The year is 260. You're an Egyptian villager, and the past few years have been nothing but trouble. A plague has been sweeping through the land for over a decade now. You yourself were brought to death's door by it, but mercifully spared. And when you were sick, so many of your friends and family left you for dead – except for your neighbor who was in that weird religious cult. At immense risk to herself, she nursed you through the worst of it. Her religion was illegal – she was shunned for avoiding the required sacrifices – but still she did it. So when you pulled through, you resolved that whatever it is she has, it's worth having. So you went under cover of darkness, and you learned about the Light of the World. After months of preparation, you were ready for the initiation, something called baptism. Until that night, whenever you gathered with Christians for worship, they'd sent you and your fellow catechumens away halfway through – they said only initiates were permitted to be present for the final mystery. But last night, you were baptized. Your old self was dead and drowned. And now, just after the Christians regained the house they'd remodeled into a church, you don't leave.
When the cry goes forth for catechumens to leave, you stand still, packed shoulder-to-shoulder with your fellow Christians. Your white robe is still the most marvelous sight. The bishop of the town stands at the altar on a small platform. Boldly he blesses those gathered for the mystery of the sacrifice: “The Lord be with you!” You don't know what to expect. But all around you, in these early morning hours, the gathered crowd calls back: “And with your spirit!” A look passes over the bishop's face, a look like a centurion's look. His eyes scan the assembly. His eyes lock with yours. And somehow, chanting in almost a military air, he barks the order: “Our hearts – upward!” You wonder what that could mean. Present hearts? Lift up your hearts high? Set your heart on heaven? You've no clue how to react. But those pressed against you to the left and the right do. They sing out beautifully: “We have to the Lord!” The bishop's face lights up with joy as he chants, “Let us give thanks!” And his joy is contagious. Each one it infects sings, “It is fitting and right!” Then the bishop begins to pray.1
That's what you would've experienced, standing in the church as a new Christian in the early centuries when faith was fiery and fresh. In fact, the majority of Christians on earth today still pray the very same call and response as part of their worship, before they join together in the Lord's Prayer a little while later. Still now as then, most of our brothers and sisters in the Lord hear each Sunday the call to lift up their hearts; and still now as then, they reply with the sacred pledge that they've lifted them up to the Lord. The Church got that language from the prophet Jeremiah, who urged his downcast people, “Let us lift up our hearts and hands to God in heaven” (Lamentations 3:41). The Church found it resonated with the psalmists who said, “To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul” (Psalm 25:1), and with the apostle who wrote, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:2-3).
And when the early Christians talked about why the priest said “Our hearts upward,” “Lift up your hearts,” they said it was a call into the heavenly Jerusalem – that before we could most fully encounter God in prayer, we needed to elevate the core of who we are to God's realm and God's outlook. Listen to what they said: “The priest commanded 'Up with your hearts!' when prayer was to be made, that silence should be made.”2 “Every fleshly and worldly thought should depart, nor should any mind dwell on anything other than the prayer that it's offering. … The heart is closed against the Enemy and lies open to God alone....”3 “Truly, in that awe-filled hour, it is necessary to have our hearts up toward the Lord, and not below with regard to the earth and earthly activities. For this reason, the priest exhorts you with authority in that hour to leave behind all everyday cares and household worries, and to have your hearts in heaven with the God who is the lover of humanity.”4 As they thought that way, maybe it shouldn't surprise us that, when early Christians reflected on why Matthew heard Jesus calling for us to pray to God as “our Father who art in heaven,” they thought along the same lines as they did when they reflected on the Church's call to lift up your hearts before the prayer and sacrifice at the heart of Christian worship. For four reasons was it deemed vital to say aloud that our Father is in heaven.
First, to pray to a “Father in heaven” is a call to be heavenly-minded, to realize the glory and greatness of our Father. To call God 'our Father' was never meant to drag him down to our level. No – God is a heavenly Father, a perfect Father, a glorious Father worthy of our most exalted ideas and understandings. When we cling to our heritage or upbringing, our citizenship or education, those are but the earthly fatherhoods that in Adam's shadow shaped us. But our Father in heaven is more unlike them than like them. We take special note that this is our Father 'in heaven' to remind ourselves that he's beyond our earthly experience, beyond all the flaws and the traumas, even beyond all the praises and the virtues that apply to the earthly fatherhoods we've known.
