THE FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT

When You Pray, Say...Give Us Today
Our Daily Bread .

March 22, 1998
John M. Buchanan

Give us this day our daily bread...

When we pray for bread as a means of practicing the wholeness which is
appropriate to the kingdom, we covenant to help prepare and serve up that
which God, after all, gives to us not for hoarding but for use.... But bread
has not just to do with the question of survival. It is also the offering of
hospitality and love. It is what we serve our guests in moments of joy
when we want to celebrate together the wholeness of life. The whole of
life, the cost and suffering as well as the reward and comfort, are gathered
and ground together, baked, served and consumed in the act of sharing
bread.

David Willis
Daring Prayer

WHEN YOU PRAY, SAY.... GIVE US TODAY OUR DAILY BREAD

Exodus 16:1-12
Matthew 15:32-39

“Tam going to rain bread from heaven for you.”
Exodus 16:4

God of mercy and love, we bring all our needs to you in confidence that you
love us and that you use our awareness of our needs to feed us and give us
gifts for our strength and sustenance. And so we ask for insight and
understanding and a sense of your presence not just here in this place, but in
our world, our relationships, our jobs, our hopes and dreams. Startle us with
your truth and open our hearts and minds to your word, in Jesus Christ.
Amen.

*

The smell of bread baking is one of God’s delectable gifts. In the neighborhood where | grew
up, directly across the street from the playground and behind a fire station, there was a bakery
from which emanated, all day long, the most amazing smells. In the early morning a fleet of
green trucks took on their daily load of bread, to be delivered to homes on a route each driver
knew and plied. And then coffee cakes, followed by cookies: molasses, sugar and oatmeal, big
as saucers, tweive to a plastic bag. In the days before OSHA, three 12 year-old boys were hired
to bag the cookies, all morning for 25¢ an hour and the open invitation to eat all you wanted. It
was my first paying job and, all things considered, with the exception of being the pastor of this
church, my favorite.

The smell of that bakery, of bread baking on an early summer morning, remains with me as a
blessing, a benediction which fell gently over all of life, a promise somehow that God is in
heaven and all will be well.

I love the very idea of bread baking. I’ve even tried my hand at it a few times — enough to
discover that it is a labor intensive activity requiring more time and patience than I usually have.

My children, knowing all of this, purchased for a birthday once a marvelous machine that allows
me to enjoy the aesthetics of the experience without the time, patience or much effort, for that
matter. I can simply dump in flour, milk, sugar, salt, cinnamon and raisins, orange zest if I’m
feeling really brave, add a little yeast, plug it in, push a button, and it mixes, kneads, knows how
long to allow the bread to rise, bakes it and makes an electronic beep to tell me that it is done.
And, best of all, the aroma — The Fairview Bakery in my own kitchen.

I am not alone, obviously. Real estate sales people know the persuasive power of the aroma of
something in the kitchen baking: bread is almost irresistible. And it is, of course, a metaphor

with many meanings: slang for money: “I need some bread” ... “How much bread do you
have?” And love — on a thousand Hallmark Cards: “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou.”
And hospitality: bread shared — bread served to guests at table, first, as a symbol of the meal to
come, symbol of hospitality. Bread of life: bread as metaphor for life’s basic necessities: for
what the maintenance of human life requires: for the social, spiritual substance of humanness:
bread as sacrament — the body of Christ for you and me: bread as promise that all of life is
sacramental: that the things of this world, the material, solid, stuff of reality is God’s creation
and contains within it the mystery and reality of God.

And so when his disciples asked him to teach them to pray one day, he said:

“When you pray, say:

Father, hallowed be your name

your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread ...” [Luke 1 1:2-3]

Jesus begins his lesson on prayer by inviting his friends to use a term of endearment, an intimate
name for God. It is a bold, radical suggestion, that the God who is so holy and righteous that
there is no name for God that is pronounced out loud, that God may be addressed in terms of our
first and most intimate relationships — our parents: our mother, our father.

And that this intimate God, who comes close, who knows us and loves us as a father loves his
children, as a mother comforts and nurses and cradles her infant, that this God is also the
transcendent, holy Other, mysterious, beyond our ability to comprehend, regardless of the
sophistication, or orthodoxy, or political correctness of our theology.

“Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.” Your reign, O God, is already here and
we who pray this prayer intend to be part of it, intend not to miss the beauty and passion and
justice and kindness and blessedness of the times and places and relationships where God is ruler
and Jesus Christ is Lord.

And then bread: our hunger, our most basic bodily needs. It’s quite a leap from the sublime
contours of a theology of immanence and transcendence to “what’s for dinner?” And the sense
of it is that Jesus makes this leap deliberately, brings bread and human need and hunger into this
prayer for a very important purpose.

