Rightly or wrongly, I had little patience for people who called me a ‘brother in Christ’ until I met Immanuel. I won’t say that I have fully grasped its meaning, but that was the day I wised up to such an expression.
My work had once taken me to a football club, which offered free coaching to young boys in an urban slum in Chennai. Some of them moved on to professional clubs every year. That encouraged dozens of boys to come every day to the football ground in a crummy corner of the city to practise shooting, heading, passing the ball or goalkeeping.
It was impossible to be run down by the stench from the nearby dumpyard that hung in the air like smog on a windless day. It was as much a symbol of the everyday reality of the boys who lived in one-room tenements just across the dumpyard as it was of urban decay. Most of the boys were Dalits and from extremely poor backgrounds. The club gave them reasons to dream.
Immanuel was the honorary treasurer of that club. He was my translator, my guide. Every morning, Immanuel, who must be in his early thirties, joined the boys. He was passionate about the game. And he arranged the refreshments that the club provided the boys.
Immanuel said the club had a loftier aim too; infusing discipline and encouraging the boys to study. In a decade of the club’s functioning, he said, there were fewer school dropouts. Just about 5 per cent of the people who lived there have had an education beyond Class X.
As we warmed up after a couple of meetings and telephone conversations, he told me he was the local pastor of a church, an international Christian denomination. (Though at the ground, the only religion was football.) One day during conversation he said, “So, we are brothers in Christ.”
Brothers? That meant we had a common father. ‘Our’ father.
Our father in heaven....
Is that not how Jesus asked us to pray?
In Theology of a Classless Society, Metropolitan Geevarghese Mar Osthathios says how the second person singular (YOU) is used in the Lord’s Prayer to refer to only God. The rest of it is in first person plural, that is, ‘WE’ or ‘US’. Thus, the prayer teaches us to ask “provision [of resources], pardon, and protection and preservation for the whole of humanity”.
Jesus, no doubt, had a way with words. He used many figures of speech, like the simile and the metaphor, to make a point. For instance, when he said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field”, he was drawing people’s attention to the similarity between a hidden treasure and the kingdom, both of which are valuable.
There is a marked difference between ‘kingdom of heaven’ and ‘kingdom in heaven’. So, what do we make of ‘let your kingdom come’ in the Lord’s Prayer?
In the words of N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham: “‘God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven . . . give us this day our daily bread.’ You cannot pray this correctly unless you are mentally putting your arms around people in Afghanistan who are literally eating grass as we speak….”
That makes it imperative to put my arms mentally around all the 925 million people, whom the UN estimates will suffer from chronic hunger in the world this year. Or the child dying every six seconds because of undernourishment related problems.
That makes it necessary for me, as Mahatma Gandhi told us, “to recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to Swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?”
Would Gandhi have allowed such a thing as grain rotting in godowns when millions went hungry? Would he have agreed to a 10-day, Rs.20,000 crore plus extravaganza for the Commonwealth Games when, according to some reports, 250,000 people were rendered homeless because of it?
“Every single bit of the Lord’s Prayer is radical because every single bit of it challenges our assumptions about who we are and who God is and what the world is like,” says Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. “And what it’s praying for… is the most revolutionary change you can imagine in the world we live in. A change to a situation where what God wants can happen, to a situation where all the hungry are fed, to a situation where forgiveness is the first imperative in all our relationships.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/
The challenge for you and me is to live the prayer. In other words, the prayer becomes meaningful when all our brothers are fed, clothed and have a roof over their heads.
I mailed Immanuel the other day, but I am yet to hear from him. I need to find the courage to pray ‘Our Father’.
My work had once taken me to a football club, which offered free coaching to young boys in an urban slum in Chennai. Some of them moved on to professional clubs every year. That encouraged dozens of boys to come every day to the football ground in a crummy corner of the city to practise shooting, heading, passing the ball or goalkeeping.
It was impossible to be run down by the stench from the nearby dumpyard that hung in the air like smog on a windless day. It was as much a symbol of the everyday reality of the boys who lived in one-room tenements just across the dumpyard as it was of urban decay. Most of the boys were Dalits and from extremely poor backgrounds. The club gave them reasons to dream.
Immanuel was the honorary treasurer of that club. He was my translator, my guide. Every morning, Immanuel, who must be in his early thirties, joined the boys. He was passionate about the game. And he arranged the refreshments that the club provided the boys.
Immanuel said the club had a loftier aim too; infusing discipline and encouraging the boys to study. In a decade of the club’s functioning, he said, there were fewer school dropouts. Just about 5 per cent of the people who lived there have had an education beyond Class X.
As we warmed up after a couple of meetings and telephone conversations, he told me he was the local pastor of a church, an international Christian denomination. (Though at the ground, the only religion was football.) One day during conversation he said, “So, we are brothers in Christ.”
Brothers? That meant we had a common father. ‘Our’ father.
Our father in heaven....
Is that not how Jesus asked us to pray?
In Theology of a Classless Society, Metropolitan Geevarghese Mar Osthathios says how the second person singular (YOU) is used in the Lord’s Prayer to refer to only God. The rest of it is in first person plural, that is, ‘WE’ or ‘US’. Thus, the prayer teaches us to ask “provision [of resources], pardon, and protection and preservation for the whole of humanity”.
Jesus, no doubt, had a way with words. He used many figures of speech, like the simile and the metaphor, to make a point. For instance, when he said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field”, he was drawing people’s attention to the similarity between a hidden treasure and the kingdom, both of which are valuable.
There is a marked difference between ‘kingdom of heaven’ and ‘kingdom in heaven’. So, what do we make of ‘let your kingdom come’ in the Lord’s Prayer?
In the words of N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham: “‘God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven . . . give us this day our daily bread.’ You cannot pray this correctly unless you are mentally putting your arms around people in Afghanistan who are literally eating grass as we speak….”
That makes it imperative to put my arms mentally around all the 925 million people, whom the UN estimates will suffer from chronic hunger in the world this year. Or the child dying every six seconds because of undernourishment related problems.
That makes it necessary for me, as Mahatma Gandhi told us, “to recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to Swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?”
Would Gandhi have allowed such a thing as grain rotting in godowns when millions went hungry? Would he have agreed to a 10-day, Rs.20,000 crore plus extravaganza for the Commonwealth Games when, according to some reports, 250,000 people were rendered homeless because of it?
“Every single bit of the Lord’s Prayer is radical because every single bit of it challenges our assumptions about who we are and who God is and what the world is like,” says Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. “And what it’s praying for… is the most revolutionary change you can imagine in the world we live in. A change to a situation where what God wants can happen, to a situation where all the hungry are fed, to a situation where forgiveness is the first imperative in all our relationships.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/
The challenge for you and me is to live the prayer. In other words, the prayer becomes meaningful when all our brothers are fed, clothed and have a roof over their heads.
I mailed Immanuel the other day, but I am yet to hear from him. I need to find the courage to pray ‘Our Father’.
