Is God really concerned about our lives… about the mundane day
to day struggles we face? Putting food on the table; keeping a roof over our
heads. Our ups and downs be they bumps and dips or tsunami like waves. Or Is
God distant and disinterested? Sometimes it feels like that, even the psalmists
wondered if God was on the job or at home with his feet up in front of the
telle.
Or maybe we think we’ve got God just where we want him! Rock band
Depeche Mode wrote a song called ‘Your own Personal Jesus’ which talks of
having someone who is there to meet all our needs, who is always there at the
other end of the phone when we are alone, at our beck and call. It picks up the
idea of God as being there primarily to meet our individual needs. It’s a song
that’s been interpreted in different ways It’s been covered by Marilyn Manson,
with a mocking tone, as a critique of religion as a crutch, a critique we have
to hear by the way. It’s also been covered by Johnny Cash, and in the shaky
voice of man who has been through so much and found faith in Jesus it is a song
of trust and dependence.
But is God just some sort of cosmic help line and get out of
Jail free card? The plastic buddy Jesus of the film Dogma, Sometimes I find
myself wrestling with that, sometimes I wonder if we don’t treat prayer like
that…like on line shopping…at the push of a button… at the bend of a knee.. And
get disappointed when we don’t get the quick fix, the instant answer, the
package in the post.
In the midst of that the Lord’s Prayer is Jesus pattern for prayer. It addresses both extremes.. It tells us
God cares and hears, Christian prayer is not about saying the right words to
try and get the attention of a preoccupied God, A Heavenly father with his head
stuck in the paper. It is not like the bureaucracies and institutions in our
world where it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the oil. In Luke 18 to encourage
us to pray in all circumstances Jesus tells the unlikely story of an unjust
judge who only answers a widow’s plea because he is worn out by her constant
demand to be heard. Jesus says God doesn’t need the constant phone messages,
the email after email, txt bombing, the incessant knocking on the door, he is
totally the opposite from the unjust judge, we can trust God because ‘Our Father knows our needs even before we ask
him.” Therefore pray. We have that relationship with God as a caring
tender-hearted parent.
Jesus prayer also stops it being all about our needs… it stops prayer
being self-centred. It sets priorities for our prayers and our lives, by
putting the ‘your’ in front of the ‘Our’. ‘Hallowed be Your name, Your Kingdom
Come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Then and only then it
moves to our daily bread, forgive our sins, hold our lives in your hands… lead
us not to the time of trial, but deliver us from evil. As I said last week we
can spend the hours on the ours, but when we pause and focus on the yours it is
put into perspective. The concerns we have don’t lessen but we can bring them
to God in the sure knowledge of who God is and his plans and purposes for our
world, which are for good not for harm.
We looked at the “your” last week and this week we are going
to start looking at the “Our” petitions mainly Give us today our daily bread.
“Give us today our daily
bread’ is such an amazing shift in the Lord’s Prayer from Your will be done on
earth as it is in heaven that early biblical scholars thought that Jesus must
have been speaking in some sort of code, that when he said bread it was a
metaphor for the ‘word of God’ for our spiritual needs. It seemed an unbelievable leap from global mission
to tummy rumbling. But the radical thing is that here we are invited to bring
our basic needs for daily existence before God, God really cares about those
things we can pray trusting that God will meet those needs. Yes in his
temptation in Luke’s gospel Jesus had said man does not live by bread alone but
by every word that comes from the mouth of God’ but the reality is we can trust
God with both, we can trust God with what we need for life. We need the daily
bread for our bodies and like the well-known devotional book “Daily bread”
reminds us for our soul.
Give us today… I don’t know about you but I often want to
jump straight to the bread part, it’s like walking past a bakery and you have
this instantaneous response to the smell of fresh bread coming out of the oven…
in fact I was disappointed to discover recently that some fast food restaurants
use chemical agents to reproduce that smell to entice people into their stores
and make them hungry… when it comes to bread it’s not a conscious coherent
thought it’s a mouth-watering, sensory overload gut reaction kind of thing. We
can miss he give us today…But the word used for today in the Lord’s Prayer in
Greek is such a rare word that it makes biblical scholars and should make us
stop to ponder what Jesus is meaning here. It could mean ‘this day’ or ‘the
next day’. Big deal I hear you say. I
think it’s quite profound…Jewish men were encouraged to pray three times a day,
at dawn mid-day and the end of the day. Jesus prayer here would fit in any of
these.
