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The Sermon on the Mount, Day 25
Read The Lord’s Prayer again (Matt 6:9-13) and do the exercises below:
In The Cotton Patch Version, Clarence Jordan translates the Lord’s prayer like this:
Father of us, O Spiritual One
Your name be truly honored.
Your kingdom spread, your will prevail
Through earth, as through the heavens.
Sustaining bread grant us each day.
Forgive our debts as we forgive
The debts of all who cannot pay.
And from confusion keep us clear;
Deliver us from evil’s sway.Jordan translates the Lord’s prayer as a poem because that is how it appears in the original Greek. As a poem, it took advantage of the ability to communicate deeper meaning through structure, rhythm, and rhyme.
- Take time to write out your own version of the Lord’s prayer in your own way.
By Henry Darger
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The Sermon on the Mount, Day 2
Now that we’ve read the Sermon on the Mount in its entirety, let’s go back and focus this week on the first part, the Beatitudes. Read Matthew 5:1-12 and do the following exercise:
Clarence Jordan was an American New Testament scholar who lived in the first half of the 20th century. Among other accomplishments, he wrote a series of translations of several NT books called “The Cotton Patch translations.” Being from the south, Jordan felt the words of the New Testament we’re especially applicable to the turmoil that was occurring there at that time (1940′s through 1960′s), and so, should be written and read in the vernacular of the south. And so, Jordan wrote several translations of NT books in the slang of the south, even substituting place names for familiar areas on the Southern United States. In the Cotton Patch version of Luke Jordan renders Luke’s version of the beatitudes in a mid-century southern accent:
