“New
Light on an Old Prayer”
5.
Bread of Life
First Presbyterian
Sacrament of Holy Communion
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The Chief
Executive Officer of Tyson Foods, Inc. manages to arrange a meeting with the
Pope at the
Undaunted, the
Tyson chief whispers again to the Pope, “We anticipated your reluctance.
So, we are going to increase our offer to three hundred million dollars.
All we require is that you change the Lord’s Prayer from ‘give us
this day our daily bread’ to ‘give us this day our daily chicken.’”
Again, the Pope replies, “I’m sorry.
That’s just not possible. The
Lord’s Prayer is the word of the Lord and must not be changed.”
One more time,
the Tyson CEO draws close to the Pope, “Your Holiness, Tyson Foods respects
your strong adherence to your faith, but we would like to make one final offer.
We are willing to donate five hundred million dollars to the Catholic
Church if you will change the Lord’s Prayer from ‘give us this day our daily
bread’ to ‘give us this day our daily chicken.’
Don’t give me your answer now. Sleep
on it.”
The next day
the Pope convenes the College of Cardinals.
“I have,” he says, “some good news and some bad news.”
“The good news is that the Church has come into half a billion
dollars.” “And the bad news,
Father?” asks one of the cardinals. “What
is the bad news?”
“Well, it
looks like we’re going to be losing the Wonder Bread account.”
*
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* *
* *
* *
*
Okay, okay bad
joke. Don’t send me cards and
letters. I love the Catholics!
But I am glad that the prayer as it originally was given has survived.
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
It really would take some getting used to, would it not, to pray, “Give
us this day our daily chicken.” It
also would complicate things here at the Communion Table.
But it may be that bread is not the most important word in this
portion of the Lord’s Prayer but rather the words us and our.
They are a reminder of the unrelenting and unremitting social nature not
only of the Prayer, but of God. When
we set a trap to catch the dream of God in our lives, which is the Aramaic
meaning of prayer, or when we attune ourselves to the divine reverie, we shall
find always that it is all-inclusive. It
is never the case that our religion is between “Thee and me.”
It is always “Thee and me and we.”
Now the
symbolism of bread is not unimportant.
From the daily bread-like manna of the Exodus wilderness to the storied
birth of Jesus in
The Lord’s
Prayer does not allow us to forget those who lack the most basic of
necessities; indeed, it binds us to them inextricably as we pray, “Give me this
day my daily bread”? No, we
pray, we say, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
This can be a problem for people like us who are sure of our next meal
because there is no way for us to pray this prayer in spirit and in truth
without including in our consciousness our hungry neighbors both near and far.
There is no way for us to pray this prayer with integrity without joining
the struggle to banish from the earth the scourge of hunger.
It is yet another opportunity to behold, to see, to practice “the
oneness of all life.”
The Lord’s
Prayer falls easily off our lips as we say it Sunday after Sunday and so we
sing it here on “Communion Sundays” in the hope that we might hear it
periodically with fresh ears. The
truth is that there are over six billion people now sharing this planet with us
and over half of them suffer some degree of malnourishment.
Hungry faces abound and, if we look at them with spiritual eyes, we see
that the image of God is being disfigured and desecrated in each of them.
If we had the technology here in the sanctuary, I would display for you
on a screen for the next five minutes a slideshow of some of those faces, not to
make us feel guilty, but as a way of making us aware once again what is at stake
when we prayer, as a way of asserting once more that the purpose of prayer is
not so much informational as it is formational.
Our full and true humanity is being formed as we pray in the way that
Jesus taught us.
What the Lord’s
Prayer does is to teach us in no uncertain terms that we are first of all
members of the human family and only derivatively or secondarily are we
Americans. Or Koreans.
Or Germans. Membership in any
particular political or cultural community does not determine our first
allegiance. Our first and primary
solidarity is with human beings everywhere.
The
When I first
contemplated this sermon, I had planned to talk about spiritual bread and
even chose as our text the sentence from the Beatitudes in which Jesus said, “Blessed
are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
I was justified in doing so, I believed, by the fact that a second
definition of the word for bread in the Aramaic language is ideas and
even truth. So, “give us
this day our daily truth” would have been the crux of what I would have
said and I would have expanded on that. But
it occurred to me that only those whose physical needs are met have the luxury
of spiritualizing this prayer. So
for me and us to do that would be a betrayal of all our brothers and sisters who
yet suffer the dispiriting pangs of hunger, the ignominy of the inability to
feed their children, and the hopelessness of helplessness.
Indeed, Jesus later pressed the plain sense of this prayer when he said, “Come,
you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the
foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty
and you gave me something to drink…”
So, indeed, as
the poet suggests, “Let us break bread together; let us drink wine
together; let us praise God together…” realizing that the together
about which the poet writes is not limited to those who are present in this
room or to those partaking of the sacrament today, but to the whole human
family. As we lift the bread to our
mouths and the cup to our lips, we are signing a promissory note in the name of
God to face toward the rising sun of that day when no one any longer will hunger
or hurt in all of God’s holy creation.
“Give us
this day our daily bread.” Indeed!
Amen.
(1)
Shriver, Jr., Donald W., The Lord’s Prayer: A Way of Life.
© Copyright First Presbyterian Church 2007