Where is Our Joy?
Henry David Thoreau, tucked away in his Walden cabin, wrote that quiet desperation had become the status quo for his fellow Americans. That was in 1845. Today, anxiety and depression are regular rites of passage from which millions never graduate. It’s a sad indictment of a country where so many pride themselves in their Christian heritage. We have the highest levels...
Our Father Who Art In Heaven
The Lord’s Prayer begins with an idea that seems easy enough to understand. Jesus wants to establish God as our heavenly Father, and we as his children. What we often fail to notice though is what Jesus doesn’t say–yet what he leaves out is just as important. What Jesus doesn’t say is that we should pray to God as “My Father.” We are...
Hallowed Be Thy Name
Jesus establishes God as a heavenly father figure, but that’s not enough for most of us. Without a name, he seems lost in abstraction. Try as we might, we simply can’t bring him into view. There is only the vague presence of someone hovering around us–like the adult of a Charlie Brown Peanuts Special, always outside the frame, speaking in a strange indecipherable...
Thy Kingdom Come
With the second line of The Lord’s Prayer, we arrive at the heart of the matter: God’s kingdom. To understand how Jesus views his Father’s kingdom, we first need to do something that will seem strange. We must take all discussion of “Heaven” off the table. There will be no talk about heaven with a capital “H,” the place we think...
Thy Will Be Done
In the Book of Luke, there is a curious statement about God. Luke quotes the prophet Isaiah as saying that through Christ (the Lord) all mankind shall see the “salvation of God“. (1) Considering the ham-fisted way that Jesus’s twelve apostles (not to mention the Pharisees and Sadducees) often handled Old Testament scripture, we might be tempted just...
In Earth As It Is In Heaven
In the last two chapters, we’ve established that our entrance into the kingdom of heaven depends on our sense of wonder; our ability to think and love; our patience; and our acceptance of will as a matter of choice–a choice shared equally with God, the Father. We’ve also learned that the kingdom is filled with potential, and with treasures that can be...
Give Us This Day
Give us this day our daily bread… Up to this point in The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus has been laying a foundation–one that establishes our relationship to God and his creation. When we recite the beginning of the prayer, we are thus engaging in an act of grounding, reminding ourselves that at the core of our existence we remain rooted in Christ. (1) With the...
