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Fall Asleep to The Lord_s Prayer EXPLAINED _ Every Line Changes Everything · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Sixty six words. That is all. It is, sixty six
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: words arranged into seven sentences, spoken by one man on
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: a hillside in first century Judea to a crowd of tired, hungry,
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  Speaker 1: ordinary people who had never been told that God wanted
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: to hear from them. Those sixty six words have since
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: been spoken by more human beings, in more languages, in
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: more desperate and sacred and ordinary moments than any other
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: combination of words in the history of human language. Whispered
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: by soldiers in trenches, recited by children who did not
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: yet understand them, held in the mouths of the dying,
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  Speaker 1: like something precious they were not ready to put down,
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  Speaker 1: Said by people who believed every syllable, and said by
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: people who no longer believed anything at all, but still
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: reached for these words because nothing else felt like enough
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: to night. We are going inside those sixty six words,
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: not across them, inside them, slowly, one layer at a time,
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: following threads that have been waiting for two thousand years
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  Speaker 1: that most people who say this prayer every day have
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: never had the chance to find. You do not need
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  Speaker 1: to bring anything to night except yourself, the weight that
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: came home with you to day, The name of the person.
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  Speaker 1: You cannot stop thinking about whatever is keeping the room
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  Speaker 1: from being quiet. Bring all of it. There is room.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Breathe in slowly, and let to night. Begin Chapter one,
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  Speaker 1: The Prayer. Nobody truly knows. James cannot sleep. He is
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: lying on his back in the dark in his house
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: in Nashville, Tennessee, one arm behind his head, staring at
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  Speaker 1: the ceiling. He is forty seven years old. He solves
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: problems for a living, which means he spends his days
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: inside systems, finding the place where something is failing and
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: figuring out what needs needs to change to make it hold. Tonight,
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  Speaker 1: there is nothing left to solve, and his mind is
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: still running anyway. Nothing catastrophic happened to day, just a
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: long day that arrived home with him in a way
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  Speaker 1: he cannot quite set down. He grew up in a church,
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  Speaker 1: a good one, and he still goes most Sundays. He
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: still believes most of the time. But to night he
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: is aware of something uncomfortable. He has said the Lord's
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  Speaker 1: Prayer thousands of times. He learned it before he could read.
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  Speaker 1: He can say it from beginning to end without a
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  Speaker 1: single pause, in under thirty seconds, and to night for
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  Speaker 1: the first time. That fact bothers him because somewhere between
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: the first word and the last word, he is not
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: sure he has ever truly heard it. In Portland, Oregon,
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: Claire is on her couch. The scrubs are off, the
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  Speaker 1: tea she made an hour ago has gone cold on
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  Speaker 1: the table in front of her. The room is dark
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  Speaker 1: except for the amber glow of a street lamp pressing
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  Speaker 1: through the curtain, and she has a blanket pulled up
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  Speaker 1: to her chin, the way she used to pull blankets
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  Speaker 1: as a child when the night felt too large. She
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: is thirty four years old and a nurse in the
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  Speaker 1: oncology unit at a hospital six miles from here. Nine years.
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  Speaker 1: She is very good at her work. She is the
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  Speaker 1: kind of nurse who sits down when she talks to
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: families rather than standing in the doorway, because she learned
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: early that the difference between sitting and standing changes everything
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: about how people receive difficult news. She believes in God.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: She prays, but there is one word in this prayer
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: that has never landed the way she understands it is
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: supposed to land. One word that sits every single time
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: at a slight angle to everything else. She has never
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: said this out loud to anyone across the country. In
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: a house outside San Antonio, Texas, Marcus is in his chair.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: He is fifty two years old. The house is his
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  Speaker 1: owned outright, one of the few things about his current
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: life that gives him uncomplicated satisfaction. Twenty three years in
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  Speaker 1: the United States Army, retired as Sergeant first class. He
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: does not sleep well. He has a complicated relationship with stillness,
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: because stillness is when the things he carries stop being
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  Speaker 1: drowned out by activity and start being audible again. He
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: has been a believer since he was nineteen years old,
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  Speaker 1: when a chaplain said something to him that landed with
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  Speaker 1: a precision he still cannot fully explain. He has carried
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  Speaker 1: that faith through everything, but there is a specific line
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  Speaker 1: in this prayer. He has never been able to say
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  Speaker 1: the way he suspects it is meant to be said.
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  Speaker 1: He says the words, but something underneath them has never
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: fully opened. And in a hospice facility in Phoenix, Arizona,
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  Speaker 1: the night nurse has just finished her two hour check
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  Speaker 1: on Thomas and pulled the door softly closed behind her.
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  Speaker 1: Thomas is eighty one years old. He has been here
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  Speaker 1: three weeks. His wife held his hand for two hours
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  Speaker 1: this afternoon without saying very much, which was exactly right,
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  Speaker 1: because after fifty three years together, she knows when words
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  Speaker 1: help and when they do not. His two children called
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: this evening. He told them he was comfortable, which was
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  Speaker 1: mostly true. He has said the Lord's Prayer somewhere near
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  Speaker 1: twenty thousand times across sixty years of faith. He knows
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: it the way he knows his own breathing. But to night,
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  Speaker 1: in the dark, after the nurse left, he began the
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  Speaker 1: prayer and said the first four words and stopped not
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  Speaker 1: because he forgot what comes next, because something in those
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  Speaker 1: four words held him in a way they never have before,
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  Speaker 1: and he was not ready to move past them. He
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  Speaker 1: is still there, sitting with those four words in the dark,
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  Speaker 1: while the court yard outside his window holds the last
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  Speaker 1: of the evening light and the facility settles into its
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: night sounds around him. Four people, four rooms, four cities,
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  Speaker 1: four different versions of the particular darkness that falls on
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  Speaker 1: human lives at the end of an ordinary day to night.
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  Speaker 1: They are going to move through the same sixty six
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  Speaker 1: words together without knowing it, the way this prayer has
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  Speaker 1: always worked. Across centuries and continents and every imaginable human circumstance.
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  Speaker 1: People connected by language, they share even when they share
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  Speaker 1: nothing else. Now, one thing you need to know before
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  Speaker 1: the prayer begins. Jesus did not pray in Greek. He
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  Speaker 1: prayed in Aramaic, the language of his childhood in Nazareth,
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  Speaker 1: his conversations with disciples around fires at night, his words
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  Speaker 1: to his mother and his friends, and the strangers who
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: came to him on the roads of Galilee. When Matthew
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  Speaker 1: recorded this prayer in Greek, he was translating, and as
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: with any translation, something is faithfully carried across, and something
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  Speaker 1: remains on the other side of the river. Tonight we
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  Speaker 1: are going back to what was left on the other side,
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  Speaker 1: because inside the original textures of this prayer there is
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  Speaker 1: something that two thousand years of familiarity have smoothed over,
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  Speaker 1: something that was always there, waiting for anyone willing to
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  Speaker 1: go slowly enough to find it. One more thing before
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  Speaker 1: the first door opens, go back to the moment Jesus
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  Speaker 1: gave this prayer Matthew chapter six. He does not simply
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  Speaker 1: introduce it. He frames it right before the prayer. He says,
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  Speaker 1: when you pray do not keep on babbling like pagans,
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  Speaker 1: for they think they will be heard because of their
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  Speaker 1: many words. The Greek word is batter loggio repetitive, mechanical
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  Speaker 1: recitation that has lost its connection to meaning, words moving
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  Speaker 1: through the mouth without passing through the mind or the heart.
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  Speaker 1: And then immediately after that warning, this is how you
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: should pray, and he gives them the Lord's prayer. The
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  Speaker 1: prayer Jesus gave as an antidote to mindless repetition has
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: for millions of people who love it most become the
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  Speaker 1: primary example of mindless repetition in their spiritual lives, not
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  Speaker 1: from lack of faith, from too much familiarity without enough attention,
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  Speaker 1: which is exactly the problem this prayer, properly heard, is
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  Speaker 1: designed to solve. Seven lines, seven doors. Thomas is still
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  Speaker 1: in the first four words, let us go find out
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  Speaker 1: what is inside them. Chapter two, Our Father in Heaven,
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  Speaker 1: the words that broke the ancient world before the first
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  Speaker 1: word of this prayer understand the world it was spoken
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  Speaker 1: into first century Judea, under Roman occupation in a religious
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  Speaker 1: atmosphere of extraordinary reverence for divine transcender God was understood
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  Speaker 1: to be overwhelmingly almost terrifyingly other set apart from human beings,
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  Speaker 1: not with coldness, but with awe. The same ore that
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  Speaker 1: made Moses remove his sandals before the burning bush, the
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  Speaker 1: same ore that caused Isaiah, in a vision of the
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  Speaker 1: divine presence, to cry out that he was ruined. The
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  Speaker 1: divine name was not spoken aloud. When a reader in
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  Speaker 1: a synagogue came to the sacred name in the Hebrew scriptures,
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  Speaker 1: he would substitute a different word rather than pronounce it.
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  Speaker 1: Scribes copying the texts by hand would pause before writing it,
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  Speaker 1: wash ritually, then form each letter with particular care. The
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  Speaker 1: name was understood to carry within its sounds something of
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  Speaker 1: the actual nature of the one it named. To speak
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  Speaker 1: it carelessly was not merely disrespectful. It was a failure
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  Speaker 1: of reality. This is the world into which Jesus stepped,
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  Speaker 1: And in that world, standing in front of fishermen and
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  Speaker 1: farmers and tax collectors and widows whose daily lives were
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  Speaker 1: already heavy enough, he taught them to begin their prayer
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  Speaker 1: with a single Aramaic word, Abbah. Sit with that for
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  Speaker 1: a moment in the Aramaic Jesus spoke every day of
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  Speaker 1: his life. This word carried a register of intimate address,
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  Speaker 1: not the formal language of petition to a distant authority,
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  Speaker 1: the language a child uses when speaking to a parent
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  Speaker 1: who is known, trusted, and close, not performing approach, simply
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  Speaker 1: arriving the way you push open a door to a
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  Speaker 1: room where someone who loves you is already waiting. The
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  Speaker 1: word has been translated into English as papa, as daddy,
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  Speaker 1: as father. None of these is quite right. Each carries
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  Speaker 1: cultural weight from our own time that distorts the original
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  Speaker 1: in different directions. What they are all reaching toward is
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  Speaker 1: not a specific English word, but a quality of relationship,
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  Speaker 1: a closeness that assumes you are known and welcome, that
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  Speaker 1: the door was already open before you raised your hand
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  Speaker 1: to knock, close enough to address with childlike trust. That
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  Speaker 1: is what the word said in one syllable to people
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  Speaker 1: who had spent their entire lives treating the divine name
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  Speaker 1: as too holy to pronounce. The effect was not gentle reassurance.
