Dear Good Samaritans,

I hope you have enjoyed hearing and singing different names for and attributes of God this past month. I find it to be a profound experience imagining the familiar in new and different ways. It is almost like adding new colors to a familiar image, it doesn’t take away from what is already there, but instead it adds nuance, depth, and brightness.

Over the next couple months, while we are on our summer schedule, I want us to explore a different way of expressing the Lord’s Prayer. This is a prayer that Jesus gives us and has become one of the most quintessential Christian prayers, recited by Christians of nearly every stripe. The danger with it’s familiarity, though, is that we stop hearing the words, we stop grasping their power, because the words flow so effortlessly.

Beginning on Sunday we will be singing—yes singing!—a version of the Lord’s Prayer at the 9:30am service composed by Mark A. Miller with text adapted from the Gospel of Matthew by Miller and Laurie Zelman. Miller is a prominent African-American composer and professor of church music at Drew Theological School.

The rhythm is gentle and almost dance-like. And, singing helps us to focus on the words in a different way.

The text is not a radical departure from what we are used to each week, it’s just simplified a bit. One thing you will notice is that it begins Our God. This sidesteps the masculine language that has dominated the Lord’s Prayer since the time of Jesus and encourages us to imagine a God both beyond all genders and at the same time encompassing all genders.

The 8am service will also get to experience this prayer in its spoken form.

So you can hear it ahead of time I found a lovely recording of this version recorded by the choirs of Grace Church and St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church of Jersey City, New Jersey.

Peace,