Bread for Us; Bread for All (Matthew 6:7-9a, 11; 11th Sunday after Pentecost; August 9, 2015)

Bread for Us; Bread for All

Matthew 6:7-9a, 11

11^th Sunday after Pentecost

August 9, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

The Lord’s Prayer is the cornerstone of what I call a “spirituality of resistance.” The prayer knows some things about the world. It know that this world is broken and in need of transformation. It knows something God, too. It knows God as one who hears the cry of God’s people, who knows the suffering the brokenness of the world causes, and who comes to save.

The Lord’s Prayer is direct, urgent, and insistent. The people who pray it don’t have time or energy to spare for fancy words or the usual protocols of prayer. They know themselves as those who are up against the wall. They need justice and they need it now. They need for the gap between God’s dream and our lived reality to be closed. They know their own role in closing the gap. They know that justice will not come unless they do justice themselves. They know that unless they act lovingly, love will not increase.

But they also know that they cannot close the gap alone. God must hear and know and act. They will not stop praying until God does exactly that. This is how Jesus taught them to pray.

I say “they” and “them” because I know the Lord’s Prayer has suffered from our tradition. It has been tamed, toned down, and turned into a gesture of submission to the status quo. It has been domesticated. We pray “they will be done” and somehow come away believing that God’s will has already been done and this unjust regime is the best we can hope for so we’d better get used to it.

But Jesus invites us to pray it differently. He does this, I believe, in the conviction that the greatest threat to an unjust regime is people praying as he taught us to pray.

But when we pray as Jesus taught, what exactly are we praying for? Well, for God’s reign to be realized, for God’s name to be made holy for, and for God’s will to be done, of course. Last week I suggested that, if we know the foundationn story of God’s people, we would have a pretty good idea of what God’s dream looks like.

But we don’t have to go that far from our text to find some specific examples of what God’s reign on earth would look like. Today’s scripture gives us one example; the next two weeks will give us more.

What does justice look like? “Give us today our daily bread!” to start with.

This isn’t hard—we just need to walk around this sentence a bit and notice some things.

First, from this point on in the prayer only first-person plural pronouns are used: “Give us...forgive us...we forgive...lead us...deliver us...” One of the things that we have to decide when we pray this prayer is, “Who is ‘us’?” How big is “we”? How big is the circle? When we pray in a few minutes “as our Lord taught us,” is the circle just big enough to just include us in this room? Or does it include the members who couldn’t be here, too? Or does it include all United Methodists? Or all Christians? Or all human beings? Or every living thing that needs daily nourishment? If this prayer is not “Give me today my daily bread,” how can we fail to pray on behalf of all that share our life on this planet? Until, that is, we discover for certain that there is life on other worlds?

Second, this prayer for bread is a prayer for bread. It’s more than that, but first it’s a prayer for bread. It’s a prayer for the most basic of foods, what they call the staple food. In the ancient Middle East it was wheat or barley bread. In El Salvador it’s corn tortillas. In some parts of Africa it’s yams. But wherever it is, it’s real food, food for real bodies, bodies that feel pleasure and pain, bodies that grow strong and then age and grow weaker and finally die. It’s about bread that is bought and sold in bakeries and supermarkets. It’s about bread made from commodities that are the subject of speculation and government regulation. It’s about food that is a matter of public policy. This is a prayer that is political, not in the party politics sense, but in its original sense of how we will order our common life. This is a “real world” prayer.

Third, I notice that this is a daily prayer for daily bread that is supplied one day at a time. It isn’t a prayer for a secure retirement or a year’s income in the bank for emergencies. It’s a prayer for enough food for today that we can live well and sleep well and wake up tomorrow with the confidence that the God who gave us bread today will do it again. This isn’t necessarily an argument against planning, but it is an argument against anxiety. To pray today for the food we need for today frees us from anxiety. The foundation story of God’s people shows us what we need to know. People gathered manna each day and were instructed not to try to save any overnight. Some anxious souls, doubtless sellers of insurance, tried it anyway. But in the morning the manna they had saved was full of worms and rotten.

The Lord’s Prayer invites us to freedom from anxiety about our daily needs. In that freedom we can attend to the common good knowing that this creates the kind of community that will care for us when we need it.

