Sundays message: Whats this about bread? The Greatest Prayer: “Our Daily Bread” Thanksgiving in the Simpsons household. “Bart,” says Marge as they settle into the table, “why don’t you say grace?” Bart folds his hands and bows his head. “Dear God,” he says, “we paid for all this stuff ourselves. So thanks for nothing.” Worst prayer ever. Right? But it points up one of the basic paradoxes of our faith. Because we are spiritual beings, but we are also economic beings. We can’t escape that fact. And in the economic system we live in, food doesn’t come free, and it doesn’t even come cheap. When you sit down for dinner tonight, you paid for all this stuff yourselves. So why this ritual of thanking God for the food we need to live? We’ll talk about that today as we continue with our summer series of messages on the Lord’s Prayer. You’ll remember that we’re digging more deeply into the words of the prayer that Jesus taught. We talked about “Our Father in heaven” and what Jesus meant by that image; we talked about “thy kingdom come” and what it means to pray for the coming of God’s reign on earth. Today we come to the first request, the first petition in the Lord’s Prayer. “Give us this day our daily bread,” we pray. So what’s that about, if it’s not asking God to run to Dash’s for us? In his book The Greatest Prayer, John Dominic Crossan connects this petition in the Lord’s Prayer to a bunch of other mentions of bread in the scriptures. Because Jesus’ words are “our daily bread,” the most evident connection is with the story of the manna in the wilderness, in Exodus 16. The Hebrew people are starving in the desert; Moses doesn’t know how he’s ever going to keep bodies and souls together. And then overnight this flaky white stuff settles from the sky onto the leaves of the plants, and in the morning they scrape it together and bake it over the campfire. Bread. Life itself. The scripture says it tasted like wafers made with honey. But maybe you remember the sequel. God’s instruction was, “Each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day.” But some of them tried to keep the leftovers for the next morning. “It bred worms,” the scripture says, “and became foul.” They learned their lesson, and Exodus says they ate manna every day for forty years. And then, Crossan says, when the Gospels tell of Jesus’ miracle of the loaves and the fishes, that piece of faith history was part of the equation. We’re going to tell this story on Thursday at Vacation Bible School. A great crowd has gathered around Jesus way out in the desert, and he teaches them long into the afternoon. But as the dinner hour approaches, a problem presents itself: How are we going to feed all these people? Now, Jesus is an excellent problem-solver, so let’s look at what he chooses to do. The disciples, and maybe the crowd, might very well be expecting an Exodus solution. This miracle worker surely could call down food from heaven, the biggest takeout order in history. He could have solved the problem all by himself. But that’s not what Jesus does. He brings the disciples into the middle of the problem. “You give them something to eat,” he says, and he sends them out into the crowd to look around. They come back with five loaves of bread and two fish. Jesus takes that food and breaks it apart, and the disciples pass it around, and everybody has dinner, and when they gather up the leftovers there are twelve baskets full. It’s a miracle, but this is a different kind of miracle. It’s not an act of God breaking through to humankind, like the manna falling from the sky. Jesus multiplies actual food that is already there, already present, already available. The way especially Mark tells it, the story of the loaves and fishes makes clear that the kingdom of God – remember “thy kingdom come”? – is already there among them. God’s abundant provision and care for the people is already at work. Jesus has inaugurated this new age. “The kingdom of God,” Jesus says in Luke, “is among you.” I’ve left something out. When Jesus takes the bread and fish that the disciples have scrounged up, he does something before he breaks them. He blesses this food. And in that action he makes it clear what God’s kingdom looks like. There is enough food – more than enough, 12 heaping baskets more than enough – already present on our earth when it passes through the hands of divine justice, of God the wise householder. When it is taken, blessed, broken and given out. When food is seen as God’s consecrated gift. What Jesus does is to make concrete this truth that in God’s kingdom, everyone is well-fed, everyone is provided for. People have speculated for millennia about what happened there in the desert. One theory is that when Jesus blessed and broke the bread and fish, and the distribution began, people in the crowd who had their own food squirreled away in their clothes brought it out and shared it. They were swept up in this vision of the beloved community; they responded to Jesus’ confident pronouncement that God’s provision is always enough; and sure enough, when they brought their gifts into that vision, there was food for all. Now, maybe that seems like explaining away Jesus’ miracle. Maybe that explanation makes Jesus just another charismatic preacher, manipulating his congregation into sharing their assets. And certainly we don’t know whether it happened that way. But something miraculous did happen that day. And however it came about, it was a miracle of community. It was the flowering of a way of being human together, a way that only Jesus could have catalyzed. And even today it brings us back to the amazing realization that the kingdom of God – that place and time of justice and compassion, of faithfulness and peace – that kingdom is indeed inside us and among us, if only we will loosen our death grip on our fear and suspicion and our deep, deep insecurity that we’ll never have enough. We see this pattern again and again in the scriptures. We see it when Jesus breaks bread with his disciples at the Last Supper. We see it when two weary travelers on the Emmaus road recognize the risen Christ as he breaks bread at their table. It’s always about the holiness of the meal, and it’s always about sharing the food. “Give us this day our daily bread,” Jesus teaches us to pray. And in those words he wants to mold our minds to a new reality. In those words, we pray to be able to trust that God will always put that daily bread within our reach. In those words we recognize that all food is blessed, touched with God’s grace. And in those words we pray that our hearts will be opened to God’s kingdom of justice and plenty that’s all around us, so that like the hungry pilgrims crowded around the Savior, we can help make real that vision of grace and plenty every day. This week and always, may it be so for us. Amen.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 13:22:42 +0000
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