Texts: Genesis 12: 1; Matthew 6: 11; Matthew 4: 1-4
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread
(Different Ways to Pray, Part 4)
Over the last several weeks, we’ve been exploring what it means to pray, moving in a non-linear fashion through different practices of prayer, as well as different biblical texts about prayer. Last week I began working through the words of Lord’s Prayer. They’re words that we say every week, so often that we frequently fail to pay the words themselves any mind. And yet the prayer is beautifully worded, and elegantly formulated. It stands as a beginning to the life of prayer, not the end of it, a primer on prayer, but not the sum total of it. For some of us those words contain enormous meaning. For others of us, they present a stumbling block. For others still, they don’t mean anything much at all, save for a formula we mutter together at the beginning of our services. My wish is to call the prayer back from overuse, or from misunderstandings. My wager is that these are words that can help to orient our lives, that can give us a foundational mooring in the world, that can call forth the best in us. The words of the Lord’s Prayer can still speak to us.
Today I’d like to focus on the line “Give us this day our daily bread.” And here’s what we’re going to do: as I speak, we’re going to offer you some bread for the day, as a way of reminding us all of the bread we seek, of the bread we share, of the bread we need in order to survive. Laura and Carleen, along with several of our deacons, are going to be passing some loaves of bread around the meetinghouse. The loaves were made over the last few days by Laura’s husband, Paul. Take it, tear off a chunk, and pass it along to your neighbors. When it comes to the end of a row, pass it along to the row behind you, and when it comes to the last person, just set the basket on the pew beside you, or along the aisle. Someone will be along to get it. It’s something like communion, I suppose, but I hope it’s a little less solemn, a little more relaxed, a simple gesture of receiving, and giving, daily bread to one another. Give us this day our daily bread, is what we pray every time we get together. And so why not have a little bread together while we think some more about those words?
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One of the things that’s striking about the Lord’s Prayer is just how earthy it is. Yes, there’s talk of heaven (which, in the Bible is not a place or a geography, but rather a state of being). But the prayer itself has to do with the earth, with the realities of life lived upon the earth. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven,” the prayer says in its second line. The Bible is always concerned with thisworld, not some other world where God might dwell, or a world that we might visit after we die. Not only that, the Bible, and the Lord’s Prayer, is concerned with the materiality of the world. That’s why, after we say the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of our services, I frequently say that we’re an earthy community. I mean that in several ways – that we’re down to earth, that we’re not snobs, that we’re easy to be with – at least that’s what I hope is true of us. But I also mean it as a reflection of the words we’ve just spoken together. We’re an earthy people because the prayer grounds us in the realities of the earth – the natural world but the economy as well, the places we live and sleep, but also the sorts of opportunities we’re given, for healthcare, for education, for recreation. The Lord’s Prayer grounds us upon the earth. It speaks to our need for bread.
And yet it’s not only about the earth. It’s not only our material conditions the prayer is interested in, because it’s true – we’re so much more than eating, breathing, sleeping, and reproducing automatons. “Humans do not live by bread alone,” Jesus says when he rebukes the devil, “but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” We’re material creatures, but we’re possessed of spirit. To neglect that spirit is to do great violence to our lives, like pretending we don’t have feelings, or living without such a thing as friendship, or drowning in a world of possessions, all the while becoming more and more vacuous and glazed. Humans don’t live by bread alone. That’s worth remembering in an age of satiation. That’s worth remembering in an age when Amazon can fulfill our every material desire with nothing so much as a click. We do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
What is that word exactly? How might we distill it? We might do worse than to return to that old word “grace.” In the midst of the alienation we do experience, in the midst of the anxiety we do feel at the threat of non-being, in the midst of the aimlessness and loneliness and creeping nihilism that do plague us, there is a word of grace whispered to each one of us, assuring us of our value and worth, assuring us of our connection to the source of our being as well as to one another. There comes a word that hints at God’s redemptive purpose within the world, and of the ways we’re invited to participate in it. Such a word is spoken, to you, to me, to all of us.
