Hilton Head Island, SC – September 29, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 55:1-9; Matthew 15:32-38
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Give us this day our daily bread.” – Matthew 6:11 (RSV)
Theologians have two special words for requests of God. If we ask God to bless others, those prayers are called intercessions. We pray that God will intercede on behalf of others: the sick, the dying, the poor, and so on. If, on the other hand, we ask God for blessings for ourselves, the theologians call those prayers petitions. To petition someone for something is to ask whomever for whatever.
When Jesus instructed us to ask God to hallow His name or to institute His kingdom on earth as in heaven, such prayers are both intercessions and petitions. If God’s name is sanctified, or if we see His kingdom manifested upon the earth, it is a blessing to everyone else as well as to us personally. Curiously, however, of the five requests of God which Jesus suggested in the Lord’s Prayer, two are intercessions as well as petitions, but the final three are solely petitions. We are asking God something for us: not for anyone else, but for us. And “give us this day our daily bread” is the first of those three obvious petitions. It is a request of God on our own behalf.
The concept of bread is a much more pressing reality in subsistence economies than it is in economies of abundance. Bread is cheap. Cheap bread is especially cheap. We can purchase really expensive bread in really fancy stores, but ordinarily bread is relatively inexpensive. That is why it is called “the staff” (or the staple) of life. Bread, rice, potatoes, and beans are staples of physical existence for millions of poor people. And because Jesus lived in a subsistence economy, where most people had just enough to live on and very few people were really wealthy, Jesus talked frequently about bread. Everyone could identify with the importance of bread.
Do you remember why Jean Valjean was arrested and imprisoned by the merciless Javaert? In Victor Hugo’s classic novel Les Miserables, Valjean was sentenced to prison for several years for stealing a loaf of bread for his starving family. Or do you recall what Marie Antoinette said when it was reported to her that the poor people of Paris were demonstrating in front of the palace, pleading for bread? “Let them eat cake!”, she heartlessly responded. A good friend once explained what that expression actually meant. The French queen wasn’t thinking about chocolate cake or angel food cake or poppy seed cake. She was thinking about the burned edges of bread still sticking to the bread pans, the off-scouring which was always thrown away because it was no good to eat. That’s what the word “cake” connoted to the late eighteenth-century French people. That’s what the queen derisively implied when she said, “Let them eat cake.” Given the circumstances of the French lower classes, what a particularly cruel thing to say! Surely she must have lost her head to have thought that! Ultimately, as we know, she did.
The third petition in the Lord’s Prayer is a very deliberately limited request of God. Jesus didn’t say, “Give us prosperity and plenty for the rest of our lives.” Instead he said, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Jesus didn’t tell us to ask for more than we need for today, but instead to ask God to give us today our “daily minimum requirements,” as it says on the cereal boxes. Such a prayer seems superfluous to us, who are so affluent. But it wasn’t superfluous to the poor peasants of the 1st century region of the Galilee in Judea. We Americans expect that we shall have whatever we need for today, but we focus on what we think we need for the next week or month or year or decade or lifetime. People of plenty expect plenty, and plan for much more. People of poverty expect nothing, but they pray to God for enough food for mere subsistence.
I read a very interesting article in Christian Century by a man named Paul Gifford. For 23 years he visiting and studied African churches. His article is called Expecting miracles: The prosperity gospel in Africa. He described the rapid growth of African Pentecostal congregations and denominations of a certain type. Their clergy promote the idea that true Christians can expect to be wealthy. That notion is also strong in some North and South American Pentecostal churches. But that is a highly dubious theological or biblical principle. Paul Gifford is especially alarmed at how widespread this form of the so-called “prosperity gospel” is spreading in the poorest countries of Africa. He writes, “What are we to make of this phenomenon? One’s judgment is likely to be tied to one’s understanding of the African context. The continent obviously has been shaped by colonialism, the cold-war rivalry of the superpowers, the world trade system and a huge burden of debt. But in my view the most significant fact about Africa is the dysfunctional political culture that permits an unaccountable elite to appropriate wealth and power at the expense of the people.” A few African clergy, like a few North and South American televangelists, are getting rich through the contributions to their ecclesiastical empires by ordinary or even very poor people.