When we pray this prayer, then, and call out to “our Father in heaven,” we lift up our hearts to greatness and to glory. We offer our hearts to our Father by the hands of the exalted Jesus – a gift, not because they're worth so much, but because God deserves a gift that exhausts all we have. We lift up our hearts in humility because it's simply right and just to throw ourselves before God. All our duty, all our salvation, is in faith's surrender to our Father in heaven. The opening line of the Lord's Prayer does it and declares it, and teaches us how to do it.
Second, to pray to a “Father in heaven” is a call to leave earthly cares behind when we enter prayer. So often, we come to church, or we come to pray, with a lot of things weighing on us. We've got plenty of troubles, we've got plenty of worries, we've got plenty of distractions. We're afraid or uncomfortable. We're nervous about the weather. We're thinking about the upcoming sporting event. We're besieged by intrusive thoughts that come and go. We're anxious and agitated, or maybe we're bored and just feel cold and distant. Whatever the case, to remember that our Father is 'in heaven' is an invitation to separate from all that – an invitation to contemplation. As one early Christian explained of his experience with the Lord's Prayer: “First my mind must become detached from anything subject to flux and change, and tranquilly rest in motionless spiritual repose.”5
When we pray this prayer, then, and call out to “our Father in heaven,” we lift up our hearts away from earthly cares, stilling our souls from our instability and chaos, centering them in God despite our distractions and our doldrums. We set down all the concerns that crowd our hearts – and then, once our hearts have been moved to heaven, once our hearts' eyes are fixed firmly on the Father, then are we in the best position to reach down, pick up those cares and concerns, dust them off, and put them in our Father's hands in the right order and right way.
Third, to pray to a “Father in heaven” is a commitment to leave earthy actions and attitudes behind when we enter prayer. So often, when we come to church or come to pray, we treat it like any other activity – one we can interrupt with our chitchat and our contempt. We come as earth-people, in the first Adam's image. “As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust.” But that isn't meant to be us. “As is the man of heaven” – Jesus Christ – “so also those who are of heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:48). So early Christians would say that “we who have begun to be spiritual and heavenly should think and perform spiritual and heavenly things,”6 “so that your conduct on earth may not defile what the heavenly nature has now bestowed and conferred.”7
When we pray this prayer, then, and call out to “our Father in heaven,” we lift up our hearts away from the lowness of our lives and routines. We scrub the mud from them, we gain distance and perspective on our way of living, of the attitudes we harbor and the activities we practice. We lift our hearts as a commitment to live no more in earthbound ways, to commit no more earthbound deeds, but instead to walk on earth according to God's Spirit and to allow that heavenly Spirit to sanctify our hearts into a new heaven wherein God himself might suitably dwell. And we refuse also to pray out of low and unworthy motives. “You ask wrongly” in prayer, says James, if you “ask... to spend it on your passions” (James 4:3). Why do we want our daily bread? Why do we want our debts remitted? Why do we seek shelter from evil? Why do we desire a kingdom? Is it so that we can please ourselves, so we can spend it on our passions? Then we ask with clay tongues and muddy hearts. But to lift up our hearts to a Father 'in heaven' is to fix our eyes beyond those passions and pleasures. It's to hope to pray for the right things for the right reasons – for heavenly reasons, reasons that fit our Father.
And fourth, to pray to a “Father in heaven” is to remember that life is a journey home, and that heaven is the Christian's proper homeland. The life of this world is not a homeland, to claim your permanent residence or your lasting loyalty. America isn't your homeland either. But heaven is, insofar as “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20). For we're all “strangers and exiles on the earth..., seeking a homeland..., a better country – that is, a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:13-16). So as was said long ago, “if the Lord is teaching us to call upon the 'Father in heaven,' he means to remind you of our beautiful fatherland; and by thus putting into your mind a stronger desire for these good things, he sets you on the way that will lead you back to your original country.”8 So “let us rush toward that domain which we proclaim to be the abode of our Father!”9
When we pray this prayer, then, and call out to “our Father in heaven,” we lift up our hearts towards home, like a compass stretched out in front of us with longing, pointing the way to our Father's house. To pray this prayer is to reignite the cooled embers and dormant ashes of the guiding torch, the combustion that fires our pistons and so motors us along. To pray this prayer is to admit we're strangers now, exiles now – that we will never find our true home in this world, that we can never afford to completely settle in short of seeing our Father's face. In praying this prayer, we run forward in search of our heavenly homeland. Lifting up our hearts toward heaven, we wish only we could throw them all the way home. But until we get there, this prayer is the prayer we pray.
