SunMar272011
Scripture: MATTHEW 6:11
LORD’S PRAYER SERIES THE FEDERATED CHURCH, UCC
One day, when I was in my twenties, I spent the entire day with friends and, after breakfast, somehow managed not to eat again. By 8:00 in the evening, I was famished. When we finally got around to eating, these friends served me artichokes for the first time in my life. I had always thought they looked awful, and had avoided them like the plague. By that point, though, I was begging for anything to eat, and much as I might have detested artichokes before, that evening they became my “daily bread,” and they were like the nectar of the gods.
That was an extremely rare day for me. Most days I get all the food I want. I don’t worry about it. I don’t even think about it. I just take it for granted. When it comes time for breakfast, lunch and dinner, there’s always something easily available, delicious and plentiful. I take it so for granted that I barely even think to ask for it. I’m not desperate. I’m not doing without. As if by magic, and Mary’s gracious provision, it’s simply there. So I hardly feel the need to ask God for it.
Nevertheless the request for daily food is part of Jesus’ signature prayer. When he tells us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Mt. 6:11), he’s giving us a sense of how to pray for the basics of life. And there are three dimensions of this phrase I’d like to touch on, because I think they speak to our lives today.
The first implication of this prayer for daily bread is that it’s perfectly appropriate to pray for food, but also for all the things we really need. Like me, most of us here don’t have to worry about asking for food. We have full pantries and refrigerators, and we generally take that abundance for granted.
What Jesus’ prayer does, though, is remind us that God is present in, and indeed is the provider of, all the mundane stuff of life. Up until this point in the prayer, the whole thing has been about God. We pray to make God’s name holy, and we ask for God’s kingdom, or world, to be made real and for the will of God to be done here and now. Three requests, all of them about God.
Then with today’s request, the whole tone of the prayer shifts dramatically. No longer primarily about God, in the second half of the prayer, it becomes about us and our need, today for bread, next week for forgiveness, and then lastly that we’ll be spared the time of trial. And what we hear in these words today is an affirmation that God is wrapped up in, and is indeed the giver of, the stuff of daily living.
Coming, as we do, out of a rationalist, post-Enlightenment perspective, most of us generally assume that whoever or whatever created this unfathomably vast universe can’t possibly be interested in the details of one piddly little human life. But these words of Jesus say ‘No, God does care about all that. God wants you to have food. But more than that, God also wants you to be clothed and to have shelter, and to be warm and healthy and safe.’ So if you’re hungry, which most of us aren’t, it’s perfectly within bounds to say, “I need some food.” And when we extend the metaphor, this is Jesus’ way of saying, “If you live in an unsafe house, it’s OK to pray to get out. If you’re snared by an addiction, it’s OK to pray for deliverance. If you’re trapped by an illness, mental or physical, it’s OK to pray for the health you crave.” The first theme of this part of the prayer is that it’s perfectly fitting to pray for all the many things that keep us alive.
A second theme that phrase touches on—and in a way it’s the other side of the same coin—is that what we’re to pray for is something simple and basic. The prayer, interestingly enough, is difficult to translate here. No one knows exactly what it means. Jesus uses a word, epiousios, that is found nowhere else in ancient Greek literature. The best guess of scholars is that it means something like “daily,” or, as we prayed this morning, “the bread we need.” It’s like the manna that comes daily to ancient Israel as it wanders in the wilderness (Ex. 16). We pray, in other words, for a loaf of bread, not for a truck full of bread. We pray for what will get us through the day. This is contrary to the big things we so often pray for—the vacation in Tuscany, the stylish and pricey new suit, the car or phone or TV with all the bells and whistles. What Jesus has us pray for, though, is the simple sustenance to get us through today.
God is about survival and a simple life, not luxury and a bloated life. The people gathered around Jesus were often not sure where the next meal was coming from, and in their deprivation they needed to ask God for the basics. Our problem is very different. We generally have not too little but too much. And that yields its own particular challenges. Think what it does to us: we take what we have for granted; we ask for still more to try to fill the empty space inside us; and we become callous to those who don’t have as much.
In the book many of us are reading for our “One Book/One Community” study this Lent, Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas point out that “Most of us perish from too much bread rather than too little, filling the gnawing emptiness within through ceaseless consumption” (Lord, Teach Us, p. 75). We yearn for more and more things, and all that happens is that the empty space within grows larger and the hoarding we do keeps crucial elements from others who need them.
