First things first

O my goodness, only two months till Christmas.

Funny how our sense of time is structured: “Two more months till Christmas day”, “Three years since Mom died”, “Four more days till school’s out”, and the big one I suppose, “I wonder how much longer I will live”. It’s that old Grandfather Clock song and the ticking crocodile in Peter Pan. Something out there is keeping track, tick-tocking our life seconds away. Mostly we try not to think about it, or maybe we just have more pressing things to think about, but the fact of our mortality shapes everything.

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, "Oh, why can't you remain like this for ever!" This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end. – Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

It all sounds rather bleak, but it isn’t really; just the way things are. We’re temporal beings and life is fleeting.

Surely the people are grass.

The grass withers and the flowers fall,

but the word of our God stands forever." Isaiah 40:7-8

There may well be something that's eternal, but it isn’t me. So, if my little life matters, it's only as it relates to that whole, eternal thing. And the orientation of my life to that bigger something is part of what prayer is about.

The first part of the Lord’s Prayer is all about God, or more precisely, “Our Father in heaven”. This is Jesus’ way of reminding us, and encouraging us to remember, that we are contingent beings. That is, we come from, and exist for, something greater than we are: God’s holiness and the glory of his name, his kingdom and his will. And one of the great dangers of prayer is that it can easily reverse this priority and put us at the centre where we don’t belong.

I think this concern is the true source of much of the unease most people feel about those “pious folk” who delight in telling stories of how “I prayed for a parking space and got one right by the door. It was, admittedly, the handicapped space, but the sign had fallen down so they couldn’t ticket me. God is sooooooooo good!” Or, as a wealthy, Christian business man once told me. “I prayed for a house in the Okanagan and God led me to the perfect place. It was way under-priced because the man who’d owned it had died suddenly and left his widow desperate for cash.” When I asked him if he’d considered the possibility that God had intended him to pay her a fair price rather than taking advantage of her situation and, thus, become the answer to her prayer, rather than her being the answer to his, he was really quite annoyed with me. Go figure.

The first half of the Lord’s Prayer is about God because prayer is mostly about what he wants, and only secondarily about what we want. He is not a cosmic bellhop who exists to see that our stay on earth is all we’d hoped it would be.

Know that the LORD is God.

It is he who made us, and we are his ;

we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Psalm 100:3

And so our first priority in prayer is always: "'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Matt 6:9-10