To clarify what me meant, Paul gave four different illustrations, each of which offered him the opportunity to describe the difference between the Christian life and the life they had previously lived. The illustrations interact with each other, but they can be distinguished from each other. The illustrations are wide-ranging. They extend from circumcision to baptism, from the cross of Christ to a triumphant process of Roman legionnaires.

Circumcision was an act important to Law-observant Christians like those in Colossae. Their circumcision had formerly been a sign of their participation in the Jewish community. But Christ, says this author, introduces another circumcision and another community. Christ was "circumcised" in his death and resurrection. In other words, his death cut off the old body and all the old ways that were associated with that. In the new circumcision, a spiritual one, he brings us into the new community of Jesus Christ, and we enjoy the newness of life that comes from participation in the body of Jesus Christ.

A similar experience takes place in baptism, says the author. You were buried with Christ in the waters of baptism. But as Christ was raised from the tomb to new life, so the Christian is raised with Christ through faith in the power of God who makes all things new.

Paul adds a third illustration to the other two. You were subject to the legal demands of the law, he says. But God erased the record of our sins by taking this legal document and nailing it to the cross. By the cross the power of sin is nullified and our sins are forgiven. Instead of being dead in our sins, we are alive with Christ.

All these illustrations -- circumcision, baptism, the power of the cross - dealt with matters that were familiar to the people in the church in Colossae. The final illustration differed from the first three in that it had to do not with a religious event but with a civic one. All people in the Roman Empire were familiar with the processions of Roman legionnaires as they marched in triumphal procession after a victory over enemies. They would bind the defeated soldiers in chains, march them through the cities to the derision of the citizens, then enslave or execute them when the procession was over. This is what Christ had done to the enemy rulers and authorities, the spiritual principalities and powers that opposed him, said Paul. On the cross, Christ defeated them, he disarmed them, he publicly humiliated them, he abound them in chains and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them on his cross. In the cross of Christ the victim became the victor and won victory over all the powers of evil that had bound him to that cross.

These actions of Christ will have a positive effect on the actions of Christian people, said Paul. They can eat and drink what they please, he said; there are no restrictions on such activities. They can celebrate festivals and new moons and sabbaths. But as they do, they have to remember that these are the shadows of faith, not its substance. But Christians ought not insist on worship of angels, or the self-abasement and self-flagellation that too often goes with that. They ought not dwell on visions or be puffed up without cause, as they so often are. This is the Christian's primary task: they have to hold on to the head, Jesus Christ, from whom the whole body is nourished and held together, so that they will grow with the growth of God.

LUKE 11:1-13: On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus paused at a certain place to pray. His disciples witnessed this. Since some of Jesus' disciples had formerly been disciples of John the Baptist, they come to him with a logical question. "John taught his disciples a way of praying. Will you teach us to pray."

In answer, Jesus did not give them a set prayer to pray. Instead he told them what to pray for. It comes in six petitions.

Father

Hallowed be thy name

Thy kingdom come

Give us each day our daily bread

Forgive us our sins, for we forgive those indebted to us

Lead us not into temptation.

These directions for prayer were to become the set prayer of Christian people, a form still used today. The Gospel of Matthew gives us the first indication of a prayer that was used in Christian worship. Matthew's form (Matt 6:9-13) is much more liturgical than Luke's.

Our Father who art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.

Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread;
And forgive us our debts, As we also have forgiven our debtors;
And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil.

By using this prayer, we can see the early Christian church forming a liturgical prayer around the instructions given to the disciples in Luke's gospel. This prayer in this form was in use by the people of the churches before the Gospel of Matthew was put into its final form. This is still the form of the prayer used in the Roman Catholic churches today.

One more addition was made to the prayer by the end of the early period of the church. A writing called The Didache ("The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles") was put together in Egypt by around 150 AD. The Lord's Prayer given in it is virtually the same as that in Matthew's Gospel. There is a liturgical ending to it, however. It concludes with the words "for yours is the power and the glory forever." This brings the prayer very close to our present usage. Somewhere along the way the word "kingdom" was added to this closing statement. The prayer in use in our churches today goes directly back to Jesus, and its identical words have been used by Christians for more than eighteen centuries.

Luke's form of the prayer is designed to tell us what to pray for.

It says that we are to call God "Father." The word in the prayer is given in the Aramaic language. "Abba," it is, and it is the word used by babies when they first learn to talk. It is the simplest of words, using only the first and second letters of the alphabet. Joachim Jeremias, the great Bible scholar, insisted that use of this word for God was unique with Jesus. That seems extreme. It was also used in Psalm 89:26, in Maccabees and at Qumran. But it does capture the sense of intimacy that Jesus had with God. God is like a father, who creates us, nurtures us, cares for us, protects us, offers us the affection that only the best of fathers can do.

"Hallowed be your name" speaks of the holiness of God that is so much a part of the prophecies of Hosea and later Isaiah. To hallow God's name means to see God in God's otherness, God's holiness, to realize that God's ways are not our ways and God's thoughts are not our thoughts. It is also a prayer to make us holy, set apart for God. Early Christians thought of themselves as "saints," and the word simply means "to be sanctified," to be set apart for God, to be set apart for God through Christ.

"Your kingdom come." This was the special task of Jesus, to proclaim God's kingship and to bring that kingship into being through his own person and ministry. Jesus went about it by preaching and teaching, challenging the powers that harm people, bringing people into the fellowship of the table, healing their ills, releasing those imprisoned, dying upon the cross, being raised from the dead to be with us forever. We are to pray for the coming of God's kingdom and to work diligently in its behalf.

"Give us our daily bread." Dependent as we are on the generosity of God, we are to pray that we have bread enough to carry on our mission for God. The prayer may be reminiscent of the Hebrews' situation in the wilderness after the escape from Egypt: each day God fed them the manna they needed for the day, The Greek word used in the prayer, "epiousios," may have a slightly different meaning and may give the prayer a slightly different context. "Epiousios" may mean, "Give us today the bread we need for tomorrow." "Epiousios" was the word used for the rations given to a Roman soldier on the night before the battle. On that night the soldier would receive his "bread for tomorrow." This would have been especially appropriate for the moment Jesus gave this prayer to the disciples. They were on their way to Jerusalem. They had cut themselves off from their homes and their usual sources of support. They could only be supported by finding homes along the way that were willing to take them in. The host would give them a meal for the evening, a place to sleep, and then a loaf of bread to sustain them on their journey tomorrow until they could find another host who would take them in. So Jesus suggested that along the way they pray that "God will give us today the bread that we need for tomorrow." If the parable attached to these prayers is an indication, there may have been times that they could not find a host, at least until very late in the day when everyone was asleep, and that host had to seek out his neighbor to re-stock the bread that he would give to Jesus and his friends the next day. It was a precarious life they were living, that of Jesus and his disciples on the way to Jerusalem. They depended on the generosity of God for the basic sustenance they needed. Yet we all do. Agriculturists tell us that each spring the whole world is just three months away from starving to death. We pray to God with fervor, "Give us our daily bread, give us today the bread we need for tomorrow." We pray this prayer with the confidence that God will answer it.

"Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us." Just as bread is necessary for life, so is forgiveness. The human world would fly apart if we did not learn how to forgive each other, husbands and wives, parents and children, employers and employees, political allies and antagonists, tribes and tribes, nations and nations, races and races. Imagine for a moment a world with no forgiveness in it at all! Yet we forgive because God has forgiven us. Imagine a relationship with the Almighty if the Divine Judge were not also the Divine Forgiver. Forgiveness flows into the world from God, and it flows back and forth among us as a divine energy. If we stop its flow, the whole world stops.

There may be a further implication in this prayer for forgiveness that we need to contemplate. "We ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us." Indebtedness was a terrible problem to the peasants of Palestine. If they were indebted to masters or bankers or tax collectors, they could be thrown into prison until the last debt was paid. Forgiveness of these debts was fundamental to the existence of their lives. Jesus seems to be saying that since God forgives our debts to him which we cannot repay, we need to forgive the debts to us which the indebted simply cannot repay. I think Jesus is saying this. The implications of his statement boggle our minds.