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  Speaker 1: It was something closer to the feeling of a room tilting.
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  Speaker 1: Thomas has lived inside this word for sixty years. He
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  Speaker 1: was twenty one when a pastor in a small church
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  Speaker 1: in rural Ohio said something about Abba that landed in
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  Speaker 1: him with a precision he still cannot fully explain. He
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  Speaker 1: had grown up in a house where love was real
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  Speaker 1: but not demonstrative. His father was a good man who
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  Speaker 1: was simply not fluent in the language of closeness. The
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  Speaker 1: word Abber had given Thomas at twenty one, a category
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  Speaker 1: his own history had not provided, not a human fi
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  Speaker 1: who was warmer than his own, something different in kind,
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  Speaker 1: a closeness not contingent on any person's capacity for closeness.
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  Speaker 1: He has lived inside that word through sixty years of
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  Speaker 1: ordinary and extraordinary life to night, lying in the dark
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  Speaker 1: at eighty one, he says it again, the first of
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  Speaker 1: the four words. He stopped in. It lands with a
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  Speaker 1: weight it has never had before. Not heavier in the
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  Speaker 1: sense of burden, heavier in the sense of substance, the
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  Speaker 1: way things become more real as you move closer to
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: the place where only real things matter. Claire has a
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  Speaker 1: different relationship with this word. Her father left when she
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  Speaker 1: was eight, not dramatically. He became less present over the
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  Speaker 1: course of a year, and then one day was simply
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  Speaker 1: not there. The explanation she was given was incomplete, in
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  Speaker 1: the way explanations given to eight year olds usually are
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  Speaker 1: when the adults giving them are not sure themselves what happened.
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  Speaker 1: She believed in God. She prays regularly and finds it
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  Speaker 1: genuinely sustaining. But the word Father has always arrived at
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  Speaker 1: that slight angle, not wrong, just never fully flat and
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  Speaker 1: clean in the place where it is supposed to land.
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  Speaker 1: A small friction she has learned to work around without
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  Speaker 1: examining too closely. To night. She is going to hear
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  Speaker 1: something about this word she has not heard before now,
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  Speaker 1: the word hour before Father, before Heaven, before anything about God,
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  Speaker 1: or the world or the human condition. The very first
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  Speaker 1: word places you somewhere specific our, not my. When you
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  Speaker 1: say this prayer in the most private room you have
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  Speaker 1: in the darkest hour of a night no one else
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  Speaker 1: knows you are having, you begin with a word that
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  Speaker 1: places you in community. You are not an individual approaching
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  Speaker 1: God alone with individual concerns. You are part of a family.
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  Speaker 1: And from the first syllable you are standing beside every
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  Speaker 1: other person who has ever reached for this prayer. At
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  Speaker 1: this moment. As you listen, people are saying this prayer
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  Speaker 1: in hospital rooms, in prison cells, in houses where everyone
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  Speaker 1: else is asleep and one person is lying in the
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: dark with something they cannot carry alone. People saying it
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  Speaker 1: at bedsides tonight for perhaps the last time, with someone
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  Speaker 1: they love. All of them said are not alone together.
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  Speaker 1: One family. One father, James is thinking about his daughter
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  Speaker 1: in Seattle. The relationship between them has become over the
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: past two years, more formal than it used to be,
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  Speaker 1: more careful, more like two adults being polite than a
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: father and daughter who are close. He says the word hour,
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  Speaker 1: and something moves unexpectedly. He is not alone in this.
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  Speaker 1: He is standing without knowing it beside Thomas and Claire
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  Speaker 1: and Marcus and everyone who has ever loved someone they
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: are losing access to and not known what to do
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: about it. That is not nothing now in heaven. This
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: can sound like distance, abba is intimate, and then immediately
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  Speaker 1: the reminder that the one you are speaking to lives
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  Speaker 1: somewhere else. But this misreads what the original is saying.
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  Speaker 1: The Aramaic behind in heaven uses chamaim, which in the
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Hebrew and Aramaic tradition referred not simply to the sky
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: but to the heights, the realm above, understood in this
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  Speaker 1: context as the place where God's purposes are fully operative.
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  Speaker 1: The dimension of reality uncontested by the competing wills and
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: broken systems of the world below. Not a geographic location
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: on a celestial map, a declaration about nature, a statement
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  Speaker 1: about what kind of being. God is vast enough to
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: hold everything, not limited by what you can see and
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: measure and touch. And so the two ideas this opening
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  Speaker 1: phrase holds together are not a contradiction. They are a paradox.
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  Speaker 1: The prayer holds deliberately because the God it is addressed
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  Speaker 1: to requires both poles to be true at the same time,
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  Speaker 1: close enough to address with childlike trust, vast enough to
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  Speaker 1: hold everything you will bring to the lines that follow,
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  Speaker 1: not one or the other, both always. Marcus grew up
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: in a house where his father was present but not
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: emotionally reachable in the way the young Marcus needed, not cruel,
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: simply at a distance that the boy never learned how
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  Speaker 1: to cross. He found faith at nineteen, and found in
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  Speaker 1: it a category of relationship his own history had not
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: given him. But the word Father has always carried faintly
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  Speaker 1: the ghost of that distance, alongside everything else it carries
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  Speaker 1: to night. He holds both words at once, Abah, which
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: is closeness, and in heavy, which is a nature beyond
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  Speaker 1: every limit. Together, they describe something neither one describes alone,
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  Speaker 1: a closeness that is not small, a vastness that is
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  Speaker 1: not cold. He does not have full language for it yet,
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  Speaker 1: but something in him has recognized it. Our father in heaven,
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  Speaker 1: Thomas is still in these four words. He has not moved,
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  Speaker 1: and does not need to. He is not trying to
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  Speaker 1: extract information from them or produce a feeling from them.
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  Speaker 1: He is simply in them, turning them in the dark,
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  Speaker 1: the way you turn something familiar in your hands when
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  Speaker 1: you finally have enough time to feel the actual weight
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  Speaker 1: of it. Sixty years he has said these words to night.
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  Speaker 1: They are saying something back. You are a child, not
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: a petitioner, not a stranger hoping to be admitted, a
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: child arriving home to the one who has been expecting you,
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  Speaker 1: with the door already open and the light already on.
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  Speaker 1: Let that be enough. For now you are known here,
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  Speaker 1: You are welcome here, and from the very first word,
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  Speaker 1: you are not alone. Chapter three, Hallowed be your name,
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  Speaker 1: the line every one rushes past. There is a moment
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: in most people's recitation of this prayer that passes so
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: quickly it barely registers as a moment at all, right
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: after our Father in Heaven forewords, and for most people
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: who say this prayer regularly, it is the most automatic,
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: least examined line in the entire sixty six words. A
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: verbal threshold, a thing you say on the way to
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: the parts that feel more substantial, the daily bread, the forgiveness,
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  Speaker 1: the deliverance. Hallowed be your name feels like a warm up.
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  Speaker 1: It is not a warm up. It is the foundation,
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: the single most important act of interior repositioning in the prayer,
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  Speaker 1: and everything that follows depends on whether this line has
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: done its work in the person praying. Let us go
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  Speaker 1: back to the Greek. The word translated as hallowed comes
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: from the verb hagiazo. Its root meaning is to treat
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: as holy, to regard as set a part, to regard
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  Speaker 1: as genuinely different in kind from everything else in your experience,
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  Speaker 1: devotionally understood. When you hallow something in this sense, you
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  Speaker 1: are not simply acknowledging a quality it already has. You
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  Speaker 1: are performing an act. You are taking the one you
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: are addressing, and placing that one at the center, at
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  Speaker 1: the position from which everything else is understood and measured.
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  Speaker 1: In practice, this means Hallowed be your name is not
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  Speaker 1: a compliment directed at God. It is an act of
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: self repositioning. It is the person praying deliberately moving God
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: from the periphery of their attention to the center of
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: it before a single personal need is mentioned, before the bread,
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: or the forgiveness or the protection you will ask for tonight.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: Most of us, most of the time, live in a
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: posture where we are the functional center of our own experience.
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  Speaker 1: This is the natural default of being a conscious creature.
