The Lord's Prayer

O cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration.
Soften the ground of our being and carve out a space within us where your Presence can abide.
Fill us with your creativity so that we may be empowered to bear the fruit of your mission.
Let each of our actions bear fruit in accordance with our desire.
Endow us with the wisdom to produce and share what each being needs to grow and flourish.
Untie the tangled threads of destiny that bind us, as we release others from the entanglement of past mistakes.
Do not let us be seduced by that which would divert us from our true purpose, but illuminate the opportunities of the present moment.
For you are the ground and the fruitful vision, the birth, power and fulfillment, as all is gathered and made whole once again.
(The Nazarene Way of Essenic Studies ~ The Lord's Prayer ~ Translations from Aramaic, Origins and History of The Lord's Prayer).

I wandered into an interesting area today that I want to note here and explore further. I got to this fascinating prayer by clicking on a link in my blog to Westar Institute, Home of the Jesus Seminar, Dedicated to the advancement of religious literacy.  Eventually I found Rex A E Hunt's (Director, The Centre for Progressive Religious Thought, Canberra) May 2007 piece, THE ‘JESUS PRAYER’, JESUS NEVER PRAYED! I found this prayer in this article and used his footnote to find his source. As I arrived on the page, I hear a beautiful voice, saying Lord's prayer in Aramaic! Wow!

I have to mention that our church used a study during our stewardship campaign this year that had a prayer that ridiculed using lofty phrases to pray (or something like that). As I thought of using this prayer in church, I thought it might be taken the same way. I find it very beautiful and full of meaning.

New Language

I am slowly learning a new way of speaking about Jesus and the bible. I don't want to throw the baby (pun) out with the bath water. Marcus Borg, Bishop Spong, Bart Erman have helped me find the words to describe the reality of my faith. Thomas Sheehan has an interesting book, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986--electronic edition 2000) where he explains,

Catholic scholars now teach that the Gospels are not accurate "histories" of Jesus but religious testimonies produced by the second and third generations of Christians, whose faith that Jesus was their savior colored their memory of his days on earth. Thus, even though all Catholic biblical scholars believe that Jesus is God, they do not necessarily maintain that Jesus himself thought he was the divine Son of God, who had existed from all eternity as the Second Person of the Trinity.

I heard an interview with him on a Stanford University podcast and found his book online. I also found his 2006 audio course on iTunes on the Historical Jesus; I made a CD and listened to it several times during my commute. He is a little embarrassed that the host site, The Secular Web that is owned and operated by Internet Infidels Inc., who describe themselves as a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to promoting and defending a naturalistic worldview defined "the hypothesis that the natural world is a closed system, which means that nothing that is not a part of the natural world affects it."

The fact that I had to go to this kind of website demonstrates how hard it is to talk about our faith without being seen as one against belief in God. In my years in the Jesus movement (1969 to 73), I had a vague understanding that a theologian was someone who tried to destroy our faith in Jesus. LOL