All that is why Jesus taught us to pray to “Our Father which art in heaven.” But the journey home isn't a solo journey. You don't venture out alone on the road. Neither do I. The road wasn't built for that. There's only a carpool lane. We're called to help each other along the way, aiming that no man and no woman be left behind. So if the road wasn't built for solo travel, then neither is this prayer for the road. There are some words you'll note are conspicuously missing from the Lord's Prayer. One such word is 'I.' Another is 'me.' And then there's 'my.' None of those are in the Lord's Prayer. And that's on purpose. We pray to “our Father,” not “my Father,” when we pray this prayer. As has been well said, in this prayer, “we pray not for one but for all.”10
So when you pray the Lord's Prayer, who are you praying with? Who are you praying for? Let's start here. The prayer you pray, you pray not for yourself alone, but for those who surround you in the pews. It's been said that “all who come together in the church enclose themselves with the same wall, since, although they are many limbs, yet they are brought together in the one body of Christ; and therefore those who are joined together in church should not be separated even in prayer.”11 Belonging together to this church, we're inseparable. That's most seen when we gather. And there's no higher prayer than the one we pray together – which is why, in a few months, we'll be adding the Lord's Prayer as a regular act of our gathered worship. In praying the best prayer in the best way – together – we pray best. But even when we pray in our respective homes, or in the waiting room at the doctor's office, or wherever you are, you're praying to the same Father who's our Father – Barry's and Barty's, Joyce's and Savannah's. So even when you're elsewhere, in praying this prayer, you pray for them.
But not us alone. The Church is more than a congregation, more than a denomination, more than a nation. The God who's our Father here in this local church is the Father also of the church up the road. He's Father also of the churches in South Korea, in Kenya, in Italy, in any land you name. He's Father of peasants and presidents, of farmers and philosophers, of abbots and astronauts. So when we stand here or at home and we pray the Lord's Prayer to “our Father which art in heaven,” we're including people well beyond our walls, beyond our pews, beyond our membership rolls. We're implicitly praying for all across the earth who can honestly call God 'Father.' Maybe you don't think about it, but when you pray the Lord's Prayer, familiarity is no limit: you're praying for people you've never yet met. And similarity is no limit: you're praying for people who've got little in common with you but Christ – people who don't think like you, vote like you, look like you. You're praying even for people you know and can't stand, but who share the one baptism wherewith you were also baptized. When you pray the Lord's Prayer, then (like it or not!) you're praying for them on equal terms with yourself. And maybe some of those you're praying for no longer practice their faith, or have even lost faith – but if they're indelibly marked with Christ's seal in baptism, then they may be a prodigal child, but while life endures, there's always hope of a homecoming, so praying to our Father is always praying for them – no matter how lost and listless. And that's true whether they live next door or whether our planet's molten core is between you and them. When we call out to our Father, the scope of that word 'our' isn't bounded by space.
And if not bounded by space, then perhaps not by time. Praying to an eternal Father, what limit is there from the pages of a calendar? When you pray the Lord's Prayer, you're praying for people who don't yet exist. God hears you, and when at last they come to be and come to be in Christ, then your prayers will cry out before his face on their behalf. And when you pray the Lord's Prayer, I dare suggest you're praying also for people who've gone already to face their eternal destiny. God, in their days, heard your prayer in advance, long before you were born. And seeing that 'our' transcending the limits of time, he lifted up Christians of ages past in part through your then-future prayer. Because when you and I pray the Lord's Prayer, it isn't just me praying, it isn't just you praying. The voice coming out of your mouth is the voice of the Body of Christ himself. And the prayer of the Body of Christ is for the whole Body of Christ – no exception made for condition of health, for space, not even for time. So implicitly, even if you never think it, even if you aren't consciously taking them alongside you, yet there they are. When you pray the Lord's Prayer, you pray for every member of our Father's family – ever. So how much better to know that, to realize that, to intend that when you pray this prayer!