“Give us today our daily bread.” Every creature of God needs its food and we pray that every creature will have it.

Of course, this prayer isn’t magic. If the world is going to become a just place, we must ourselves act justly. If the world is going to become a loving place, we must ourselves act lovingly.

So it is not enough, as James says, to say to our hungry brother or sister, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill” without supplying their bodily needs.¹ Part of our praying the Lord’s Prayer is making sure that the food pantry stays well-stocked. Part of our praying the Lord’s Prayer is making sure that the community meal program stays strong.

When I drive through the countryside around Decorah, I am constantly amazed by the corn and soybeans. I’m no farmer, but to me they look fabulous. Our friends from Potrerillos who visited us last year were awe-struck. After Kathi Mitchell and I met them at O’Hare airport and negotiated our way through traffic until we were out of the metro area, one of them pointed to a northern Illinois cornfield—not, admittedly, an Iowa cornfield, but pretty impressive nonetheless. “¿Qué es eso? (What is that?)” Another answered, “Maís. (Corn)” “¿Maís?” “Sí.” The whole group fell silent for while as we passed mile after mile of densely-packed corn plants. It’s not that they had never seen corn before. Every patch of level ground bigger than a square yard has corn planted in it. But they had not seen corn like this.

We grow enough to feed the world. So why are there hungry people? The answer to this clause of the Lord’s Prayer is growing in Winneshiek County. How can there be bare cupboards or empty refrigerators? I argue that the answer to that question is that our system is not designed to make sure that everyone eats. It’s designed to make sure that some people make a profit. There is food enough, but only for those who have money to pay.

Our system even tries to interfere when people try to grow their own corn for their own use. Monsanto lobbied the State Department to hold up aid money to El Salvador because of a government program in El Salvador to provide free seed corn for subsistence farmers. Monsanto argued that this is unfair competition, even though the corn being produced was not going to be sold on the market, nor could the seed corn that Monsanto produces be used in thin dirt patches around Potrerillos. But the market cannot abide the possibility of a profit unmade, never mind at what cost it would come for those who depend on that community-grown corn for their daily bread.

So our prayer pits us against our system. The Lord’s Prayer puts food for people above profits. Our system puts profits above everything. We can’t pray the Lord’s Prayer while drifting with the stream. We can only pray it upstream, against the current of our culture. The Lord’s Prayer is a prayer of resistance. Far from reconciling us to a status quo that we regard as God’s will, it stirs us up to resist a status quo that befouls God’s good dream.

To pray this prayer we shall have to learn about such things as food justice and urban food deserts. And then we will have to figure out how to make things better for the folks in Potrerillos and the inhabitants of own city cores. And Monsanto won’t like it.

That should be enough, but there’s a story that wants to be told here. I’ve told you about Sister Peggy whom I met in Suchitoto last summer. She has been in Suchi since the mid-1980’s, doing whatever needs to be done, whatever will make for justice and peace. We had supper one evening. A word of advice: Don’t let a nun who has been in El Salvador for thirty years decide where to eat. She has an American passport and a Salvadoran digestive system.

She shared some of her experiences from her early days, when the war was raging around them and Suchi was an Army stronghold and she spent her time helping the Army’s victims. She and a Salvadoran volunteer were traveling from one village to another. They had a driver and a bodyguard and they were riding in the back of a pickup truck with other riders, standing up and holding on for dear life in the way that it’s done there. This is how you transport fifteen or twenty people in a pickup truck.

Their trip had run late and it was almost dark, a dark like we don’t experience anymore, what with security lights and all. They were stopped by a couple of campesinos who blocked the road. There was an Army patrol nearby, coming in their direction. Sister Peggy grabbed her bag and the hands of a couple of the women who were with her and ran into the night across a field. They reached a ditch on the other side and, as one of the women was eight months pregnant, they decided to hide there and wait it out overnight.

Peggy had no food; she hadn’t planned to be away overnight. The pregnant woman had two dozen tortillas in her bag. Salvadoran tortillas are more substantial than the Mexican variety we’re familiar with, but still, two dozen tortillas among three women wouldn’t go far as “daily bread.” Peggy protested when she was handed eight tortillas. “You should eat them,” she said. “You’re eating for your baby, too. What will you eat tomorrow? And besides, I have nothing to share with you.” This dirt-poor campesina replied, “Tonight I will share my tortillas with you. Tomorrow you will share your hunger with me.”

