Gospel: Luke 11:1-13
Grace and Peace to you from God our Loving Creator, and Jesus the Christ, the Teacher of Humanity, Amen
My earliest memory of learning the Lord’s Prayer is being 3 or 4, laying on top of my bunk bed. With my older brother on the bunk below, and my younger brother on the floor - my mother would read to us every night. Usually both a kids book and out of the old 50’s style children’s bible. With epic renaissance pictures on nearly every page, and probably the classic King James text alongside them, we’d read the bible and after we were done reading, we’d say the Lord’s Prayer.
My brothers and I had it down by the time Sunday School started. As I’m sure many of you have similar stories of learning this prayer that has been passed down through the disciples and then on to us and our children. Your grandchildren.
Along with knowing the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer is one of the tenets of most cradle Christians. Something we hold onto. Even when visiting folks in memory care units, even as heartbreaking as dementia and Alzheimer's are, there’s something to be said for the way the mind retains things like old hymns and the Lord’s Prayer.
Then you throw in the ‘other’ version, whichever version that means to you - and we know it so well we stumble over the other version out of habit. When I was on internship in rural Otter Tail County, the congregation would say one version during traditional worship, the other during contemporary. If you only went to one style of service, you only said one style of prayer.
But I would help lead both. And my supervisor and I would have a way of leading right into, "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be…" and finish with whatever version we were doing.
Jesus was gathered with the disciples, in a certain place, and Jesus taught them how to pray. In this prayer, Jesus lays out the basics of God, life itself, our interactions in the world, and what could happen after our life. Jesus mentions asking God for our daily bread, and then proceeds to throw around a parable about asking for daily bread. A friend waking up their neighbor in the middle of the night, only to ask for bread. To be given back at some point, because the friend asks to be lent them. But Jesus plays with the narrative a little bit, because the neighbor refuses, but then relents after the friend’s persistence.
Then Jesus drives it home with the traditional, ‘ask and you will receive, search and you will find, knock and the door shall be opened unto you… Allelu, Alleluia’, as the old hymn goes. What this could mean for us, is that God only does, when we ask. Only if we're persistent. Then maybe God could be bothered to get up and do something about our daily bread.
But I don't think that's what this parable is about. Because God already provides. God provided when God created and said that it was good. God provides when God created you and me and the evergreen trees. God will always provide.
And yet, there are times when we ask for bread, and Jesus offers the crumbs off the master's table.
Because life isn't as simple as asking and receiving. As much as God does provide, broken humanity gets in the way. Even in the parable, the neighbor refuses the friend. It wasn't until some other force propelled the neighbor to give the friend the daily bread.
Martin Luther talks about our daily bread in both the Small and Large Catechisms, but he lays it out better in the Large Catechism. "For when you mention and pray for daily bread, you pray for everything that is necessary in order to have and enjoy daily bread and, on the other hand, against everything which interferes with it."
God provides, we receive. But sometimes there are forces that prevent that daily bread from reaching its intended recipient. According to multiple studies, the world produces more than enough food to sustain all of us. Yet millions go hungry. There are plenty of empty houses in this country alone, yet millions live on the street. Schools with education and knowledge, but high tuition rates that prevent enrollment. World class healthcare, with exorbitant costs preventing access. The list goes on.
Luther continues, "Therefore you must open wide and extend your thoughts not only to the oven or the flour-bin but to the distant field and the entire land, which bears and brings to us daily bread and every sort of sustenance."
Luther invites us to look beyond the idea of literal bread, and as he continues in the explanation of the Lord's Supper, he describes how we could further look into the systems that prevent distribution of our daily bread. How things like distribution of power and wealth prevent people from accessing their daily needs.
We could add race, class, gender and sexual identity, ability and legal status to those realities that add barriers to our receiving of our daily bread.
In any town like Bagley, big enough to have it's own school but not large enough to support a large retail or grocery store, such as Morris, where I grew up… the barrier of distance and transportation prevents access to the bigger selection offered by large retail stores. My mom grew up in Morris, and she said you could buy almost anything essential in Morris except neckties or belts. And to this day, that's pretty much the same story.
God provides, and will continue to provide. God provided humanity with a child that knew humanity firsthand. A child that lived a life of teaching, healing, and providing the very things that were asked for in the prayer. Jesus asked the disciples to give up all that they had, and promised that God would provide for them the rest of their journey. Breaking down the barriers, the societal norms, the lines between clean and unclean, righteous and unrighteous - Jesus walked among humanity, and showed humanity what daily bread meant. Through Jesus' life, death and resurrection, God saves and provides for us all. It's up to us to follow in Christ's way of breaking down barriers that keep us from each other, and our daily bread.
As I would sit on top of my bunk bed, with my two brothers below and my mother reading and praying with us, I had no idea what would become of us. How the realities of poverty and small town opportunities would impact our lives from there on out. How the fact of living almost an hour from the nearest Target, or 10 miles from school and work would be our barriers.
God provided, and I'm up here able to talk about it. But too many families go without food for more than one meal. Too many children go hungry in this state. Too many children are on the street, or live within literal barriers.
God provides, and invites us to be persistent in breaking down the barriers between each other and our daily bread. Thinking of not only ourselves, but each other in our request for daily bread.
From our very beginnings of learning our faith in the words of the Lord's Prayer - to actively engaging that faith in our world by living out our calling to serve one another… God provides and will guide us through. Thanks be to God.
Amen
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