Scripture: Exodus 16 selections
There’s this story in the book of Exodus about some people who find themselves out in the desert wilderness and they are hungry and they are not happy. When I am hungry, I am not happy. God is not so happy that they are not happy, because of some of the things they are saying behind God’s back, except that it’s very hard to say things behind God’s back, so God listens in to the grumbling that is going on and doesn’t care for the tone of it. But God does see that the people are hungry and decides to provide them with food, bread from heaven, manna as it comes to be called. God provides enough of this food just for each day for each person. There is no excess, and whatever anyone tries to save up for tomorrow spoils before tomorrow comes around, except on Friday and Saturday when God provides enough to carry people through the Sabbath. Thus the hungry people in the wilderness have enough to eat because God gives them a daily portion every day. I would not be surprised if Jesus had this story in his mind when he said, in the prayer he was teaching his disciples, “Give us this day our daily bread.” I’ll come back to that.
This story about manna in the wilderness is, of course, part of a much larger story. It is a story about the Hebrew people and their suffering in Egypt, their miraculous escape from slavery, their 40 year trek across the desert, picking up the Ten Commandments along the way, and their eventual arrival in a land where they could settle down and enjoy a life of safety and prosperity. More accurately, it is a story of God, whose heart goes out especially to people whose lives are burdened, whose holy spirit rebels at injustice, who works in ways that are sometimes dramatic and sometimes hardly noticeable to liberate people from oppression and move people to new and better places, who guides and sustains people on journeys toward happiness and wholeness, who envisions a time of shalom, a place, a reign of justice and well-being that would spread itself out over the whole earth. That is the larger story that Exodus tells. It is a story that many people, myself included, take to be the larger story of all of scripture. The story of Exodus gives us a broad general pattern of what all of scripture is about: the God who is moved by human suffering and who is involved in all our struggles and journeys toward justice and shalom.
The story of Exodus is the story of scripture itself. It is the big picture of God’s desire, God’s intention for us. Jesus is reminding us of that big picture when he tells us to pray: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And that is what I was looking at a couple of weeks ago in the sermon. Jesus wants us—pardon the jargon—to tune our praying into the grand sweep of God’s hope and purpose for us. Let our hope, O God, be your hope, let our prayer be your prayer, that your reign come among us and a beloved community arise among your people. Let that come about, dear God, let it be. Let it be.
In the context of that larger story, the story we heard this morning is just a momentary cross-section, a slice of life if you will. Sure the Hebrew people are on their way to the Promised Land. Sure God has taken them by the hand and led them safely out of slavery. Sure there are adventures and marvels awaiting them. But at the moment, the moment of this story, they are hungry. And although one might wish, and God does wish, that they would not so easily lose sight of the big picture, the reality of the moment is nevertheless a reality. This momentary hunger is real hunger and the people who are living in the moment don’t want the hunger to become more than momentary.
The same could be said about Jesus and the disciples. Jesus reminds the disciples as he teaches them the Lord’s Prayer to keep the big picture in mind, to pray for the reign of God, but then immediately recognizes that there are also needs that fall into a different category, needs for daily bread, and everything that daily bread represents. “Give us this day our daily bread.” Though I remember saying a couple of weeks ago that the reign of God was everything to Jesus, and in a way it was, at any given moment in their lives, the reign of God was not all there was, could not have been all there was, for the disciples, or for Jesus.
Or for us, of course. Jesus does encourage us, by his words and example, and specifically in the Lord’s Prayer, to set our hearts on the reign of God. And for me keeping my mind and heart set on that vision that comes from God’s heart is one of the things that gives each of those cross-sections of my life some larger context, that keeps each of those passing moments from just fading away, one by one, into nothing and amounting in the end to nothing. I am not a person who believes we should live entirely in the moment, or that we can. Each moment, for me, is part of a much bigger story, and yet we do live that story moment by moment, day by day, not all at once. And it is hard to have our minds set on the reign of God all the time. And as motivational sayings remind us, we make our long journeys one step at a time and take our lifetime one day at a time. The reign of God may or may not be on our mind or in our prayers day by day. Honestly it is probably not a conscious thing most of the time. Honestly, most of the time what I need now, what I need to make it through this day in some human, self-respecting way is what counts. What counts is my daily bread.