From the beginning people have tried to make Christianity into an other-worldly religion. The
subdivision of reality into two realms —- material and spiritual, is as old as the religion of ancient
Babylon. Once you buy into that, it isn’t long until the physical is being described as dirty,
impure, sinful...and the spiritual as pure, clean and good. Once you buy into that division,
religion is for the purpose of keeping our attention on the spiritual and not the physical: to
discipline us, to resist the allure and beauty of the physical in order to dwell, sublimely detached
from material reality, unaffected by human hunger and need. John the Baptist and others like
him in Jesus’ day lived in the realm of the spirit like that; denying physical needs, eating only
what they could forage in the desert, wearing rough clothes, sleeping between rocks in the

wilderness. People wondered why Jesus, claiming the presence of God’s kingdom, did not teach
that and live that way. Jesus suffered by comparison with John’s radical zealotry, John’s clear
other-worldliness. “John came neither eating or drinking...the Son of Man came eating and
drinking and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard.’” [Matthew 11:19] They couldn’t
understand how a man of God seemed to have such a good time eating and drinking with his
friends, obviously enjoying the things of the physical, tangible, sensual world.

Greek philosophy, with which Christianity would contend for centuries, taught the same lesson:
the division between physical and spiritual: world and otherworld, earth and heaven. But Jesus
intentionally erased that distinction both in the way he lived and by teaching his friends to pray
for daily bread.

W. H. Auden caught the spirit of Jesus’ holistic theology in a delightful poem, No, Plato, No:

I can’t imagine anything

that I would less like to be

than a disincarnate Spirit,
unable to chew or sip

or make contact with surfaces
or breathe the scents of summer
or comprehend speech or music
or gaze at what lies beyond.
No, God placed me exactly
where I’d have chosen to be:
the sub-lunar world is such fun,
where man is male or female
and gives Proper Names to all things.

[W. H. Auden, Thank You, Fog, cited by Larry Rasmussen, Luther and a Gospel of
Earth, in Union Seminary Quarterly Review, Vol. 51, 1997]

Bread symbolizes the wholeness and unity of our humanness. We are not disembodied Spirits
but, at our best, physical and spiritual, invited by God to experience and to enjoy the goodness of
creation. It is, in fact, heresy to conclude that God made a mistake by creating us with physical
bodies and physical appetites. The creation is God’s idea. Hunger is God’s idea. So is good
food and wine. So is sex and laughter and visual beauty and great music. Helmut Thielicke was
one of the great preachers of the last generation. I have been referring to a series of sermons on
the Lord’s Prayer he preached to his congregation in Stuttgart in the terrible final days of World
War II. As the bombs destroyed their city, their church, their homes, their livelihood, their
sources of food and hope, he told them to pray for bread: that even Beethoven sounds lousy
when you are hungry and that if they had to choose either a volume of poems or a wool sweater
to take to the air-raid shelter, they should go with the sweater.

Creation is good, Jesus was teaching. Evil is not the physical, the sensual; it is whatever violates
the goodness of the creation. The physical world and the human senses which allow us to

experience and enjoy it are not suspect. Hunger, need, desire, joy...are gifts, means of grace.
God is in them. “Give us each day our daily bread.”

One time Jesus did just that. A crowd had been following him to hear his teaching. The day was
coming to an end. People were hungry. There was no place to get food. Someone volunteered
two fish and five loaves. And somehow that modest investment, in his hands, became enough
food to satisfy everyone.

On that occasion he prayed one of the most familiar and ancient prayers of his people:

“Blessed are Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the earth, who bringest forth bread
from the earth.”

No Jew ever prayed, or prays, those words without remembering the precious story of God’s
people in the wilderness and their hunger and how God provided manna for them to eat. Slaves
in Egypt for several generations, led out of slavery by Moses, they are barely across the Sea of
Reeds and into the wilderness on the far side when they start to complain. “If only we had died
by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, where we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of
bread: for you have brought us into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
[Exodus 16:3] Slavery may have been awful, but at least there was food and shelter.

The wilderness is where God’s people learn how dependent they have become on their physical
security and comfort: how they are slaves to something more powerful and insidious than the
Egyptians.

Studs Terkel wrote a book, American Dreams: Lost and Found. and interviewed a cross-section
of people about their definition of “the American Dream.” A successful businessman said:

“The American Dream is to be better off then we are. How much money is
‘enough money?’ ‘Enough money’ is always a little bit more than you have.
There’s never enough of anything. This is why people go on. You always go for
the brass ring that’s always out there a hundred yards farther. It’s like a mirage in
the desert: it always stays about a hundred yards ahead of you. You must go for
more — for faster, better. If you’re not getting better and faster, you’re getting
worse.”

