  Foundations of the Faith
Foundations
of the Faith explores
and explains The Lord’s Prayer: Who art in heaven By Robert P. Mills, The Presbyterian LaymanVolume 33, Number 5, Posted September 29, 2000 |
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However, whenever we begin the Lord’s Prayer with the words “Our Father, who art in heaven,” that archaic verb can be a powerful reminder that our God is a present tense God. A present-tense God Within certain intellectual circles it has long been fashionable to announce that the Christian concept of God is outdated. Modern science (or psychology or philosophy), so we are told, has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is an unnecessary hypothesis (or an illusion or an incoherent notion). Today’s liberal theology, not yet willing to completely abandon the idea of God, stammers that well, yes, the human race has outgrown the God worshiped by Christians and Jews for thousands of years. What we really need, it suggests, is to re-imagine a kinder, gentler deity, one more in tune with the reigning psycho-social paradigm. For such as these, the God of the Bible is a past-tense God. Meanwhile, some strands of conservative Christianity, rightly rejecting efforts to relegate God to the dustbin of history, focus so intently on the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the joy of heaven that God seems to be almost entirely future tense. Both groups would do well to recall that when Moses asked God’s name God replied, “I AM WHO I AM … This is my name forever” (Ex. 3:14-15). When Jesus told certain Jews “before Abraham was born, I am!” (John 8:58), their response was to pick up stones to stone him, for they correctly understood that Jesus had identified himself as the God who calls himself “I AM.” And in Revelation 1:8 God declares “I am the Alpha and the Omega … who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.” When we pray to “Our Father, who art in heaven,” we confess what Christians have always believed: God eternally exists. “When we position ourselves in God,” writes Hans Urs von Balthasar, “we say that all times are present to his eternity.” Both parts of his statement help us understand the significance of praying to the present-tense God. Our position in God To begin with von Balthasar’s second point, to say that “all times are present to [God’s] eternity” is to acknowledge that the God to whom we pray is present with us at every moment of our existence, wherever we are, whatever we are doing. Theologians speak of this attribute as God’s “omnipresence.” Although some find this doctrine troubling, God is no more constrained by our understanding of space than he is by our ideas about time. Just as the God whose name is “I AM” transcends our understanding of what it means “to be,” so his attributes of presence, knowledge and power immeasurably exceed our finite grasp of those concepts. What we can know, with absolute assurance, is that the One to whom we pray has always been, will always be, and is at this moment present to his people.
Yet although we are “in God,” and although we know that God is always present with us, there are times when God seems far away. Why is this so, and is there anything that we can do about it? Coming near to God Indeed there is. It is one thing to accept the intellectual proposition that God is always present everywhere. It is quite another to know the presence of God. That we are in God is God’s gift. We can do nothing to attain this status; we merely receive it as God’s gift. But once God has established this relationship with us, he gives us tremendous latitude about where we position ourselves relative to him. Just as one can be physically close to a spouse while being emotionally distant, still legally married yet barely in relationship, so we can choose a position closer to or farther from the God in whom we live and move and have our being. Throughout each day we make any number of choices that affect our position in God. We may begin each day with prayer.We may set aside a block of time to read the Bible. We may choose to attend Sunday school, prayer meeting, and Bible study. Or we may sleep late, read the paper, surf the Internet or watch TV. Obviously, some of these activities are likely to leave us closer to God than others. That we do not always feel close to God does not mean that we are no longer in Christ. Our feelings must never be allowed to trump the facts of our faith. But feeling far from God may well mean that there are aspects of our relationship with God that need our attention. “Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” Paul instructs the Philippians. “Come near to God,” says James “and he will come near to you.” The art of knowing God “Precepts,” writes Simone Weil, “are not given for the sake of being practiced, but practice is prescribed in order that precepts may be understood.” Coming near to God and continuing to work out our salvation exemplify precepts that cannot be fully understood apart from their practice. Only because we are already in Christ can we obey the command to draw near to God. Only as we work out our salvation do we learn why we are called to do so. The skills we acquire by study and experience progressively enhance our study and experience of God. And here a wonderful linguistic synergy emerges. “Art” is a rarely used form of the verb “to be.” In the Lord’s Prayer, this form reminds us that God is, and that God is always present with us. But “art” is also “skill acquired by experience, study, or observation.” And there is an art to experiencing the presence of God. In the devotional classic The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence notes that “when we are faithful to keep ourselves in His holy presence, and set Him always before us … by often repeating these acts, they become habitual, and the presence of God rendered as it were natural to us.” One of the best ways to keep ourselves in God’s holy presence is to pray, to converse with God (which means both to talk and to listen) throughout the day, to pay attention to God’s presence with us each of in our daily activities. Cultivating the habit of attending to God in all that we do is a practice commended by the saints of the Church, from Paul to the present. “Absolutely unmixed attention,” writes Weil, “is prayer.” Of course, giving undivided attention to anyone or anything does not come naturally to most of us. We are easily distracted by an endless barrage of baubles that have conditioned our attention to flit about in constant search of novel stimulation. One way to break our addiction to novelty is to pray the Lord’s Prayer slowly, focusing intently on every word, even such archaic verbs as “art.” To pray the Lord’s Prayer even once a day with utterly undivided attention is, I suspect, a discipline mastered by few. But it is a skill we can acquire, an experience that is open to us, a practice that would aid us in the art of knowing God. |
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