Jesus confined this petition in the Lord’s Prayer to just one thing: daily bread. Not bread for tomorrow or next week or next year, but for today. It is not only unseemly to ask God for long-term blessings, it is totally unacceptable to do so. When anyone prays for a newer or bigger car, or for any kind of car, or for a newer or bigger house, or for more dependable financial security, such a person is likely to evoke God’s annoyance more than big, bold blessings from God. To pray for more than daily bread is to engage in theological chutzpah, and God is not pleased with such prayers.
Damien Hirst is a British artist, of sorts. He created a work of art, if such it may be legitimately called, which he named For the Love of God. It consists of $25 million dollars’ worth of diamonds securely fastened to an actual human skull. The skull’s real teeth are there, but everything else on the bony surface of the skull is covered with diamonds, hundreds of glittering gems. For a mere $100 million, you can snap up this artistic treasure. You’d better get in line soon, though, or you’ll miss your chance.
I suspect that Jesus of Nazareth would be incensed by For the Love of God. I can guarantee you he would have been appalled by anyone who should petition the Holy One of Israel for this obscene purported piece of purported art. Daily bread is sufficient for anyone; to ask for more is dangerously to test the patience of the Lord of Hosts, Adonoy Sabaoth.
The two travelers on the road to Emmaus did not recognize the risen Christ until Jesus broke bread for them in their home. And in the instant he did that, he vanished. It wasn’t a miracle which directed them to Jesus’ true identity; it was the mundane breaking of the Passover matzoth which led them to perceive who Jesus was. Nobody really needs anything other than basic food; more than that is more than enough. And God promises us only enough.
There is yet another feature to “Give us this day our daily bread” that can easily become lost in the homiletical shuffle. “Give us our daily bread” has a social dimension to it. Jesus didn’t tell us to say to God, “Give me my daily bread;” he said, “Give us our daily bread.” Nobody can succeed in life alone. We all require major assistance from everyone else.
Remember The Little Red Hen? In this children’s story, a small red chicken was going to bake some bread. So she asked the pig to help her harvest the wheat. “Not I,” said the pig, so she did it herself. She asked the cow to help her thresh and sift the wheat. “Not I,” said the cow, so she did it herself. So on with making the flour, etc., etc., etc. Assuming all of you have heard the story, you can easily fill in the blanks for yourself. Then, when she had baked her bread, she asked, “Who will help me eat the bread?” “I will!” said the pig, cow, and horse. The Little Red Hen imperiously answered, “No, since none of you helped me, I’ll eat all of my bread all by myself.” Whether that is a worthy moral lesson for little kids I’ll leave for you to decide.
The point of citing this classic children’s tome as a sermon illustration is to suggest that it is almost impossible for any individual to take all the steps necessary to baking bread, from first gathering the wheat to finally eating the finished product. The very existence of bread itself connotes a social, as opposed to an individual, effort. Jesus is indirectly telling us that we are a prerequisite to my having food. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for life. We learn from and receive from and derive nourishment from one another. It’s the only way it works. So we say to God, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Practically everyone here this morning is affluent. Some are more affluent than others, but there is none of us who is desperately poor. Even poor people on Hilton Head Island or in Bluffton are affluent compared to poor people elsewhere in the world. Without doubt every one of us is relatively well fixed financially. The problem with affluent people is that we think about and plan for more financial and personal security than is necessary for daily life. People who have $5,000 in the bank want $10,000 in the bank. People who have $50,000 in their IRAs want $100,000 in their IRAs. Those who have $250,000 in their 401k’s want $500,000 in their 401k’s.
The same principle operates for national security as well. The wealthiest of nations seek the highest levels of security. Our government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year to protect us. But the security we seek is impossible to guarantee. It was estimated that the 9/11 attack cost the terrorists only $150,000. Seventeen years later it has probably resulted in several trillion of dollars of expenditures to prevent another such attack. Lotsaluck to us.
