I RECENTLY visited Rome for the first time. I was the guest of the Anglican Centre, which is a kind of Anglican outpost and embassy in the Eternal City, and a centre for ecumenical dialogue and hospitality. It was a fabulous visit.
The main purpose was a public conversation with the Pro-Prefect of the Section for the First Evangelization and New Particular Churches of the Dicastery for Evangelization, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, discussing how disunity between Christians damages our witness. After all, on the night before he died, Jesus prayed that the Church would be one so that the world would believe (John 17.20–21).
At that point, “the Church” was just the 11 disciples gathered around Jesus in the upper room (Judas had already gone out to betray him), but, even then, Jesus could see how easy it was for people to disagree with one another, how depressing the inevitable conflict and division would be, and how damaging its impact to the central purposes of the gospel. The disciples then, as now, often argued with one another about who was the most important.
Sadly, Jesus was right. He usually is. His plea to his disciples fell on deaf ears. The history of the Church which bears his name is a history of astonishing service — an amazing expansion into all the cultures and nations of the world, but also a bloody story of conflict, oppression, human failure, and division.
In our own day, although there have been real steps forward in dialogue between what is now a tapestry of different Christian denominations, most of us have simply got used to the idea that there are different Churches and that they largely run on parallel lines.
Not only is this a scandal to God, but it is also probably one of the main reasons that those who do not yet know Christ are put off the message of the gospel. After all, if followers of Jesus can’t even be reconciled to each other, why should they take seriously our claim to have a message of reconciliation for the whole world?
On that same night before he died, when Jesus prayed that the Church would be one, he also gave his disciples the meal that would be the way they remembered him. Breaking bread, pouring wine, he showed them how to make a perpetual remembrance of his dying and rising, and how this would bring them together into a new humanity. But in the Church today, we can’t even come together to share this bread and wine. What was one communion appears to be several.
There is hope. All mainstream Christian denominations acknowledge each other’s baptism, and this is something we can and must build on. But what is still most shocking is the way we continue to take our disunity for granted. We have become habituated to it. We aren’t scandalised: we think it’s normal.
WITH all this in my mind as I travelled to Rome, I knew that part of my visit would be an audience with Pope Francis. I was excited and nervous.
With my wife and a few colleagues, I arrived at the Vatican with a little trepidation. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would we be ushered in, exchange a few pleasantries, and then be on our way? Or might it be something more? Well, it was.
We did indeed exchange pleasantries. But then the Pope ushered us into the adjacent parlour, where we sat and talked. It wasn’t a long conversation, but, for about 20 minutes, we talked together about the scandal of our disunity, about the bond of a common baptism, and about the need, as Pope Francis put it, “to walk together, to work together, and to pray together”.
In other words, perhaps we need to stop seeing unity as something to be achieved by intellectual agreement: that it isn’t so much about solving the complicated questions of the past, which were the cause of our breaking away from each other, and all the other complex, political demonstrations of power which have been, and probably still are, tightly woven into our discussions, disagreements, and reasons for splitting.
It is about seeing that we are already one in Jesus Christ, and that, because of our baptism, we already belong to each other. The task, therefore, may not be to unravel the twisted knots of the unity we don’t have, but to reveal the unity we do have. And build on it. And do something new. Then the other issues would start to unravel of their own accord. We would discover unity, not achieve it. And maybe the best way to begin is to do things together: to walk together, work together, and pray together.
Then we did just that. We prayed. And the Pope led us in the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer that is the heart of all prayer, the prayer that belongs to all Christians, the prayer that Jesus taught us.
We were an international little gathering in that room; so we each said the prayer in our mother tongue. Yet, at the same time, we all knew we were saying the same thing: the same words to the same God which we had learned from the same God.
What was binding us together in that moment was our common faith in Jesus Christ, and our desire to follow him and learn from him. He was the one who had taught us to pray this way. Words from the heart of God to our hearts.
It was in that moment that the power of the opening word of the Lord’s Prayer in English really struck me. Not my God or your God.Not my Father or your Father. Ours.
Just saying this prayer was a declaration of the unity we already had. Now, we needed to work to make it visible. It meant, whether I liked it or not, that everyone else who said this prayer was my sister or my brother. We belonged to each other.
“Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother,” Jesus says (Matthew 12.50). And, as if to emphasise the point, it is on Easter Day itself that Jesus says to Mary Magdalen that he is “ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20.17). The Father has now really become our Father.
TO SAY the Lord’s Prayer is to articulate the will and purposes of God. It binds us to each other in a community whose membership we are not able to control or police, because it comes from our belonging to God through Jesus. We are all children of the same heavenly Father.
Jesus is the one who counts us in. We cannot therefore ever have the power to declare people out.
And, of course, if we belong to each other, then we have a responsibility to each other. Whatever someone’s nationality or denomination or language or ethnicity or culture or sexuality, everyone who says this prayer is part of the household of God, the very household and community of faith that Jesus has made possible through his death and resurrection, breaking down those barriers of separation that we so love to erect. Therefore, to say this prayer, just the opening two words, is to say something astonishing and powerful about who we are in relationship to each other across the world, and who we are in relationship to God.
Jesus taught us to love our neighbour, but, in saying this prayer, the challenge of living this out is brought into an even tighter focus: the person who is my neighbour who says this prayer with me, is a member of my family, my household. They are my brother and sister.
As ever, Pope Francis himself has expressed this with beautiful simplicity. “I am not an only child,” he writes: “none of us is.”
Moreover, the fact that it is our God, not my God, runs through the whole prayer.
So, imagine for a moment that the prayer was not written this way. Imagine it was the first-person singular, “My Father”, not the first-person plural, “Our”. It wouldn’t just change the prayer; it would destroy it. Give me my daily bread. Forgive me my sins. This is a narrow, nasty, selfish way of praying. It is all about me and what I want. The prayer only works because it is plural. And because it is “ours” it is broad, challenging, and beautiful.
James Chan/PixabayJames Chan/Pixabay
Once again, we discover that what is best for us is found in community with others; that we cannot be ourselves on our own. Our well-being is tied up with the well-being of our neighbour.
It is our isolation from one another, and from God, which is the problem and the besetting sin of all humanity. We see this in those old, old stories at the beginning of the book of Genesis, where we read about how sin came into the world. Adam and Eve, who are made for community with each other and for community with God, turn on each other, blame each other, and even try to hide from God. Cain slays his brother Abel.
A whole sorry history of separation and failure unfolds. Empires rise and fall. Barriers of separation grow. Walls get higher. Trenches are dug deeper. All because we do not love each other; do not think we belong to each other; fail to take responsibility for each other; and indulge the fantasy that it is possible to hide from God. We do this so effectively today that we’ve even managed to convince ourselves that God does not exist.
But God is not to be messed with. And, because God is the God who is love, and is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit God, and because all love wants is to expand the horizons of love so that the reciprocity of giving and receiving the love that is within God might be shared with the whole creation, God steps into the world. God in Jesus is reconciling the world, showing us what love looks like, breaking down barriers and rolling stones away.
God is saving us from ourselves. God is teaching us how to pray, which is about learning how to live our lives in communion with God and in communion with each other. By giving us this particular prayer, and by its repetition so that it dwells deeply within us, God is teaching us how to live.
THE Lord’s Prayer is a pattern for life, not only a pattern for prayer. Right praying, we discover, shapes right living. We learn this prayer by heart, and our hearts are changed. We read the prayer, but also the prayer reads us.
We are called not just to say “Our Father”, but to live as good neighbours and sisters and brothers within the whole household of the human family; to know that, in Jesus, we have access to God, as a child with its father or mother and with the same intimacy of love. We are given the opportunity of living life God’s way.
Which is why I want to say two more things about the Lord’s Prayer. First, be careful with this prayer. All our prayer books and service sheets should carry a health warning. “Be warned!” they should say. “This prayer will change you. It will change the way you think about yourself. It will change the way you think about others. It will change the way you think about God.”
Second, don’t say this prayer if you are not prepared to be changed; and, particularly, don’t say this prayer if you are not prepared to be the answer to the prayer you offer.
What I mean by this is that, because prayer is not just words, but communication and relationship with God, then to say, “Your will be done. . .”, “Give us our daily bread . . .”, “Help us to forgive others . . .” is not the wistful dreaming of an impossible ideal we can’t possibly live up to and probably won’t ever attempt. It is a declaration of intent.