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  Speaker 1: Your perception begins from where you are. Your concerns begin
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  Speaker 1: from what affects you. Your prayers, if you are honest
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  Speaker 1: about them, usually begin from your situation, your needs, your
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: assessment of what is wrong and what requires fixing. There
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: is nothing wrong with bringing those things. The prayer will
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: get to all of them, but Jesus is saying that
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: before you bring them, something else must happen first. God
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  Speaker 1: must be placed at the center, not as a ritual
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: gesture before the real prayer begins, as a genuine interior act,
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  Speaker 1: an honest recognition that the one you are speaking to
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  Speaker 1: is not a resource you access when your own resources
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  Speaker 1: run low. He is the center from which your life
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: finds its proper shape. When this line does its actual work,
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: everything that follows it changes character. The daily bread is
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: not asked for by a person at the center of
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: their own universe, requesting what they have determined they need.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: It is asked for by a person who has just
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: in this one line relocated themselves. That person asks differently,
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: receives differently, understands provision differently. This line is load bearing
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: nothing above it stands properly if this one has not
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: been placed correctly. Now the word name. In the modern world,
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: a name is primarily a label, useful but essentially arbitrary.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: You could have been given a different name and you
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: would still be entirely yourself. The name points to you,
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: but is not you. In the ancient world, this was
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: not how names were understood, not in the Hebrew tradition,
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: not in the Aramaic speaking world of first century Judea.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: A name was understood to express the inner nature of
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: the thing it named. To know the name of something
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: was to know something essential about what it actually was.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: To speak the name of something was to invoke its nature.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: This is why the divine name was treated with such
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: extraordinary care, not because of an arbitrary rule about which
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: sounds were permissible in religious contexts because the name of
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: God was understood to carry within it something of the
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: actual nature of God. To handle it thoughtlessly was to
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: approach the ground of all existence with inadequate attention. When
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: Jesus says hallowed be your name, he is not asking
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: followers to protect a label from misuse. He is asking
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: how you hold the nature of God in your mind,
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: whether you have allowed your understanding of who God is
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: to shrink to a size that fits comfortably inside your
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: existing categories. Whether the God you are actually relating to
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: in daily life is the God of scripture or a
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: more manageable version that habit and disappointment and familiarity have
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: quietly shaped into something smaller. The theologian R. W. Tozer
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: wrote in a book published in nineteen forty eight that
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: what comes into our minds when we think about God
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: is the most important thing about us, not what we
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: believe in the formal theological sense. What actually comes into
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: our minds the instinctive image the God who shows up
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: in your interior life when you are simply reacting to
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: your circumstances, rather than carefully constructing your theology. For many people,
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: that instinctive God is smaller than the God of scripture,
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: more transactional, more like a powerful human authority figure than
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: like the ground of all existence. Hallowed be your Name
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: is the correction, the moment in the prayer where you
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: stop before anything else and hold your actual working image
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: of God against the full weight of what God actually is,
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: and allow the contact between those two things to do
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: its work in you. This cannot be rushed. It is
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: not a thought you finish in one sentence. It is
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: an orientation you return to daily, a practice, which is
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: exactly why it comes first. James has said this line
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: ten thousand times. To night, he is saying it with
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: genuine attention for what may be the first time, and
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: he finds, to his surprise that it points him somewhere specific.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: For several months, he has been carrying a work situation
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: that has occupied more interior space than it deserves, a
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: project with uncertain outcome, professional stakes that have become, in
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: the quiet of his own mind, larger than they actually are,
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: a significant portion of his daily mental energy organized around
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: something that has not yet happened. When he says Hallowed
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: be your Name tonight and actually means it, something shifts
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: not a resolution, not sudden peace. The situation moves not
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: out of his life, out of the center, into its
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: correct position relative to the one who is actually at
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: the center. It is still there, it still matters, but
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: it is no longer the frame through which everything else
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: is interpreted. That is what this line does not comfort,
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: not an answer, a reorientation so fundamental that what you
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: are worried about sits differently in you. Afterward, Claire is
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: thinking about the patient she lost last Tuesday, a sixty
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: two year old man four months in her unit, a
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: wife who came every single day. He died at four
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: point fifteen in the morning while she was in the
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: room adjusting his IV. She has been carrying it the
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: way nurses learn to carry these things, contained professional, with
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: a steadiness that is necessary for the work but sometimes
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: makes it hard to know what to do with the weight.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: When the shift ends and the scrubs come off and
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: the night is quiet, she says, hallowed be your name,
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: and does not rush past it. The weight of Tuesday
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: morning does not disappear, but it moves from something that
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: is simply heavy into something that exists within a larger reality,
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: a reality she cannot see from here, but is in
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: this moment choosing to trust. That is what this line
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: is for, not to explain the weight to place it correctly.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: Marcus says this line slowly to night. It asks something
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: specific of him that does not come naturally. It asks
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: him to step out of the center of his own
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: operational picture and place something else there, to stop being
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: the one doing the assessing and start being the one
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: held by a room managed by another. For a few seconds,
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: the grip loosens. That is the practice, not the permanent
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: surrender of the center, the daily offering of it, the
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: daily return to the posture of someone for whom God
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: is not peripheral but primary. Thomas has been doing this
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: for sixty years. He would tell you it does not
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: get easier in the sense of requiring less. But he
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: would also tell you that after sixty years of the
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: daily return, something has accumulated that could not be built
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: any other way. Something in him oriented differently than it
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: was at twenty one, not by dramatic transformation, by the
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: quiet accumulation of ten thousand small acts of reorientation, each
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: one imperfect, each one partially meant, each one counting for
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: something in the building of a life that faces in
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: the right direction. Hallowed be your name, not a warm
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: up the foundation. Place God at the center now, not perfectly,
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: not permanently, just now, and notice what happens to everything
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: else when you do. Chapter four, Your Kingdom Come, Your
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: Will be done, the most dangerous prayer in the world.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: I want to begin with a question. Hold it lightly.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: You do not need to answer it to night, But
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: hold it honestly. Have you ever actually meant this line,
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: not said it, meant it in the full weight of
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: what it asks, Because if you have, you know what
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: it costs. And if you have not, what follows may
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: be the most consequential part of this entire prayer. Your
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: Kingdom Come, Your will be done on earth as it
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: is in Heaven. On the surface, this sounds like the
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: most natural request a believer could make. Of course we
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: want God's kingdom. Of course we want his will. That
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: is the whole orientation. But stay with it longer than
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: the automatic processing allows. Your kingdom come, Your will be done,
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: not mine yours. When you say these words and genuinely
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: mean them, you are not expressing a preference. You are
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: opening the hands that have been gripping your own preferred
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: version of how things should go, your own time line,
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: your own ideas about what a good outcome looks like,
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: and releasing them. Releasing something you have been holding tightly
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: is not a spiritual gesture. It is a real act
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: with real cost. This is why I am calling it
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: the most dangerous prayer in the world. Not dangerous in
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: the sense of harmful, dangerous in the sense of consequential.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: If you say these words and mean them, things will change.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: Not necessarily the things you expect or in the timing
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: you would choose, but things will change. The word translated
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: as kingdom comes from the Greek basile, and here is
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: what most English translations lose in the crossing. Basilia does
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: not primarily mean a geographic territory. It does not mean
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: a place called the kingdom, a location you could draw
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: on a map. Basilia means the active exercise of royal authority,
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: a reign, the dynamic, living, present, tense reality of a
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: king's rule being implemented in the world. Your kingdom come
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: is not a prayer for a place. It is a
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: prayer for an activity, for God's authority to be actively
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: operative right now, in this situation, in this relationship, in
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: this specific life, and your will be done describes what
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: that looks like in practice, things happening the way God
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: would have them happen, rather than the way our competing
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: agendas and fears and desires would arrange them. On earth,
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: as it is in heaven. In the dimension Jesus is
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: pointing to, God's will is not contested. What God intends
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: is what happens without friction, without the interference of competing wills,
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: not by force. The inhabitants are not compelled or overridden.
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: They see clearly enough to understand that what God wills
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: is genuinely the best possible arrangement of things. They surrender
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: not against their own understanding, but because their vision is
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: clear enough to see that surrender is not loss, it
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: is recognition. What we are praying for is that quality
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: of clarity, not that our will would be suppressed, that
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: our vision would be clarified enough to see what God
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: sees to understand even dimly, why the kingdom coming is
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: worth surrendering your own kingdom to join. There is something
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: historically important about this line that changes the sound of
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: it completely once you know it. When Jesus taught this prayer,
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: the world his listeners inhabited was organized around a specific
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: the Roman emperor Tiberius. In the period, scholars believe this
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: sermon was given was understood not simply as a political leader,
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: but as divine. His will was the will of the gods,
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: expressed through Roman law and Roman military authority. Kingdom, come,
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: will be done. These words spoken in first century Judea
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: under Roman occupation were not abstract spiritual phrases. They were
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: politically charged words spoken in the shadow of a kingdom
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: that enforced its claim with soldiers and crucifixions along the
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: roads outside the city. When Jesus taught his disciples to
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: pray for a different kingdom and a different will, he
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: was making a claim with real consequences. The grain of
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: history is moving in a direction that empire cannot redirect.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: This was not a safe thing to teach, and it
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: is not a safe thing to mean. Marcus is in
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: his chair in the dark in Texas. When he retired
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: from the army ten years ago, he built a version
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: of his future in his mind, specific and detailed what
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: peace and satisfaction and a life well lived would look like.
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: When he finally arrived there, he had earned it, or
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: felt he had very little of that version has materialized.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: He has spent ten years confused and quietly angry at
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: the gap between the version he planned and the version
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: he is living, wondering what he did wrong, running the
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: scenarios backward, trying to find the decision that sent him
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: off course. But to night, for the first time, he
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: is sitting with a different possibility, that the gap is
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: not a failure of God to co operate with his plan,
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: That what has not materialized may not be a mistake,
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: That there might be a will operating in his life.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: That he has been with considerable skill and determination resisting
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: Your will be done. He says it in his mind, slowly,
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: with something approaching actual intention behind the words. For the
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: first time in years, Nothing dramatic happens, no voice from outside,
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: no sudden clarity, but something very small changes. The hands
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: open a fraction. That fraction is where it begins. James
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: has been thinking about his daughter and the phone call
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: he has been postponing for two years, the conversation that
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: requires him to be more vulnerable than he is comfortable
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: being to say things that might not land the way
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: he hopes. He says your Will be done, and finds
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: that the prayer does not point him towards something abstract.
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: It points him directly at the phone call, not as
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: a command from outside, as a quiet clarification of what
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: it would look like in his specific life this week,
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: for the Kingdom to come a little closer to earth
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: as it is in heaven. He does not know what
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: to say when he calls, but for the first time
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: in two years, he has stopped pretending his reas reasons
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: for not calling are actually good ones. Thomas has said
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: Your will be done in every season of his long life,
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: the easy seasons when what God was doing and what
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: he wanted were not far apart, the hard seasons, when
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: the words were something he forced himself to say, rather
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: than something rising naturally. When his wife had a cancer
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: scare twelve years ago, when one of his children went
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: through a period of real darkness that did not lift quickly.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: He does not always know looking back, what God's will
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: was in those seasons. The perspective is still partial. But
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: he would tell you that the practice of saying the words,
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: especially in the seasons when they cost something, built something
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: in him that is holding him to night in a
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: way his own understanding and his own strength could not
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: hold him. Your will be done. He says it in
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: the dark, and means it in a way he has
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: never quite meant it before, not with resignation, not with
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: gritted teeth, with something that, after eighty one years, is
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: beginning to resemble actual Trust, Your Kingdom, Come, your will
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: be done on earth as it is in heaven. Breathe
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: it in slowly, Say it as an act of trust
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: in someone whose understanding of your life is larger and
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: clearer and more merciful than your own. Open the hands.
