My devotional this week was largely influenced by a class I taught on the Lord's Prayer in  Allentown, NJ before moving to Seattle. This class was based off a beautiful pamphlet my friend Gilles Boucomont wrote on the prayer found in Matthew 6:5-13.

Gilles says "to pray is not only to ask God for what we need and want. Many of our prayers are like this - we pray about our work, our families, our studies." Of course we are welcome to come to our Father anytime with any request (Philippians 4:6), but the Lord’s Prayer is an introduction into a relationship with God. In this prayer we learn to know God, and also learn to know ourselves. Prayer is a privilege given to children to communicate with their Father.

So why, Father? Why does the prayer start with "Our Father"? We are aware that the Bible was written in a patriarchal society. Although there are Motherhood images of God as well as Fatherhood images, neither one ways everything about the nature of God. It was extremely radical for Jews during the time of Jesus to give themselves permission to call God their Father.  They weren’t proclaiming that God had a sexual identity (or a sexual life like some of the Roman gods of that time) but instead they were getting at a radical image for the nature of the relationship between God and humans. The relationship of a child to her parents is one of the most striking images they could have chosen.

No one influences and affects us the way our mother and father do. When we are born into this world we are completely dependent on them. That we could approach God as father, with that kind of intimacy and connection, was revolutionary for Jewish culture at the time of Jesus and can be revolutionary for us as well. 

We are all in this together!

yours in Christ,