I’m not entirely sure why that story wanted to be told, but I suspect it has something to do with the Lord’s Prayer. I suspect that, when we’ve lived into this prayer, into the request to “Give us today our daily bread,” we will find that this story is completely logical, even obvious. Until then, we’ll keep praying.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

1 James 2:15-16

Hey! What Gives!? (Matthew 6:9-10; Tenth Sunday after Pentecost; August 2, 2015)

Hey! What Gives!?

Matthew 6:9-10

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 2, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, IA

If there is a single prayer from our tradition that people know by heart, it is the Lord's Prayer. There are a few variations. Some folks forgive debts where others forgive trespasses. United Methodists forgive trespassers, some wag has said, because we never forgive debts. More on that in a couple of weeks. Most Protestants use some version of the prayer as found in the Authorized Version, the so-called King James Version, named for the guy who did the authorizing. Many, though, use a modern version put forward by the International Consulation on English in the Liturgy. Some folks change a word or two here or there, to remove the patriarchal language. There are some slight differences in the concluding doxology (that is not part of either biblical version).

But all that aside, I can step in front of nearly any Christian body in the English-speaking world, say, "Let us pray as our Lord taught us," and have the assurance that we'll all get through it pretty well. We have this prayer memorized, even if it's only "sing-along" memorized, you know, in the way that we can sing along with a song on the radio that we couldn't sing without help. We also know the prayer by heart, which isn't quite the same thing. It's been a kind of refuge for us. When we have to pray, but don't know what or how, these words give agonized souls a way to pray.

I don't want to take any of that away, but like any set of memorized words that we use often, the Lord's Prayer has been subject to two distortions. First, we may never have read the Lord's Prayer very closely, in a way that let us hear it with something like the force that Jesus gave it. Second, like any common ritual, whether it's saying the Pledge of Allegiance or telling each other goodnight, we have this tendency to do it without really paying much attention. The words just carry us along and the first thing you know it's over and we hardly even noticed. We tell our spouses that we love them and after a few years it becomes automatic.

The solution to that problem is not to stop saying, "I love you." Nor is it to stop praying the Lord's Prayer. The solution is to pay attention, even if it is for the first time.

So, for the next four weeks we'll be looking a little more closely at the Lord's Prayer, learning or reminding ourselves of what it actually says, so that our worship together and our prayers when we are apart will carry more meaning.

The first thing that I want to notice is the sheer audacity of the prayer. With hardly any courtesy and no bowing and scraping at all, the prayer addresses God, lays out seven demands with the seven uses of the imperative. Then it stops so abruptly that Christians of later ages felt compelled to add the familiar doxology, "for thine is the kingdom, and so on..." It's a cheeky prayer, a prayer with sass. It doesn't request little things, either. This is not a request for help in finding a parking space or a lost set of car keys.

The scope of the prayer is huge, as the first five lines of the prayer make clear:

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

These requests aren't really three separate requests but three ways of asking for the same thing. Here's the situation: God, though addressed as a parent, is somewhat removed from us. God is in heaven. And we are not.

God looks around heaven and everything looks okay. God's name is regarded as holy. God reigns. God's will is done. But that's in heaven. That's not where we are. We are on earth. On earth things are not what they are where God is. And perhaps this has escaped God's notice.

God's name is not regarded as holy. God does not reign. I say this because God's will is not being done on earth. How do I know that? I'm glad you asked. I know that because I know what God wants. We all know what God wants. We spent four weeks laying that out in detail before I went on vacation.

To be sure, the Ten Commandments are not the only place in the Bible where God tells us what God wants, but it's a pretty good place. It isn't hard to understand, either. To begin, God is the God who set Israel free from slavery to the gods of Egypt. Israel labored endlessly to ease Pharaoh's anxiety by meeting his whims. They labored without rest. The conditions under which they lived did not allow for rest or neighborliness or community or human being. When Israel cried out, God heard them, God saw their misery, and God determined to set them free.

God does not want people in thrall to any economic system or government or social arrangement or even to any person. It is God's intention, God's will, to "bring out" everyone who lives in slavery.

