Rattling Heaven's Doors—Introduction A Six-Week Series on the Lord's Prayer

This is part of the worship series, 
"Rattling Heaven's Door”

Series Introduction 
Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 
Week 5 | Week 6

Introduction

"To clasp the hands in prayer is to begin an uprising against the disorder of this world."
—Karl Barth

The Lord’s Prayer bristles with a hopeful, contrary agitation. A finely embroidered version of it may hang in the family kitchen under a picture of the praying hands, exuding an air of simple piety, but this prayer is hardly an invitation to tranquility. On the contrary, the Lord’s Prayer urges us to examine our loves and loyalties and engages us in personal and social transformation. Who will you serve? Who will you trust? What do you hope for? What loyalties set your agenda? The Lord’s Prayer invites followers of Jesus to struggle with these existential questions. Time and again it summons the church to pray for the radical renewal of all things, disturbing the status quo and provoking a hopeful, contrary agitation—a longing for the coming of shalom.

The liturgies in this series grew out of our desire to plumb each petition within the Lord’s Prayer—to rattle heaven’s doors using Christ’s own words—in search of justice that neither starts nor stops far from home. Each week one petition is added. To invite concentrated contemplation, we coupled Taizé and similar music with poetic imagery and periods of silence.

Many of the prayers were inspired by or adapted from Gifts of Many Cultures (Cleveland: United Church Press, 1995), which includes several prayers expanding the Lord’s Prayer. Those uses are indicated with the abbreviation GMC and the page number.

Although Fellowship originally developed the series for Lent, it can be used at any time you wish to focus on justice issues. As originally used, the series contemplated “for yours is the kingdom” on Palm Sunday and celebrated the “Amen” on Easter Sunday, for only in the power of Jesus raised from the dead can we pray and live the Lord’s Prayer.
—Roy Berkenbosch and Cheryl Mahaffy

Series Image

The image for this series is available in the resource section below in both green and black as well as both vertical and horizontal orientation. It can be freely used by ReformedWorship.org readers with the following copyright line: © 2003 ReformedWorship.org CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Series Outline