Sermons

Our Daily Bread

Roderic Frohman                                                      Third Presbyterian Church
October 19, 2003                                                                      Matthew 6:3

We have known the words since childhood, "Give us in this day our daily bread." The familiar words of the Lord's Prayer are almost as common to us as breathing. The phrase is a fixed religious form of our public and private worship; indeed, a 2000-year-old fixed religious form.

“Our daily bread.” It is a curious turn of phrase that appears only in the Lord's Prayer as found in Matthew and in Luke. If it were translated more accurately, the phrase would read literally, “our bread - the needed - give us today”, or more smoothly, “Give us our needed bread today.”

By the time Matthew had written these words, some 50 or 60 years after the time of Jesus, they had already been established as a fixed liturgical form in the early Christian Church. Indeed as the first Christians gathered to “break bread together”, a metaphor for Christian worship, the use of the phrase, “our daily bread” was central for how Christians formed their day-to-day expectations in the world. Indeed, to Matthew, the words may have been as familiar to him as they are to us.

But Matthew is no scribe taking dictation, an honorable trade in antiquity. He is a literary and theological artist who is reformatting “salvation history”, that is reformatting the religious hard drive of his urban, prosperous congregation,(1) probably in Antioch of Syria on the Orontes River. He is “remodeling”(2) the way people of faith understood the design of the god-to-human relationship. It is a veritable “While You Were Out” project.

The heart of this remodeling concerns the experience of the death and resurrection of Jesus which Matthew understands to be a turning point in the salvation story that has brought the believer into a New Covenant with God that is free of old barriers of nation, race and the Mosaic law. Indeed there is a real sense in which Matthew presents Jesus as a new Moses. But Matthew’s gospel is more than just a freedom from past theological models,
there is a new future, which is expected. In that future is an "immediate impending eruption"(3) of the second advent of Jesus in their midst. They knew that in Jesus of Nazareth the Kingdom of God had already come among them, but they were expecting a second coming of this Jesus who was to return to right all wrongs, to bring in the full power of the new covenant, as well as pass judgment upon the conduct of Christians as to whether or not they were living according to the teachings of this new Moses. So Matthew lived in the tension between the already and the not yet. And he designed his gospel that way, proleptically.

Now there's a word for you, P-R-O-L-E-P-T-I-C. Proleptic. You probably won’t find it in the New York Times crossword puzzle. Something that is proleptic invades the present from the future with a sense of clarity and power.

This past Tuesday evening, October 14th, a proleptic event occurred in Wrigley Field, Chicago. It was fan interference with Moises Alou’s ability to catch a foul ball. The fan interference seemed to take the wind out of the sails of the Cubs players. It seemed to function as a sign, a symbol of things to come. What was proleptic about this fan interference is that it seemed to have power in the present to shape behavior to act as if the future has already occurred. It is as if the players said, “Well if that is going to happen, then the end is already here,” that is, the defeat of the Cubs. As God is my witness, I turned to my wife at that point in the game, and I said, "I've been on enough losing baseball teams to know that that kind of incident can shape the entire outcome of the game”.

Had the gospel writer, Matthew, been in Wrigley Field that day he would have had premonitions. “Matthew loves to anticipate, to point forward.” Proleptic signs of the universal mission [of Jesus] can be found throughout his gospel.”(4)

For example, only Matthew has Zoroastrian priests from Persia come to pay homage to the Christ child. We call them “the Three Wise Men”. What these kings of the orient are meant to be is a proleptic story, a sign about the future, telling the reader to expect new and universal, worldwide things from this infant Jesus.

Now the Lord’s Prayer also works proleptically both in Matthew’s gospel and in the life of his church. The Lord’s Prayer and its familiar, yet loaded, metaphors function as the prayer of anticipation in the life of the church. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And then immediately following, “Give us this day our daily bread”. To have bread, needed food for the day, is a sign, evidence of the Kingdom of God which is already present and yet to come.

Needed bread for the day. There is a hint in this phrase of the experience of the Hebrew people in the wilderness as illustrated at our Old Testament lesson of the morning. (Exodus 16:1-7) There, manna was provided on a daily basis, just enough for the day and just enough on weekends so that the Israelites would not have to work on the Sabbath, to gather their daily bread. So there is an echo of manna gathering in the phrase “our daily bread”.

