Trying not to babble...

Well, it didn't take me long to start missing days, did it?

Anyway, today's a doozy, since the Gospel reading includes the Our Father. I'm just going to go line by line and see what happens.

Our Father who art in heaven,

Okay, so how many times have I heard the importance of the first-person plural pronoun emphasized? People love to point out that this is a collective prayer (and I'm sure that must be appealing to neo-Marxists).
I'm not really sure I want to tackle the very significant nature of God as Father just before dinner either.
What does strike me a little differently looking at this line as the editor's break it up, however, is that the first utterance of the Our Father is a profession of faith in the mere existence of God. God is...and more to the point, He is, in an essential way, someplace that is not here.
Sure, God is omnipresent. God is "everywhere." But not in the same way that the Father is in Heaven.
This, I think, is crucial for reclaiming the opening line from an atheist, collectivist mindset.
When we say God, we really do mean a Being who exists apart from us.
We don't pray to "Our Father who are in our hearts" or "Our Father who art in us." This would become to close to seeing God as some manifestation of ourselves, as if God were made in our image rather than us being made in His. Of course, God does exist in us, but that isn't the whole picture. He isn't just imminent; He is transcendent.

hallowed be thy name,

It's also kind of peculiar that God bothers to have a name. He doesn't have to have a name mind you. It's not like He needs people to be able to identify Him on a personal level. Naming is usually a tool of the superior to be able to classify, identify, and organize the superior. The first man gets to name the animals...they don't get to name him. And we only usually use names when there is more than one of something. Adam and Eve are simply "the man" and "the woman" for the most part of their story. If Adam were the only man, he'd never really have to be called Adam.

Obviously, I'm not suggesting that the fact that God has a name suggests there are other gods beside Him (although scholars say that the very earliest Hebrews might not quite have approached monotheism as the idea that only one god exists...it was more a matter of only worshipping one god and rejecting all of the others). That being said, God, in His usual God way, goes beyond necessity. He allows Himself to have name, even though He doesn't really need one.

thy Kingdom come,
thy will be done,

For me, these two lines are curious. If the coming of the Kingdom ultimately serves as the Eschaton, Armageddon, the Second Coming in Glory, this makes sense.
But if the coming of the Kingdom is meant in the sense of extending the Kingdom on the presently broken Earth, this seems to have less to do with God taking action and more to do with us taking action.
We are the ones who are supposing to be doing God's will, so these two lines are really about us conforming, submitting ourselves to God's plan so that we might act in accordance with it.
We still need to pray for this because, after all, none of us are really able to do this on our own.
When we say this, we are aligning ourselves with God and hoping that He will strengthen us to do His will.

on earth as it is in heaven.

Is this then a call to change our attitudes about God's will? I can't imagine the angels and the saints begrudging serving God in Heaven, or struggling with their own desires to accomplish whatever He has them doing up there.
God doesn't want servants who do their duty; He wants a creation that fulfills its purpose with joy.

Give us this day our daily bread;

This seems especially poignant given our current economic crisis...although I'm always a bit worried by the use of the understood "You" in this line. The way it is punctuated in English makes (and the lack of a subject in the sentence) creates an imperative form. It sounds like we are issuing demands of God.

and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us;

I don't like that comma. With the comma, the editor creates a caesura, a break between the two thoughts. It sounds like we are demanding forgiveness...and, oh, by the way, we'll try to get around to paying some of that forgiveness forward. I'd like to drop that comma so that we have a more conditional statement: Forgive us as (i.e. in the same manner that) we forgive others.

This seems more in keeping with the Gospel lines that follow the Our Father:

If you forgive men their transgressions,
your heavenly Father will forgive you.
But if you do not forgive men,
neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.

The more conditional version makes it sound less like we are making demands, and more like we understand how our actions have a degree of potency in our own fates. This goes along with my thoughts on the previous lines where God's will being done is ultimately our own responsibility.

I think what I've realized more this time through is that the Our Father isn't just about asking God for His assistance. It's partly about pledging ourselves to do God's will so that we become the answers to our own prayers.

This isn't simply a matter of the Franklin's extra-biblical motto: "God helps those who help themselves." Or, perhaps it is, but only if we really invoke the plural third person of Franklin's quote.
Franklin's motto is about individuals taking responsibility for their own actions -- doing things for their individual selves rather than waiting for Divine intervention. Forgiving others isn't just about insuring our own forgiveness from God. Forgiving others is about bringing a taste of God's forgiveness to others.

That initial "Our" comes back to mind.

Just as we are to bring a taste of God's forgiveness to others, we are to bring the Kingdom and God's will to one another.

How often is it that a person is the answer to the prayer we had...and how more often would that happen if more people were pledging themselves to God's will? And how often is it that we then, even if unconsciously, are the answers to others prayers?

In a way, I think I've just proven that I am, in fact, God's gift to humanity.

...but so are you.

and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.

Ah, but lest I get too confident in my new purpose as God's gift to humanity, Jesus throws in a monkey wrench.

Avoiding temptation and liberation from evil -- real evil, not just general human naughtiness -- are not things for which we can rely on ourselves or each other.

There is real evil out there -- malevolent forces beyond man. We really do need God to protect us from those. There is no corresponding force of human agency at this point. There is no, deliver us from evil as we deliver others from evil. We can't. We are, as sinners limited by our now fallen bodies, essentially vulnerable to the diabolic unless God protects us.

So the Our Father is 1) a reminder of God's existence as something that extends beyond us, 2) a call to arms and a reminder of our own agency in God's plan of Salvation, and 3) a reminder of our own limitations.

Comments

[Akh Ari]

You are quite right that it is an imperative and quite right that to say such a thing knowingly and on purpose requires great audacity. That is why in the Mass this prayer is introduced with the words "Praeceptis salutaribus moniti et divina institutione formati, audemus dicere:"

[Lindsay]

Your comments on the imperative tone of the petitions of the Lord's Prayer remind me of something I tried to explain to my kids last week. In many cases, when we say something that sounds like a question, we really mean it as a command. When you ask your dinner companion, "Will you pass me the salt?" you don't expect her to say, "No." You want her to give you the salt. In a similar way, when we demand that the Father give us our daily bread, I think we're still recognizing that he has every right to refuse us if he so chooses.

Language is complicated.