Sermon: The Lord's Prayer - Series 2

Provision – Matthew 6: 11

"Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread” 

We’ve come to the second of our series on the Lord’s prayer – and there’s a shift in focus – from the emphasis on you and yours (your name, your kingdom) to ‘us’ and ‘our’. Remember when one of the teachers of the Law asked Jesus ‘of all the commandments, which is the most important? What did Jesus reply? –“love the Lord your God with everything you possess – and – (equally important) ...love your neighbour as yourself”. It’s a subdivision that reflects the 10 commandments – if you look at them there are 5 to do with our relationship with God; and 5 that cover our relationships with others. So once again here we get a sense of Jesus’ priorities – the need for God’s name to be glorified, God’s kingdom to come and will to be done – FIRST – before our own needs. Revolutionary, radical, isn’t it!! In a world that teaches us that being self-centred and self-absorbed is ‘normal’  - even praiseworthy.  

Now then…(footnote time – ever the academic!) there are dangers in overemphasizing this division of praising God on the one hand and looking to our own needs o the other – especially if it means that once we think we’ve got the first bit covered, now it’s time to twist God’s arm to give us what we want. There’s something more important happening here in this prayer. The fact is, when we become the Father’s children, what he desires is what we should desire too. As we sing sometimes after Communion: Seeking first the kingdom and finding all these things are added also.

So as we come to think about this line of the prayer, let’s be clear that we aren’t praying to God in order for him to give us what we want. The order suggests that we are praying in order that we might become the sort of people he wants. 

But what does it mean to ask for our daily bread?

There’s been a lot of debate about what Jesus might have meant by giving us this short petition to pray and there are 2 main issues that will help to structure our thoughts this morning. One is about the meaning of bread –or food (as some translations put it); and the other is what ‘this day, or today actually means. 

BREAD

The staple, basic food of the Bible lands – eaten either on its own or used to wrap other food. Sure there are other foods mentioned – meat, honey, oil, grapes, figs etc. but they do not figure here. This is about the basic essential food to keep us alive, not the Michelin-guide to nouvelle cuisine. Bread, if you like, is a figure of speech – its meaning certainly extends to all food – but also to everything we need for life: our physical need for things like shelter, clothing, food, water, health, medicine, money; psychological needs for peace of mind, hope, encouragement – love; and spiritual needs for God’s strength and a sense of purpose and identity. Bread covers provision in the widest sense of the word.

But there’s even more significance to Jesus’ use of bread here. For the Jews – those listening to Jesus – there would have been a great central event in their history that would have been uppermost in their minds? Q Can you think what that might be? – well it’s the Exodus – where God had rescued his people from slavery in Egypt and kept them safe in the desert wilderness for the 40 years it took them to get into the land he’s promised. How did he keep them alive? By providing then with bread – or Manna (a Hebrew word that was something like ‘What is this ?)

For the Jews this was the way Yahweh mysteriously and miraculously provided for them.  

To Jesus’ listeners, these things - that happened when God rescued his people from slavery - were central to their faith. Despite their mistakes and wrong turns, God had a great track record of supplying his children with essential food. But it might have also suggested to them that Jesus was in fact some kind of new Moses: that something excitingly new was happening with all his talk of the Kingdom. So ‘bread’ would have pointed back to what God had done for his people in the past. But it would also have pointed to the future – and the prophecies we thought about last time that were associated with the coming Messiah who was going to throw a huge party.  

Can you see the overlap with praying for his kingdom to come – and are you beginning to see how very down-to earth and practical this prayer is? 

Because the second word that’s been hugely debated is Jesus’ use of the word “DAILY” – epiousios in Greek ­– a very rare word that probably had quite a paradoxical meaning – that could be translated as ‘Give us today the bread of tomorrow. Give us here and now, struggling as we are, a foretaste of that eternal bread, that supernatural nourishment which will be our lot in the future kingdom.

So what is Jesus getting at? Almost certainly he’s encouraging us to pray for our short-term, immediate needs – but isn’t he also pointing to something greater. And practically what does this mean for us in our praying? How do we expect God to respond to a prayer like this? 

