EXODUS 16:2-4,9-15

PSALM 78:14-20,23-25

EPHESIANS 4:17-25

JOHN 6:24-35

Sermon – August 3, 2003

“Give us this day our daily bread.” Sound familiar? Some of us may have said the Lord’s Prayer, including this phrase, hundreds, if not thousands of times. Not all of us may have thought about it every time or even most times. “Give us.” It’s almost like we’re giving God a command, which would be highly presumptuous except that Jesus taught us to pray like this. So we are commanded to give God instructions – for bread. Sounds rather prosaic. Basic. Essential. Well, yes, that’s the point: Jesus invites us to depend on God for sustenance and to expect God to answer. But another key word is daily. “Give us this day our daily bread”: not enough bread so that we never have to ask – or receive – bread from God again, but enough for today. No hoarding, stockpiling, or selling to others of what God gives us – and no days off from praying, either!

So where did Jesus get the idea for this provocative phrase in the prayer he taught – and what experience did it immediately evoke in the minds of his first, all Jewish, listeners?

Today’s Old Testament reading tells the tale. The first experience of God’s people of daily dependence on God for food was while the people of Israel were journeying across the Sinai desert from slavery in Egypt towards the Promised Land, which would one day be called Israel. They had spent years as slaves of the Egyptians, whose country was the richest, more powerful and the most agriculturally productive country in the world. As slaves they had learned never to think for themselves and to depend on their masters and owners for their daily bread in a country where wealth and food were conspicuous and thus easy to believe in.

Now, in Chapter 16 or Exodus (from which we just read) the Israelites are in the rocks, dirt and mountains of the Sinai desert, that very thinly populated triangular, peninsula between Egypt proper and what is today the Israeli border.

The wettest part of the Sinai peninsula today gets about four inches of rainfall a year – about as much as we got in some weeks this Spring – and they were not in the wettest, coastal region, which had lots of Egyptian army outposts. These people, who had lived their whole lives close to the river Nile, were scores of miles from any consequential river – or major agricultural area.

And so, they scoffed, doubted, grumbled and “dissed” God, speculating that God had delivered them from slavery only to let them die in the wilderness. They glamorized their past life in Egypt, recalling the food of Egypt – as though slaves got to eat it all! – and neglecting to remember the abuse, exploitation and even genocide that went with being slaves. “The good old days” weren’t really as good as they pretended – ever realize that about your “good old days”? And they doubted God’s love and perhaps his ability to help them – they who had just been rescued from the clutches of the greatest army on earth for no particular reason except that God loved them!

In sum, they were asked the question, “God, what have you done for me lately?” It’s a question one or two people have asked since.

In response, God fed them. We might have expected God to get huffy, give them a speech about ingratitude, faithlessness, impatience etc. – but though God does that later on in the story, now he feeds them, and in Chapter 17 he gives them an obvious source of water. After all, God has not yet given them the 10 commandments, even (that comes in Exodus 20). Grace – God’s free gifts – precedes the Law – the code of conduct God expects. God’s free gifts are freedom, food and water, enough so a person can live and live freely and freely choose to follow God in commitment.

The “daily bread” part comes in today’s story, too. God does not rain down loaves of bakery bread on their heads; God points out to them a natural phenomenon – that is, one he created but which they as newcomers were unfamiliar with – which is the daily appearance of a sweet, flaky substance under a certain bush native to the Sinai, which can indeed be eaten and sustain life. Shortly, God would guide Moses to a place to find water, and God would continue to guide the Israelites to oasis after oasis as they journeyed. Without such help, the Israelites surely would have died. I have been to Sinai, and the oases are hard enough to find with maps and 4WD vehicles. On foot and without human guidance in the desert in summer, they would have been toast – literally – without divine guidance.

Water, yes, and bread. Daily. The manna did not keep and could not be hoarded, as some disobedient Israelites soon found out. However, miraculously, a two-day supply appeared each week on the day before the Sabbath, so that they could take a day off to worship God and still have...enough. “Give us this day our daily bread,” Lord, just as you did 3,200 years ago in the Sinai.

God still offers us freedom and sustenance. We are offered new life in baptism – freedom from slavery to sin and to our own wishes and desires – and spiritual sustenance in the Holy Eucharist, the bread and wine which are tangible reminders of God’s pledge to care both for our physical needs and for our spiritual needs, to give us enough.

The key words are “needs” and “enough”. In many wealthy countries, especially America, people have an inflated notion of what their “needs” are (and I struggle with this myself). God does not promise us wealth as materialists define it – or more wealth than the person next door or than our forebears necessarily. God promises enough, another concept many Americans find hard to grasp in a world in which 1.1 billion people have no dependable source of pure drinking water, never mind cars, central air conditioning, DVD players and a host of other things many Americans take for granted.

God promises that there is enough bread in God’s world so that everyone can have enough for their daily bread. And then, as part of our spiritual discipline, we are asked to make sure the bread is shared with everyone.

This is a challenge – and it is a challenge for us as Americans to share our abundance of physical bread, and for us as Christians to share our abundance of spiritual bread. Jesus Christ, the One through whom all things were made, gives himself – “the Bread of Life” as he describes himself in today’s Gospel – to us in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, in the Scriptures and in his presence wherever two or three are gathered together in his Name.

If we don’t share the Good News of Christ with others, we are hoarding just as surely as we are if we hoard money and never give charitably. We can share Christ in a world in which millions are spiritually hungry by building friendship, community and commitment among those who already come to this church or some other, by warmly welcoming those who are new, by inviting those you know who have no local congregation in which they worship to visit this church or another; by wearing a cross or having a Christian car bumper sticker, by reflecting on the spiritual and other gifts God has already given you and by prayerfully asking God how we can share Christ with others, and also how we can best share our bread literally with others.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” God has responded, just as he did during that dusty journey through the wilderness so long ago. God is responding today, even if you feel like you’re going through a wilderness now. And we are all called to respond, so that all may bloom with the glorious abundance of God’s gifts, physical and spiritual, shared by us.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church