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: A fraction is enough to begin. The night is deeper now,
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: your body is heavier in the way that means rest
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: is approaching. The day is far enough behind you that
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: its specific weight is beginning to lift. Let the prayer
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: hold you. The kingdom larger than your problems, the will
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: wiser than your plans, the Father working in your specific life,
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: even in the seasons when you cannot see what he
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: is doing or understand why he is allowing what he
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: is allowing. You do not need certainty in order to trust.
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: You only need to open your hands. Chapter five, Give
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: us this day our daily bread, the word that exists
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: nowhere else. Before we go further into this line, there
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: is something I need to tell you something, most people
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: who have studied the Lord's Prayer, no, but that almost
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: never makes it into the versions of this prayer. That
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: ordinary people actually hear something so specific and so genuinely
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: strange that when scholars first encountered it, some assumed there
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: had been a copying error somewhere in the manuscript tradition.
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: There was no error. When scholars undertook the enormous work
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: of cataloging every word in ancient Greek literature, every inscription
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: on stone, every papyrus recovered from the dry sands of Egypt,
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: every text from the full span of the Greek speaking world,
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: they discovered something that stopped them. The word Matthew uses
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: for daily in the Lord's Prayer is virtually un attested
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: outside this prayer in all of the ancient Greek texts
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: scholars have been able to conclusively verify. This word appears
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: nowhere else, not in philosophy, not in medicine, not in
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: the correspondence of merchants, or the records of courts, or
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: the literature of the great academies. The word is epiosios
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: one home in the ancient world, this prayer, this line.
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: When you cannot find a word in any other text.
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: You cannot determine its meaning from comparison. You have only
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: this single instance, with no other examples to inform the reading.
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: Scholars have been debating epiosios ever since. Some argue it
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: means bread for the coming day. Others argue bread for
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: our existence, using a root related to the Greek word
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: for being or substance. Still others argue it means bread
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: that comes from above, sustenance more than physical. The Early
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: Church origin, writing in the third century, noted that epiusios
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: did not appear in common Greek usage, and suggested that
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: Matthew or possibly Jesus himself, working through the challenge of
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: expressing an Aramaic concept in Greek, may have coined the
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: word specifically for this prayer, a word created for this
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: line because no existing word was adequate to carry what
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: needed to be said. Whatever epiusios means precisely, the context
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: makes one thing clear. The request is for enough for now,
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: for today, not a stockpile against future contingency, not reserves
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: that would make tomorrow feel secure for today. What is
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: needed for this moment, what sustains life, and that specificity
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: is the entire point. Go back to the wilderness. The
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: Israelites in the desert between Egypt and the Promised Land,
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: facing the concrete proper of food for an enormous number
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: of people in a landscape that does not naturally support them.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: God provides manner. It appears on the ground every morning,
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: sufficient for the day, and with the provision comes a
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: specific instruction. Each person is to gather only what they
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: need for that day. If they try to store it
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: over night to hold back some against tomorrow's uncertainty, it
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: spoils full of maggots by mourning inedible. The system is
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: designed to make hoarding impossible, not as a restriction, but
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: as a relationship. You must come back every morning. You
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: cannot accumulate enough to day to make to morrow's return unnecessary.
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: Provision in this framework is not a completed transaction. It
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: is a living, daily encounter with the one who provides.
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: This is the background against which Jesus teaches his disciples
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: to pray for daily bread. He is not simply teaching
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: them to ask for food. He is teaching them a posture,
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: the posture of some one who comes back each day,
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: who receives to day's portion without spending it on to
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: morrow's worry. Claire is on her couch in Portland and
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: to night. The insufficiency she is feeling is not material.
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: She is, by most measures fine. What she is feeling
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: is the particular emptiness that comes after a shift that
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: costs more than she had budgeted. Nine hours of being
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: fully present to other people's suffering, and she has arrived
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: home genuinely used up, not tired. Empty. The professional reserves
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: that allow her to keep going have been drawn down
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: to something close to zero. She has been here before.
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: She knows the feeling, but knowing it and being unafraid
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: of it are not always the same distance apart. Give
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: us this day, our daily bread. Something in this line
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: reaches her in the specific place where she is empty.
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: Not a promise that to morrow will be lighter, not
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: a guarantee the next shift will cost less, something more immediate,
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: The acknowledgment that what was used to day will be
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: given again, that the emptying is not the end of
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: the story, That she does not have to generate to
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: morrow's reserves. To night in this room from the nothing
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: she currently has. To night's provision is to night's the
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: morning will bring what the morning needs. James separates the
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: weight He has been carrying the uncertain project at work,
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: his daughter in Seattle, and the mortgage as a single
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: undifferentiated heaviness. When this line arrives to Night, the weight
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: comes apart into its actual components. The project has no
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: to night shape. It is a next month problem. It
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: does not belong in this room. His daughter is real
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: and ongoing, but he has already decided to make the call.
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: That decision is made. It does not need to be
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: carried any more to night inter Night's room. His house
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: is warm, his family is safe, and the actual present
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: moment contains what the present moment needs. This is not
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: the dismissal of real concerns. It is the refusal to
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: let the concerns of future days consume the provision of
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: the present one. Marcus spent twenty three years trained to
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: live three moves ahead of the present moment, to assess
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: threats before they arrived, to never be caught unprepared. He
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: came home and the skill did not come with an
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: off switch. He still wakes at three in the morning
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: running scenarios for situations that have not yet occurred and
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: may never occur, in the form his mind constructs them.
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: Still finds himself, spending the quiet of an evening in
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: a future that has not arrived yet, using up the
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: energy of now on the anxiety of them. Give us
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: this day our daily bread. He says this and finds
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: the line asking the same thing that your will be
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: done asked of him, but smaller and more immediate. Not
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: the release of a decade long plan, the release of
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: tonight's portion of the anxiety, the permission to be fully
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: in the room that actually exists, rather than managing the
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: rooms that might exist later. The house is quiet, the
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: night is safe. To morrow's problems will meet to morrow's provision.
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: Tonight has enough. There is one more thing in this
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: line worth staying with. The request is not give me
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: my daily bread. It is give us our daily bread.
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: When you ask for bread as part of an us,
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: you are not asking for your own provision in isolation
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: from others. You are asking as a member of a family.
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: And built into that membership, implicitly and unmistakably, is the
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: understanding that the bread that comes to the family is
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: for the whole family. Receiving and sharing are not separate act.
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: They are two movements of the same gesture. The earliest
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: Christian communities understood this practically. They shared what they had
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: not as a rigid system, but as the lived expression
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: of what the prayer described. We are not individuals with
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: separate accounts. We are a body, and the body shares.
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: Thomas asked for bread to night in a form different
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: from the others. He is not worried about money, or
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: work or professional uncertainty. The particular future anxieties that occupy
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: the others have over eighty one years been replaced by
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: something different. What he asked for was enough, enough, presents, enough, clarity,
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: enough of whatever it is that allows a person to
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: be genuinely at peace in a room like his room,
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: at a time like this, in the particular season he
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: is in and lying in the dark. He found that
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: he had it. Not because the circumstances were easy, not
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: because the room was bright, or the diagnosis was reversible,
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: or what is approaching is not approaching, but because the
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: one he was asking had given him to day exactly
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: what to day needed, not to morrow's portion, to day's
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: and to day's was enough. Give us this day our
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: daily bread. Ask for what you need, not for next year,
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: For to night, your breathing, the dark around you, the
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: bed beneath you. The fact that the day is over,
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: and the night is quiet, and the morning is coming.
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: That is provision, That is bread. That is the enough.
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: This line is asking you to receive. You do not
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: need to morrow's portion to night to night's is already here.
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: Let it be enough. Chapter six, forgive us our debts
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: the only conditional in the prayer. We have arrived at
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: the most structural, unusual line in the Lord's Prayer, not
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: the longest, not the most historically contested, but the one
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: with a feature that appears nowhere else in the sixty
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: six words a condition, and forgive us our debts, as
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: we also have forgiven our debtors. Every other petition in
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: this prayer moves in one direction only from the person
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: praying toward God, Hallowed be your name, your Kingdom. Come
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: give us bread, Lead us not into temptation. Each of
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: these is a simple direct movement, with no reference to
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: anything the person praying is themselves doing. This line is different.
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: It looks at God and says, forgive us, and then
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: immediately looks inward and says, in the same way, we
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: have forgiven those who owe us something. The request and
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: the condition arrive in the same sentence, you cannot separate them.
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: Jesus wired them together deliberately, and then, as Matthew records,
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: immediately after the prayer concludes, Jesus returns to this one
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: line alone, not to any other line, to this one.
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: For if you forgive other people when they sin against you,
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: do not forgive others their sins, your father will not
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: forgive your sins. He does not circle back to explain
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: Hallowed be your name. He does not add a footnote
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: to give us our daily bread. He returns to forgiveness
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: because he knows it is the line that will be
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: hardest to mean. Before we go further, I want to
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: address something directly. There is a way of hearing this
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: line that produces not peace, but a specific kind of dread,
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: the transactional reading. God will forgive you only if you
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: have first forgiven everyone who has ever wronged you. And
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: if there is someone you have not fully forgiven, someone
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: who hurt you badly, someone whose actions had consequences you
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: are still living with, then God will not forgive you either.
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: If that is how you are hearing it, stay with me,
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: because the original language is saying something different, and understanding
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: what it is actually saying changes everything. The word translated
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: as debts is the Greek or phylema, not the most
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: common Greek word for sin, Not hamatia, which means to
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: miss the mark, not paraptoma, which means a trespass, not
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: a nomia, which means lawlessness. Oh phylima means a debt,
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: something ode an obligation that exists between two parties because
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: something was taken or something was done that created an
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: imbalance between them. This word choice is not accidental. It
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: changes the entire frame. Sin in this construction is not
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: primarily a violation of an ant abstract law. It is
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: a rupture in a relationship, something one person owes another
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: because of what has passed between them. And forgiveness is
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: what happens when the creditor makes a decision about the debt,
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: not a feeling, a decision. The creditor chooses not to collect,
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: chooses to absorb the loss, chooses to release the debtor
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: from the obligation they carry. This means forgiveness is not
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: contingent on feeling differently about what was done to you.
