Exodus 16:4-5, 13-21

Matthew 6:25-34, 18:1-5

In her memoir Lit, the writer Mary Karr describes her descent into alcoholism and how she eventually got sober and found God. She tells a story of a literary gathering she attended shortly after she decided to stop drinking. At the fancy dinner that followed, she felt out of place, thirsty, and very, very conspicuous when she refused to touch her glass of wine, even when everyone was making toasts. Finally, she excused herself and went to the restroom, where she entered a stall, knelt down on the floor and, against every instinct, began to pray.

“Please keep me away from a drink. I know I haven’t been really asking, but I really need it. Please please please.” Remarkably, after praying this desperate prayer and taking a few deep breaths, she felt “like a calmer human than the one who’d knelt a few minutes before.” Calmer, and ravenously hungry. She returned to the table to find her wineglass replaced by a glass of ice water. She took a piece of bread from the basket and dunked it in olive oil. “Never,” she writes, “has bread tasted so good.” (1)

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray to the One as close to us as the air we breathe--Our Father--and who is Holy and set apart--in heaven. We begin by asking God, reveal who you are and then, set the world right. This prayer opens with the greatest paradoxes of our faith and then, just when we are dwelling in the wonder and mystery of who God is and how God works, Jesus brings us back to the reality of our daily, earthly lives: every day, every day, we get hungry.

And so, Jesus teaches us to pray: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Or, in Eugene Peterson’s words, “Keep us alive with three square meals.” Apparently this intimate yet holy God is not just involved with bringing heaven to earth, with making this world look more like a place where God’s love and justice reigns, but with the workings and cravings of our very bodies.

As human beings have pointed out for centuries, the cravings we have are not just physical, they are spiritual as well. One writer suggests that at the bottom of all human spirituality is “a haunting sense of incompleteness, a yearning for completion, a craving for certainty, a brokenness hungering for wholeness.” St. Augustine wrote a sentence that has resonated with believers for centuries: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

We all get hungry. We all have cravings. We all experience moments when a restlessness enters our spirit and we long for something we cannot name...something more.

Does this sound a bit ridiculous to you, that we all want something more than what we already have? After all, there is no denying that, compared to the rest of the world, we are rich. No matter what you might wish you had more of or what you lack, we are all rich in relative terms.

92% of people in the world don’t have a car.

1 billion people don’t have clean water.

1 billion people live on less than a dollar a day.

800 million people won’t eat today, 300 million of them kids. (2)

Not only do we have enough food in our stores and in our cabinets to fill our bellies, we actually get to go the store or open the pantry and say to ourselves, “what do I want to eat right now?” We not only get to eat, we get to choose what we eat. The same is true with satisfying our spiritual cravings. Not only can we choose from Christian denominations and churches across a huge theological spectrum, but now even in small town America we can experience other religions as well.

And yet...in spite of this abundance of food, material things, and options for spirituality, we worry about tomorrow...because we all get hungry. We all have cravings. We all experience moments when we long for something we cannot name...something more.

Jesus told his followers they needed to become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven. And one of the undeniable things about children, especially infants and toddlers, is that they are utterly dependent and completely in the present moment. If a newborn wakes up at 3a.m. with an empty stomach there will be no rest for anyone in the house until he is on his mother’s breast or in his father’s arms with a warm bottle in his mouth. If you tell a toddler she has to wait until after lunch to have a piece of candy, as far as she’s concerned, if she can’t have it now, that means she can’t ever have another piece of candy again...hence the tantrum. Children don’t worry about tomorrow, they worry about now and they depend on their parents to meet their needs now.

In this way, the Israelites were forced to become like children when God provided them manna each day in the wilderness, for God provided just enough for one day and no more. Like children, they became totally dependent on God to give them what they needed to live through the day, and, as the days went on, they learned to trust that God would indeed give them enough for each day. The Israelites knew without a doubt that they depended on God. They could not succumb to the illusion that they were in control of their lives...an illusion most of us give into every day in part because we have more than we need to satisfy our cravings, at least the physical ones.

But in this phrase, here in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer, we are reminded that no matter how much we fill our pantries or our stomachs or even our houses, we still suffer cravings. We hunger for more. And it is this hunger, this restlessness, this dis-ease that leads so many people in our culture--so many of us--into the disease of addiction in all its ugly forms.

