Ask the Priest!

Dear Lisa,
Why are we "bold" to pray the Lord's Prayer?

Dear Bold,
Great question! I thought I would share with you a beautiful reflection on boldly praying the prayer Jesus taught us. See below for an excerpt from Frederick Buechner’s, Wishful Thinking.

“In the Episcopal [Anglican] order of worship, the priest sometimes introduces the Lord’s Prayer with the words, “Now, as our Saviour Christ hath taught us, we are bold to say…” The word bold is worth thinking about. We do well not to pray the prayer lightly. It takes guts to pray it at all. We can pray it in the unthinking and perfunctory way we usually do only by disregarding what we are saying.

“Thy will be done” is what we are saying. That is the climax of the first half of the prayer. We are asking God to be God. We are asking God to do not what we want but what God wants. We are asking God to make manifest the holiness that is now mostly hidden, to set free in all its terrible splendor the devastating power that is now mostly under restraint. “Thy kingdom come… on earth” is what we are saying. And if that were suddenly to happen, what then? What would stand and what fall? Who would be welcomed in and who would be thrown the hell out? Which if any of our most precious visions of what God is and of what human beings are would prove to be more or less on the mark and which would turn out to be phony as three-dollar bills? Boldness indeed. To speak those words is to invite the tiger out of the cage, to unleash a power that makes atomic power look like a warm breeze.

You need to be bold in another way to speak the second half. Give us. Forgive us. Don’t test us. Deliver us. If it takes guts to face the omnipotence that is God’s, it perhaps takes no less to face the impotence that is ours. We can do nothing without God. We can have nothing without God. Without God we are nothing.

It is only the words “Our Father” that make the prayer bearable. If God is indeed something like a father, then as something like children maybe we can risk approaching him anyway.”

– Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

God bless you,

The Rev. Lisa Saunders

Feel free to send questions for this column to revlisasaunders@gmail.com or leave a message at 414-271-1340.