Jesus was no ascetic, but it was daily bread that he taught them to pray for: the sustenance I need
today, the immediate resources I need to get to tomorrow.

Marian Wright Edelman, in her wonderful little book, The Meaning of Success — a Letter to My
Children and Yours, writes:

“Don’t get overwhelmed. Sometimes when I get frantic about all I have to do and
spin my wheels, I try to recall Carlyle’s advice: ‘Our main business is not to see
what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.’ Try to take each

day and each task as they come, breaking them down into manageable pieces for
action while struggling to see the whole.”

Marian Wright Edelman then quotes something the great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
said — I think one of the wisest things anyone ever said:

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be
saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense
in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing
we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by
love.” [The Irony of American History]

“Give us each day our daily bread.”

The wilderness is where we learn how dependent we have become. It is also the place where we
learn that God will provide for our most basic needs, where we receive the promise, “I will rain
bread from heaven for you.”

Sometimes life takes an unexpected turn and we find ourselves no longer in charge, no longer as
independent and self reliant and autonomous as we assumed we were, no longer sure we have the
resources for a new and strange and frightening future. Sometimes life teaches us a lesson in our
dependence on others and on God for basic resources. It can happen with unexpected change: in
a job, a relationship, our health...

Let me tell you about two friends, Jim and Betsy York. They live in Boca Raton, Florida and I
met them some time ago. They are very devoted Presbyterians. Jim is an orthopedic surgeon
who has taken time away from his busy practice over the years to be a volunteer with the
Presbyterian Church medical mission in Africa. They’ve done it 15 or 20 times. For several
weeks, sometimes several months, Jim and Betsy pack, close their home, say goodbye to their
friends and go to the Cameroon or Zaire or Sudan and work in Presbyterian hospitals, performing
surgery in situations very different from the modern operating theaters where Jim is accustomed
to fixing shoulders and replacing knees and hips. They are absolutely delightful people; lively,
energetic, gracious. Jim is trim and athletic, loves to golf, a big, strong man, with a strong grip —
he’s in great shape. They have begun retirement — which for them means more time to go to
Africa and practice medicine,

Jim was in Chicago to have a knee replacement himself recently, because he has family here. And
during the surgery, which he has performed hundreds of times, something unplanned happened
during the administration of the anesthesia, a tiny slip. Jim York woke up to find himself
paralyzed from the waist down.

Because of their relationship with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) we got a call about them and
pastors began to visit them in the hospital and then in rehabilitation. Last Saturday they flew back
to Florida, Jim strapped in his wheelchair.

The day before they left we talked at length. This active, strapping man was devastated initially,
But now he’s angry — not at God — but that he can’t go to Africa next month. “I’m going” he
said “even if I have to operate out of this contraption.” Betsy said, “We’ve prayed a lot these
past few weeks. We can’t believe God did this. But what we do believe is that God is going to
get us out of it somehow, or make something out of it, or give us what we need to make
something out of it.” Jim brightened up. It’s already happening. “The Senior Highs in our
church have already invited me to come meet with them and talk about how we're coping and
how we’re going to deal with this adversity.” And he explained that his pastor had told them
that they had already removed part of a pew so Jim could sit in his favorite spot in the sanctuary
next Sunday.

“We’re just going to have to learn to depend a little more on God,” Jim York said.

It was the great thinker Karl Barth whose sharp insight into human nature led him to conclude
that our real problem with asking God for anything isn’t really that we don’t believe God can and
will respond, not really that there are some things for which we have no business asking God, or
anyone else, for that matter. The real problem, Barth said, is we don’t like to have to ask God for
anything. We don’t like the implied dependence. We prefer to believe that we can provide for
ourselves.

And there comes a day, as it has come to Jim York, when we learn that our resources are all gone:
that we’ve reached deeply into our own souls and there’s nothing left there, that we have spent
out all we have — physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually — our hands are empty and
the one thing left for us is to acknowledge the truth and to throw ourselves on the mercy and
providence of God and to say,

_ “Give us this day our daily bread.”
So the invitation is to pray confidently and to bring before God your most basic, most urgent
needs: your desires, your hunger, your hopes and dreams, your disappointments and frustrations,
your anxiety and your anger: all of it: all of what is most human about you. Leave nothing out.
Pray boldly, simply, honestly.

“T will rain bread from heaven for you.”

The promise is that God hears your prayer and will give you, not always what you want, or think
you want, but what you need today.

“Give us each day, our daily bread.”

Amen.