The word “addiction” comes from the Latin, and the original meaning was to say or pronounce ‘toward’ something. Roman laws used the term “addict” to describe a person who, by official court action, was spoken for or surrendered to a master. Addicts were not free to pursue other relationships or responsibilities. Their lives were spoken for. They were, literally, enslaved. (3)

We are all hungry. We all have cravings. We all experience moments when a restlessness enters our spirit and we long for something more. And this means that we all risk becoming addicted, becoming enslaved to whatever fills that longing, however temporarily. Sex, drugs, alcohol, work, shopping, the internet, porn, success, the runner’s high...we turn to these things again and again to satisfy the longing for more. But if we expect these things to fill our deepest need, they will enslave us, delivering just enough satisfaction to keep us coming back for more, hoping that this time our need will be met and our hunger satisfied.

As one preacher put it, in terms of how it affects us, addiction is slavery.

But in terms of our relationship to God, addiction is idolatry.

There is an urgency to this part of the Lord’s Prayer--“Give us this day our daily bread”...“keep us alive with three square meals”--an urgency that reminds us that “we are addicts whenever we turn our back...on our utter dependence on God to meet those needs.” (4)

To be sure, the challenge of addiction is more acute for some of us than for others, but the truth that Jesus points to in this phrase, give us this day our daily bread, is that we all have a tendency to turn away from God and toward other idols, to think that we simply don’t need God to live.

For forty years, every day, there was manna enough for the Israelites to eat. For forty years they lived out daily their utter dependence on God; they had no choice but to rely on God for their daily bread.

Maybe we wish it were that simple. Maybe we think it would be easier if we didn’t have so many options before us of things to eat and things to do to satisfy our deepest spiritual hunger. Yet we cannot deny that God has created us this way, to hunger, both physically and spiritually. And in that very act of creating us to be restless creatures, God planted in us a deep desire for what only God can provide.

And so, week after week, we come here. And when we walk through those doors we may not leave our addictions behind, but for this brief time of worship we turn our backs on them, we release ourselves from our enslavement to them. We come here and we pray this prayer, in which we acknowledge that without God we would not be alive; we might survive by filling our bellies and our lives with the abundance around us, but we would not thrive. “Keep us alive with three square meals.”

When we enter this place, when we pray this prayer, Jesus invites us to leave behind the world that is all about me and my hunger and my desires, and lay down our worries about tomorrow, lay down the addictions that enslave us, lay down our need to be in control. Jesus invites us to enter this world, the real world in which we are the children of a loving, caring God, a God who has promised to take our burdens from us, to provide for us each day what we need to live--really live.

*****

As I wrote this I read sermons by two colleagues who have preached series on the Lord’s Prayer and who graciously shared their work with me. And while both of their sermons were thoughtful and moving, I struggled with the fact that they focused primarily on spiritual hunger, as I have done. I can’t help feel like if we make this phrase--“Give us this day our daily bread”--just about our spiritual hunger and our need to depend each day on God to sustain us, then we have missed an important part of this prayer.

After all, we aren’t just making an individual request here, we are making a communal request. We are declaring that we--we human beings, we, God’s children--are all in this together: give us this day our daily bread. Keep us alive with three square meals. Not my bread, not keep me alive. Our, us. In this phrase we state our dependence on God and our interdependence on one another.

A group of Trappist monks sat down one evening to dinner in silence. Finally, one of the monks became so overcome by delight in the fresh-baked bread he was eating that he blurted out, “Hey, did we make this bread or did somebody give it to us?” One of the other monks answered, “Yes.” (5) Nearly everything we eat is the product of physical labor of other human beings, without which we would not have bread on our plates.

“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink...do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.” Anchored firmly in the present moment, children do not worry whether their parents will feed them tomorrow. As long as they have been fed today, that is enough, and so if there is food leftover, they share in the confidence that tomorrow, their parents will provide for them again. Today, when you hunger, physically or spiritually, may you turn away from the idols in your life and turn toward to God. And when you receive from the hand of God the Bread of Heaven, may you relish its texture and flavor and taste. May you, for this moment, on this day, be filled with faith and trust that the God who loves you provides you with enough...enough even to share. Amen.

Endnotes:

1. Karr, Mary, Lit, Harper Collins, 2009.

2. from the Nooma video “Rich,” featuring Rob Bell.

3. Nelson, James B., Thirst, God, and the Alcoholic Experience. Westminster John Knox, 2004.

4. from the sermon “Hungry” by the Rev. Mark Ramsey, Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, Sept. 20, 2009. Used with permission.

5. Willimon, Will, Stanley Hauerwas, and Scott Saye, Lord, Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer and the Christian Life. Abingdon Press, 1996.