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: It does not require the anger to be gone or
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: the wound to have stopped hurting. It is a decision
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: you make with your will about what you are going
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: to do with the debt someone carries toward you. Now,
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: the verb tense the phrase have forgiven carries in Greek
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: the sense of an action considered as a whole rather
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: than an ongoing process, a decisive turn rather than a
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: completed achievement, something like forgive us our debts as we
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: have made the decision to release those who owe us,
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: not as we have perfectly forgiven, not as we have
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: arrived at the finished version, where nothing remains, as we
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: have turned in the direction of releasing, as we are,
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: however imperfectly and however slowly moving that way. That distinction
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: matters enormously for the person lying in the dark to night,
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: carrying something they are not sure they have fully forgiven.
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: The direction counts now the theological mechanism behind the condition.
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: The person who is genuinely receiving God's forgiveness, who is
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: actually experiencing the interior reality of being released from guilt
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: and shame, finds that the same opening in the heart
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: that received that release naturally creates space over time to
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: extend something similar outward. Not immediately, not without grief for
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: what was lost, or anger at what was done, not
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: without struggle, and the long non line a process that
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: real forgiveness between real people actually is. But directionally. The
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: heart that has genuinely been forgiven tends, over time and
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: with intention, toward the capacity to forgive, and the heart
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: gripping tightly to some one else's debt, holding it as
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: the defining fact of a relationship building around it. An
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: architecture of justified resentment has constructed something that makes the
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: full reception of forgiveness difficult, not because God withholds it,
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: but because hands that are full of some one else's
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: debt cannot quite open enough to receive what is being
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: held out. This is not a warning. It is a
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: description of how the interior life actually works. Claire is
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: on her couch in Portland, and this line has arrived
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: at the specific place where she lives. She has a
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: person she has not fully forgiven. She would not describe
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: it that way she has processed it. She would say done.
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: The work been to therapy, built a life that is
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: good and meaningful and full of genuine care for others.
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: But there is a person, her father who left when
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: she was eight, who came back fourteen years later when
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: she was twenty two and building her own adult life,
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: and sat across from her in a restaurant and apologized.
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: Who explained himself as best he could. She said, Yes,
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: she meant it as much as she could mean it
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: at twenty two. But forgiveness for something that shaped you
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: during the years when you were being shaped is not
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: always completed in a single act. Sometimes it is a
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: direction more than a destination, a series of decisions made
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: again and again to keep releasing a grip that keeps
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: wanting to close. Lying on her couch to night, honest
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: with herself in the way that late hours allow, she
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: knows the grip has not fully released. There is a
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: place inside her where the eight year old who was
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: left is still holding something the twenty two year old
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: said she had let go. She is not a failure
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: for this, She is a person, and the prayer is
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: meeting her exactly where she is. Forgive us our debts
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: as we have forgiven our debtors, not as we have
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: perfectly forgiven, as we have turned in the direction of
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: releasing as we have been, however slowly and incompletely moving
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: that way. She has been for years, even when she
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: has not named it, as that the direction counts. Marcus
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: is thinking about a man he served with, a specific
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: person who made a specific decision under pressure that Marcus
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: believed then and believes now was the wrong decision, a
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: decision with real consequences for people he cared about. He
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: has carried a clearly defined anger toward this man for
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: eight years. The anger is not dramatic. It does not
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: dominate his daily life, but it lives in him with
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: specificity and permanence that tells him it is not finished.
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: There is a file in his interior life on this man,
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: a verdict rendered, an accounting maintained. He has told himself
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: for eight years that the anger is proportionate, that the
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: situation warrants it, that the verdict is correct. All of
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: this may be true. The wrong was real, the consequences
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: were real. But to night he is sitting with a
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: different question, not whether the verdict is correct, whether carrying
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: it is worth the cost. The man he is angry
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: at is living his life somewhere, largely unaffected by the
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: anger Marcus carries toward him. The anger has not reached him,
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: has not changed anything about his situation has not reversed
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: what was done or repaired what was broken. It has
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: lived for eight years in Marcus, taking up space, occupying
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: interior room that could be used for something else, being
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: maintained the way you maintain a file, regularly accessed, regularly confirmed,
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: regularly kept current. Forgive us our debts. He says this,
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: and feels the weight of his own need for it,
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: the decisions he has made under pressure that do not
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: fully excuse themselves, the people in his own past who
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: carry files on him that are not neutral files. He
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: needs what he has been refusing to give, as we
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: also have forgiven our debtors. He does not forgive the
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: man to night, not completely, not in the form that
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: feels finished. But he makes a decision, small and interior
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: and invisible to every one except the one the prayer
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: is addressed to. He is going to begin, not for
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: the man's sake, for his own. The file is too
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: heavy to carry into whatever comes next. James is thinking
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: about a former business partner six years of working together,
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: a decision three years ago that costs James real money
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: and a significant professional relationship. The man apologized. The situation
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: resolved in the practical sense, but James has not forgiven him.
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: In the interior sense. There is an accounting maintained quietly
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: in a place James does not examine very often. Tonight,
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: the prayer has found that accounting. He says, forgive us
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: our debts, and the line places his own need for
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: forgiveness and his own withholding of it in the same sentence, deliberately,
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: without allowing him to consider them separately, without letting him
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: approach one without the other being immediately uncomfortably present. This
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: is uncomfortable. It is meant to be, not punitively, in
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: the way that genuine self knowledge is uncomfortable before it
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: becomes anything else. Before we move on, one important thing
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: about what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness is not the same
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: as reconciliation. You can forgive someone you will never speak
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: to again. You can release a debt is your interior
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: life without restoring the relationship it belongs to. Sometimes restoration
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: is not safe, sometimes the person is no longer alive.
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: Sometimes wisdom requires distance even after forgiveness has occurred. Forgiveness
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: is not saying that what was done was acceptable, the
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: debt was real, the harm was real. Forgiveness does not
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: revise the accounting. It makes a decision about what you
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: are going to do with it from this point forward,
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: and forgiveness is not forgetting. The memory may persist, the
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: appropriate caution you have developed may persist. These are not
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: incompatible with forgiveness. What forgiveness is at its core is
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: the decision not to let the debt be the heaviest
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: thing you carry, the decision to put the accounting book down,
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: not because the number are wrong, because carrying it is
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: costing you more than the debt is worth. Thomas has
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: a lifetime's relationship with this line. He has needed to
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: forgive things that took years to work through, and he
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: has learned something about forgiveness across those years that he
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: could not have known at forty or fifty or even
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: sixty five. He has learned that forgiveness is less like
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: a door you open and more like a path you walk.
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: The opening of the door is the decision, the decisive turn.
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: The walking of the path is the work of years.
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: And the path goes somewhere. It goes to places you
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: cannot see from the doorway. He has walked far enough
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: on some of those paths to see what is at
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: the other end, and he would tell you from eighty
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: one years of living that the weight lifted at the
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: other end of a forgiveness path is unlike any other
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: lightness he has found. The night is quieter now than
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: when we started. Your body has been relief the day
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: for some time, and the releasing is almost complete. You
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: need forgiveness, you know that. And there is someone in
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: your life who needs it from you. You probably know
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: that too. The prayer holds both of these things in
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: the same sentence without resolving the tension into something more comfortable.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: The grip does not have to be fully released to night.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: It only has to open a little more than it
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: was when the night began. That has always been enough.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: Chapter seven lead us not into temptation, the line that
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: confused every one. There is a question that has been
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: asked about this line for nearly as long as the
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: line has existed. Not asked by skeptics, asked by careful,
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: theologically serious, sincerely faithful people who read it slowly and
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: find themselves genuinely puzzled. The question is this, does God
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: lead people into temptation? Because if the answer is no,
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: then why would Jesus teach his followers to ask him
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: not to You do not ask someone to refrain from
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: an action they would never perform. The request only makes
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: sense if the thing being requested is genuinely possible, and
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: if the answer is yes. This raises troubling questions about
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: the nature of the Father who taught us in chapter
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: two to call him Abba. The confusion is real and
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: it has a long history. In the year two thousand seventeen,
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: Pope Francis, in an interview that received significant international attention,
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: suggested that the traditional Italian translation of this line was
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: theologically problematic. The Italian version implied that God might be
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: the agent of the leading. He suggested a more accurate
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: rendering might be do not let us fall into temptation,
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: placing the agency differently. The French Catholic Bishop's Conference had
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: already adopted a similar change. The Church of England has
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: grappled with the same question in their own translation work.
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: This is not a minor translation dispute. It is a
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: window into a genuine complexity in the original language that
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: most people who say this prayer weakly have never been
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: told about. Let us go back to the Greek, the
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: word translated as temptation is perasmos. Pirasmos carries two distinct
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: meanings simultaneously. The first is temptation in the familiar sense,
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: the pull towards something morally wrong, the internal pressure toward
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: a choice that would damage yourself or someone else, the
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: seductive drawer of something that looks appealing but leads away
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: from what is good. The second is trial ordeal, a
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: situation of difficulty or suffering that tests the character and
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: faith of the person going through it. Not a moral temptation,
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: but a severe circumstance, the kind of experience that pushes
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: a person toward the edges of what they can endure.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: In the Greek of the New Testament, both meanings live
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: in this single word, and Jesus, in using pirasmos rather
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: than one of the more specific alternatives available to him,
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: may have been holding both meanings together deliberately. The prayer
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: asks for protection from both the pull toward moral failure
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: and the weight of circumstances that exceed a person's capacity
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: to survive intact. Now the theological problem. The Letter of
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: James addresses this directly. Chapter one, verse thirteen. Let no
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: one say when he is tempted, I am being tempted
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: by God. For God cannot be tempted with evil, and
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: he himself tempts no one. This is unambiguous. God is
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: not the agent of moral temptation. So what is Jesus
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: doing when he teaches this prayer? The answer lies in
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: understanding how Semitic thinking about causation worked in the native
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: thought world of Jesus and his disciples, even when they
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: were speaking Greek, in Hebrew and Aramaic expression. The distinction
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: modern Western thought draws sharply between actively causing something and
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: allowing something to happen was not always drawn the same way.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: When God was understood to be sovereign over all things,
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: the language of direct causation was sometimes used to describe
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: what we would call permission or providence. The causative language
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: described ultimate sovereignty, not always immediate mechanism lead us not
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: into temptation functions. In this framework, it is not saying
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: that God arranges moral traps for his children. It is
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: a prayer that acknowledges God's sovereignty over the territory of
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: our lives, including the difficult and testing territories, and asks
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: him to use that sovereignty on our behalf. Do not
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: let me enter situations that exceed my strength without you
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: present in them. Do not let me face the place
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: where I am most vulnerable alone, be actively present in
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: my path, so I do not walk into what I
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: cannot survive on my own. This is a prayer of
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: self knowledge, and here is what that self knowledge requires,
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: Knowing where you are weak, Knowing specifically, not vaguely, the
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: conditions under which you make your worst choices, the particular
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: emotional states, the specific situations that reliably bring out the
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: version of yourself you would not choose. This line asks
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: you to say that honestly, even in prayer where only
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: God is listening. James has a specific recurring situation at work.