Some people talk a lot about miraculous answers to prayer – healings that leave the medical profession baffled – and they do happen. But so do other sorts of answers to prayer – when a person with an illness gradually responds to antibiotics, or another who gets the strength to endure their illness. Equally someone may get a job that enables them to earn enough to gradually pay off their debts. Yet another - the council finds them a vacant flat. There aren’t two categories of answers to prayer – the first class/spectacular and second class humdrum or mundane. Our prayers shouldn’t limit how God is to work. In the wilderness God supplied Israel with bread in an amazingly spectacular way (I guess he had to). But for most of history God has been supplying bread through much less headline-grabbing ways – through farmers producing grain and bakers turning it into loaves of bread – and of course by the One providing the grain in the first place and watering it to make it grow. 

Now back to this shift in focus from God to us and our needs. There we were last week praying for his Kingdom to come and his will to be done – now we’re told to pray for bread - of all things (the sublime to the ordinary??) What’s that all about? (as they say). Well this is really important: in reality we’re not just praying about bread. As J. John points out, this is also about mortgage repayments, friends with illness or depression, dry rot in the cellar – and children with nappy rash. We shouldn’t over-spiritualize as some have done – “Jesus couldn’t possibly mean real bread!” This is one of Christianity’s disastrous mistakes – one of its truly BAD ideas. And you can probably think of some others that are pretty obvious: authorizing the dreadful slaughter of the crusades for one; or burning heretics to name another. But this one is about dividing the world of the heavenly, the spiritual – from the physical. Everybody blames this on the ancient Greeks who saw the non-physical, spiritual realm as something pure – and the physical world of matter and body as unspiritual and dirty. (Can you see where we’re going with this?) 

Amongst other problems, this kind of view creates a two-tier Christianity with an upper-level where there are those who deal with spiritual matters – such as vicars, pastors, priests and nuns. And then there’s everybody else – ordinary men and women in the pew – who are locked into the sinful, physical world. Can you see how this leads into the mistaken belief that those in the lower level can only talk to God through those in the upper echelon – that they need the “professionals” to be able to talk to Jesus!! Such nonsense – which is why the Apostle Peter talks of us all being part of a ‘royal priesthood.’ Yet this is the temptation that occurs right across our churches – and it may account for our tendency to worship God just for an hour on a Sunday morning – because the logic is that God really isn’t too interested in what happens for the rest of the time.

It leads to the idea that the only things that really matter are to do with heaven. So being a wife or husband, a student, an employer, a worker hasn’t anything to do with spiritual life? Ah ah!!! Mistaken!! But do you see how a whole bunch of crazy stuff follows. It’s the church building that gets to be seen as a ‘holy place’ – while the workplace or the home is not. And everything gets put into compartments – even God – with disastrous consequences. So to be involved with earthly matters is second best?? That’s absolutely not how Jesus is teaching his apprentices – his disciples – you and me  - to pray. We need to celebrate what we’ve labelled ‘lay ministry’ – Christians getting involved in life – in politics – in business – in education and health (as many of you are). The root of the problem is that we’ve fundamentally misunderstood what the word ‘spiritual’ means – as something less real and solid than physical things. As Teilhard de Chardin once said – “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” The resurrection accounts seem to go out of their way to point out that the ‘spiritual’ Jesus was not in any way less than Jesus was before he came back from the dead. So the disciples touched Jesus and ate with him. The fact that he was not limited by walls or locked doors may actually suggest that far from being some sort of ghost or apparition, the risen Jesus was more solid than a brick wall – think about it. 

So what do we say: to be truly spiritual in the Bible’s terms is not to be removed from the world but to be in it (just like Jesus prayed in John 17) – to get involved – to engage with culture, politics, literature, the arts – and yes sport and films.

This is an incredible prayer – because it brings heaven and earth together in a natural unembarrassed way. Which is why Paul pleads with the Roman Christians to give their bodies to God, letting them be a living and holy sacrifice – the kind he will accept. After all when you think of what God has done for you – become embodied to die on a cross – is this too much to ask?

So let’s pray (and I’m using a version by the American philosophy professor and writer Dallas Willard’s): Dear Father, always near us. May your name be cherished and loved. May your rule be completed in us. Your will be done here on earth just the way it’s done in heaven. Give us today the things we need for today.  Amen