Repeating is not Believing

He said to them, "When you pray, say Father, hallowed be your name..."

-- Luke 11:2

While I thoroughly enjoy singing in public or performing onstage at my local community theatre, proclaiming the Word by preaching a sermon is something that doesn’t come easily to me. My fear from public speaking comes from being a stutterer when I was child. My earliest memory is frantically trying to tell my father an exciting story of what had happened at preschool and my father taking me by the shoulders, looking me directly in the eye and saying, “Candice, stop. Take a breath. Think about what you want to say. Then say it.” Perhaps that’s why I like singing so much. Speaking in public might be scary to me, but singing in public never has been. There is a pace and a rhythm, a definite start and stop to what you’re doing when you sing. You don’t have to try to find the words you want to express – They’re already there. The same holds true when we say the Lord’s Prayer in worship. I remember as a child standing with my grandmother during the service to say the Lord’s Prayer, and loving how soothing the sounds were, how comforting the words were, and how easy the rhythm was to follow along. Singing and corporate prayer were the ways I learned how to speak out loud. They, quite literally, gave me my public voice. Once, I was asked to lead worship for one of the churches in the presbytery where I formerly worked. I prayed about what text on which to speak. The Lectionary for that week was Luke 11:1-13, one of the two accounts of Jesus giving the Lord’s Prayer to the disciples. Two things came into my mind when I saw that: one, I will have to seriously concentrate to not say “and we forgive those who trespass against us” instead of debtors (my inner Methodist is showing there!), and two, how lucky for me that my pastor had just finished a five-week series on The Lord’s Prayer, so I have a great mentor to ask if I have questions when I am writing (Thanks, Larry!).

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I noticed that as I was writing my notes for the sermon that I, again, had to really concentrate on the words of the prayer. It struck me that, as well as I can recite the Lord’s Prayer, reciting it isn’t praying it. If you don’t have to think about the words you are praying, then you don't think about the words you're praying. Repeating isn’t believing. I stopped to think about how many times I must have recited the Lord’s Prayer throughout my life – every Sunday for approximately 15 years growing up, sporadically through college, every Sunday I am in church currently – let’s conservatively estimate it at around 850 times in my life. 850 times I have recited the most powerful prayer that Jesus gave us… but how many times have I actually prayed it? How many times have I put thought and faith and prayer into “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name"?

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If you don't have to think about the words you're praying

you don't think about the words you're praying.

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For many of this, this is familiar territory. Sure, we may have debates about “debts/debtors” versus “sins/sinners,” (and I hope that some people side with me in the compulsion to say “As we forgive those who trespass against us” instead of “debtors” in the middle of a service), but essentially, the prayer is the same. We know how it goes. We know the rhythm and the pace. We know when to pause and when to start again. We develop a muscle-memory for reciting the prayer because of its familiarity. That’s what makes praying the Lord’s Prayer every week so difficult: it becomes familiar. We stop praying it and start just saying it. We gloss over the words because we don’t have to think about what comes next; we just recite them.

Sometimes, the language in the Lord’s Prayer itself can get us tangled up and cause us to not listen to what we are praying. We are using sophisticated words that cloud the meaning of what we are praying and can distance us from the heart of the prayer. Please don’t misunderstand me: I have a deep love for words and their expressiveness (and for me, the NKJV of Luke 2 as recited by Linus in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" is the only real and true version of the Christmas story). But what I need in my prayer life is a way to stay connected to what is at the heart of the prayer, not the ability to recite impressive words.

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It can be hard to break out of the routine of the prayer. Looking at the text in Matthew 6:9-13, different translations highlight different themes in the Lord’s Prayer bring out different themes. Take a look at the NRSV, the NIV, the NLT and The Message. What themes do you see? For me, what stuck out the most was New Living Translation. It created such simple, understandable commands from the text that I was able to go back and reread the other translations with deeper understanding:

Jesus said, “This is how you should pray:

Father, may your name be kept holy.

May your Kingdom come soon.

Give us each day the food we need,

And forgive us our sins,

as we forgive those who sin against us.

Don’t let us yield to temptation,

But rescue us from the evil one.”

Knowing another translation of this scripture is helps me when I look at the Lord’s Prayer. I can better understand the big picture of what I’m praying so that I can focus on praying for the details in the prayer (but that's another topic for another post). For now, I work to consciously remind myself that repeating is not believing. The Lord's Prayer isn't a box to check every week. It's not a list of words to rattle off like a name, an address, or a serial number. Jesus gave me (and gave us all) this prayer so that we could enjoy the same type of deep and meaningful relationship with God that he did. Am I willing to be open to the conversations that the Lord's Prayer can lead to when it's prayed and not recited? I hope so. I pray so.