Humans don’t live by bread alone. But even so, give us this dayour daily bread is what we pray. Give us enough to live on and to live with, because to neglect the body, to neglect the material conditions that allow a body to flourish, is to risk enormous damage to our spiritual and moral lives. Do you remember Esau, the brother of Jacob? Did he not sell his birthright and foreclose his future simply for want of food? Did he not sell his soul for a mess of pottage? How many people in the world are brought to ruin, for want of bread? Do you remember the story of Jean Valjean in Hugo’s Les Miserables? Did he not become the convict 24601 for stealing a loaf of bread? How many people are forced to make impossible and calamitous choices because of financial burdens, or food insecurity, or threats of violence? The Lord’s Prayer is an earthy prayer, because even as Jesus understands that humans do not live by bread alone, he also understands that without daily bread, the spiritual and moral foundation of our lives is too easily rent asunder. Give us this day our daily bread we pray, so that we won’t be faced with impossible choices, so that having met our basic material needs, we can also address the spiritual, and emotional, and moral dimensions of our lives.
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Let me pause with those countervailing impulses, because they both have to do with a wider dynamic of movement and migration. On one hand, humans do not live by bread alone – that results in a particular kind of movement or journey throughout the pages of the Bible. On the other hand, give us this day our daily bread – that results in a different kind of movement or journey in the pages of Scripture. A word about both.
Sometimes we come from a place of plenty, and it becomes necessary to travel, or to migrate, to a place that has less. Here, I’m thinking of the story of Abraham, the father of all three of the great Monotheistic traditions. Before he became Abraham, he was known as Abram, and he lived in the land of Ur, which was the cradle of civilization, a land of resources and learning. But early in the pages of Genesis, Abram is called by God to depart the land of Ur, to leave behind the prosperity in which he dwelled, in order to travel to a place he had never seen, a land with far less comfort. But it was also a place in which he would be afforded the opportunity to grow as a human being. I’ll never forget sitting in a class on the Old Testament when I was an undergraduate, and hearing the professor, a man I admired then as now for his erudition and principled simplicity, explain Abram’s departure as God saying to Abram, “I’ve got to get you out of here. For the well being of your soul, I’ve got to get you out of this land of decadence, because humans don’t live by bread alone.” And note: it’s only after his departure that Abram becomes who he most deeply is. It’s only after he left the land of Ur that he acquires a new name. Sometimes the pathway of faith means setting out from a place of comfort, because humans don’t live by bread alone.
Abraham’s migratory path is an uncommon one, born of faith, trusting that God hath yet more truth and light to reveal. It’s what the Hebrews did when they fled the land of Egypt. It’s what the Prophet Mohammed did (peace be upon him) when he left Mecca. It’s what our Pilgrim ancestors did when they left Holland. They chose meaning over comfort and stability. They chose a life of struggle for the live possibility that God would be discovered within the journey, along the pilgrim way, as one song puts it. Humans do not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
I’m guessing that few of us will undertake the kind of journey that Abram undertook. But you might be surprised. You might find within you the intuition that it’s time to depart from that which has settled you. You might find within you the need to flee a life of abundance or comfort, even for a little while, in search of greater simplicity, in search of greater clarity of being. Ask yourself: are you being asked to depart from anything, to set out from anything, for the sake of your faith, for the sake of your life? Consider it carefully: the life you save may be your own, because we all need more than bread to get by.
And yet the prayer continues to speak, forcing us to consider another kind of journey, another kind of pilgrimage. Here we come to the second form of migration, for give us this day our daily bread is the desire that sets a good many people in motion. Such journeys occur from places of scarcity, moving toward places of abundance. The spiritual forbears of those travelers are the children of Jacob, also found in the book of Genesis, who undergo a famine, and so migrate to Egypt in order to find bread. Their forbears are the Hebrew people, wandering in the wilderness, praying that they might find enough bread to get them through the day. Their forbears are Jesus, and Mary and Joseph, fleeing political violence in Jerusalem, when a mad king renders their lives untenable. Give us this day our daily bread, they all pray, and then they hit the road.
This summer as our family drove south, Rachael and I read Isabelle Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Sunsout loud in the car. The kids were on their devices, and so while they were tuned in to some Redbox feature, we tuned in to the story of the great migration of African Americans, from the apartheid terror of the Jim Crow South to a life of possibility in the North, and the West. The book is, at its core, an extended meditation on those words from the Lord’s Prayer: Give us this day our daily bread, with all of the connotations that bread implies.