That slavery can take a lot of forms. It could be the slavery of, say, student loan debt that is so massive it can never be repaid. Or it could be the slavery of endless austerity imposed on one nation by another (who, in the case that I'm thinking about, have had a nasty habit in the last century or so of trying to impose their will on other people, sometimes with tanks, this time with banks). Or it could be the slavery of consumerism that dangles shiny objects in front of people who when they "support the economy" by buying them are then accused of being greedy when the business cycle turns down. Or it could be the slavery of fear that is peddled by those who want our obedience, and use that fearful obedience to make the world less safe and themselves richer and more powerful. Or it could be the slavery of addiction to chemicals that poison the mind and body and leave behind wrecked lives and a tidy profit for the drug lords. Or it could be the slavery of the American Dream that holds out the promise of a prosperous life to any who work hard and obey the rules and shatters that promise at the hands of a racist criminal justice system. Slavery comes in many shapes and sizes. God hates them all. It is God's intention, God's will, to break the chains of bondage.

It is the God who hated Israel's chains in Egypt, who broke those chains, and who gave Israel a new life. We know God's dream for the shape of that new life. It would be a life of freedom from oppression by the gods of endless labor, endless anxiety, endless fear, and endless anxiety, the gods of death in all its forms. God would protect them from those gods. In their new life, there would be rest from labor. There would be freedom from fear that their houses and fields and orchards and vineyards would be taken from them. There would be freedom from violence. There would be relations that were based on truth-telling and where one neighbor would not regard the other as their rival or enemy. There would, perhaps best and least likely of all, be freedom from the envy and greed that gnaw at the roots of community and mutual care like the worm Nithhogg who in malice gnaws at the root of the world tree in Norse mythology.

God's will, in short, is no mystery. The mystery is, What has happened to it? Where is the making holy of God's name? Where is the reign of God? "These things are heaven," someone says. And I say to someone, "That's not good enough."

It wasn't good enough for Jesus. It wasn't good enough for the martyrs. It wasn't good enough for Benedict and those sought to fashion that humane life on earth, even if it was only within a small community, so that the rest of us should not lose hope. It wasn't good enough for Hildegard of Bingen who faced down bishops and demanded the unity of the Church. It wasn't good enough for William Wilberforce whose festival day was just this Thursday whose life-long labor was the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. It wasn't good enough for Martin Luther King, Jr., who saw clearly the destruction caused by the interlocking mechanisms of racism, poverty and militarism.

It's not good enough for us, either. Obamacare not withstanding, there are still plenty of people who need Decorah's free clinic. The so-called recovery from the last recession not withstanding, there are hungry children in our own country, in our own county. A post-racial society not withstanding, a black woman can get arrested and thrown in jail where she dies under suspicious circumstances for changing lanes without signaling.

You see, Jesus told us to pray like this, demanding God's justice in an unjust world. We've been doing it for a long time. We've been praying for two thousands years for God's will to be done, for God's kingdom to come, for God's name to be made holy and it hasn't happened yet.

Are you discouraged? I am. Justice is a long time coming.

God broke Israel's chains and gave them a new life. But it isn't as if God simply snapped the divine fingers and snatched the Israelites from their beds in Egypt and plopped them down in the Land of Promise. At some point the Israelites had to get up on their own feet and walk out of Egypt.

The other half of the Lord's Prayer is that it isn't enough to nag at God for justice, although God's people have never been above nagging. At some point we have to decide that it's well worth giving up some of our privilege for the sake of justice for everyone. At some point we have to decide that it isn't going to be business as usual. At some point we have to decide that we have had enough. At some point we have to get up on our own feet and walk out of Egypt, too. At some point we have to decide that we aren't going to governed by fear or greed. And all of this is part of the answer to the Lord's Prayer that we keep waiting for and resisting at the same time.

This prayer isn't a set of words we say together that comfort us in their familiarity. Still less is it to be prayed on auto-pilot. It is a prayer that demands the full engagement of our minds and our hearts and our hands and our feet. It is a prayer that demands a response from God and from us. An answer might not be soon in coming; it might take another two thousand years. But we're going to keep praying like we expect the answer tomorrow.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.