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: A colleague whose particular way of operating in meetings, the
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: cadence of his interruptions, the specific quality of his dismissiveness,
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: reliably brings something out in James that James does not like,
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: not dramatically, not visibly to any one else in the room.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: But James knows what happens in his interior life during
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: those interactions, the contempt that rises, the sharp responses he
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: manages most of the time to keep inside. The way
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: he leaves those meetings slightly diminished in his own eyes.
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: He has never thought to pray about this. It has
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: never occurred to him to bring it to prayer. It
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: feels like the wrong scale of problem for God's attention.
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: But lead us not into temptation. Is not reserved for
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: dramatic crises. It is exactly for this, the ordinary Thursday
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: morning meeting, where the specific conditions of that room reliably
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: produce in you a version of yourself you would not choose.
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: Do not let me walk in there alone next Thursday.
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: Be present in the seconds between his comment and my response.
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: Be present in the place where my worst impulse will
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: be most available and my better self will be hardest
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: to access. That is the prayer Jesus is teaching, not
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: the prayer of the exceptional and dramatic, the prayer of
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: the ordinary and recurring, the prayer that takes seriously the
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: specific geography of your own weakness and asks for company
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: in it, rather than pretending the weakness is not there.
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: Player is thinking about a voice, not a literal voice,
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: A persistent interior argument that gets loudest on the nights
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: when she is most depleted, as she is to night,
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: the argument that she is fundamentally on her own, that
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: no one is reliably there that self sufficiency is not
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: a preference but a necessity, because the people who were
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: supposed to be reliably there have a track record of
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: not being. She knows where this argument came from. She
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: understands its origin. She knows that it is not the
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: truth about her life, now that there are people who
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: are reliably there, that the track record she keeps unconsciously
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: applying does not belong to everyone. But on nights like
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: to night, after shifts like today's shift, when the reserves
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: are empty and the room is dark and the street
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: lamp is the only light, the argument gets loud. Lead
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: us not into that temptation. For her, the temptation is
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: not moral failure in the conventional sense. It is the
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: temptation to close, to conclude again that the room is empty,
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: and the abba at the beginning of this prayer is
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: a wish rather than a presence. Deliver us from the
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: voice that makes that argument most insistently now, but deliver
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: us from evil. The Greek is rusamai apotou poneeru, and
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: the word poneru with the definite article too preceding it
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: functions as a noun, not evil as a general quality.
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: The evil one a specific, personal, particular adversarial presence. The
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: New Testament, across many authors and many contexts, treats this
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: presence as a jet when you in entity, rather than
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: a metaphor for the general tendency of things to go badly.
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: And Jesus, who spent forty days in the wilderness engaging
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: directly with this presence before beginning his public ministry, does
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: not treat it as abstract in any of his teachings.
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: Deliver us from the evil one is asking for active
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: rescue from an active adversary, the language of someone who
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: understands that the interior life is contested territory, that there
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: are influences and suggestions and persistent arguments at work that
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: are not simply products of your own psychology or your
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: social circumstances. At its most basic level, something is actively
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: working against the things this prayer has been building in
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: you tonight, Against the intimacy of Abba, against the surrender
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: of your will be done, against the trust of daily bread,
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: against the release of forgiveness, deliver us from the one
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: word King, against all of that. Marcus has a direct
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: relationship with this line. He has spent enough of his
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: life in contested environments to have no difficulty accepting that
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: some territory is genuinely fought over. The concept of an
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: adversary is not abstract to him. He has operated against adversaries.
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: He has learned to take them seriously rather than dismiss them.
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: The adversary this line points to is one he has
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: not always taken seriously enough in the territory of his
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: own interior life. The voice that tells him the surrender
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: is not worth it, that the trust is naive, that
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: the open hands are a position of vulnerability rather than
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: a position of freedom. Deliver us from the evil one.
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: He says it with the directness of someone who means
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: it precisely. Thomas has a simple relationship with these words
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: to night. He cannot give you a precise theological account
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: of the nature of what Jesus is pointing to, but
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: he can tell you that, across eighty one years of
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: paying attention to his own interior life, there is a
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: difference he has learned to recognize between his own doubt
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: and something that feels like doubt being pressed from outside,
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: between his own tendency toward closure and something that feels
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: like it is actively working to close doors. He has
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: not chosen to close. He has learned over sixty years
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: to bring those moments directly to this line. Deliver us
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: from the evil one, not with drama, with the simple
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: directness of someone who has been in this long enough
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: to know what he is dealing with. Lead us not
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: into temptation, Deliver us from evil. Both of these are
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: prayers of honest self knowledge. I know where I am weak,
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: I know the voices that tell me things that are
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: not true. I know the territory where I am most
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: likely to lose my way, and I am not pretending otherwise.
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: I am asked asking for what I actually need from
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: the one who can actually provide it. There is a
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: particular quality of rest that becomes available to the person
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: who has said this line and meant it, not the
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: rest of having conquered the territory or silenced the voices,
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: the rest of not being alone in any of it.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: The places where you are weakest are known. You do
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: not have to be stronger than you are. You do
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: not have to have the territory secured before you are
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: allowed to ask for company in it. You only have
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: to have asked. You ask to night. The night is
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: very still, your breathing has slowed without your noticing. You
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: are not navigating this alone. Rest in that chapter eight,
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: For Yours is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: the ending that became essential. For nearly two thousand years,
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: Christians across every tradition and every continent have closed this
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: prayer with the same words, For Yours is the Kingdom,
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: and the Power and the Glory forever. Mothers have said
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: it at the bedsides of their children, Martyrs have said
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: it in the hours before their deaths. Monks have said
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: it in cold stone chapels before dawn. Ordinary people have
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: said it in ordinary rooms at the end of ordinary days,
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: the way you say it to night. Because it is
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: how this prayer ends, and has always ended in the
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: living memory of the Church. There is something I want
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: to tell you about the history of this ending, not
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: to disturb what it means to you, but because the
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: history makes it more beautiful, not less. The closing doxology
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: does not appear in the oldest Greek manuscripts of Matthew's
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: Gospel that scholars have been able to examine. The earliest
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: texts we possess end the prayer at deliver us from evil.
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: The doxology follows in later manuscripts informs that vary somewhat
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: between different manuscript traditions. The first clear reference to it
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: outside the Gospels appears in a document called the didasi.
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: The Didacay, whose title is the Greek word for teaching,
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: is one of the earliest Christian documents outside the New Testament.
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: Scholars date it to the late first or very early
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: second century, making it contemporary with or only slightly later
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: than the Gospels themselves. It is a practical manual for
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: Christian community life, and in the Didacay's version of the
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: Lord's Prayer, the doxology is present. The community is instructed
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: to pray the prayer three times daily with these closing words.
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: What this tells us is that from very near the beginning,
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: the Church has prayed this prayer, with this ending nearly
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: two thousand years of continuous daily communal prayer across every language.
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: This prayer has ever been spoken in across every century since.
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: This is not a deception or a corruption of what
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: Jesus gave. It is a liturgical completion within early Christian practice,
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: a natural tradition grounded way of ending a communal prayer
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: entirely consistent with the Jewish prayer forms Jesus himself had
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: grown up with. In the synagogue tradition of first century Judaism,
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: communal prayers were regularly concluded with a doxology, a closing
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: affirmation of divine nature that returned attention to God. The
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: psalms are built around these endings. The liturgy Jesus learned
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: as a child in Nazareth was shaped by them. When
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: the early Church added this doxology, they were completing the
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: prayer in the way the tradition they had inherited always
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: completed prayers, and doing so with words that are not
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: merely traditional, but theologically precise in a way worth examining carefully.
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: For Yours is the Kingdom, and the Power and the
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: Glory forever three words Kingdom, Power, Glory. These three were
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: words directly and specifically answer the three deepest categories of
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: concern this prayer has been addressing across its seven lines.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: The Kingdom is yours. This answers the anxiety underneath your
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: Kingdom Come. We prayed for the Kingdom to come because
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: we live in a world where it is not yet
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: fully visible, where God's rule is contested and partial, and
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: sometimes not evident. At all. The doxology responds, the coming
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: we prayed for is the fuller expression of something that
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: already belongs entirely and permanently to God. We are not
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: praying for God to win a battle whose outcome is uncertain.
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: We are participating in the unfolding of a reality whose
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: final shape is already decided. The kingdom is his, has
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: always been his. The coming is not a question of ownership.
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: It is a question of visibility. The power is yours.
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: This answers the anxiety underneath, Give us our daily bread,
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: and deliver us from evil. We asked for provision because
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: we are not self sufficient. We asked for deliverance because
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: we are not strong enough on our own. The doxology responds,
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: The power adequate to meet every need you brought to
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: this prayer was never yours to generate. It is his,
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: entirely and inexhaustibly his. There is no shortage of it.
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: There is no human situation that exceeds it. What you
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: asked for to night, you asked from the one who
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: holds all power. That changes what it means to have asked.
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: The glory is yours. This is the resolution of hallowed
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: be your name. We began the prayer by repositioning ourselves,
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: placing God at the center and recognizing ourselves as the circumference.
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: The doxology makes that positioning permanent at the end of
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: this prayer, as at the beginning. The story is not
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: primarily about you. It is about the one who is
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: worthy of all recognition and all honor, not because you
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: have decided to give it, but because it simply, factually
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: completely belongs to him forever. The Greek word behind forever
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: in the Doxology tradition is aonon age, a duration so
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: vast it exceeds the categories of human measurement, not simply
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: a very long time, a span that makes all human
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: time lines from the beginning of the universe to its
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: end feel like a single quiet afternoon. Yours for ever,
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: not yours for the seasons when things are going well,
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: and then negotiably yours when they are not, simply entirely,
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: permanently yours, and then amen. Amen is one of the
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: most traveled words in human history. It has moved from
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew of ancient Israel into Aramaic, from Aramaic into Greek,
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: from Greek into Latin, from Latin into virtually every language
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: where the Christian tradition has spread. One of the very
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: few words that has remained essentially unchanged in sound across
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: two thousand years and hundreds of languages, and its meaning
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: is not the end. The Hebrew root ahman means firm, faithful, certain, confirmed.
