THE LORD'S PRAYER

On the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists connected with Osama Bin Laden hijacked United Flight 93, bound from Newark to San Francisco.  One of the passengers, 32-year-old Todd Beamer from Cranbury, New Jersey, an account manager for Oracle, reached a GTE operator on the Airfone.  The operator, overwhelmed by the call, transferred it to a customer supervisor.  Beamer told the supervisor, Lisa Jefferson, that three people had taken over the plane, two with knives who had gone up into the cockpit and a third standing in the first class cabin with what appeared to be a bomb strapped around his waist with a red belt.  During the call, he learned from other passengers who had used their Airfones that other hijacked planes had been flown into buildings that morning.   Beamer, who taught Sunday school, told the operator he wanted her to recite the Lord’s Prayer with him.  They recited it together.  He told the operator from that point on he was going to have to go on faith because they were talking about jumping the hijacker in the front of the cabin.  He turned away from the phone to talk to someone else and she heard him say: “You ready?  OK.  Let’s roll.”   The operator heard screams, commotion – then silence.  The plane, which had been diverted towards Washington, D.C., crashed in western Pennsylvania, killing all on board.  Beamer and others had evidently stormed the hijackers, who may have crashed the plane rather than lose control of it.

So we pray the Lord’s Prayer often – in normal times and in extremis.  We pray the Lord’s Prayer so often it can be hard to think about it, to parse it, to follow its sense.  It’s easy to recite it by rote.  Its familiarity is soothing.  Sometimes, I confess, I use it as a soporific if I have trouble getting to sleep.

But it is far more than a familiar anodyne.  It is the prayer Jesus Christ taught us – and it sums up, in a handful of verses, the essence of all of Jesus’ teaching.

What can we learn from these few lines, about God, about Jesus, about our relation to God?

Questions

When did you learn the Lord’s Prayer?

How often do you say the Lord’s Prayer?

Have you said the Lord’s Prayer in a moment of crisis?  In a hospital?

Have you thought about what each phrase in the prayer means?