And you think YOU work with great people. A few days ago I asked my colleague Dennis Smith, the LaDonna Kramer Meinders Professor of New Testament, if I could interview him for my blog. He’s too nice to say it or think it, but this is below his pay grade, people. He’s big time. He gets invited places where they give him fat honoraria to speak (er… I mean, I assume); and even though all I could offer was homemade blueberry pie and gratitude, he still agreed to be interviewed here and even hang around and answer questions as he’s able.

(He incidentally is married to Barbara McBride-Smith a storyteller who is enough of a big deal that she has her own Wikipedia entry. (She’s also lovely and nice and awesome.) Not surprisingly their son Adam McBride-Smith got the awesomeness genes, and he’s a singer-songwriter living in Paris and performing as one half of Half Seas Over whose album, by the by, I have on iTunes. All that is just to say, if by chance this blog is being followed by the person in the government whose job it is to designate who gets to ride on the escape pod to Mars when we’ve finally ruined the planet beyond all hope: The McBride-Smiths are people whose DNA you want, clearly.)

SARAH: I was hoping we could have a conversation about a Matthew 6:2-8. One of the things I’ve been blogging about lately is sanctimony from religious people, even on the Christian left (which is of course the people I know best, inasmuch as those are my people). I suppose I’d like to invite you, first, just to talk about the passage and whatever features you might like to talk about. I’ll roll with it, and ask follow-up questions.

DENNIS:
My first thought when I looked up the text you had chosen was: Oh, no! Why such a smarmy text as this? It sounds so pietistically sweet, almost a reverse hypocritical text. You could read it as, “don’t pray big bombastic prayers like the hypocrites, but instead pray in private — but pray for the same thing. The main thing is to keep it to yourself, and in so doing you can be really smug about it.” It’s all about appearance, not about content. Or at least that is what the text seems to be saying on the surface. Ugh! I had to dig myself out of that interpretation (you know, like digging through the pile looking for the pony?) and remind myself I am a scholar, by gum! I needed to look at it from another perspective. Interested?

SARAH:
Oh goodness, yes! “Interested” doesn’t even begin to get at it!

I also love how you put it: “The main thing is to keep it to yourself, and in so doing you can really be smug about it.”

That remark – and actually, this passage – reminds me of a conversation I had last night with a Facebook friend about a particular… well, genre, I guess it would be… of testimonial that I’ve seen in some modern liberal churches .

It goes like this: Someone has returned from visiting a country in the global south where s/he was doing relief work. In giving the presentation about hir work, s/he relates an anecdote about how s/he was invited over for dinner by a family who had so little. Long, lingering descriptions follow of the paltriness of this family’s resources. And yet! The family killed one of their few chickens (or, sometimes, maybe it’s a goat) to show that s/he (the relief worker) is an honored guest.

And it just builds and builds, rhetorically… How HARD it was for such a RICH PERSON as hirself to accept this gift, yet SOMEHOW (pause for effect) s/he was able to FIND IT WITHIN hirself to just eat the dinner.

And I always want to say: “Okay, but… then you came back and gave a long speech drawing attention to how gracious it was for YOU to accept their chicken. I mean, really, if I were your host, I’d be thinking, Look, just eat the chicken, wouldja? My point was to welcome you, not to get one of the leading roles in your own little morality play/personal crisis over here.”

I hope that wasn’t too much of a tangent. Anyway, I guess that brings us around to what you said: possible interpretations, and new interpretations. Um… are there any?

(And with that, my 2yo has managed to injure himself on the sofa. Take it, Dennis!)

DENNIS:
Yes, I like your parallel story. Because my second look at this text (after digging out of the layers and layers of piety) suggested I should title it: “It’s not all about you, dude!”

One of the basic rules of scholarly interpretation is “context, context, context.” When we take it out of context, we give it a surface reading and conclude that Matthew 6:2-8 is all about being more humble than thou. But notice how that reading is still self-centered.

One aspect of the context has to do with Matthew’s larger purpose, his overall themes and goals. I would suggest he had bigger fish to fry than simply promoting humility. One way to get at that is to notice the immediate context:

a) 6:1 introduces our text by setting forth the theme: “Don’t practice your piety for the purpose of making a big impression on others.” In other words, there is a larger and more important focus for “piety” than making oneself look more religious to others (aka self-centered religion).

b) 6:9-13 clarifies where the focus should be with the text we call “the Lord’s prayer.” But we have to read that prayer differently than we do customarily. Because we usually read it as a prayer about oneself (all about me and my needs). That is not what I think it is about.

Is this making any sense so far? If so, I will explain my reading of “the Lord’s prayer.” But be sure and tell me if I am getting too dense.

SARAH:
Oh, no, please go on! I can hardly even read the Lord’s Prayer without going into singsong Sunday School mode.

(Also – sorry for my delay in replying. I had to run to Reasors for a chicken.)

DENNIS:

(I hope you got the chicken. I amused myself by writing my next section in Word.)

So here is my next point. After the theme introduced earlier –”It’s not all about you,” — the next theme is: “Get with the program.” I think “the Lord’s prayer” sets forth “the program.” Here’s how I think that works:

In the Greek, which is the original language of Matthew, the prayer is nicely balanced in an ancient style that we call “chiasm.” This is a style in which a series of statements is then repeated in reverse order using different words, diagrammed as statement a, statement b, statement c; followed by statement c’ (paralleling “c”), statement b’, and statement a’.