"Lead us not into temptation." Dietrich Bonhoeffer had the best explanation of this that I know. He insisted that "temptation" should not be interpreted as every little thing that happens to us that might throw us off track. The word has to be reserved, Bonhoeffer said, for that terrible moment when even God seems to be gone from our lives. Jesus knew this moment from personal experience. He had been taken into the wilderness and tempted for forty days, forty long days and nights when God seems to have abandoned him. He would experience this again in his moments of prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and his hours on the cross: "My God, for what reason have you abandoned me?" The experience is so terrible that Jesus did not want his followers to have to undergo it. Reinhold Niebuhr added one more significant thing to our understanding of temptation. There are only two kinds of temptation, he said. There are moments when we feel that we are so strong that we do not need God's help, and there are moments when we feel so weak that not even God can help us. In both moments, God is gone from us. Lead us not into these experiences, said Jesus; lead us not into temptation. And the later liturgists added to Jesus' prayer, "Deliver us from this evil."

Karl Barth in his book On Prayer added an insight to the prayer to which I want to call our attention. He said that Jesus instructed us to pray these prayers precisely because these are the prayers that God will answer. Every prayer that we make should be a derivative of these prayers, because these and these alone are the prayers that God surely will answer.

There is something else about this prayer that is important to me. I believe that this prayer is the most important theological document that we have. For these prayers tell us who God is, and they tell us who we are. This chart may show what I mean by that statement.

At the beginning of his greatest work, "The Institution of the Christian Religion," John Calvin wrote, "All sure and certain knowledge consists of two things, who God is and who we are. Yet we are not sure which one precedes and brings forth the other." The Lord's Prayer of Jesus Christ is the perfect illustration of Calvin's thought. In just these few words of the prayer, Jesus describes who God is and who we are; and we know this through Jesus Christ. We only know who we are when we know who God is, and we only know who God is when we know who we are. But whether this knowledge comes to us originally from God or from ourselves is the great mystery of the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

The text goes on to tell the story of the householder who was without bread, received a guest, then had to go to a neighbor to borrow the bread to feed the guest. I suggested above that this actually might have been the experience of Jesus and his disciples as they journeyed to Jerusalem. They arrived late, were received by their host, who suddenly discovered he had no bread to give them for their journey of the next day. So he called on a neighbor's help in supplying the bread. The neighbor was at first reluctant. He was in bed, and his children were sleeping beside him. He did not want all the fuss and bother of getting up, unbolting the door, waking the children, and finding the bread. But he did. He thought of the shame of not doing it. (That is the meaning of the word in the story which is translated "importunity." The Greek word does not mean that. Instead it points to the shame of refusing hospitality.) Hospitality was to be freely given to travelers. Inns were alternatives, but they were bad places, as I wrote in the description of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. They were dangerous, strangers were bunked together as they slept, and they were little more than brothels. Travelers sought out friends or householders to have places to stay. The friends and householders were supposed to fulfill the request. It was shameful not to do it. This one night, though, one of the householders did not want to go to the trouble of doing it, but then thought of the shame on him and the shame on his neighbor for not doing it, and he complied. Viewed this way, this story is not so much a parable of Jesus (it has no particular point) as it is a recollection of one of the events that occurred during the memorable journey of the disciples and Jesus to Jerusalem.

Returning again to the question of prayer, Jesus tells his disciples, "Ask, seek, knock." If you ask, it will be given you. If we seek, you will find. If you knock, it will be opened to you. Asking, seeking, knocking on God's door are to be our stance in prayer. God will give us what God has promised to give.

Then Jesus does bring in a short parable. If your son asks for a fish for dinner, fish being the common meat of the people, will you give him a snake? If he asks for an egg, will you give him a scorpion? The fish, with its scales, looks like a snake, but no father will substitute a snake for a fish. A scorpion rolled up into a ball can look like an egg, but no father would substitute a scorpion for an egg when his son requests an egg for dinner. Jesus then makes a theological point that is worth our consideration: "If we, being who we are, inclined to evil at all times, know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more will the good God give to us his children the greatest gift of all, the gift of God's Holy Spirit. Ask for it, and you will receive it. Seek it, and you will find it. Knock on the door of the heavenly kingdom, and that door will be opened to you.