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: A thing that is amen is a thing that is solid, stable,
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: not subject to revision based on how you feel about
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: it today, not contingent on circumstances. When ancient Israel responded
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: to a declaration by saying Amen, they were not simply
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: expressing agreement. They were saying, this is real. This is
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: as solid as the ground beneath our feet. This is
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: not a wish that might disappoint, but a reality we
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: are standing on. When you say Amen at the end
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: of this prayer, you are not closing a conversation. You
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 1: are placing a seal on a declaration. You are saying
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: everything in this prayer is the firmest thing in my experience,
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: more solid than my circumstances, more certain than my feelings,
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: more real than the uncertainty of everything else in my life.
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: Our Father in Heaven, Amen, this is real. Hallowed be
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: your name, Amen, this is firm Your kingdom come, your
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: will be done. Amen. This is already decided. Give us
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: this day our daily bread. Amen. This is the relationship
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: I am actually in every day. Forgive us our debts
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: as we forgive our debtors. Amen. This is where I
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: actually stand and what I am actually called to lead us,
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: not into temptation, deliver us from evil. Amen. This is
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: what I genuinely need and have genuinely asked for tonight.
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: For yours is the kingdom and the power and the
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: glory forever. Amen. This is the truth that holds all
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: the rest. Thomas said his four words to Night and stopped.
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: He has been in those four words across the full
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: length of this night, not trying to extract everything from
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: them at once, not performing comprehension, turning them slowly in
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: the dark, the way you turn something familiar in your
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: hands when you finally have enough time to feel the
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: actual weight of it. Sixty years he has said these
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: words to Night. They are saying something back, he says, Amen,
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: now quietly in the dark of his room, with the
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: courtyard outside his window and the night sounds of the
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: facility around him. Not as the end of something, as
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: the seal on the firmest thing he knows for yours
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: is the kingdom, not mine to manage or protect yours
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: already permanently, the power not mine to generate yours inex
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: house steeply adequate to everything, the glory not mine to
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: urn or build yours before I arrived, after I leave,
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: always forever, Amen. The night is at its deepest now,
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: the particular hour when the day is fully behind you
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: and the morning is genuinely ahead, and the space between
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: them belongs entirely to rest. For yours is the kingdom
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: and the power and the glory forever. Rest in that,
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: not in your understanding of it, which will always be partial,
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: not in your feeling about it, which changes, in the
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: reality of it, which does not Amen. Chapter nine, The
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: prayer Inside the prayer, what happens when you actually mean it.
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: We have walked through seven doors, each one opened into
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: something larger than it appeared from the outside, Each one
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: contained behind the familiar surface of war words said ten
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: thousand times, a room that most people who recite this
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: prayer have never stood inside. Before the night ends. Let
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: us step back from the individual lines and look at
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: the whole. Because there is something in the architecture of
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: this prayer that is not visible when you are moving
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: through it line by line, something that only becomes clear
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: when you look at the shape of the entire thing
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: at once. The prayer is not a list, It is
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: a structure. The first three petitions face outward toward God,
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: our Father in heaven. Hallowed be your name, your Kingdom. Come.
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: Before a single personal need is mentioned, the prayer has
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: already repositioned the person saying it. God is at the center.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: The person praying is at the circumference correctly located. The
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: next three petitions face inward toward human need. Give us
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts. As
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: we forgive our debtors, lead us not into temptation, but
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: deliver us from evil, physical provision, relational restoration, protection from
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: what destroys. As practical and earth bound as any words
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: in scripture and the doxology frames the whole, the prayer
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: begins in God and ends in God, with everything in
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: between held inside that frame. This is the architecture of
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: a life that is correctly oriented, and what it does
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: to the person who moves through it with genuine attention
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: is this. It refuses to let you arrive at your
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: needs before you have first arrived at God. Before you
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: ask for bread, you spend time with who the giver is.
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: Before you ask for forgiveness, you have been in the
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: presence of the one who gives it. By the time
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: you reach give us this day our daily bread, something
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: has already happened in you. The reorientation has taken place.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: You ask differently, you receive differently, You understand provision differently.
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: The prayer is not sixty six words. The prayer is
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: a practice, a way of beginning again each day from
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: the right starting place. Martin Luther understood this deeply. In
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: the year fifteen twenty seven, Luther was forty three years
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: old and moving through one of the hardest periods of
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: his life. The reform movement was fracturing, plague had come
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: to Wittenberg. People he loved were dying. He suffered during
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: these years from what he described in his letters as
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: a heaviness of soul that was difficult to lift. That year,
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: he wrote a letter to his barber, a man named
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: Peter Beskeendorf, who had asked simply for advice on how
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: to pray. The letter known to later readers as a
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: simple way to pray was built almost entirely around the
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: Lord's prayer. Luther wrote that before bringing his specific need, needs,
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: and fears to God, he had made it his consistent
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: habit to warm his heart by moving through the Lord's
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: Prayer slowly, line by line, allowing each line to do
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: its work before proceeding. When he approached prayer without this
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: prior orientation, his prayers tended to be scattered and self referential,
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: disconnected from any real sense of who he was speaking to.
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: But when he began with the structure of this prayer,
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: by the time he arrived at his own needs, he
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: was a different person than the one who had sat down, reoriented, repositioned,
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: no longer at the center of his own petition, but
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: at the circumference. Addressing the one who was actually at
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: the center, he wrote that there was no better prayer
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: on earth than the Lord's prayer, not because it covered
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: the most theological ground, because it was the most perfectly
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: fitted to the actual shape of what a human being
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: needs in order to pray at all. It began in
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: the right place, it moved in the right direction, it
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: ended in the right place. Now the four people who
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: began this night with us. James is in the dark
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: in Nashville, in that territory between waking and sleep, where
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: thoughts still come, but without the sharp edges they carry
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: during the day. He is thinking about his daughter, not
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 1: running the simulation of how the conversation might go, not
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: managing the situation in his mind the way he has
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: been managing it for two years. Just she exists. She
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: is his. He loves her, and he is bringing that simple,
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: unmanaged love to the right address for the first time.
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: He is going to call her this week, not with
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: prepared remarks or a strategy for how to open the door,
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: with the decision to stop postponing what he knows is
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: right and to trust that the conversation itself, however imperfect,
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: is the next step. The prayer pointed him. There, your
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: will be done, made what needed to happen visible. He
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: does not know how it will go. He knows he
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: is going to make the call. Claire has sat up
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: on her couch. The blanket is still around her shoulders.
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: The room is dark except for the street lamp. She
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: is thinking about the word abba. She does not feel
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: resolved about her father. The eight year old inside her
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: has not been suddenly healed by a single night of listening.
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: She does not expect that, and the prayer does not
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: promise that. But something has changed in the frame. She
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: has spent years approaching the word Father through the lens
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: of the specific man who had held that role and
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: then not held it. Every time the prayer said Father,
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: that lens was present, distorting the word before it could
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: arrive at its actual meaning. To night, for the first time,
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: she has seen the lens for what it is not.
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: The word, not the reality, a lens, something between her
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: and the word given to her by circumstances she did
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 1: not choose, which shaped her before she had the language
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: to understand what was happening. The word is not her
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: father's word. It belongs to God, and the God who
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: claims that name has a record in her life, a
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: record she has been attributing to other things because the
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: category of abba had been too distorted to receive them correctly.
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: He was there in the hospital on the worst night
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: of her medical training, when she reached into a room
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: that felt empty and the room was not empty. He
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: was there on Tuesday morning at four fifteen, when she
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: needed something to hold that was larger than her professional composure,
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: and something was there to hold. He has been there,
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: she has simply not had the right name for it.
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: Until to night. The lens has shifted, not disappeared, shifted,
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: become visible as a lens rather than transparent as reality.
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 1: She says the word quietly in the dark abor, and
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: for the first time in her adult life, it arrives
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: without the friction, without the slight, sideways angle that has
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: always been there, flat and clean and real, in the
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: place where it was always supposed to arrive, like something
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: that was always true. Finally reaching the place where truth lives,
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: she stays there for a long time. Marcus is in
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: his bed now. He moved from his chair about an
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: hour ago. The stillness of the bed is usually where
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: the difficult things get loudest. To night, the bed is quiet.
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: He went through the prayer one more time before lying down.
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: Not as discipline, as conversation with some one he has
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: believed in for thirty three years, and has been in
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: various seasons of those years genuinely close to and genuinely
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: far from when he said your will be done. He
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: meant it more than he has meant it in years.
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: The ten year gap between when the version he planned
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: and the version he is living sat differently than it
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: has before, not resolved differently held. When he said forgive
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: us our debts, he thought about the man from his
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: unit and made the decision he has been postponing for
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: eight years. The file is being closed, not for the
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: man's sake, for his. The hands that held the accounting
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: are empty now. He does not know yet what that
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: emptiness will become. But empty hands can receive things that
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: full hands cannot. When he said deliver us from evil,
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 1: he felt, for the first time in longer than he
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: can remember, the particular quality of being heard that sometimes
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: comes in prayer, and that when it comes, is unmistakable.
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: Not a feeling he generated, a presence he received. The
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: room is quiet. The things he usually carries into the
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: night are not absent. They are resting, held by something
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: that is not his own strength. Thomas has been in
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: four words all night, our Father in Heaven. He has
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: not moved past them. He has not needed to. Sixty
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: years of saying this prayer have given him a sense
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: of the whole that does not require him to walk
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: through every room to night. He knows what is in
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: every room to night. He is in the entry. The
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: first four words, the place where the relationship is established,
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: before anything else is said. He says them one final time, quietly,
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: with the voice of a man who is tired and
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: peaceful and not afraid. And then he is still not
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: because he has nothing left to say, because everything he
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: needs has been said, and everything he needs to receive
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: has been received, and everything he needs to be in
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: this room at this hour, in this season, he already is.
