When we lived in New York we could not help but interact with Roman Catholics. Catholics who were not in good standing with their church would often come to me for weddings and funerals. One day a Catholic family asked me to officiate at the funeral of one of their family members who had strayed from the church. “Of course,” I agreed. But then it got complicated when they started talking about the funeral mass. “Hold on a minute,” I interrupted. “I am not a Catholic priest and this is not a Catholic Church—which means I won’t be doing a Catholic funeral mass.” The family sat there, stunned, with the deer in the headlights look on their faces. They insisted that I must do a Catholic funeral mass, and I insisted that they would need to go to a Catholic priest and a Catholic Church for that. Well, that was out of the question, so we looked for common ground. “How about the Lord’s Prayer?” someone offered. “Everybody knows the Lord’s Prayer.” So after further discussion, we settled on a format we could all agree on—sort of.

The funeral service was proceeding smoothly. Then it came time for the Lord’s Prayer. I remembered that Catholics use the term “forgive us our trespasses” rather than the term “forgive us our debts.” But I did not realize something else. Catholics stop with the phrase, “and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” So I was the only person there who continued with the familiar (to Protestants, anyway) conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer—“For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.”

That phrase is a doxology, which means a statement of praise to God. But the words are not found in Jesus’ prayer as written in Luke and they aren’t in the earliest Greek manuscripts of Matthew. So how did it come to be a regular part of how we pray?

Well, when the Hebrew people prayed, they often added words of praise or doxology to conclude their prayers. Doxologies sprout up all through the Bible. It’s possible that these words (or words like them) were used by Jesus and his disciples as a way to close this prayer that Jesus taught. Without the doxology, the prayer does end kind of abruptly. And we know that from the very early years of the Christian church, the Lord’s Prayer ended with this phrase of praise.

We’ll talk a little about how this phrase found its way into the text this Sunday as we conclude our study of the Lord’s Prayer. But more importantly, we’ll focus on the significance of these words as an act of worship. I hope you’ll be there as we come to the conclusion of the deeper meaning of the Lord’s Prayer.