Lord's Prayer: Father in Heaven

For years I breezed through the first line of this prayer as if they were the first words to a friend on the phone. "Hi, how are you?" "Hey, whats up, John?" It was just the line Jesus used to jump start the prayer, right? After all you have to start somewhere. I overlooked the depth of the words that Jesus chose, words that seem to hark back to creation.

In Genesis 1, God is presented to us as powerful, distant, and awe-inspiring. He stands at a distance and orchestrates creation "ex-nihilo". Whatever our understanding of Genesis 1, we have some form of incomprehensibility and otherness mixed with it. In Genesis 2, God is presented with his hands in the dirt and breathing into our nostrils. He is close, intimate and connected. We see a personal side we did not see in Genesis 1.

So Genesis begins with "in heaven" - the powerful and otherly God followed by "father" - the personal God. We are reminded of both his essence and his power when we pray to "our father who is in heaven."

Jesus had a way of saying so much even when he said so little.