“For us,” say Willimon and Hauerwas, “we ought to pray . . ., in a culture of overconsumption, ‘Give us the grace to know when enough is enough’ or ‘Help us to say, “No” when the world entices us with so much.’” And they quote the apostle Paul: “I have learned to be content with whatever I have” (Phil. 4:11). We might even be so bold as to pray, “God, give us less. Straighten out our priorities. Make us satisfied with what we have.”
Several months ago, a church member sent me a brief video presentation. It’s a series of slides, and it helps make this very point.
[Show slides, comparing our comfortable North American situation with the plights of so many around the world, concluding with one saying, “We have been given our daily bread and more.”]
It’s important that we take the right conclusion from that show. It’s not that things of beauty and comfort are bad. Jesus wouldn’t have us pray for them if they were. It’s more that when we’re excessively focused on our things, our lives are relatively empty. And when we take more than our due, others are denied their fair share. As Willimon and Hauerwas point out, the prayer is not for my bread, but for our bread. To be faithful with what we have, it’s crucial that we share, that we offer some of our abundance to those who have too little. This, in fact, is one of the major ways we understand our pledges to the church. And it’s the reason we offer next week’s One Great Hour of Sharing: if we’re giving substantially, it’s an opportunity for us to let go of some of the excess that weighs us down, and to offer it to others in the name of Christ.
I said earlier that there are three things I want to lift up this morning about that phrase from Jesus’ prayer. The first is that asking for the necessities of life is a good thing. The second is that letting go of our excess is an equally good thing. And the last one is this: that it’s a good thing to be grateful for the little gifts of life. When we pray for something as simple as bread, we’re recognizing that everything we have, no matter how small and apparently trivial, is a gift from God.
I suspect that praying for daily bread is a way of reminding us of that. It’s a way of calling us to remember that every day, in the littlest of gifts, we get the sustenance we need from a God whose very way is to give without limit. Having a job is a gift; it’s daily bread. A friend to talk to is daily bread. Playing a game we love is daily bread. A stimulating teacher is daily bread. Getting medical care for a condition that would have killed us fifty years ago is daily bread. At every turn, manna comes to us from heaven.
The key, of course, is to look for it, to notice it, to give thanks for it. This part of Jesus’ prayer reminded me to do just that this week, and it’s amazing what I saw. I saw a stunning cardinal in our back yard: daily bread. I waved at countless people on my morning walk and watched them wave back, sometimes with great energy and enthusiasm: daily bread. I had the opportunity to have a stimulating conversation with Bob Ryan’s granddaughters at his calling hours, as we discussed art and literature and music and their lives: daily bread. I spent about fifteen minutes with a jobless, disabled man on Friday. He offered me a ceramic container for some gas and food money. I gave him $20—it wasn’t much—and he told me he’s become much more aware of life’s simple pleasures. He said he doesn’t pray any more for luxuries, but only for the basics of food and shelter. “Give us this day our daily bread?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, “that’s what the Bible says.”
Last Saturday, my mother and I went to Valley View Cinema to watch a high-definition broadcast of an opera from New York’s Metropolitan Opera. As we talked during the intermission, the man sitting next to my mother joined in. He was full of fascinating stories about seeing an opera outdoors in Verona, Italy, and how a tenor aria sung there was so stunning that the audience wouldn’t stop cheering until he had sung it again; and how the two beautiful Marc Chagall paintings that hang in the windows at the Met were painted as scenery for a Met production of Mozart’s Magic Flute. It was enthralling to my mother and me.
We told him that we were going to see the Cleveland Orchestra perform Mozart’s Don Giovanni this past Tuesday. It turned out that he was going, as well. When my mother and I left the movie theater that afternoon, we both said how much we had enjoyed talking to him, and that we would look for him at Severance Hall.
Well, Tuesday evening, intermission came, and there he was in the lobby, looking for us even as we looked for him. He said he had had a friend over for dinner a couple nights earlier, and he was telling her about this meeting we’d had. As he told his friend about my mother and me, she said, “That’s my pastor!” And so the connections and the joy continued. As a matter of fact, by the time we had parted on Tuesday, my mother and he and his wife were thinking about meeting in New York next spring to see Verdi’s La Traviata! All of that from one visit to the movie theater! Talk about daily bread!
The point of telling you that whole involved story is to say: who knows what astonishing wonders await us at every turn. It’s these fabulous little graces that are the real sustenance of our lives, the bread that gives us life and hope and joy. This is what God is doing every day. May we pay attention, and give thanks, and share the abundance and the joy with everyone we meet.