From the Archives: We Never Pray Alone (Part I)
From Bad Wilsnack, Stadtpfarrkirche St. Nikolaus (1460/1470). Photo: CVMA Deutschland Potsdam/Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften; Holger Kupfer
The following article is the first part of the Rev. Kurt Reinhardt’s keynote address at the St. Mark’s Conference held at Our Saviour Lutheran Church in Baltimore on April 24–25, 2023, which may also be viewed here. This article appeared in Vol. 31, No. 7, Trinity 2023.
We Never Pray Alone: Part I
Rev. Kurt Reinhardt
Standing in front of the used religious book section in the Value Village thrift store in a town near my home in Canada, I was amazed (although perhaps should not have been) at how many books there were on prayer amongst the discarded volumes on various forms of spirituality. They were, for the most part, of the typical evangelical variety directing their readers to the life-changing power of truly personal and heartfelt prayer. Some touched on the power of communal prayer. Others, like the Prayer of Jabez volumes, promised a surefire way to guaranteed worldly happiness and success if you followed their tenets.
As I stood there perusing the volumes, I thought of Luther’s comment at the beginning of his Personal Prayer Book that “Among the many harmful books and doctrines which are misleading and deceiving Christians and give rise to countless false beliefs, I regard the personal prayer books as by no means the least objectionable.”[1] Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, indeed! Undoubtedly, Luther would have been appalled by what he saw on the shelves. Why? Because without exception all these books approached prayer from the perspective of the Law. They, like the books of Luther’s day, were either about how to use prayer to appease God and get what you want or how you could use prayer to change yourself and others into what you wanted them and yourself to be. Prayer in them was all about what we do rather than about God making us a part of what He does. Sadly, these books do what sinful man has been doing ever since Eden—making everything about little old me.
The fact that there were so many books about prayer on those thrift store shelves is evidence enough that people have a desire to pray, which, I would argue, is inborn in us from our creation in the image of God in the beginning. The fact that there were so many of them there also points to the fact that since our fall into sin, we struggle with knowing how to pray. The fact that so many of these books professed to be Christian in some way indicates clearly that many are still standing with the disciples before the Lord Jesus asking Him to teach them to pray. The fact that so many of these books are being written two thousand years after Jesus answered the question is a clear indication that many of us are still having a hard time hearing His answer. Finally, the fact that all these books have found their way into the used book section of the thrift store instead of being treasured spiritual classics on people’s bedside tables is also a clear indication that our own answers are not working because they are not the Lord’s answer, nor do they flow out of it.
Two thousand years ago the disciples asked the prayer question, and the Lord answered it with the words that faithful Christians have prayed for the past two millennia and which they will be praying until all its petitions are eternally answered when Christ returns in glory to raise the dead and conclude His paschal recreation of the world. The Lord’s answer to the earnest petition of the twelve, “Lord, teach us to pray,” was not a 12 or 24 step program to purposeful, powerful, plentiful, pleasing, positivity-producing prayer that gets results but the seven simple petitions of what traditional Christians call the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus gave them a prayer to pray, which is in part why it is rightly called the Lord’s Prayer since the Lord gave it. But He does not just give them any prayer to pray; He gives them His own prayer, which is the profound truth behind its title as the Lord’s Prayer. It is the Lord’s Prayer because the Lord gave it, but it is most perfectly the Lord’s Prayer because it is Jesus’ own personal prayer that He invites us to pray with Him. This truth is why Luther in response to all those personal prayer books of his day said, “And I am convinced that when a Christian rightly prays the Lord’s Prayer at any time or uses any portion of it as he may desire, his praying is more than adequate.” [2]
More than adequate, indeed! Could we need any answer to the request “Teach us to pray?” other than the one Christ gives? Do we need any other prayer than the prayer that He has given us to pray? Could I not at this point simply say there is nothing more that needs to be said be done? Indeed, I could and not leave you any poorer for it because when it comes right down to it, the Lord’s Prayer is all that you need, and the praying of it is all that you need to do. For many, that would seem to be far too minimalistic and even bordering on heresy to say, “What? We just need to pray the Lord’s Prayer? And that’s it? You’ve got to be kidding. But to say, we just need to pray the Lord’s Prayer is like saying that we just need to keep the Ten Commandments.” No, there is no “just” praying, for when it comes to the Lord’s Prayer, that’s another kind of praying alltogether. Indeed, there can be a mindless rattling it off as Luther complained about in his day, but that is not praying it, not as Christ gave it to us to pray it, in any case. No, praying the Lord’s Prayer is never something that we just do or ever really fully do. From the time we first receive it at our Baptism through to the end of our earthly lives, we are ever learning to pray it, as Jesus is ever giving it to us to pray, as He is ever teaching us to pray it. The life of prayer into which we are baptized is after all the prayer life of Jesus, which is completely encapsulated in the prayer that He prays and gives us to pray.