This is how we intend to live our lives. We intend to seek God’s will. We want to work for a world where all are fed. We want forgiveness and reconciliation to be the hallmarks of our lives and of our public life, and be the way we deal with each other, whether it is our neighbour across the street or the nations of the world.
This is what I mean by being an answer to our own prayers. If we say in our prayers that we want the hungry to be fed, then we need to ask ourselves what we are doing to feed the hungry. If we pray, “God’s will be done on earth as in heaven,” then we need to ask ourselves how our lives conform to and demonstrate the will of God as we see it in Jesus Christ.
And, at this point, you may want to stop reading, because this is very hard indeed. Suddenly, the prayer that seemed so simple and straightforward becomes the hardest challenge you will ever face. Indeed, we start to wonder: “Can I ever say this prayer and truly mean it?”
But please don’t stop reading. It is hard. It is challenging. But the prayer itself, not least these two opening words, also carries the hope that will see us through without ever letting us off the hook.
In this prayer, as should be the case with all Christian prayer, we come to God only too aware of our shortcomings, misgivings, failures, and pride. After all, this is the prayer that says, “Forgive us our sins . . . forgive us our trespasses.”
“For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out,” Paul says. “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing” (Romans 7.18b-19, NIV).
This is a predicament familiar to all of us. We are not the people we want to be, let alone the people God wants us to be. Nevertheless, in all his letters, Paul’s great watchword is “persevere”. He knows his need of God. So do we. Therefore, we persevere.
We persevere, knowing that the God who loves us is the God of mercy and justice; the God who holds before us the high ideal of a Christlike life is the God who knows that we stumble and fall.
We keep saying this prayer because, by the Holy Spirit praying within us (more on this later), these words change us, and our lives begin to demonstrate the things we learn. God will truly be our loving Father. We are God’s children.
As we learn this, and by the patient, persevering repetition of this prayer, we come closer to Christ, and, through Christ, closer to the Father’s heart. This is good news for our lives and good news for the world.
It also means that we come closer to each other. The unity that we already have in Christ is revealed. This will be very good for the Church, but, much more importantly, as Jesus prayed, it will bring belief and hope and peace to the world; a world still so angrily divided, still so suspicious of others, still crying out for all the good things this prayer promises.
AlamyBishop Latimer, as depicted by an unknown artist, in a portrait that is in the National Portrait Gallery
Living and serving at one of the most anguished and turbulent times for the Christian Church in Europe, Hugh Latimer was a Church of England martyr of the Reformation period. He was Bishop of Worcester for a short time, and was a brilliant and popular advocate for the reformed faith and a lively and provocative preacher. But, when Mary Tudor came to the throne in 1553, Latimer was sent to the Tower of London. In the following year, together with Ridley, he was burnt as a heretic in Oxford.
Many of his sermons and writings survive. They are inspired reading, particularly his spiritual writings, and, for me, particularly his preaching about the Lord’s Prayer. He too homed in on the word “our”.
I finish with his beautiful and challenging words: “He saith not ‘my’ but ‘our’. . . This word ‘our’ teacheth us to consider that the Father of heaven is a common Father; as well my neighbour’s Father as mine; as well the poor man’s Father as the rich: so that he is not a peculiar Father, but a Father to the whole church and congregation, to all the faithful. Be they never so poor, so vile, so foul and despised, yet he is their Father as well as mine: and therefore I should not despise them, but consider that God is their Father as well as mine . . .
“When I pray, I pray not for myself alone, but for all the rest: again, when they pray, they pray, not for themselves only, but for me: for Christ hath so framed this prayer, that I must . . . include my neighbour in it. Therefore, all those which pray this prayer, they pray as well for me, as for themselves, which is a great comfort to every faithful heart, when he considereth that all the church prayeth for him.”
This is an edited extract from Praying by Heart: The Lord’s Prayer for everyone by
Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York, published by Hodder & Stoughton at £14.99 (Church Times Bookshop £11.99); 978-1-3998-0530-8.
Archbishop Cottrell will be talking about the book at the next Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature, which takes place in Winchester from 28 February to 2 March. Find out more and book tickets here.
Archbishop Cottrell talks about the book on this week’s edition of the Church Times Podcast.