Something new...

It never ceases to surprise me how it is that a reader can discover something new in a text.  Of course this is most certainly true with the Living Word, because it is living and active, creative and performative.  But this can happen with any text, really.  Tonight, it happened for me in Divine Service Setting One (DS1).

I miss ... truly miss ... Divine Service Setting Three (DS3).  I miss every bit of it, the words, the tune, the familiarity, the comfort.  Especially I miss the Nunc Dimittis.  However, while listening to the spoken Service of the Sacrament after Evening Prayer held at my church tonight, I discovered something new in the text of DS1.

Most often, when it comes to leading the congregation in praying the Lord's Prayer, the text coming before it begins something along the lines of "...we are bold to pray...." However, in the DS1 setting, the words read: "...teach us to pray...."

I am so used to the chanting.  And, in the case of DS1, I am used to being lost in the notes, trying to match them to the words that I do not really hear the words, except those which I do know, the Words of Institution.  Perhaps, I heard the different wording precisely because I was not anticipating the beloved notes of the Verba.

I liked those words better.  Truly, I do.  Even though it has been three years now, I remain in utter awe of what Luther wrote in Part III of the Large Catechism in the Christian Book of Concord regarding the meaning of the Lord's Prayer.  In Part IV, when Luther writes of the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, he declares: "It is, in short, so full of consolation and grace that heaven and earth cannot understand it" (39).  To me, the same could be said for The Lord's Prayer.

I have only begun to learn the smallest fraction of what God gives us to pray in this magnificent prayer.  Sometimes, I feel as if I understand not a word.  So, when I heard/read/discovered that in DS1 we are asking God to teach us this prayer as we pray it, my whole being thrummed with the rightness of that supplication.

To me, it made praying those Words even more of a refuge than they have come to be for me.  And, again, though I understand not why, something deep within was sated by being with Christian brothers and sisters as I prayed them.


Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief!