Language is constantly changing, like the people who speak it. The Tower of Babel not only stops Japanese tourists from speaking freely with Bernese ticket inspectors; it also puts barriers between parents and children. Our children's "mother tongue" includes phrases that our mothers never used (like "mega-awesome"), and in a few centuries time, our own everyday speech will be as hard to understand as Anglo-Saxon is to us.
Some language changes more slowly - for example, the language which we use in worship. For over four hundred years, from 1549 to 1967, we addressed the Lord's Prayer to "Our Father, which art in heaven". There was great resistance to replacing "which" with "who" - although now, thirty years later, we regard the 1967 version as "the traditional form". And there is still resistance to addressing God as "you" rather than "thou", even though very few of us can use "thou" correctly. (Is it "thou wast" or "thou wert"? "Thou couldest" or "thou couldst"? "Thy eternal kingdom" or "thine eternal kingdom"?)
Since 1972, public worship has addressed God as "you" (although Patrick Appleford's hymn "Lord Jesus Christ, you have come to us" dates from 1960). But there are pressures to revert to the "thou" form for the Lord's Prayer. The Lord's Prayer occupies a special place in both private and public worship. Until the 1840's, people attending church on a Sunday morning would have heard it four times - five on communion Sundays! So it is part of our culture - far more so than the 'traditional forms' of the Gloria, the Apostles' Creed, the General Confession, or the other prayers you will find in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer in the back of the pews in St Ursula's.
Whichever form we use, we should be clear what Jesus asked his hearers to pray for. Firstly, they were to pray for the coming of God's rule on earth. "May your name be revered, may your reign begin, may your will be done." It is a pity that our English translations miss this thrice-repeated pattern. And it is a pity that the word "hallowed" has passed out of general use, so we fail to connect the first of the three petitions with the day when the whole world lives in the presence of God.
Then we are to pray for our own part in that relationship. We ask God to feed us, to forgive us and to keep us safe. On the one level, we look to God for regular sustenance, for compassion on our failings and for protection from being led into evil ways. On another, the bread "of the day" is the food of the heavenly banquet ("Our bread of the morrow give us today" was a translation proposed for the Australian prayer book in 1966). Our "debts" are those which will keep us out of God's kingdom (read the parable of the unforgiving servant, Matt.18:21-35). And we look for God's deliverance from the powers of evil at the end of time, when our hearts and mind are tested against the heat of God's purity.
Translators have tried to find words to express these meanings in today's language. The word "trespasses" has lost its meaning in everyday speech - and in any case it never conveyed the meaning of "debts". But the word "debt" used in the Scottish translation ("Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors") is too much of a financial term, and has none of the moral sense that "Schuld" has in German. So translators have preferred "sins", which Luke's Gospel uses.
At the Reformation, there was a lot of discussion as to whether God would actually lead people into temptation. Henry VIII struck out the line proposed for the first formal English version in 1537 and replaced it with "Suffer us not to be led into temptation". But in fact, when we pray, we are not trying to twist God's arm - we are asking for what God is pleased to grant us in any case. "Do not let us fall as a result of temptation" might convey the sense better.
After Henry's death, prayer books went back to the literal translation: "Lead us not into temptation." But Jesus was not referring (directly at least!) to opportunities for taking things without paying, or all the other temptations one can think of. The word he used meant "testing", and in particular, the final test before the day of judgement, when we would be challenged to put our attachment to God before our attachment to the world. "Do not bring us to the time of trial" was the version used from 1973 to 1980, but many people were unhappy with these words, and so many alternatives were suggested that Cranmer's original 1537 text of the line was restored in the service book we now use.
The Lord's Prayer is about God's reign in our hearts. It is right that we conclude it with words that are not from Jesus but from the church. The Eastern Orthodox church had for centuries added its own words of praise at the end of the prayer, and these had crept into the manuscript that formed the basis for the King James Bible - the "Authorized Version" of 1611. So in the seventeenth century, the doxology was added at the end. In it we add our own reflections to the prayer that our Lord has taught us: "The kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and for ever." And so they are indeed.
HD