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Lord Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father”
As I read through Lord Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer and the Christian Life I plan to share select quotes and some quick thoughts as I make my way through this (short) book. To follow the series as it develops, click here.
This first chapter focuses on the phrase “Our Father,” with a specific emphasis on the communal aspect of opening the prayer with “Our”:
Some people are offended that we are taught to address God as Father. The greater offense may be the little word Our. In this prayer we are taught to pray, not as individuals, but as the church.
When we speak of God as “Father,” we are not talking about the way each of us has a biological father. Rather we are saying that, through Christ, all biological fatherhood is relativized by our lifelong learning that God alone is our true Father. We do not call God “Father” because we have had certain positive experiences with our biological fathers and therefore project those experiences upon God. Rather all human fathers are measured, judged, and fall short on the basis of our experiences of God as Father.
God is the Father. Family is the church. Christianity teaches us to look beyond our families and see our membership, through baptism, in the family that has been evoked from all families, nations, races, and cultures-the church.
In this chapter the authors begin to make their case that Christianity requires a complete shift of perspective. Do you think their emphasis on our “new family” is too strong?
Martin Luther King and Stanley Hauerwas on Christian Non-violence
King quotes worth considering
From Showdown for Non-violence, published after his death:
I’m committed to nonviolence absolutely. I’m just not going to kill anybody, whether it’s in Vietnam or here … I plan to stand by nonviolence because I have found it to be a philosophy of life that regulates not only my dealings in the struggle for racial justice but also my dealings with people, with my own self. I will still be faithful to nonviolence.
From An experiment in Love, a 1958 sermon:
The cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. The resurrection is the symbol of God’s triumph over all the forces that seek to block community. The Holy Spirit is the continuing community creating reality that moves through history. He who works against community is working against the whole of creation.
Hauerwas quotes worth considering:
From this article on how MLK became non-violent:
Love, therefore, becomes the hallmark of nonviolent resistance requiring that the resister not only refuse to shoot his opponent but also refuse to hate him. Nonviolent resistance is meant to bring an end to hate by being the very embodiment of agape.
and later on:
Rather agape begins by loving others for their own sake, which requires that we “have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution.”
Such a love means that nonviolent resistance seeks not to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win a friend. The protests that may take the form of boycotts and other non-cooperative modes of behavior are not ends in themselves, but rather attempts to awaken in the opponent a sense of shame and repentance.
The end of nonviolent resistance is redemption and reconciliation with those who have been the oppressor. Love overwhelms hate, making possible the creation of a beloved community that would otherwise be impossible.
Accordingly nonviolent resistance is not directed against people but against forces of evil. Those who happen to be doing evil are as victimized by the evil they do as those who are the object of their oppression.
From the perspective of nonviolence King argued that the enemy is not the white people of Montgomery, but injustice itself. The object of the boycott of the buses was not to defeat white people, but to defeat the injustice that mars their lives.
Take some time to think through these and your understanding of the Christian call to non-violence. You may disagree on the extent of the call to “love your enemy,” but the call itself cannot be denied. The question that I am wrestling with is this: What do the events of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection have to do with today’s Christian and our view on war and violence?
Current Events and Information Overload
From BBC News Magazine (read the full article here):
The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties. Something that if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellow human beings.
No doubt this can easily relate to our media obsession. I think it also has some pretty significant implications for historical and theological studies.