Best of all, it's a reciprocal relation. If the Lord's Prayer out of your mouth is implicitly a prayer for every child of our Father (past, present, or future), then the Lord's Prayer out of the mouth of every child of our Father (past, present, or future) is implicitly a prayer for you. When they take these words of Christ on their lips, when they call out to “our Father which art in heaven,” they pray for you. When believers in underground churches in China pray the Lord's Prayer, they're praying for you. When Christians around the world pray the Lord's Prayer, they pray for you. In centuries past, when Charlemagne and William the Conqueror, Joan of Arc and Francis of Assisi, when any of them prayed the Lord's Prayer, they prayed for you. So did Mother Teresa, so did Billy Graham, so did all the apostles. You've been prayed for by emperors, explorers, warriors, and saints!
And perhaps when generations yet unborn come to be, then if you have great-great-great-grandchildren who, long after you leave the world, should become children of our heavenly Father, then when those great-great-great-grandchildren of yours pray the Lord's Prayer in their day, your Father and theirs is already listening from eternity to those future prayers and counting them as prayers for you here and now, as fully as if they listed you by name. And perhaps – though this is just my speculation – the 'great cloud of witnesses' who from heaven now watch us run our race here below might still be praying for us with the substance of this very same prayer.
So take confidence, children of one Father in heaven! For when you pray the Lord's Prayer, you enter into a life sustained by literally trillions of prayers for you, trillions of prayers by Christ's Body from our Risen Head to the humblest toe. Throughout ages past and ages yet to come, across the world and perhaps across the gulf between earth and heaven, whenever and wherever this prayer is raised, you have been prayed for. And while its fruitfulness depends on what you make of the grace you've been given, our Father in heaven will never ignore those trillions of prayers in the voice of his own Son's Body. And to give back, you learn this prayer, you pray this prayer, and so Christ's prayer through your prayers joins the chorus, doing your part to cry out to our Father in one relentless siege of heaven, never ceasing 'til at last our Father will be all and in all. So lift up your hearts, lift up your hands, lift up your voices! All eyes on heaven! Glory to the Father in Jesus Christ! Amen.
1 The primary source used here is the papyrus text P. Monts. Roca inv. 154b (early-fourth-century Egypt), adapted from translation in Michael Zheltov, “The Anaphora and the Thanksgiving Prayer from the Barcelona Papyrus: An Underrated Testimony to the Anaphoral History in the Fourth Century,” Vigiliae Christianae 62/5 (2008): 487. But the same dialogue was used in Christian worship throughout the world, both earlier and later – see allusions in Hermas, Shepherd: Vision 3.10.9 and Mandate 10.1.6 (early-second-century Rome); and text in Hippolytus, On the Apostolic Tradition 4.3 (early-third-century Rome); Cyprian of Carthage, On the Lord's Prayer 31 (mid-third-century North Africa); Commodianus, Instructions 76 (mid-third-century North Africa or Syria); the Anaphora of Addai and Mari (third-century Mesopotamia); Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catecheses 5.4 (mid-fourth-century Palestine); Apostolic Constitutions 8.12 (late-fourth-century Syria); Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 227 (early-fifth-century North Africa); Caesarius of Arles, Sermon 22.4 (early-sixth-century France); and so forth. See also Jason Darrell Foster, Sursum Corda: Ritual and Meaning of the Liturgical Command in the First Five Centuries of the Church, PhD Dissertation (University of Durham, 2014).
2 Commodianus, Instructions 76 (mid-third-century)
3 Cyprian of Carthage, On the Lord's Prayer 31 (mid-third-century)
4 Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catecheses 5.4 (mid-fourth-century)
5 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Lord's Prayer 2 (late-fourth-century)
6 Cyprian of Carthage, On the Lord's Prayer 11 (mid-third century)
7 Peter Chrysologus of Ravenna, Sermon 69.3 (early/mid-fifth century)
8 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Lord's Prayer 2 (late fourth century)
9 John Cassian, Conferences 9.18 (mid-fifth century)
10 Cyprian of Carthage, On the Lord's Prayer 8 (mid-third century)
11 Venantius Fortunatus, Poems 10.1.11 (late sixth century)
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