Daily security is our only reasonable prayer to God, just as daily bread is our only reasonable petition to God for bodily sustenance. People who pray for long-term financial security or long-term personal security are bound to be disappointed. God is not in the long-term care business. He promises to bless us only in the short-term, and in eternity. We must limit our requests to Him for daily bread. More than that is beyond the scope of His divine provision.
Besides, bread doesn’t last long-term. It is best used right away. The shelf-life of bread, or the refrigerator- or freezer-life, is limited. We can take measures to prolong its usefulness as nutrition, but a loaf of bread was never meant to be become a permanent nutritional investment for anyone. Use it or lose it; that is the motto of our daily bread.
On the other hand, just as we can become too concerned with long-term security as represented by the food we eat each day or by the investments we store away for the future, so too can we become too concerned even about our daily bread. In the Old Testament lesson for today, the prophet Isaiah urges us to seek the kind of food that truly satisfies our needs. It isn’t physical, Isaiah tells us; it is spiritual. “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Hearken diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in fatness.”
The prophets were also poets, and this poetic utterance is not talking literally about bread, but rather about spiritual food. If we want to keep from starving, spiritually, then we must put our trust in God, and in God alone. Don’t put it in your own efforts, and especially don’t put it in the Almighty Dollar. God offers us everything we need in life, and it doesn’t cost one red cent. We spend too much emotional energy worrying about both food for today and financial security for every day of our lives. Isaiah and Jesus are telling us to look to God for our ultimate security. God alone can provide such security. And it doesn’t come in the form of a pantry filled with food or a portfolio bulging with stocks and bonds; it comes solely by our placing our trust in God. Any other kind of security, even the security of daily bread, is false security.
The miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle of Jesus that is found in all four of the Gospels. When you ponder that fact, it is extraordinary. I suppose from it we should deduce that it surely must have happened basically as it is recorded. However, in Matthew and Mark it was four thousand men who were fed, not the five thousand people whom Luke and John tell us about. On the other hand, when Jesus referred to this miracle in the very next chapter of Matthew after it is first recorded, he tells the disciples it was five thousand who were fed, not a mere four thousand. The Gospels are authenticated by their differences, not their uniformity.
But that isn’t the point. The point is that Jesus recognized the need for his listeners to be fed. They had spent a good part of that day with him, and now they were hungry. Physical hunger is real, and Jesus recognized that. The God who created us with bodies knows those bodies need fuel to keep going. And here is where Doug Bowling had the best explanation of the feeding of the five thousand (or four thousand) that I ever heard. Years ago Doug was pastor of St. Andrew By-the-Sea Methodist Church here on the Island five pastors ago. Lois and I heard him address this scripture passage in 1996 or 1997 during the time we attended St. Andrew. Doug said that no Jewish mother in that crowd of people would ever have gone off to listen to Jesus without bringing some bread to eat for her children, her husband, and herself. You can’t be a qualified Jewish mother if you neglect such an important maternal prerequisite, he said. So Jesus asked everybody in that large gathering to turn in everything they had to eat, which they did. And there was more than enough to feed everyone. The miracle is that people whose inclination was to provide for themselves provided for all. Would that that miracle happened every day everywhere!
As you may know, the Israeli-American violinist Itzhak Perlman had polio as a child. It is difficult and painful for him to walk. Whenever he is a soloist with an orchestra, he is the last to walk out. He seats himself in a chair, takes time to adjust his leg braces, fiddles with his fiddle, and then nods to the conductor. On one occasion he began playing the violin solo in a particular concerto. Shortly into the work, one of his strings suddenly snapped with a loud pop. The audience held its collective breath, assuming he would need to go slowly off stage to get another string. Mr. Perlman paused a moment, and removed the two parts of the broken string. Then he nodded to the conductor to go ahead, and he played with just the remaining strings. Anyone who knows music knows that it is not possible to play a violin with a missing string. But on that magical evening, Itzhak Perlman did it, making all the necessary improvisations to accomplish his gargantuan achievement. At the end of the concerto, the audience rose as one, giving him a thunderous, delirious, and prolonged applause. After they finally quieted down, this magnificent Mensch of a musician calmly said to them, “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”
We all have been given our daily bread. And there’s always enough to give us strength to do what we need to do. There is even always some left over. Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.