Give us each day our daily bread (Proverbs 30:7-9, Luke 11:1-13)
Proverbs 30:7-9 (NRSV) 7 Two things I ask of you;
do not deny them to me before I die:
8 Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that I need,
9 or I shall be full, and deny you,
and say, “Who is the Lord?”
or I shall be poor, and steal,
and profane the name of my God
Luke 11:1-13 (NRSV) He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2 He said to them, “When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
3 Give us each day our daily bread.
4 And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.”
5 And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread;6 for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’7 And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ 8 I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.
9 “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 11 Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? 12 Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? 13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
August 21, 2016 Sermon Summary
Three weeks into our sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer we finally get to the piece that most people think of when thinking about prayer, making requests to God. It is important to note that Jesus’ teaching about prayer does not begin with giving God a to-do list. Instead, Jesus tells his disciples to begin with praise and a recognition of who God is. Only later does Jesus begin to ask God for provision and sustenance. This is often the exact opposite of the way we approach God in prayer.
It is also helpful to notice what Jesus tells his disciples to request from God. Instead of seeking power, prestige, and wealth, we are told pray for bread. There is a very important reason for this. The image of bread is used throughout the Bible to demonstrate God’s love and protection. When the people of Israel were fleeing from slavery in Egypt, God fed them in the wilderness with manna, bread from heaven. Jesus used bread and a few fish to feed thousands of people. He even described himself as the bread of life.
When Jesus calls us to pray for the bread we need he reminds us that we are physical beings. Even as we pray for God’s kingdom to come, we are called to live in this world. God knows that we need food, clothing, and shelter to survive. This is why we have been given a world so abundantly full of the resources we need to survive. This is why Jesus tells his disciples to pray with persistence. He says to them that God’s gifts will supply whatever they need. All they have to do is keep knocking on the door and the heavenly Father will provide.
This message is critically important to those who are in need. Some of those people are here in our congregation, and millions more exist around the world. It is incredibly important to know that in our moments of greatest need there is a place to go. We may not get everything we want. Luxuries and needs are two very different things. No matter how bad things look on the outside we will not be ignored. Our daily bread will be provided.
As reassuring as the message of hope in God’s provision of daily bread is on the surface, our faith should be challenged by the fact that there is still so much poverty in the world. In short, if we believe that God hears us when we pray for “our daily bread,” why are so many people still going hungry?
Part of the answer comes from the fact that we are poor stewards of the world we have been given. The world in which we live is indeed a gift, but we have forgotten that God is the source of the gift. The world is not something we have created for ourselves. Duke Divinity School professor J. Warren Smith describes it this way:
The petition for our daily bread is a petition of humility. The word humility comes from the Latin word humus (which is also the root of the adjective humanus, “human”), meaning “earth”or “soil.” To be humble literally means “to be close to the ground,” hence metaphorically it means “to be lowly.” The Lord’s Prayer challenges us to be humble in a more literal sense.
(The Lord’s Prayer: Confessing the New Covenant, p. 80)
Humility is not something that comes naturally to most Americans. We like to live with the idea that we are ruggedly independent individuals. Our founding mythology is the lone pioneer on the frontier. However, the Lord’s Prayer reminds us that we are ultimately totally dependent on God’s daily provision for our lives. Our life is not our own. We are children of our Heavenly Father. Just like a toddler going through the “terrible twos,” we crave our independence and we chafe at being held back, but the truth of the matter is that we are simply not equipped to make it on our own.
Our dependence on God is matched by our interdependence with all of creation. The word “our” in terms of “our Father” and “our daily bread” reminds us that the resources of this world are not an individual possession. They belong to all of us. One need not be a communist to recognize that what affects one part of society can have impacts on all other parts. With nine billion people in the world our planet has become a very small place. We are inextricably tied together.
Of course, this is not something that we like to think about. American culture has come to believe that our relative wealth is something of a birthright. We are the richest, most well-fed, and energy intensive society on the planet. The effects on our own country health and environment have been nothing short of disastrous. The social consequences of this imbalance are only beginning to be understood. Even though our affluence is killing us, we like to pretend that nothing is wrong.
Eastern University professor of theology Ronald Sider explains the dangers we face:
An abundance of possessions can easily lead us to forget that God is the source of all good. We trust in ourselves and our wealth rather than in the Almighty. When we focus on ourselves, we forget not only about God but also the people he created. In our self-absorption, we are fooled by the pleasure of possessing.
Most Christians in the Northern Hemisphere simply do not believe Jesus’ teaching about the deadly danger of possessions. Jesus warned that possessions are highly dangerous–so dangerous, in fact, that it is extremely difficult for a rich person to be a Christian at all: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Luke 18:25 NRSV). Christians in the United States live in one of the richest societies in the history of the world, surround by a billion desperately needy neighbors and another two billion who are poor. We are far more interested in whether the economy grows than in whether lot of the poor improves. We insist on more and more, and reason that if Jesus was so un-American that he considered riches dangerous, than we must ignore or reinterpret his message.
(Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, p. 93)
This warning is not something Sider came up with on his own. The writer of Proverbs said much the same thing several thousand years ago. The writer prays for neither poverty nor wealth. While poverty might drive us to theft or dishonesty, wealth can cause complacency and pride. This is why asking only for “our daily bread” matters so much. In short, we are asking God to give us just enough. If we get too much we might forget God and claim that which belongs to our neighbor. Even though this world is not a zero sums game, letting others have sometimes requires us to have less. Even when that is the case, the Lord’s Prayer reminds us that we will still have bread enough for today.
Finally, praying for “our daily bread” reminds us that we must seek out the bread of life, Jesus himself, each and every day. The people of Israel could not store manna overnight, otherwise it would spoil and become rotten. Instead, they had to seek out God’s blessing each and every morning. Our relationship with Christ works exactly the same way. No matter how much we pray one day, the next morning we need to start all over again.
This is the very reason that our tradition, the Disciples of Christ, makes a point of coming to the table each and every week. We know that God’s grace is not something that can be stored up. We know that we are in need. We know that we need to humble ourselves before the Savior of the world. We know that here we can find the sustenance that that Christ offered when he said this bread is his body broken for us. Here we have the reminder of his promise and a foretaste of the resurrection to come.
Before we come together around this table, we will pray the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. Fortunately, we can do so in the confidence that no matter what we are facing, God will provide the Holy Spirit to us. Through God’s grace we will find the fulfillment of Christ’s promises. Our physical and spiritual needs will be met. Our humility and interdependence will be restored. We will feast on the bread that God alone can provide.