From the 1920’s through the middle of the 1970’s, when the Great Migration finally ended, some six million people disappeared in the middle of the night, hopping trains or buses, or simply starting a car, heading toward one of the receiving stations where they might have relatives – in Chicago or LA, in New York or Philadelphia. In one of the most memorable moments of the book, Robert Pershing Foster, a young surgeon, sets out from Louisiana in the 1950’s, heading west toward California, a distance of some 1600 miles. He had a friend in Texas, and knew he could stop there for a night of rest. But after that, he didn’t know a soul, and contrary to many of the stories told about that era, Jim Crow laws may not have applied after crossing the border from Texas into New Mexico, but Jim Crow customs certainly did. Every hotel he stopped at turned him away. Gas stations told him he couldn’t sleep in their parking lots. And sleeping on the side of the road was out of the question. Foster was forced to drive for some 36 hours straight, until he made it to San Diego, where he promptly asked the first person of color that he saw where he could find a hotel, and a bite to eat. Foster had never been so exhausted or so famished, and the experience was seared upon his soul for the rest of his life. His migration, and so many just like it, was a bodily and earthy way of praying, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Those migrations continue. Sometimes they’re from Honduras, or Guatemala. Sometimes they’re from Rwanda, or Syria, or Puerto Rico, or Congo. Sometimes they’re from Pakistan. I understand each and every one of those journeys to be a profound and heartfelt form of prayer, of the Lord’s Prayer. Give us this day our daily bread is what all those travelers are praying, whether they know the words or not. Give us this day the safety we need. Give us this day the access to food, and medication that we need. Give us this day the stable home environment that we need. Give us this day the freedom from fear that we need. Give us this day a future for our children, which they all need. Give us this day our daily bread, for we are hungry and famished for that which we need in order to flourish. Is there any more powerful prayer in the world than those conducted with feet, as individuals and families journey toward a promise, however vague? Give us this day our daily bread, is what they’re praying.
And you know what? We’re praying it with them. When we say those words, we’re linking ourselves to that common struggle, stretching across time and space, where human beings set out on a journey in search of bread, and of so much more. Did you realize that we did that every week? Have you sensed how we’re all joined with one another by those beautiful words? Give us this day our daily bread is a phrase that joins us to all those migrations, for we are all of us, at core, vulnerable creatures in need of a little bread.
On Tuesday, several among us are going to be traveling to Cuernevaca, Mexico. We’ll be staying with a community of nuns who have given themselves to a life of simplicity, living among the poor, and helping people like us to understand the complex dynamics of Mexico today. Ours will be a migration of the first kind – out from abundance, as a means of affirming that we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. We need that reminder here in North America, here in Connecticut, here in Old Lyme. Or at any rate, I do. But I suspect I’m not the only one.
Once we’re there, our paths will converge with those who are praying the words of the Lord’s Prayer in a very literal way. And I expect we’ll learn about how that prayer affects an entire population. Some stay home and make do. Some provide hospitality to travelers along the migrant trail. Some exploit those along that trail. Some send their children onto the path, trusting that anything will be better than staying put. I don’t expect that it will be easy, or that we’ll come back with simple answers. But we might come back having learned a little something about human life these days. We might come back with a greater understanding of those who are, at this moment, praying with their feet. We might come back having learned just a little bit more about the words we pray week by week here in the Meetinghouse. Give us this day our daily bread.
But we need that daily bread as well. Not in the same ways, perhaps, but we need it. Because all of us are people on a journey. All of us are in search of bread, and sometimes we search for that which is more than bread, for that word of grace spoken from God. It’s not always easy, but I’ve come to trust that God has given us the capacity to feed one another, to strengthen one another, and to nourish one another. I’ve come to believe that every time we utter those words, we’re reminding ourselves of our sacred responsibility to provide bread, to be bread, and to eat of it. May this bread sustain you on your journey, wherever you may wander, wherever you may roam. May it be a sign of the word of grace, whispered to each one of you. Bless now, O God, this journey, that each of us has undertaken.