The Lord’s Prayer is the sum of all Christian prayer. It is Christ’s prayer that He ever prays for us on our behalf and in our stead, as it is the prayer that He ever prays with us and that we pray with Him. The Lord’s Prayer is what makes our prayer profoundly personal, and yet never really private, because it unites our prayer with the personal prayer of the Son of God. Some might object that this makes the prayer impersonal because it is not my own private prayer in my own words with my own thoughts and feelings. Sadly, some even choose not to pray the Lord’s Prayer, preferring what they call “heart” prayer, as if the prayer of the sinless heart of the Son of God could ever be deficient compared to what comes out of the sinful, rock-hard thing that beats in my chest. No, when praying to the God whose thoughts are not our thoughts and our ways not His ways, is it not better to leave my own thoughts and ways behind and repentantly speak His language, so to say, that through praying with the Son His mind and heart might also be formed in me? God, after all, is not going to do or give something that goes against His thoughts and ways. Unlike us, He is true to Himself to the utter depths of His being. He cannot, will not, and does not act in contradiction to Himself since to do so would be His undoing, an impossibility for the One who was, is, and ever shall be.
The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer of the new man created by God in the waters of Holy Baptism, which is no small part of the reason why, with the pastor’s hand on their head, it is prayed over and with those who are being baptized. Baptism into the life, death, and resurrection of Christ as it unites the baptized with Christ Himself is God’s ultimate answer to the Lord’s Prayer, an answer that will unfold throughout the life of the newborn child of God until it is prayed with and over them again as their Baptism concludes in their departure from this valley of sorrow unto God in heaven, to await their Baptism’s fulfillment and the fullness of God’s answer to the Lord’s Prayer in their resurrection. Baptism answers every petition of the Lord’s Prayer even as it makes it truly and completely the prayer of the baptized. Baptism makes God my dear Father in heaven even as it makes me His dear child, as it makes me one with His only-begotten, beloved Son in whom He is well pleased. Baptism hallows God’s name in my life as it places God’s name upon me and sanctifies me by it. Through Baptism God’s kingdom comes to me as it extends Christ’s reign over me and delivers me out of the kingdom of darkness into His marvelous light. Through Baptism God’s will is done for me on earth as it is in heaven as He saves me from sin, death, and hell by uniting my life to Christ. Through Baptism God gives me my daily bread as He sustains and feeds my life as a child of God with the bread of heaven—Jesus—as Baptism gives me a place at the Lord’s table on earth and in heaven. Through Baptism God forgives all my trespasses as He washes them away with the blood of His Son even as Baptism authorizes and empowers me to forgive as I have been forgiven. Baptism keeps me from falling into temptation as it links my life to the One who has been tempted in every way that I am except without sin and makes His victory over it all my own. Finally, Baptism delivers me from evil as it unites my life to Christ and sets me under the care of the holy angels to keep me in all my ways and deliver me out of sin and death by bearing me home at last to heaven.