But notice also that it is not weekly bread or monthly bread, but daily bread. Sufficient, not stockpiled. And also notice that it’s daily bread. It is not our daily pizza, or daily steak and eggs, or our daily latte. [Now the preacher is meddling.] It is bread, a staple, the metaphor for basic nutrition. Daily, needed bread is both the evidence of the Reign of God and the proleptic sign of the promise of the coming Reign of God.

But what if someone lacks his or her daily bread while we have ours? Then the regular recitation of the Lord’s Prayer becomes not only a sign of the coming reign of God but a sign of God’s coming judgment. “Our daily bread” is a sword with two edges, a sign of promise, and a sign of judgment, for Matthew’s urban prosperous congregation and for us. So the question becomes, how much longer can we go on reciting this prayer week after week, "Give us this day our daily bread, " and not try to figure out a way to redistribute the resources with which we are so abundantly blessed. How much of our daily bread do we dare to keep?

“Modern economic theory originated and developed in the context of Calvinism, the [16th century] political and theological system at the root of the Reformed tradition. Both economic theory and Calvinism were bids for personal freedom against the interference of earthly [religious and political] authority. They based their bids on the conviction that beyond the very narrow sphere, motives of self-interest are overwhelmingly dominant. Economic theory differed from Calvinism only in celebrating as rational what Calvinists confessed as sinful.”(5) John Calvin clearly understood the ethical tension in the phrase, “Give us this day our daily bread”. “Modern economics contributed to freeing individuals from hierarchical authority, as well as to providing more abundant goods and services. These have been achievements of such importance that it has seemed wise to most persons of goodwill to treat their negative effects [the concentration of poverty] as secondary, and as a necessary price for crucial advance. For a long time this may have been an appropriate stance. But with each passing [recent] year the positive accomplishments of the [global] economy have become less evident, and destructive consequences more evident."(6)(7)

And those consequences are that a lot of people are not getting their daily bread. In the USA, “33.6 million people—including almost 13 million children—live in households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger. This represents approximately one in ten households in the United States (10.7 percent). America's Second Harvest, the nation's largest network of food banks, [the parent network of Rochester’s Food Link] reports that 23.3 million people turned to the agencies they served in 2001, an increase of over 2 million since 1997. Forty percent were from working families.”(8)

The economic anomalies in the US are multiplied many times around the world. “More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished—799 million of them are from the developing world. More than 153 million of them are under the age of 5. Six million children under the age of 5 die every year as a result of just hunger.”(9) Do the math. That is, 16,438 per day or 685 per hour, 11 per minute. Since I began this sermon,132 children under the age of 5 have died from hunger. That death rate would wipe out our Sunday School.

Is it really possible to end hunger in the world? Yes. “Virtually every country in the world has the capacity for growing sufficient food on at least a sustainable basis. But they cannot produce enough food to feed their populations, nor, can they afford to import the necessary commodities to make up the gap. Most of these countries are in sub-Saharan Africa. Hunger does not exist because the world does not produce enough food.”(10)“We have the experience and the technology right now to end the problem. The challenge we face is not production of food, but more equitable distribution and consumption.”(11) Our distribution problem is highlighted by the fact that “1.2 billion live on less than $1 per day.”(12) Half of the world’s population lives on $2 per day.(13) Our consumption rate is highlighted by the fact that “if all the world’s population consumed at the rate the average American does, it would take 5 earths to sustain that rate of consumption.”(14) Nevertheless, it would take a modest effort to end hunger and malnutrition worldwide. Hunger is a political condition. And so the key to overcoming hunger is to change the politics of hunger.(15)

What can we do?

One modest way to begin is to send a letter to our New York Senators today. A sample letter from the Bread for the World organization is enclosed in your bulletin. Our Session has formally endorsed this Christian organization and has signed a pledge making Third Church a Bread for the World “covenant church”. This is why the letter appears as an insert in your bulletin.

The letter concerns support for the United Nations’ Millennium Development Fund. Former President Carter urges such support. “In [the year] 2000, the United States joined 188 other nations in signing the Millennium Development Goals, a list of eight achievable commitments to improve conditions for the world's poorest people. One of those goals is cutting hunger in half by 2015, but it will not be possible without the resources needed to attack poverty in a significant way. We need to put words into action. I know that when people of faith get behind something, it moves. I urge you to join with thousands of churches across the country [this week] whose members are writing letters to Congress on behalf of Bread for the World's Rise to the Challenge: End World Hunger campaign. Your letter can help ensure that congress takes seriously President Bush’s commitment to reduce world hunger and poverty.”(16)

During the regular offering time this morning, just add Senators Clinton and/or Schumer’s name to the letter, sign it and pass it to the center aisle. Special ushers with baskets will collect it.(17)

This past August I attended the “International Conference on Religion and Globalization” in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It was my third trip to a developing country. I have also traveled in Kenya and Costa Rica. But this summer something clicked together in my head that I have never put together before. That is, the same economic system that creates concentrations of poverty in Rochester also creates concentration of poverty in the developing world. One is an internal colony to the global economic system and the other is an external colony.

Hunger is caused by the concentration of poverty. In order to de-concentrate poverty we need to implement at least four visions of the common good simultaneously: design, ecology, politics and economics. All are interrelated.

1. Design. Where poverty is concentrated there is little or no sense of community. Poor people live in isolation and fear. A quiet, almost invisible revolution in design has gained momentum in the United States over the past 10 years. It is called “new urbanism”.(18) New urbanism is an architecture of community-- a return to public space, houses with porches pedestrian-friendly, compact, closely-knit, mixed-use, diverse communities with defined edges, an economic unit. Social equity occurs with the renewal of this kind of public space, and visa versa. Design affects and effects behavior.

2. Ecology. We live in a closed ecological system. It is suicide to soil our bed, but we are doing it . The current use rate of the fossil fuel and land resources of the globe is at 126%.(19) Frankly Christianity and the West in general, has a weak ecological tradition. The 18th century Enlightenment ideas suggested that human beings were separate from the biosphere. Nature was the object of our study. But much of the current “dominion” ethic of economic globalization logically emerges out of a 18th and 19th century Christian misreading of the Hebrew creation legends (Gen 1:27-28) in which the ideas of “subdue” and “dominion” are read from a male, industrialist perspective meaning “exploit,” This has lead to a further complicating situation now called “environmental apartheid”(20) in which people of color are greater victims of ecological disaster than whites. Thus a new direction in the relation of human beings to the natural environment is to affirm that we are one with it. This is what can be called a “deep ecology”.(21) In the words of Native American, Chief Seattle, “The earth does not belong to us, we belong to it”.

3. Metropolitics. A third vision is political, but a politics that is geographically focused in metropolitan regions. The political vision is summarized in the word, “Metropolitics”.(22) Most American cities (and indeed many cities of the world) have a “favored quarter” which also means “the existence of the un-favored three-quarters. Metropolitics is built on uniting the political weight of the un-favored three quarters”(23), including the colonized poor in the center of most metro areas. Metropolitics is the opposite of balkanized politics.

4. Economics. The heart of this discussion tends to be the confusion, either deliberate or accidental, of the difference between GNP and economic welfare. GNP is a measure of production . Economic welfare is a measure of consumption. Many economists hold that the boat of economic welfare rises when the water of GNP rises. This is true to a small percentage but it assumes that most consumption is good. While consumption may be good for GNP it is not necessarily good for human welfare in general. For example, the consumption of alcohol, tobacco and fatty foods are counted positively for GNP(24) but they are not all that positive for the human body. Similarly the consumption of automobiles is good for the GNP but can greatly damage the environment. The GNP yardstick is way to short.

Herman Daly, a former senior economist at the World Bank, and John Cobb, a theologian at Claremont School of Theology, have developed the “Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare”. Instead of looking only at production and growth indicators, this index looks at the whole impact of economic development using 22 indicators: such as, household labor, personal pollution cost, depletion of non-renewable resources, ozone depletion cost.(25)

This only scratches the surface. A continuation of this discussion will take place in the next weeks in our Adult Education program called, “Seeking the Common Good”.

Where do we go from here?

It is time to reformat, remodel how we distribute our daily bread. It is time to democratize our world economic system based on a market-driven third model—a model other than either capitalism or socialism, a model which is focused on the common good-- one that “sustains the total web of life.”(26)

“Our daily bread” is a sword with two edges, a sign of promise, and a sign of judgment. “The United States is just now gaining a foretaste of the suffering that the global economic system, so enthusiastically embraced, has inflicted on hundreds of millions of others. If we continue on our present path, future generations are condemned to misery. The fact that many people of good will do not see this coming misery [or do not agree with this analysis] is undeniably true, [and] very regrettable.”(27)

“Give us this day our daily bread.” What is our share of our daily bread and how much belongs to someone else? Or to put it another way, how much do we really dare to keep?