Musings about Faith

For the season of Lent we will be focusing on the Lord's Prayer.  We continue with the Introduction. Lord’s Prayer – Our Father in Heaven Today we begin a series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer – Newsletter will have an article that will talk about the background of the prayer.   So dive right with what Luther calls the introduction – Our Father in Heaven. In many ways this opening is like the “salutation” of a regular letter – “Dear John” or “Dear Mary.”   These words open the prayer but they also set the tone for all this is to follow.   And especially those first two words – Our Father – they are powerful words that are like a foundation upon which the rest of the prayer is built.   It is those two words that I would like to focus on this morning, we’ll leave the 2 nd part of that 1 st line – the in heaven part for when we consider the 2 nd petition since they are related.   So… Our Father – Who’s Father?   OUR Father.   Right...

For the season of Lent we will be focusing on the Lord's Prayer.  We begin with this general introduction to the Lord's Prayer: Pray Then in This Way Beginning in Lent we will begin our 40-day pilgrimage with a focus on the Lord’s Prayer.   This wonderful prayer is one which is familiar to all Christians and which has been a regular part of Christian worship since the early church.   It is so familiar that it runs the danger of becoming too familiar.   In other words, it is easy for something like this beautiful prayer which we recite over and over to become so familiar that it looses it’s edge and bite.   For this prayer has an edge.   Though it is based on the Psalm tradition of the Old Testament it nevertheless is, in many ways, a very radical prayer that lifts up God’s unexpected priority for God’s children and calls for a equally radical response from those who prayer this prayer. The first issue which this prayer lifts up, however, is that th...