We continue looking at the Lord’s Prayer as a model for a Rule of Life. So far, we have looked at how our Christian journey is most fulfilling when we Center on Jesus. By being Centered, we find ourselves called into self-less, self-giving, cruciform love. Our Rule of Life reflects that desire as we consider ways to live in a way that gives up our will and fully offers our gifts back to God. It can require that “our will be undone.”
This week we move onto the seemingly simple phrase "Give us this day our daily bread." In light our our responsibility as members of the Body of Christ, this is not quite so easy. The slides from the class can be downloaded.
Using the Lord’s Prayer as a blueprint for a Rule of Life we
discover that we are called into community. Like the early church, Becoming a Church calls for us to “Unite around the practice of a
rule of life in small gathered communities.
These kinds of groups—small circles of people who support each other in
following Jesus with intention and accountability—are necessary for cultivating
Christ-centered life.” Acts 2:44-45 tells us that after Pentecost, all
the believers met together in one place and shared everything they had. Selling
their possessions and goods, they shared with anyone who was in need.
What might it mean in our culture? We think
we need more and more to prove that we are successful and happy. Max Lucado
notes that “God is committed to caring for our needs…we pray, only to find our
prayer already answered!” (Great House of God, pg. 100-101) Lucado goes
on to remind us that “we simply take our place at the table and gladly trust
God to ‘give us this day our daily bread.’”
The Lord’s Prayer tells us that we are to ask for our daily
bread, an acknowledgement that we must have food to survive. Like the manna
given to the Israelites in the wilderness, God gives us what we need. Because
our God is a God of abundance, we can freely share our bread with the less
fortunate and not risk losing out ourselves. However, we might ask
ourselves, “How much do I really need?” Can I simply rest and trust that God
will indeed supply what I need?”
Sometimes different translations give us new insights into
the words of a familiar prayer. The New Zealand Prayer Book version uses the
phrase, “With the bread we need for today, feed us,” while a translation from
Syrian Aramaic expands the request to be, “Grant what we need each day in bread
and insight.” Leslie Leyland Fields wrote her own version of the Lord’s Prayer
including the line, “we ask, would you give us each day the food we need (but
no more, no less, so we live by trust more than food)?” Alan Redpath translates
the words “Give us this day bread suited to our need.” (Victorious Praying)
How would you paraphrase the familiar words?
In my book, The Lord’s Prayer: Walk in Love, I say, “We
long to be fed by God, as a child is fed, or as a lover enjoys the company of
her beloved. This phrase of the Lord’s Prayer is much more than a request for
food. It is the desire of our heart reaching out to God…Praying for our
daily bread is much more than a request for food. It is, if we allow it to be,
an offering of ourselves to sit with God as our beloved and be filled with the
simplest of joys and love.”
That relationship of lover and beloved between us and God
leads us into transformed inter-personal relationships. Deborah Smith Douglas
calls this the “pastoral function of friendship, stretching out our hands to
each other, bearing each other’s burdens…a ministry to which we are all called
as part of our membership in the Body of Christ and for which we are all
gifted.” (The Praying Life, pg. 75) Douglas quotes Alan Jones (Dean
Emeritus of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco) who notes, “one of the purposes of the
spiritual life is that we hold up mirrors for each other that we may better see
ourselves as we really are.” (pg. 74)
NT Wright says that “this clause [in the Lord’s Prayer]
reminds us that God intends us to pray for specific needs…once we put the
prayer for daily bread within the whole kingdom-prayer where it belongs, to
turn then to the specific things we honestly need right now is not trivial. It
is precisely what children do when they love and trust the one they call
‘father’.” (The Lord & His Prayer, pg. 44-45)
Wright goes on to say the clause makes it “impossible truly
to pray for our daily bread…without being horribly aware of the millions who
didn’t have bread yesterday, don’t have any today, and in human terms are
unlikely to have any tomorrow either. But what can we do about this, as we pray
this prayer in church and go home to our Sunday lunch?” (pg 45) Then Wright
brings us back to the need for community by saying that not only should we
give, as best we can…become more politically sensitive, [etc.]…we should be
praying this prayer not just for the hungry, but with the hungry, and all who
are desperate from whatever deep need. We should see ourselves, as we pray
the Lord’s Prayer, as part of the wider Christian family, the human family,
standing alongside the hungry, and praying, in that sense, on their behalf.”
(pg. 47)
As you work on our Rule of life this week, ask these
questions:
What if praying for Daily Bread is linked to the next clause
about forgiveness and not misusing all that God provides, and allowing enough
for all?
What action of community might you be urged toward?
You may want to take time to meditate on these images and ask what they say about community. One is by a 13-year-old and the other by an adult.
