We did not say the Lord’s Prayer very often in the church in which I grew up. It was considered important enough to memorize and I did so at an age so early that I cannot remember it happening, maybe at home, maybe in Sunday School. But the Lord’s Prayer was very seldom said in public worship.
When I encountered churches with more liturgical tradition I found that the Lord’s Prayer was often a component of every worship service. Here in our own Covenant denomination I found the Lord’s Prayer connected to the celebration of Holy Communion, so that basically meant recitation in worship once a month. However, we now have a second, early service where Communion is received and the Lord’s Prayer is said every Sunday.
The understanding in the church of my childhood was that any sort of rote or written prayer, even the Lord’s Prayer, was inferior to eloquent extemporaneous prayer, composed as it were in the moment. So it’s only later in my life that I have been able to take Jesus more at His word when He offered this prayer to his disciples in response to their request, “Lord, teach us to pray,” in Luke 11:1, and as a simple direction, “Pray then in this way,” in verse 9 of our text for this week Matthew 6:7-15.
So I will preach this text as I try to live it now. This prayer Jesus gave us is meant to be prayed in just these words. Our Lord gave us words to say when we don’t have words of our own. And as Hauerwas and Willimon argue in their little book, Lord, Teach Us, as we pray this prayer we learn our theology, we learn about God and how He works in our lives, and we learn how we are to live, just by praying this prayer.
Of course, we must pray thoughtfully and with some understanding. That’s why sermons and books on the Lord’s Prayer exist. We’re meant to grow out of childish ignorance of the meaning of these words (like the little boy who thought God’s name here was “Art”) into an intentional appropriation of this prayer as a blueprint for our relationship with God and others. Hauerwas and Willimon say that you might define a Christian simply as a person who prays the Lord’s Prayer.
Of course prayer is not restricted to the words of the Lord’s Prayer. We can and should pray in other words, for specific needs. Let us, though, keep coming back to the basic fact that when Jesus set out to answer the question about prayer for this week, how to pray, He gave us this prayer.