(I hope I have not lost you yet, because this is really good stuff!)

When there is a statement “d” without a parallel, then it gives emphasis to that middle statement.

Here is how the prayer comes out according to that pattern (using my own translation):

Father in heaven:
a) May your name be sanctified --
   b) May your kingdom (or rule) come to be -
      c) May your will be done -
         d) As in heaven, so also on earth.
      c') Give us today the bread necessary for existence.
   b') Forgive our debts, in the same manner as we forgive our debtors.
a') Let us not wander into the realm of temptation - protect us from the evil one. 

Here is my interpretation:

1) In heaven, where God is,
      a) the holy name (which signifies the full power of the divine) is always kept holy;
      b) the rule of God is fully present;
      c) the will of God is fully followed.
2) The prayer is a request that the values of heaven so summarized be present on earth:
      a) where God's name is kept holy - there the evil one is kept at bay.
      b) where God's rule is present - there is where debts are all erased
[note: debt represents here a social schism between the haves and the have-nots].
      c) where God's will is done - there is where there will always be sufficient food for everyone.
3) Conclusion: it is not a prayer for "me and my needs" - it is a prayer for the renewal of the earth.

It fits the overall theme of the Sermon on the Mount, which begins with “You are the salt of the earth – You are the light of the world” and concludes with “you cannot serve God and mammon – seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness and you will have sufficient for all your needs (that is, where the kingdom of God is, there is the realm where all are cared for).”

Whew! Maybe this is too much. Does this sound like too much scholarly jargon? (PS I don’t know why my font changed — I do not mean to yell!)

SARAH: [changing font so Dennis is no longer yelling, which is hard for her to imagine happening]

So, if I understand you correctly, what I’ve learned to recite as “The Lord’s Prayer” is not actually a script, dictated by Jesus, that was given out with instructions to recite it JUST LIKE THIS so as to personally appease your Sky Daddy so that you can be a Good Person… unlike those yucky-bad-wrong people over there.

But, rather, it’s more like Jesus is narrated as saying “Hey, so you want to pray? Awesome. Here’s what you should be praying will happen. Pray that earth will be more like heaven — where God’s name is kept holy, where everyone has enough, and where everyone is reconciled. And here’s what you shouldn’t care about: Whether enough people are paying attention to how holy YOU are.

DENNIS:
You got it! It is so encouraging, and so rare, when my eggheady, convoluted musings actually appear to be understandable to someone else!

Another way to say it by the way is to interpret the Lord’s prayer in terms of other sayings in the Sermon on the Mount, such as: “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light” (6:22). This fits, in a subversive kind of way, with 6:3, “But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” That is to say, it should be second nature – the prayer is something more to be lived than to be repeated in a rote form.

SARAH:
As a last wrap-up I’d like to ask you to speculate about how/why this might matter (if at all) to three different hypothetical people:

For starters, how about the Christian who was taught, and currently believes, that the Lord’s Prayer is in fact a script directly handed down by Jesus, whose value lies in its capacity to make Holy Individuals, as opposed to Bad Individuals?

DENNIS:
First of all, the prayer is in the plural, not the singular (much of the rest of the sermon on the mount is in the plural also; Greek has a plural “you” whereas English does not, unless you use the southern “y’all.”). So it is about us, not about me. But in any case, perhaps the real point worth debating is what a holy individual looks like.

SARAH: How about the person who is not Christian and may have consciously rejected Christianity, but who has interactions with Christians which s/he does not always care for. In fact let’s say that this person is deeply, deeply skeptical of anything that even smacks of there being a Big Guy In The Sky?

DENNIS
If the Big Guy in the Sky is a Judgmental, angry God – then I am with you there. I like to think more of a God who is with the little people here. Matthew has a good text there again, “Where 2 or 3 are gathered in my name, I am there in their midst” (18:20). If you interpret in my name according to the “Lord’s prayer” as we interpreted it above, it means “wherever people are reconciling and taking care of one another, then that is where I like to hang out as well.” God is in, or is to be equated with, the goodness of people, so to speak – we don’t have to be dogmatic about it.

SARAH
Okay, how about “my people” — the Christian left, who pride themselves on not being the religious right, occasionally with a real emphasis on the “pride” part. Because sanctimony is certainly not the special cottage industry of the religious right. We Sojourners-reading mainliners can fall into it as well.

DENNIS:
(Careful there – those are my people, too!)
Well, I guess “pride” gets back to individualism and “all about me.” It sometimes seems to go contrary to our raisin’ as good ‘mericans, but the emphasis here is on community, not on the individual. On the other hand, I still believe that strong-willed activism on behalf of the larger good is sometimes called for and should not be labeled as “pride.”

This has been fun, Sarah! Thanks for including me in this conversation!

SARAH: Thank YOU, Dennis, for reporting from your undisclosed location somewhere in Sabbatical Land. It’s awfully generous of you. You really classed up the joint! Dennis said he’ll make time to answer questions in the comments as he’s able. If you’ll excuse me I’m going to go bake him a pie to express my gratitude.