Blessed are the hungry ...

Readings:  Exodus 16:2-4 and Luke 11:1-3, 5-13

Bread for the journey. 

The people of Israel are happy to be led out of enslavement to the Egyptian empire.  But they are not happy when their supply of food from Egypt begins to run out.  They fear they will die without the food they were fed as slaves, until Moses helps them understand that for the journey they were on, they will come to rely on a different kind of food.

The disciples of Jesus, too, are encouraged to ask for nurture that the world cannot provide.  When Jesus teaches them to pray for “daily bread” he has more than just three square meals in mind.

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

I wonder if we should be careful what we pray for.  If God ever answered this prayer completely literally, we’d probably have quite a bit less food in our homes than we have right now.

I wonder if one point of this prayer, for us at least, is to help us remember each day that all we have in life is ultimately of God – not just by our own design or as reward for our labour, and that it is healthy and holy to be grateful for what we have, every time we have it.

For a lot of people in the world, though, this is a real prayer for something they do not have.  A real need they need the help of others to meet.

Globally 74 million people are suffering famine today; 32 million in East Africa alone – in NE Nigeria, South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.  Sixty percent of the world’s population is “food-insecure,” meaning their access to daily food is at risk because of war, drought or some other climate disaster, economic and social collapse, because of the unequal distribution of the world’s resources, and because of the extreme waste of food by those who have it.

Locally we know hunger is real by the numbers of people who rely on food banks to get by – big, corporate ones in major centres and smaller, mom-and-pop operations like our own Stoney Creek Food Bank.  There are people around us for whom daily bread is at least as much a prayer as a given.

And when we know this, we are happy to give.  All last month we collected for the Stoney Creek Food Bank.  In 2 weeks the Winona Fire Department will have its annual Community Food Drive, and a lot of people will be ready with cans and packages of non-perishables.  A few weeks after that we’ll take our turn to cook and take Sunday dinner to the Wesley Centre.

And we’re happy to do it.  This is one of the things the people at our Mission-Statement workshop a few weeks ago said they most love about our church, and that we are good at. 

When we pray this part of our Lord’s prayer about daily bread for all of – “for us,” how can we who have more than enough not be happy to share, and unhappy not to?  Martin Buber has written, “to help one another is not considered a task, but the self-evident reality on which companionship is based.  To help is not a virtue, but a pulse of existence.… Help, not out of pity – that is, from a sharp, quick pain which one wishes to expel – but out of love, which means to live with others.”

On Friday City Kidz – which we also support, was on the front page of The Spec because of what they do as their ordinary and regular reason for being, week in and week out for 25 years.

“On a recent Wednesday evening,” the story says, “four buses pull up at the CityKidz building at 601 Burlington St. E. between Wentworth and Sherman.  Smoke from industrial stacks is frozen against the hard blue sky in fading light.  Tonight 109 teens file in, most ages 12-15 in their CityYouth program, and the rest ages 16-17 in the RoadMaps program.  Like every Wednesday, when the doors open, volunteers stand ready wearing smiles and holding open pizza boxes.  Every CityKidz event begins with food, what organizers call breaking bread.  Food for thought follows the cheese and pepperoni.”

Food for the body, and food for thought.  Bread for the body, and bread for the spirit.  Food to help us live, food to help us live right.  We really need both, don’t we? 

And daily.  In the same way as we can’t eat food for our body just for a while and then not bother for the rest of our lives, we also can’t focus on food for our spirits just for a while – maybe in our childhood, and then assume we have all we need for the rest of our lives.  “Give us this day our daily bread.”

One day at a time is something we all learn at some time, often a time of crisis.  Maybe the death of a partner or a parent or a child leaves you in such grief and confusion that one day at a time is suddenly all you can manage.  Or the loss of a job or a dream.  The loss of your health.  Anyone living in recovery from accident or illness, living in difficult or strained relationships, or living with disability and diminishing capacity knows well the holy wisdom and necessity of living one day at a time – and of praying for, and being open to whatever bread there may be to help with living that one day well.

After Japhia was diagnosed with gastroparesis and the complications that come with it began, we started doing daily readings together from a book called “One More Day: Daily Meditations for People with Chronic Illness.”  Now, we didn’t do it right away; it was maybe five or six years after the diagnosis that we got smart enough to know we could use something to help us face each day well.  And we got the book only because I happened to see it in our church library one day when I had nothing better to do but browse the shelves to see what was there. 

But now it’s on our dining room table along with another little book called “Cup of Comfort” – a collection of delightful little stories of very real people finding amazing grace in the middle of all the muddy mess of their lives, and together these books help us day by day to be open to that same grace of redeemed and redeeming living.

And that’s the point of it: to be enabled to live well – live faithfully, live as a mature human being in the world as it is.  It’s about the spirit of our living – to be enabled to live with holy, rather than unholy or even just non-holy spirit.

Now there is, to be sure,  a lot of “spiritual bread” out there that’s so other-worldly and heavenly-minded that it’s of little Earthly worth, and I have less appetite for that the older I get.  Because sometimes it’s as unhelpful as the other extreme – the toxic and poisonous stuff we’re fed every day by our culture, by the world around us, and even by our leaders. 

Almost everywhere we turn these days there’s a buffet of hate and fear, a feast of ramped-up anxiety and division, of cynicism and hopelessness, of mistrust and self-righteous demonization of the other, of narrow self-interest, simple cruelty and bullying.  And it just isn’t good for us – isn’t good to have as the main part of our diet because we are what we eat, and that kind of stuff just isn’t good for the life of the world.

Like the people of Israel we need to step away and be freed of enslavement to a culture like that.  We are called by God beyond the limits of the culture we live within, to recognize the limits of what it feeds us, and to let ourselves be open instead day by day to what God wants to feed us with – with the food of God’s kingdom, not of this world’s empires; food that nurtures a different kind of life – a life of integrity, courage, humility and service; and food that sustains a different kind of community in the world – a community of compassion, of creative rather than destructive imagination, of love and grace, of welcome and hospitality and support, of forgiveness and hope for the saving of all.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done Earth as it is in heaven” is what Jesus prays just before he prays about daily bread.  Because people of the kingdom and communities of God’s will being done on Earth as in heaven are the kind of people and communities the world needs.  And it’s this kind of bread – good food for the body and good food for the spirit that nourishes that kind of living that Jesus teaches us to pray for and to share.

And to share.  Because others too are hungry for this kind of food.  People who, just like us, are struggling to live well.  People who are looking for something each day of our lives, to help them live as whole and holy people, living well in all their relationships and with mature purpose and meaning.  People who maybe don’t have the faith and the sense of community we have?  Don’t get to be greeted every week with the words “Let the love of God enfold you” and with people who put that into practice? 

We have something to share.  Our prayers for daily bread have been, and are answered.  And because of that, we can be the answer – we can be God’s answer, to someone else’s.