Baptism and the whole sacramental life that flows out of it truly and fully answers every petition of the Lord’s Prayer as He prays it for me, even as it makes that prayer my own. As I pray the Lord’s Prayer with Jesus after being baptized, what is personal to the Lord is made personal to me in my baptismal life in Him. For Baptism is the true one-flesh union of persons that is exemplified by the joining of husbands and wives in marriage. In Baptism my person is united with the person of the Son of God as He makes His flesh my flesh and my flesh His own through the Word that He speaks to me and over me in the font. He becomes my head and I become flesh of His flesh and bone of His bone. My Baptism fulfills and realizes the Lord’s praying of the opening “Our” of His prayer even as it forever saves me from coming before God in the nakedness of a solitary “I.” For truly as a baptized child of God, I never pray alone; I always pray with Christ as Christ always prays with me. Even when I go, as Jesus advises me, to pray in secret to my Father who sees in secret, my prayer is not really private as my person is baptismally bound before the Father to the Person of His Son. Officiating recently at my son’s wedding has given me new insight into this whole baptismal reality in prayer. My son’s marriage has forever changed my relationship with a beautiful young woman named Anika, who has become his wife. While I know her as Anika, a distinct person, I cannot see or hear her without seeing her or hearing her in connection with my son as his wife, and she cannot see or hear me without seeing or hearing me as Eduard’s father. Surprisingly, I have also noticed that I cannot see or hear my son anymore without seeing or hearing him as the husband of Anika. While I still know him as Eduard, even when I’m alone with him, I do not see or hear him apart from her. Likewise, I’ve noticed that he for his part, no longer comes before me apart from her. He always comes to me and speaks to me as Anika’s husband. With my son and his wife, there is no longer an “I” that is not enriched by the mysterious one-fleshed “our” of their life together. So, too, with the Son of God there is no “I” before the Father that is not enriched by His mysterious one-fleshed union with His baptismal Bride the Church and, so, with each individual person baptized into Him. After your Baptism into Christ, you cannot be seen or heard by God without being seen or heard in connection with His Son and, incredible as it may seem, the Son no longer can be seen or heard by His Father without being seen or heard in connection with you.
This is the great mystery of that beautiful Gospel first person plural possessive pronoun that is on the lips of the Word made flesh from the moment that He unites Himself with our humanity in the Incarnation. That little word “our” flows out of the depths of the mysterious truth of the Son’s uniting the divine and human natures in His one Person. As the Son joins His divine nature to human flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, He joins His divine nature to her flesh, to the Church’s flesh, and to your flesh and my flesh. He makes Himself one in that moment with all who will be made baptismally one with Him. As the Word made flesh, He no longer prays to the Father as a solitary “I” but as a divine Bridegroom forever united to the Bride of humanity. The profound mystery of the collective “Our” that begins the prayer Christ gives us to pray is the beautiful Gospel truth that we pray with Him and that He prays with us. The unfathomable reality behind the Incarnation and each Christian’s Baptism is that the Son of God prayed “Our Father” and gave it to them to pray with each one of them in mind. When the Lord told the disciples, “Pray then like this, Our Father in heaven,” the mind-blowing reality is that He begins with that “Our” not only with the Church catholic as a whole in mind, but also with each individual baptized child of God in mind—yes, with you in mind. The Lord’s “Our” includes the thousands of thousands of the Church of all times and places as it includes just the two of the individual Christian and Christ. This, after all, is the transcendent reality of the Lord’s Word, that all that He says and does He does and says to all, even as at the same time all that He says and does He does and says personally for and to you. Christ dies for all even as Christ dies personally for you. Christ preaches, teaches, and speaks to all even as He personally preaches, teaches, and speaks to you. And so Christ prays “Our Father” for all even as He prays “Our Father” for you. He invites all into His “Our” even as He personally invites you into it at the same time.