Biblical commentaries say that this “stuff” the Hebrews were fed in the wilderness was not your typical bread. The term bread from heaven may be a little misleading. We’re not talking 12-grain, pumpernickel, or sour dough loaves steaming with the smell of fresh baked bread suddenly appearing in the middle of the desert. We’re talking about a flaky substance that when it first appeared the people looked at it and said, “What is it?” That’s how it got its name. Manna means, “what is it?”.
And that’s a good question, it seems to me. What is “our daily bread”? Some translations of the Lord’s Prayer translate that phrase, give us what we need for the day. We mostly well fed, well housed people know that daily bread refers to more than having food on the table, or a place to sleep. What we need for the day is of course much more than to have our bodily needs met. We can easily be pretty clear that daily bread can mean a whole lot of things. We are often not so clear, I think, on what exactly it means for me on any given day. And it seems like a fair question, and an important question for us to be asking ourselves: What is it? What is it that I need for today? What is my daily bread this day?
It’s not necessarily the same every day. One day I may need not so much food itself but a time to enjoy food, to savor its taste in spite of the stresses of the day, or some time to share food with someone and just to be in the quiet presence of someone you like—or love. Another day what I need for the day may be good powers of concentration and the ability to accomplish a lot—to end the day feeling useful and productive. Another day I may need to end the day feeling like I’ve been a good friend. Another day what I need may be just some small word of kindness or recognition or appreciation. Some days I may need someone to talk to and other days I may need not to have to talk at all. Some days I might need to laugh out loud and some days I may need some time to cry.
You get my drift here. To pray “give us this day our daily bread” is to confess ourselves to be needy people. That is a good thing—an obvious thing, you could say—certainly a basic thing: that our souls have needs, that we need to be nourished daily in this way or that, some days in this way and some in that. That we hunger, for all sorts of things. We are not self-contained, self-sustaining, self-fulfilling people, always willing and able to give, never needing to receive, always willing to feed, never needing to be fed. We are not such people. “Give us today our daily bread—what we need for the day.”
But it would be good if we could be more specific, and besides putting us in a kind of humble frame of spirit in which we confess our neediness, our prayer for daily bread does invite us to ask ourselves more precisely what it is that our spirits need today. And besides just a greater self-awareness and self-understanding, that is a good thing because it is a reminder that we do not need everything we sometimes need all the time. Just as we do not ask God to grant us each more than a daily portion of bread, just as we do not ask God to give us this day enough food for an army or for a lifetime, so we do not ask for all our spirit’s neediness to be fed. It is a way to curb our excess neediness, whether what is in question is food for the body or food for the soul. We would ask less, expect less, demand less of others—and of God—if sometimes we could be a little clearer about just what we do need today and if we could let go of the rest until such time as we really do need it. “What is it?” is a good question to ask about daily bread.
But then there is still another way to look at this. What is our daily bread? Yes, it is whatever we need, whatever our body or our soul needs today to cope, to get through the day in one piece, to go on, to stay on the journey, to have any sense of the meaning of things. But it may also be that this daily bread is not so much whatever we need as it is whatever is given. We are fed daily not only by things we undeniably need, like friendship and kindness and recognition, but also by things that we are given that don’t immediately look like food but that are nevertheless gifts from heaven. Our days are filled with such things. And there is no question of not getting our daily bread in this form because our days are filled. The only question is whether we will see what our days are filled with as gifts from heaven, bread of heaven, our daily bread—or not. We can choose to think that daily bread consists only of those things we quickly recognize as bread or we can choose to think that there may be nourishment hidden in those parts of the daily round that we never expected would nourish us. After all, manna didn’t look much like food when it first appeared either.
When we pray, “give us this day our daily bread”, it is in one sense a petition to God. We are asking for those things we know we need for our journey and that day by day are often things that seem to count the most. We are asking for those things we legitimately hunger for, our daily bread. But in another sense what we are asking for is the grace to see that a portion of our daily bread is already given, already there, right in front of us, or awaiting us just around the corner. There is always the option to complain that this is not the bread we quite had in mind, not the bread we ordered. But there is also the option to let all sorts of unlikely things become daily bread for us. Not that we have to accept everything as bread or blessing. That wouldn’t be right. But that there are many things in our daily lives that we have the option to receive as gifts and to let them nourish us.
Meanwhile, still, in the back of our spirits maybe, we continue to dream of God’s reign, God’s kindom, in which, among other things, all God’s children are fed with bread from heaven, food for the body and food for the soul. For it is not just for one or for a few of us that we pray. We pray for all of us when we say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 22, 2004