May 17 - Daily Bread
Sermon “Our Daily Bread, ” May 17, 2020 Carolyn Smith
Our daily bread.... A favourite, humble and simple prayer. The comforting presence of simple food on the table, and indeed a loaf of bread, is universal.
From poet Robert Browning: If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens.
and from JRR Tolkien: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
Khalil Gibran says: For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half a man's hunger.”
And this snippet of wisdom, unattributed but it sounds like Jay & Jeff,: I’d rather eat crumbs with bums than steaks with snakes.
The world over, we mix love and hospitality and goodness with bread, with food on the table, and surely, with the ones we share it with.
The Lord’s prayer, as we’ve seen, is a calling and commitment to participate in the warm, hallowed Household of God. Not in the future, a coming event to prepare for as John the
Baptist promised, but to look around and find it in the present. To carve out space for it and live it, here and now. On earth, now, as it is in heaven.
And the next line of our prayer is the simple and humble petition: Give us this day our daily bread.
In April, except for this pandemic lockdown, Deborah & I were excited to go with some of you to hear John Domenic Crossan. It’s his book that we’re drawing much of our exegetical history from about the Lord’s prayer - fancy way of saying digging around for clarity. He tells a story of digging in the muck, as in, the muck in the Lake of Galilee. In a particularly dry season in 1985, wide swathes of the lake bottom were visible and out in the muck, someone found a boat. A boat so fragile, its timbers were 90% water, a treasure worth saving, barely. It took a radically dedicated effort and forty tons of donated Polyethelyne glycol to save this ramshackle 8 foot by 26 foot vessel. When I last attended a Crossan event, he captivated us with pictures. It needed a crew of at least 5 but could hold10, and it had been repaired and repaired again, as is common for lowly boats of struggling fishermen. By the time it met its fate, it was cobbled together with 12 different types of timber- whatever was available. Eventually, when it just couldn’t keep the water out anymore, it ended up at the bottom of the lake, settling in for 1985 centuries. This boat was dated to the first century of the CE- The time of Jesus, and it matches a mosaic image excavated near Magdala. Sailing in the storm or hauling up 153 fish, this was the kind of boat the Jesus and his friends knew.
Bread is pretty simple stuff. And wine too, in the 1st century Mediterranean. And so is fish, an unlikely star of any show, but our gospel stories mention fish over and over again. Unlikely for a king of the Jews to start a movement around, unless it is close to the core of the story.
Once upon a time, there were lowly fisher people and their townsfolk kin, abiding on the gentle lakeside, working, playing, praying, growing; trying each day to make it to the next with some good food in their bellies, shelter for the storms, and some joyful sabbath rest. Some lived well, some not so much. Then, along came the evil emperor - I’m not making this up, and I’m not really glamorizing it... Herod Antipas - a lesser tyrant, was sidelined to Galilee with something to prove. He brought with him a grudge and a mission to make as much money and influence as he could muster. In a scruffy, hot land like Galilee, maybe there was money to be made by the lake with fish, at a cost to everyone else.
What happens when Walmart moves into a small town? Some people get meagre jobs and the mom & pop shoppes close up. When a pandemic hits, Tim Horton’s survives and the locally owned restaurant goes bust. Permits and taxes and legalities so often favour the powerful, and it becomes easy to sideline the poorer, lower class who just can’t keep up. Maybe we want it more complicated than that, but in Galilee, the fisherman who owned that sodden boat, and the community he loved was now on the bottom of the food chain. What had been a simple and struggling life was now unfair, unequal and unbearable. One
doesn’t just get angry and fight. You get arrested, at least, for something like that. You don’t rise up and vote them out - the armies were well fed and funded enough to crush you. Some neighbours sell out, and find the work they can for the upper crust, or as tax collectors, or bribed officials, at a deep cost of community and belonging. So, some can’t sleep at night because they’ve turned on their friends. Some can’t sleep at night because they’re hungry. This is the Kingdom of the Empire. You will scrape together some resources, draw a smaller circle of who you can afford to worry about. You will fearfully seek to protect what you can and build a higher fence around it.
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This isn’t the world we were made for! This isn’t a world that is sustainable, or abundant, or even fun.
This was Jesus’ 1st century world. He’d grown up under this growing oppression, where a hard day’s work amounted to nothing, and contemplated all he knew of the Kingdom of God with the impossible struggle around him. “Come and See” he said to his fishing friends, “let’s fish for people.” And he knew that fighting back was a fast way to be dead, or worse, or heartless, so that wouldn’t do. Standing up against the Empire required something radically different and radically hopeful.
One day, he sat on the hillside surrounded by people. That day, he’d been looking forward to rest after days of interacting, expressing his ideas of a way forward, and
making everyone’s lives different with stories we tell of healing and blessing.
Something about the way he said and did such amazing things captivated people. And of course our story of the loaves and fishes comes after the Beatitudes - his radical idea of the last and least lifted to blessing. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Just words... words of justice. Then as the day moved on, he put his words into action. With fish and bread. Just bread. Bread of Justice.
So the people are hungry, and he is too - and where our regular everyday habit would be to send everyone off to buy a hot dog at the food truck or dig into their own picnic baskets, to fend for themselves, knowing some had nothing and others had much, - that’s our normal way. That what the disciples, those friends of Jesus just like us, practical and problem-solving - that what’s we suggested. Instead, ridiculously, radically, Jesus has everyone gather the food, and it seems so meager: a bit of bread, 5 loaves or something like that; and some fish - 2, or maybe more, .... He Takes the bread, he Blesses it. He Breaks it apart and he Gives it, with the fish, sharing it out, and out and out ... until all the people have been satisfied. We still tell that story today. He takes it, blesses it, breaks it and gives it until all have been satisfied.
He Took back the lake from Antipas, and Took back the land and fish and the people and he Blessed them, Named them as holy and belonging to God. Now it was all God’s lake and land and fish and people... to be Broken up equally and Given out, until all are satisfied. Close your eyes, take yourself to the seaside, among your friends and
neighours, eating and enjoying the sunshine for an afternoon. There is a reason we miss gathering in person these days. There is reason we always need Pie day or Dene’s chocolate cake, or a potluck when we’re together. There is a reason we first think of food banks with our outreach. Simple sharing of daily bread is what a divine household looks like. In simple sharing, and blessing, with not a finger lifted in violence against the Empire, a whole world order is turned upside down.
If I have a shortlist of favourite sayings here is one of them:
(When you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher fence.)
This is Kingdom living- Earth as in Heaven- knowing that the poor will always be among us, and yet none should go without. Knowing that empty bellies lead to exhaustion and despair instead of optimism and second chances. Knowing that in sharing bread and fish and wine, and chips ahoy cookies and banana chocolate chip muffins, and even twizzlers, we share stories and so we share lives. You are invited to squeeze in at the table, in so doing, you bless and are blessed. We break bread and share out equally and in so doing, we discover abundance. For that is how it is at God’s table,
God is gracious. God is Good. Let’s all thank God for this food. By God’s hand, we are fed, give us Lord our daily Bread. Amen.
And Amen.