When I was a little girl, my mom kept three things close at hand when we were at the dinner table: an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a thesaurus. Reason being, whenever we had a question, she wanted a resource to look up the answer.
Skip forward to college during my freshman writing seminar (a requirement at my university), my professor reminded me of the importance of using a thesaurus so that no word was repeated too often within any given document.
So, when you look up the word "glory" in the thesaurus in English, its synonyms include renown, prestige, honor, acclaim, kudos, praise, splendor, majesty, nobility, greatness, and fame. The Greek word for glory, doxa, translates as praise, honor, good opinion, and splendor. The Hebrew word, kavod (kabod), means abundance, honor, weight, riches, and splendor.
But if you've ever been to Catholic mass, you've probably noticed that the last sentence we Protestants are used to saying at the end of the Lord's Prayer isn't directly there. So as fun as this word study has been, you're probably wondering - who cares about God's glory. Should we even be talking about it every week when we recite the prayer Christ taught us?
When did that stubborn little sentence get added anyway? Well...
Scholars tell us that this fun little book called the Didache (meaning "teaching") included that last sentence, officially called the "doxology" (from that Greek word for glorifying God back there), as early as the third or fourth century. So our early Christian siblings did actually say a prayer similar to our own, even if it is not in the gospels.
However, somewhere it go thrown out by the Roman Catholic church. Because, of course it did. And it did not get revived until Elizabeth I of England decided to include it as the standard in the English prayer books in the 1500s. Since our own Presbyterian heritage is closely linked to England (give you a hint
here: Scotland and England shared a king just one generation later), that is likely how we ended up with it at the end of our prayer.
So there is some history and a good word study for you. But here's the rub: what does God's glory have to do with us?
That is the question we will take a look at this weekend as we wrap up our Lord's Prayer series.
Blessings,
Rev. Janie
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