Our Father

If it weren’t for all the dag-nabbed pebbles of jealousy and superiority that scrape at the itches on our bellies and backside we could easily stand up. We don’t realize that the scars that keep us wallowing on the ground perform like poison ivy. Momentary relief, followed by an intense need to itch at our sores. Pretty soon we’re rolling around like lost fools, boils of sin all over us, and we think we’re attending to the problem by itching.

God cleanses everything, over and over again. He never tires of washing us clean.

Once we’re all sparkly, we know that the sand, silt, and debris quickly returns, so we require a thick covering of several heavy coats of wax so we don’t think that dirt is our designed clothing.

That is the final recognition in our prayer. We ask that an applied undercarriage shield us from further sin. Called for at the end of the short Our Father, Jesus knows we journey on a repetitive cycle of wash and repeat. The request that God not lead us into temptation, to not subject us to a defeating test, is not simply a last minute add-on to balance out the rather terse phraseology of the Lord’s prayer.

Keep us clean


http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/101117.cfm
JON 4:1-11
LK 11:1-4

Repentance overwhelms all other aspects of prayer. So says Jesus in how we should pray to the Father of us all. Right after we call out to God as our true Father, that is. First comes our call to the Father and his coming Kingdom, then our petitions as his children, and finally our repentance. In order to enter into the heavenly Kingdom’s apparent beauty and awesome vision, we’re in dire need of a good cleansing in order for us to feel God’s touch through the caked dirt covering our bodies. 

When Jesus taught the twelve to pray, the chosen apostles whom he was soon to send upon the earth in his name, he introduced for all of us a sanctifying pattern of praise, plea, and repentance. The process toward repentance found in the Our Father must surely be purposeful.

The divinely bestowed prayer begins with praise and recognition of God. That’s how we should always come to God. There you are God, and here I am calling out to you. I don’t come to you as a drinking buddy, or as someone to harangue regarding my finances or health. I come to you as your son, your daughter. I’m your adopted progeny, born of man and woman, and grafted willingly to God heart to heart, a spindly branch connected to the root of all. 

I don’t know how it all works, but this compact mantra of holy words is the most amazing salutation to God ever written. Jesus knew that above all else, belonging to the family of God appeals to our hearts.

Jesus teaches us in his short prayer to follow our high praise and call to God with pleas. It’s OK to cry out to the Father. We should ask for the coming Kingdom to surround us, reminding us of eternal life with a daily dose of the bread of life. Each grace that fills us here mirrors the Kingdom life to come.

We can see the nourishment and nutrition of the Kingdom in the produce of this creation. The wonder of woods and glens and waterfalls and glaciers startle us with their intended purpose. God wants to live with us in what he considers the greatest of places he has ever built. He will soon restore everything to him, us and all of creation.

Jesus explains that God attends to us as his children. He listens to his children. The praise and pleas, though, point to needed repentance on our part. Jesus ends this most important prayer urging us to mightily lament. We should groan for forgiveness, humbly weighted only by our own practice of forgiving others, a sour condemnation in itself, and a ready recognition that forgiveness isn’t deserved, only willfully delivered.

And then, Jesus finishes with a final plea for a divine dose of protection. We need God to lead us away from evil, to shield us from an ever-failing life.

Forgive us our sins, and lead us not into temptation.

As we scootch, crawling slowly through the shadowed high grass and dark forest journey of spiritual maturity, so few of us stop to simply sit up and call out to God. Pained from the miseries of our afflictions, we struggle to stand erect. Jesus tells us to let go and stop clinging to the ineffective, muddy salve down in the dirt. Up on our feet, we will feel the love of God course through us. God’s healing reaches beyond the surface where our body itches and distracts us. Only by gazing toward him can we catch glimpses of the Kingdom to come. 

The blue sky above, the stars and galaxies in the night, and the horizons of both dawn and dusk blaze holy messages from heaven. 

The light above us is not a fire that destroys, sending us into caves and burrowing in the ground. No, destruction is our own doing as we lay upon the ground, crawling but going nowhere. The light from God is a purging of the sources of our pains. His purging is what heals. 

Jesus taught the apostles, and thereby us, to stand and raise our hands to our true Father. “Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name!” We are to do this even though we refuse to be children again, even angry at the notion that we need to be ministered to by the creator and author of the universe. Some of us can’t believe that he who announced our very lives into being would care for us. We’ve been doing just fine all on our own, thank you very much. Our itches are getting scratched, and we think we’re making pretty darn good progress all on our own.

Jesus disagrees.  

If it weren’t for all the dag-nabbed pebbles of jealousy and superiority that scrape at the itches on our bellies and backside we could easily stand up. We don’t realize that the scars that keep us wallowing on the ground perform like poison ivy. Momentary relief, followed by an intense need to itch at our sores. Pretty soon we’re rolling around like lost fools, boils of sin all over us, and we think we’re attending to the problem by itching.

God cleanses everything, over and over again. He never tires of washing us clean.

Once we’re all sparkly, we know that the sand, silt, and debris quickly returns, so we require a thick covering of several heavy coats of wax so we don’t think that dirt is our designed clothing.

That is the final recognition in our prayer. We ask that an applied undercarriage shield us from further sin. Called for at the end of the short Our Father, Jesus knows we journey on a repetitive cycle of wash and repeat. The request that God not lead us into temptation, to not subject us to a defeating test, is not simply a last minute add-on to balance out the rather terse phraseology of the Lord’s prayer.

Repentance, repeated pants of pleas and lament, describe our temporary condition of living with sin. Our Father will never tire of taking us back. And soon, the Kingdom will be here, sinless and awesome.

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