portals to the heart and so the way to the heart is through the body. Christian worship paints a picture of the beauty of the Lord, a vision he desires for creation in a way that captures our imagination, if we act toward what we long for and if we long for what has captured our imagination, then reformative Christian worship needs to capture our imagination, that means Christian worship needs to meet us as aesthetic creatures, who are moved more than we are convinced. Our imaginations are aesthetic organs, our hearts are like stringed instruments that are plucked by story, poetry, metaphor, images, we tap our existential feet to the rhythm of imaginative drums.
Jesus himself is not innovating here with the idea of introducing a new prayer, if you’re forming a crew of disciples and you want to teach them what you’ve learned about how to be faithful to the covenant and to love God and love neighbor, teaching memorable prayers that would be memorized and recited by your students. Jesus is not just reflecting his own learnings and impressions from the Hebrews scriptures himself, but that he himself is a part of a tradition of Judaism in the time he grew up that he was formed by. When Jesus teaches a prayer, it’s his own unique stamp, but also combining things that all of his neighbors were praying as he was growing up too. If our habits form us, then this is a tradition that has not forgotten that our physical body, movement, postures, rhythms, habits, shape our view of reality and that’s what this is all about, it’s a way of life that helps you sustain a certain way of seeing the world and a certain way of living in the world.
When Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, in Luke chapter 11, the disciples come up to him and ask him and he gives them a model prayer that’s similar to this one in Matthew, but also different, it seems for Jesus, this model prayer could actually take a few different verbal forms, but the core importance was this sequence of ideas that could be expressed in a few different sets of words and it’s the template that Jesus wants to pass on, the same ideas, but slightly different wording, but the shortness is part of its meaning. The themes of the prayer are dripping with Hebrew Bible language and imagery, prayer in Judaism is about habit and repetition and ritual in the best senses of all those terms. Prayer is something you do morning, middle, day and evening and you weave into the fabric of your life, reciting ancient prayers and making them your own.
Jesus would have uttered this prayer hundreds of times throughout his life and his time with the disciples and that he would adapt the wording based off of whatever the needs of the day. There’s something about these sequence of six ideas, that the God of Jesus is my Father, that I am anticipating and waiting, yearning for the arrival of his Kingdom and his will, that his reputation is restored, I’m asking for just enough for each day, I’m recognizing and naming that I fail to live up to Jesus’ ideals, even my own and also that every day is going to present me with choices, that will test my faithfulness to God and to others, there’s something about that sequence that I need to remind myself of every day, multiple times a day to live in the story.
Liturgy and liturgies are practices, rituals, routines, they are something that you do that do something to you. What makes liturgies religious, what makes rituals spiritual, is not that they just plant ideas in our heads, it’s that they are actually inscribing a desire in our heart for some certain end. These love shaping practices, then really get at the very core of who we are, because we are what we love. To use a metaphor, think of these liturgies as calibration technologies, they bend the needle of our hearts like a compass, but when such liturgies are disordered, aimed at rival kingdoms, they are pointing us away from our magnetic north in King Jesus. We don’t think our way through the world, we imagine our way in the world and if we are going to take seriously how our habits are formed, those habits are caught, rather than taught, which is why practices sort of shape us.
The ancients appreciated that we are aesthetic beings, we are very much shaped by what we imagine and the imagination is a core faculty of the human person, but it also means we are embodied beings, we are material beings, our bodies are integral to our identity, which is why bodily rituals, to kneel when we confess our sins, to raise our hands in praise and thanksgiving, to receive a blessing with open hands, all of those physical acts are portals to the heart and so the way to the heart is through the body. Christian worship paints a picture of the beauty of the Lord, a vision he desires for creation in a way that captures our imagination, if we act toward what we long for and if we long for what has captured our imagination, then reformative Christian worship needs to capture our imagination, that means Christian worship needs to meet us as aesthetic creatures, who are moved more than we are convinced. Our imaginations are aesthetic organs, our hearts are like stringed instruments that are plucked by story, poetry, metaphor, images, we tap our existential feet to the rhythm of imaginative drums.
Jesus himself is not innovating here with the idea of introducing a new prayer, if you’re forming a crew of disciples and you want to teach them what you’ve learned about how to be faithful to the covenant and to love God and love neighbor, teaching memorable prayers that would be memorized and recited by your students. Jesus is not just reflecting his own learnings and impressions from the Hebrews scriptures himself, but that he himself is a part of a tradition of Judaism in the time he grew up that he was formed by. When Jesus teaches a prayer, it’s his own unique stamp, but also combining things that all of his neighbors were praying as he was growing up too. If our habits form us, then this is a tradition that has not forgotten that our physical body, movement, postures, rhythms, habits, shape our view of reality and that’s what this is all about, it’s a way of life that helps you sustain a certain way of seeing the world and a certain way of living in the world.