The Lord’s Prayer, Afghanistan and Harvest Thanksgiving.

The poet W H Auden tried over the years of his life to recite the Lord’s Prayer once a day, usually at night getting ready for bed. He reckoned that it was one of the hardest things to say the whole prayer, petition by petition, paying attention to each, and not letting the mind wander. Try it. It’s harder than you might think!

Yet in times when so much is happening, much of it going wrong, it’s good to have an anchor point for our anxieties, a framework within which to be hopeful. The Lord’s Prayer gives us words that take us out of our worrying and into the presence of God, whom Jesus taught us to call our Heavenly Father.

Much of the Sermon on the Mount is about how we learn to trust God, and teaches us about the God we are invited to trust. If God feeds the birds and clothes the flowers, why be anxious about food and clothing? God knows what we need before the thought enters our heads and the words leave our lips. Solomon had everything anyone could ever want or use, yet in all his glory and despite being overloaded with stuff, the field anemone had a beauty he could never emulate, a glory he couldn’t copy.

So when Jesus gave to his disciples, and to the church, a model for prayer, he gave us words and phrases that touch all the important sides of our lives. What is to be the focus and purpose of human life? According to Jesus being part of God’s will and purpose for his creation. What is the will of God in heaven that we pray should be done on earth? Paul found various words for that – peace, justice, joy, love, grace, all of these the gift of God and achievable by the power and purpose of God who has come to us in his Son Jesus Christ: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.”

More than that. The old fashioned word providence hovers over the whole prayer like a sheltering promise. “Give us this day our daily bread”, is a prayer for the basics of life. But I keep coming back to the grammar of that prayer for bread. Us, not me. Plural, not singular. Us isn’t just me and mine, it’s you and yours, it’s them and theirs, it’s myself and every other person for whom bread is necessary for life.

It’s quite a thought, that a prayer that starts with hallowing God’s name, and finishes with kingdom, power and glory has a loaf stuck right in the middle, and that plural pronoun. I often wonder, with great sadness, about food banks and what they do to folk who are hungry, and have to go ask for food. More than once I’ve gone with someone, as support, and to help ease what is a difficult thing to do. The folk who serve our communities in these ways are wonderfully kind, careful and courteous not to patronise or make people feel all the emotions it’s so easy to feel – guilt, shame, embarrassment.

With all that in mind I have no doubt at all, that the Lord’s Prayer has profound political implications. “Give us this day our daily bread” is a prayer for a world where far too many go hungry, and where wealth, food and the basics of life are all out of balance. The great theologian Karl Barth was absolutely right:  “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” 

At a time when in our own country people will be anxious about the winter, the Lord’s Prayer tells us as Christians what we pray for. Bread and with it the basics of life, for others. Heating and eating, shelter and clothing, friendship and support, all the things that enable a human life to flourish and be free. That’s what we pray for ourselves, but not without also praying for the same provision (providence) for others. “Give us…” Me and my neighbour, us and them, God’s created children in Afghanistan and all those other places that we peer into on the news.

At our harvest service in Montrose on October 3^rd we will have the opportunity to share in an offering for the people of Afghanistan, which is both a thanksgiving to God for his goodness to us, and is also one small way in which every prayer that we pray has practical consequences. Give us, and our neighbours in Afghanistan, their daily bread, and shelter, and medicine, and whatever else money buys that makes life sustainable.

During this week as we pray the Lord’s Prayer each day, let’s include Afghanistan in our prayers. May God’s will of justice, peace and joy be done in that part of our earth; and may the people there have daily bread, shelter, warm clothes and medicine in all the disruption and loss they have suffered. And may our own contributions help towards all this through the work and presence of Baptist World Mission and all the other aid agencies in that country.