This gathering and binding together of Christ to humanity and of each individual Christian to Christ and one another is the work of the Holy Spirit who is the love of God. He comes upon the Blessed Virgin Mary as the love of God that binds humanity to the Son as He unites the eternal Son to our human nature as He conceives Jesus in her womb. The Spirit is the love of God that makes the Bridegroom one with the flesh of the Bride in the bridal chamber of the Virgin’s womb. The Spirit is the love of God who binds the Bride and every individual member of her to the Bridegroom in the sacred bridal chamber of the baptismal font. The love of God that is the Spirit holds fast the Bridegroom to His Bride so that they are no longer two but one flesh; He creates the “Our” of their life and so their prayer together. The Spirit makes the “Our” on the lips of the Son of God and the “Our” on our lips a one-fleshed reality. He binds the Bride to the Groom making His name her own in the font and making the Groom’s father her Father and His God her God. He gives the Bride direct access to the Father through the Son, so that she need not ask anything of the Son, but can ask of the Father directly in the Son’s name that the Spirit has made her own through the union that He has created between her and the Son (John 16:23). Although as her husband and great high priest, the Son ever makes intercession for her, praying out His prayer with her and for her at the right hand of the Father, He does not need to ask on her behalf, because the Father loves her on account of the love that the Spirit has given her for His Son (John 16:26–27). The Spirit opens the lips of the Bride and everyone baptized into her life with the Son to pray “Abba, Father, who art in heaven.” The Spirit moves her to pray it without ceasing, a truth that is plain in the fact that as Christians pray the Lord’s Prayer the world over morning and evening as the earth spins around the sun, there is not a moment when the “Abba, Father” is not going up to heaven from the lips of the Bride. Even when individual Christians are struggling and too weak to speak it, He causes it to rise as incense out of the depths of their being with groans too deep for words. As Jean Pierre de Caussade, an eighteenth-century French Roman Catholic priest puts it in the book The Sacrament of the Present Moment,
His (God’s) purpose includes and contains the substance of that incomparable prayer, dictated by Jesus, which, as ordained by God and the holy Church, we recite aloud several times a day, but which we also repeat every moment from the bottom of our heart as we rejoice in all we do and suffer in obedience to his word. What the lips take many syllables, sentences, and time to pronounce, the heart is really saying all the time. [3]
By the Spirit we are truly praying without ceasing. God is working out our salvation in us whether we realize it or not, but it is the great high calling of the Bride to be an active participant in the divine life, giving voice to the thoughts of the Spirit that are the undercurrent of her heart and mind. As de Caussade says, truly by the Spirit Christ is ever praying His prayer within me as a baptized child of God, but when the Lord opens my lips to declare them with my mouth, He manifests what is going on within me and makes me an active participant in it.
Hans Urs von Balthasar in his book on prayer unpacks the beautiful openness of our access to God in Christ with what he calls one of revelation’s key words, parrhesia. He writes that parrhesia has to do with “frankness of speech, including ‘openness to truth’” and that
Truth itself presupposes the element of openness, of non-concealment, of sincere self-communication and manifestation. In Holy Scripture, however, God Himself is the prime instance of non-concealment. He steps forward out of His “native” invisibility and unapproachability; He “shines forth” (as Ps 79:2 says, using the word parrhesia). . . . But we can only grasp the parrhesia of God in the parrhesia which He gives us, the elect, the redeemed, who have been raised up to be full citizens of heaven. This parrhesia on our part is the open, unconstrained and childlike approach to the Father, neither ashamed nor fearing shame. We come to Him with heads held high, as those who have an innate right to speak. We may look into the Father’s face without fear . . . [4]
C. S. Lewis in his Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, also speaks of this making known both on God’s part and our own. He begins with the omniscience of God with respect to each of us, saying, “We are always completely, and therefore equally, known to God. That is our destiny whether we like it or not.” [5] This knowledge, however, for Lewis is in the category of things.