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: He is held, He has always been held. The holding
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: does not require him to be conscious of it in
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: order to be real. The Lord's Prayer is the most
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: widely spoken prayer in the history of human language, but
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: it is also quietly one of the most widely misunderstood,
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: not in its content, in its purpose. It is not
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: a request mechanism, not a list of things you want
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: God to do. It is a practice of daily transformation,
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: a way of beginning each day as a different kind
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: of person than you would be if you did not
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: say it. The person who says our Father and means
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: it is a person who is not alone. The person
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: who says hallowed be your name and means it is
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: a person for whom God is genuinely at the center.
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: The person who says, your will be done and means
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 1: it is a person in the process of releasing their
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: grip on their own version of how things should go.
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: The person who says, give us our daily bread and
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: means it is living in the actual present. The person
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: who says, forgive us our debts and means it is moving,
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: however slowly, toward the freedom that comes from putting down
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: what others owe them. The person who says deliver us
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: from evil and means it knows themselves honestly enough to
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: ask for help in the right places. That person is
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: different from the person who does not say it not perfect,
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: not finished, not free from difficulty or the recurring weight
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 1: of a human life, but oriented differently, living from a
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: different center, building through the daily practice of this prayer,
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: said with genuine attention, a life that is slowly and
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: mostly without noticing more alive. This is what Jesus was
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: giving his disciples on that hill side two thousand years ago,
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: not a formula, a way of being. To night, through
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: sixty six words, perhaps truly heard for the first time,
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: you have touched the edges of what that way of
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: being actually is. You do not need to have arrived.
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: You only need to have begun, and tonight you have
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: Chapter ten, the Blessing. The room is very quiet now.
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: Whatever the world was doing when this night began has
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: settled into its lowest register. The night has reached the
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: hour when it is most fully itself, the particular stillness
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: of a place where the day is genuinely finished and
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: the morning is genuinely ahead, and the space between them
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: belongs entirely to rest. This is the hour the prayer
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: was made for. You can say this prayer at dawn
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: and it will do its work. You can say it
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: at noon, in the middle of everything the day demands,
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: and it will do its work. You can reach for
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: it in a crisis when something has broken and you
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: need something to hold that will not break with it,
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: and it will do its work. But there is something
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: specific about this hour, when the performance is finished and
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: there is no audience left, and you are simply yourself
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: in the dark, with whatever is most honestly true about you,
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: when the intimacy of Abah is not competing with anything
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 1: else for your attention, when the room is quiet enough
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 1: to feel the presence the word points to tonight, you
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: felt it not perfectly, not with complete understanding, not in
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 1: a way that resolves every question or heals every wound.
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: You are the same person you were when this night began,
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: in the same room, with the same life waiting for
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: you when morning comes. But something has shifted in the
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 1: orientation of that person. Something has moved, quietly and without drama,
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: in the direction this prayer was always designed to move.
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 2: It. That is not small, that is in fact the thing.
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 2: So let me speak a blessing over you now, not
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 2: as a formula, as a genuine act of one wishing
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 2: the deepest good for the person at the other end
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 2: of this night. You are known, not in the general
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 2: sense in which everyone is theoretically known by a god
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 2: who is theoretically present everywhere, in the specific sense, the
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 2: sense that knows your name and the particular weight you
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 2: carried into this room tonight, and the specific question you
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 2: have been living with longer than you have told anyone,
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 2: and the specific person you thought about when this prayer
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 2: asked about forgiveness, and the specific grip you have been
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 2: maintaining on something the prayer gently asked you to release
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 2: that specifically that completely you are known. You are not
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 2: too complicated to be known, not too inconsistent, not too
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 2: far from where you feel you should be. The Father
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 2: at the beginning of this prayer knew you before you
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 2: said the first word. He knows you now, having been
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 2: with you through every line of this night. Through whatever
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 2: combination of genuine attention and wandering and real seeking and
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 2: occasional numbness you brought to it, all of it was received.
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 2: You are not behind whatever standard you have been using
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 2: to assess where you should be in your faith, or
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 2: your life or your relationship with the God. This prayer
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 2: is addressed to let it go to night. You are
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 2: exactly where you are, on a journey that began before
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 2: you were aware of it, and will continue past the
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 2: point where you can see it from here. The pace
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 2: is not yours to set. The progress is not always
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 2: yours to measure, because the most significant things that happen
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 2: in a person's interior life happen below the level of measurement,
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 2: in the deep places where what has been received is
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 2: slowly becoming part of the person who received it. To night,
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 2: you received something. What it becomes is not your responsibility
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 2: to insure it is in the hands of the one
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 2: who makes things grow, who has been doing that work
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 2: in you, whether you were paying attention or not, through
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 2: every season of your life that has brought you to
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 2: this particular night. You are not alone. This is the
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 2: first and last thing this prayer says our the word
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 2: that places you, from the very first syllable alongside every
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 2: other person who has ever reached for this prayer in
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 2: a dark room, the vast, quiet, centuries long community of
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 2: ordinary people doing what you did to night. Tired people,
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 2: frightened people, people who were not sure their faith was real,
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 2: people who said it because they had nothing else and
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 2: needed something to hold. They reached and it was enough.
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 2: You are part of that community, not by achievement, not
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 2: by the quality of your belief or the consistency of
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 2: your practice, simply by the fact that to night you
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 2: were here, listening, willing to let something aim and alive
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 2: speak into the specific darkness of your specific night. That
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 2: willingness was enough. Let me speak the prayer over you
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 2: one final time, not for you to follow. Let it
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 2: arrive as something spoken over you rather than by you.
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 2: Let the words wash over you the way words do
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 2: when you are at the very edge of sleep, when
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 2: what is received goes deeper than what is received in
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 2: full waking our Father in heaven. You are a child,
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 2: not a petitioner, not a stranger waiting to see whether
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 2: you will be admitted a child. The door is already open,
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 2: the light is already on, The Father is already home.
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 2: Hallowed be your name. You are not at the center
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 2: of your own story to night. That is the relief,
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 2: not the burden. The center holds without you holding it.
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 2: You can stop. Your kingdom come. Your will be done
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 2: on earth as it is in Heaven, in your life,
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 2: in this room, in the specific situations that tomorrow will bring,
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 2: and the ones you cannot see from here. His will
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 2: wiser than yours, gentler with you than you are with yourself,
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 2: working right now in the parts of your life that
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 2: make the least sense to you, working in the dark,
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 2: working in the waiting, working in the seasons that feel
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 2: like silence. Give us this day our daily bread. Tonight's
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 2: portion is here.
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: You have it.
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 2: The breath in your lungs, the quiet around you, the
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 2: bed beneath you, the fact that the day is over
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 2: and the night is holding you, and the morning is coming.
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 2: That is bread. That is enough. Tomorrow's will come in
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 2: the morning. Forgive us our debts, as we also have
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 2: forgiven our debtors. You are forgiven, not theoretically, specifically and completely,
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 2: and somewhere in you, however small, and however new. The beginning,
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 2: the process of releasing what someone else owes you, has
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 2: begun tonight. The direction counts, The beginning counts. You do
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 2: not have to be finished. Lead us not into temptation,
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 2: but deliver us from evil. The places where you are
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 2: weakest are known, all of them. You do not have
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 2: to be stronger than you are.
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: You do not have to.
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 2: Navigate the difficult territory alone. You asked for company in it.
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 2: Tonight that asking was heard. You are accompanied for Yours
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 2: is the kingdom, and the power and the glory forever,
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 2: not yours to manage, not yours to protect or maintain, His,
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 2: the kingdom that holds your situation, whatever it is, the
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 2: power adequate to everything you asked for tonight, and everything
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 2: you did not know how to ask for. The glory
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 2: that was before you arrived and will remain after you leave,
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 2: and is right now the truest and most permanent thing
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 2: in the room where you are lying. Amen, this is firm,
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 2: This is real, This is the most solid thing available
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 2: to you tonight. James will make the call this week,
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 2: not with the right words, prepared, with the decision to
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 2: stop postponing what love requires, and to trust that the
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 2: conversation itself is enough to begin. Claire has said Abbah
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 2: and meant it for the first time. The lens through
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 2: which the word arrived has shifted, and that shifting does
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 2: not reverse. It will be different tomorrow. Something has moved
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 2: that does not move back. Marcus has put down an
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 2: eight year accounting. His hands are empty of it for
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 2: the first time in eight years. Empty hands can receive
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 2: things that full hands cannot. He does not know yet
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 2: what the morning will bring into them, but he is
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 2: ready to find out. And tom has said four words
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 2: to night and found in them everything he needed. He
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 2: is still there in the dark, at eighty one years old,
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 2: in the first four words of the prayer he has
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 2: said twenty thousand times, finding them new. Somewhere in the
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 2: room where you are lying, something has settled, not everything,
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 2: not all at once, but something real and something that
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 2: will still be there when the morning comes. Sleep now beloved,
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 2: not as a dismissal, as a gift. Sleep is where
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 2: the body does the work that waking cannot do where
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 2: the things received in the long quiet hours of the
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 2: night go down into the permanent places where the seeds
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 2: find their soil. Let your breathing slow completely, Let your
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 2: muscles release the last of what they have been holding.
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 2: Let the thoughts that are still moving become less urgent, slow, quieter,
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 2: until they are more like water than like fire. You
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 2: heard something to night that you have been saying all
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 2: your life. That is not a small thing. The Father
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 2: is awake. He does not sleep. He does not lose
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 2: track of the particular person in the particular room on
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 2: this particular night. He knows where you are. He knows
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 2: what to night gave you and what it could not
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 2: yet reach, and what is waiting in the deep and
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 2: patient way. That truth waits for the morning when you
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 2: will be ready to receive it. The morning is coming.
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 2: It always comes with new mercy, as it has come
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 2: every morning of your life, carrying what that specific day
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 2: will need. For that specific day. You do not need
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 2: to be ready for it yet, you only need to rest.
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 2: Good Night, beloved. The prayer is in you now. The
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 2: Father is near, and you are held completely and without
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 2: condition by the love that spoke these words into the
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 2: dark of a Galileean hillside two thousand years ago, and
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 2: has been speaking them into the dark of human nights
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 2: ever since. You are not the first to hear them
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 2: in this hour, you will not be the last. But
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 2: to night in this room you are the one, and
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 2: that is enough. Sleep deeply. You are home.