O most compassionate life-giver,

may we honour and praise you;

may we work with you

to establish your new order

of justice, peace and love.

Give us what we need for growth,

and help us, through forgiving others,

to accept forgiveness.

Strengthen us in the time of testing,

that we may resist all evil,

for all the tenderness, strength and love

are yours, now and for ever.

Amen

Bill Wallace (b 1933)

Bill Wallace is a retired Methodist minister. He’s also a poet exploring ways of bridging gaps between the language of traditional Christianity and that of contemporary culture. Here, he reworks aspects of the Lord’s Prayer which are multi-layered in meaning and association, enabling our return to the original with fresh insight.

Jesus’ word ‘kingdom’, for example, occurs dozens of times in the gospels but he only defines his terms through mysterious similes and stories - wedding guests, pricey pearls, buried treasure, seeds and yeast all playing their part.  He tells his disciples to pray for God’s kingdom to come, while also announcing that it has “come near” (Mt 4.17) and apparently implying that in him ancient longings for God’s reign have been fulfilled. Bill Wallace has had a go at deconstructing some of this dense richness held by the word ‘kingdom’, and in his prayer it becomes God’s ‘new order of justice, peace and love’.

Jesus revealed the radical inclusivity of this ‘new order’ by reaching out to those disdained by the establishment - women and children, the poor, those ethnically and physically ‘different’, and those in the pay of the occupying Romans such as Zacchaeus the tax collector, seen in this Russian fresco. So today, having been helped by Wallace to celebrate the spaciousness of God’s kingdom, we watch the Lord’s Prayer being prayed in British Sign Language and hear children singing David Fanshawe’s setting from his African Sanctus.