As a Morning Prayer and noon day prayer it has the day we
are in in mind in the evening which for the Jews was the start of their day, it
is going to bed trusting God for tomorrow. To pray give us today, does two
things, it’s an acknowledgement that our times are in God’s hands that each day
is a gift from God. It also invites us to trust God for the day the Lord has
given us…and as we end the day to hand over to God all the concerns and worries
we have for the future and be able to rest in that.
Now that’s easy to say and I don’t know about you but I
often lie awake concerned about things… or wake up concerned about them in the
middle of the night… in praying Give us today this daily bread Jesus invites us
to give those things over to him. Invite us to trust him even with the big
things that might loom over us and be like a blanket shrouding the future as
far as we can see. But you know we are going to have to deal with them one day
at a time, one step at a time. We can trust God to provide what we need on that
journey every step of the way, every day on the way.
Bread… In our supermarket shopping well stocked shelves, full freezers
and cupboards, suburban lifestyle we might not connect as readily with what
Jesus is saying. In Jesus day in first century Palestine poverty was rife,
people lived hand to mouth, much of their time was spent working to simply get
bread to eat that day. You couldn’t simply put a couple of loaves in the
freezer for latter in the week. Also for Jesus original listeners there was the
common history of remembering back to their ancestors in the wilderness when
God had provided for his people a daily portion of manna, bread that except for
the Sabbath would not last from one day to the next that could not be horded.
They remembered as a people they were actually dependant on God each day for
their existence.
And to pray for our daily bread is to acknowledge our
dependence on God today for the basics of life, to bring those things to him
and know he cares about them and to live in an attitude of thanksgiving that
God provides. We can forget that bread does not just come pre-cut and readily
wrapped. God provides the sun and the rain, the soil and those who toil, to
grow food, the seed and the stead for ploughing and planting, the skill of the
baker or the recipe for the bread maker, he give us the gifts, abilities and
opportunities to earn a crust, it seems like we do all the work, but it is
dependent on the goodness and grace of God.
The challenge of bread is also that we often get our needs
and wants confused. We are used to a world where we are constantly bombarded
with luxury items being must haves, can’t live withouts, and praying for our
daily bread brings us down to focusing on what is essential for us. It stops
prayer being the spiritualised wish list in our consumer society. It’s a call
to be satisfied with a simpler lifestyle. The answer to commercials on the TV
is quite simply ‘Give us today our daily bread’.
Praying this prayer has wider ethical considerations. It
invites us to consider fair trade; am I getting my daily bread at the expense
of someone else’s? Is it sustainable? Is it just for multinational corporations
to have a monopoly on food production… Does the focus on today and my daily
food mean we don’t think about the long term effects of food production and land
use for the future?. After the Lord’s Pray in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus
moves on to economics, in that he echoes what is in the Lord’s prayer… he says
put first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these will be added
to you’… trusting God with our daily bread, liberates us to be about the God
stuff, Kingdom of God stuff… Salvation and transformation.
Give us today our daily bread… can I sum it up by saying God
cares for us…
People God cares for you… he can be trusted with the big things,
the global things, and with the small things… the everyday things of life… God
cares for you… this prayer is for you… give us today our daily bread is an
assurance that God is willing and able to provide our daily needs… In fact as
we pray that it helps us to see God’s hand not always in the miraculous but even
in the mundane. At this time of year I grumble about rain and sunshine because
the grass grows too fast, but it’s part of God’s provision… the big theological
word is it’s God’s prevenient grace.. it’s providence…God cares
Have you seen this cartoon?
ReplyDeletehttp://asbojesus.wordpress.com/2007/09/09/62/
Thanks Stephen... I like it. hope the three hour lecture and dealing with the dodgy tooth goes well for you. Blessings
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