This Lent, we are on the Palm Sunday path with Jesus. Which, to me, means that we are actively seeking confrontation. How very un-Minnesotan of us! We are preparing to emulate what Jesus did entering Jerusalem. In opposition to Caesar’s fearsome procession of horses, chariots and soldiers with swords, Jesus organized the donkey, and the chanting crowds with their palms and cloaks. He created a moment of political and spiritual theater that was about communicating what he stood against, and what he stood for. In the face of abusive Roman power, he demonstrated instead the power of humility, the power of non-violent non-cooperation, the power of ordinary people leading in a multitude of ways. Like Jesus, we too are showing up in public to provoke and reveal—to spotlight the moral bankruptcy of this regime, and to display what else is possible when we act with moral imagination.

Today’s reading from Matthew contains Jesus’ most famous teaching on prayer. The Lord’s Prayer, that we pray each week in worship, is derived from this text along with a parallel passage in the Gospel of Luke. And then we have layers of translation and tradition that have altered and enhanced the prayer—and thus the many versions of this foundational teaching. Perhaps it’s helpful for a moment to set aside all this complication, to step back and take the big picture view, to simply notice that Jesus makes prayer a priority, and that his teaching weaves prayer and activism together. In these urgent, overwhelming last few months, I have personally found prayer difficult. Really I have found that it’s challenging to give deep attention to anything. And without enough grounding, I have felt myself growing exhausted and disoriented. So my discipline during Lent includes an intentional return to prayer. How is your prayer going these days (whatever prayer is for you—centering, meditation, reflection, singing, dancing, yoga, silence, mindfulness…)?

I’m hoping that during the rest of this season, we can reinvigorate our relationship with the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. When we enter in to this prayer today and over these next weeks, I want to try interrupt the rote nature of our recitation. I want to suggest that we approach the Lord’s prayer in a more contemplative way, as a prompt for deeper rumination on core aspects of our relationship with God and each other. Because I believe that’s what Jesus intended. “Pray then in this way,” he said to his disciples. He gave them an outline. He laid out the most important subjects for prayer, and also demonstrated the spirit with which they should pray.

Jesus’ teaching on prayer begins with guidance about how to address God. The Gospels were written in Greek, and so, in both Matthew and Luke Jesus appears to approach God with some formality, as “Our Father in heaven”. However, we know that Jesus’ native language was Aramaic, and that he would have spoken to his disciples in that mother tongue. The Aramaic word scholars believe he actually used in prayer, here and elsewhere, is “Abba”—essentially the word a child would use to call upon their parent; more like “Papa” or “Daddy” than “Father”. I don’t think Jesus named God “Abba” primarily in order to gender God, or even to insist that we must think of God as a parental figure. I believe what matters most here is that Jesus instructs us to address God in an intimate, familiar and comfortable way, to be unguarded and natural with God.

The second move of Jesus’ prayer is to clarify our loyalty and set our moral compass, to ground ourselves in God’s vision of how the world ought to be. “May your name be revered as holy. May your kingdom come. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” In Jesus time, as in ours, a murderous power held sway over people’s lives. Remember how the Roman governor Herod hunted the child Jesus and his family, executing all baby boys under two in an attempt to eradicate this perceived threat to the throne? The prayer of Jesus is inherently “political” in the way it calls us to resist this rule of fear, cruelty and abusive power. The Roman emperor claimed to be a divine figure. The followers of Jesus center our lives instead in allegiance to the Creator. “Holy” means set apart—and so, in prayer, we step outside the influence of those who lie and manipulate. And we align our energies and goals with the promise of an alternate “kingdom,” a different way of being community.

Jesus then moves on to a new, yet interrelated subject. “Give us today our daily bread.” Here he draws on the experience of ancestors who ate manna in the wilderness, the mysterious, God-provided substance that sustained the people of Israel on their journey out of slavery and toward freedom. As the story goes, the people were commanded to take only enough manna for one day. They learned through experience that if they disobeyed God, gathering up more than they needed for the present, and attempting to store it for later, the extra would rot. At God’s table, no one is allowed to be a glutton, or to go hungry. The book of Proverbs expresses this same idea saying, in Chapter 30 [verses 8–9]: “give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that I need, lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ or I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.” Praying for “daily bread” literally moves us toward a society of enough, of shared abundance. And spiritually it moves us toward trust—trust in God and community, trust that we are in this together, trust that we can and will provide for each other.

“Forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors.” This reference to debts also shows up in Luke’s version, paired there with the term “sins”. This economic language suggests that forgiveness, like food, has an explicitly material dimension as well as a spiritual one. I believe Jesus is speaking literally, about the way the wealthy exploited the poor through unfair practices of indebtedness. In the ancient world, more and more people, unable to pay the heavy taxes levied by empire, were forced to relinquish their land, and without land, were unable to sustain themselves, and often ended up selling their own families, their own bodies, into slavery. “Forgive” in Greek has the root meaning of “release”. So in this part of the prayer, Jesus urges his followers to pray for release from the shame and hopelessness of being trapped cycles of oppression, release from hating those who harm us, release from the need for revenge or retribution. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu says in The Book of Joy: “Until we can forgive the person who harmed us, that person will hold the keys to our happiness, that person will be our jailor. When we forgive, we take back control of our own fate and our feelings. We become our own liberator.”

The final aspect of praying with Jesus is to acknowledge the reality of the forces that stand in the way of God’s intentions for creation. The evil one is not a devil with horns; it is the part of each of us that is lured to participate in the economic, political and spiritual systems of violence and oppression. Evil is real and it is always with us. We must name it, unmask it, and ask God to help us defends ourselves from it.

My friends, let us pray then in this way, pray with Jesus. May prayer be a priority for us. May our prayer and activism be one. Grounded in the source of all life clear in our values, sustained with daily bread, released, liberated, and protected, let us continue on the prayerful path of confrontation and transformation. Amen.