Full Text for Confessions 2- Volume 29 - Why Did Luther Include the Lord's Prayer in the Small Catechism? (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN CONFESSIONS LC2 29 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 800 825 5234 www.captionfirst.com *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> JOSH: I'm intrigued by the fact that Luther included the Lord's Prayer in the catechism. What does Luther teach us about the use of the Lord's Prayer? Why did Luther feel it was important to include in the catechism? >> DR. KOLB: If you want a purely historical answer to your question, Josh, Luther included it because it was there in the catechism of the Middle Ages. But, of course, we know that he discarded the Ave Maria. And so he could have theoretically substituted something else on prayer. But these are the Lord's words. And Luther stresses, especially in the large catechism, that the Lord's Prayer brings with it the command of our Lord. When you pray, pray like this. But it also has the promise of the Lord. In addition to that, Luther regarded the Lord's Prayer not just as a prayer to be repeated but as a kind of agenda for prayer. The Lord's Prayer doesn't, of course, teach us how to give thanks. That's another matter in the Bible. And Luther worked hard to teach his own children and other children how to give thanks. The Lord's Prayer doesn't include the complaints, the sense of woe that comes through some of the Psalms that teach us how to pray too. But what the Lord's Prayer does is teach us how to ask for the things that are most important and how to place ourselves in the larger community of prayer, the community of God's church. So what we have in the Lord's Prayer is a suggestion that we could use, if we wanted to, each day as a kind of outline for our own prayers. We could tuck certain concerns into the first petition, other concerns into the second petition, and so on and so forth. But, in addition, we have in these few words the model of our trust's expression of its desire to place our hands ourselves in the hands of the heavenly Father. And so, to learn these words, as to learn many words from the liturgy, from the hymns, from our catechism. But to learn these words is to give ourselves a tool when thought runs out, when at some point or other because of an accident or illness, we simply don't have the mental energy to say anything else to God. I remember a man who was in a hospital bed, had been in a hospital bed for six or eight weeks without being able to communicate. And I visited his hospital room regularly because his wife was usually there and I wanted to encourage her. But I knew that the man himself was beyond encouragement because he hadn't been able to feed himself. He hadn't been able to talk or really to respond at all. And so he was lying there with his hands folded on the bed. And, as I went over and said to him, "John, let us pray," I wasn't really saying it to John because I knew John couldn't hear me. No, John's hands weren't like that. His hands were like this. The one was paralyzed. The other was still able to move. And I went to John and was praying really to have a prayer with his wife since he couldn't hear me. And I said, "John, let us pray. Our Father who art in heaven" and John's hand moved to be folded in prayer. From all the signs we had, John couldn't pray anymore. But John could pray. John knew the words. They were part of the way his faith had constituted his very being. And in that moment, though he couldn't turn to God perhaps in any other way that we could trace, at least consciously, he could come to the Lord with the Lord's Prayer. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***