We are, like earthworms, cabbages, and nebulae, objects of Divine knowledge. This changes, he says, when we (a) become aware of the fact—the present fact, not the generalization—and (b) assent with all our will to be so known, then we treat ourselves, in relation to God, not as things but as persons. We have unveiled. Not that any veil could have baffled His sight. The change is in us. The passive changes to the active. Instead of merely being known, we show, we tell, we offer ourselves to view. To put ourselves thus on a personal footing with God could, in itself and without warrant, be nothing but presumption and illusion. But we are taught that it is not; that it is God who gives us that footing. For it is by the Holy Spirit that we cry “Father.” By unveiling, by confessing our sins and “making known” our requests, we assume the high rank of persons before Him. And He, descending, . . . reveals Himself as Person: or reveals that in Him which is Person. . . . God is in some measure to a man as that man is to God. The door in God that opens is the door that he knocks at. . . . He speaks as “I” when we truly call Him “Thou.” [6]
Lewis’ last point can be lost on modern ears where the archaic English “Thou” is seen as a formal lofty form of address rather than as it was once used as an equivalent to the informal German “du” used for close family and friends, as opposed to the formal, more distant German “Sie” or English “You” used for superiors and acquaintances. The Son of God has made known His Father as a Person to us, as the Father has made Himself known as a Person to us through His Son, as the Son has united His life baptismally to ours and brought us into His Father’s house and given us a place at His Father’s table—giving us, in the words of von Balthasar, “parrhesia,” or in Lewis’ words, interpersonal access to God.
And so, every time that the Lord opens our lips to pray “our Father,” the whole reality of the Incarnation with all its incomprehensible gifts baptismally bestowed on us is manifested before us in all of its stark beauty as it is lived out in the present moment that it is spoken. I know that the “Our” so often roles off the tongue without much thought for most of us most of the time. It is a little word that is quickly spoken and soon left behind as we go on to the meat of the petitions, but the truth is that with that little “Our” we are giving voice to and being incorporated into the mystery that was hidden in God from before the ages, the fullness of which we will not see or know until we are perfected in our recreation in the Resurrection. We need to know that that little word “Our” that so easily and so quickly rolls off the tongue causes the fullness of the heavens and all the powers therein, the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, to gasp in awe and rejoice in triumph, even as it causes hell to tremble and makes Satan and his angels groan in despair. Indeed, that little “Our” is anything but little; it is as big and as great a word that we can speak, as it is impregnated with the fullness of Jesus, the Word made flesh, and what He is and means to and for us. That “Our” spoken at the beginning of the day as it was spoken at the beginning of our lives in the baptismal font puts the present of that day into the eternal mystery of the Incarnation of the Word, Christ for us and Christ with us before the Father, just as it as it is spoken at the end of the day and at the fulfillment of our Baptism as we close our eyes on this world, Christ for us and Christ with us through the night that leads to our dawning resurrection. So too, as it is spoken throughout the day in any time of need. Some six years ago it was led by my wife when my family prayed it around me as I lay on my bedroom floor after a massive stroke suddenly left me completely paralyzed on my left side. Christ for me and Christ with me before the Father, Christ for them and Christ with them before the Father, and so Christ for us and Christ with us before the Father, in the shock and fear of that moment and what it could and did mean for me and for them. It remains the clearest memory that I have of that traumatic morning when my world was turned upside down and fell apart until Christ in His mercy righted it and put it back together again. I can still hear the voice of my wife saying, “We need to pray” and then her and my four children saying, “Our Father . . .” In that moment, in that great and mighty “Our,” the fullness of the Incarnation was being lived out for and with me and for and with them as they prayed it with and for me.
Part Two to Follow Next Week.
Notes
[1] AE 43:11.
[2] AE 43:12.
[3] Jean Pierre De Caussade, The Sacrament of the Present Moment. (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1989), 78.
[4] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer (San Francisco: IgnatiusPress, 1986), 45.
[5] Clive Staples Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 32.
[6] Lewis, Letter to Malcolm, 33.