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.

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1 James 2:15-16