LD 50, Deuteronomy 8 "Bored with Bread" Scott Hoezee

Four years. That's how long the book Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution has been on the bestseller list in The New York Times, where it currently occupies the #1 Bestseller spot in the category of "Advice and How-To" books. Over 6 million copies of Dr. Atkins' original book have also been sold, and there are at least twenty other diet books which have sold briskly in recent years. Over 29 million people worldwide attend a Weight Watchers meeting every week. Even within Christian circles there is a new diet approach called "Weigh Down" which combines prayer and Bible study with a weight-loss plan. According to the Weigh Down website, the newest study is called "Exodus from Egypt," in which "Egypt" apparently stands for the tyranny of the refrigerator for compulsive over-eaters!

Exact figures are difficult to get, of course, but it can be conservatively estimated that right now tens of millions of Americans are dieting, including yours truly who has been following the Weight Watchers plan for the past ten weeks. So what can the request "Give us this day our daily bread" mean in a land already so full of food that many of us pray every day not for enough bread but for enough willpower not to eat too much bread? What can our Lord's request for bread mean in a land where the Atkins' diet actually forbids bread?

Clearly we need to be very thoughtful about the meaning of what is, on the surface, the simplest, most straightforward petition of this prayer. What could be more plain than a modest request for bread? Yet for folks like most of us, this request is not so simple.

As the Catechism rightly notes, in addition to indicating real bread, this request opens up the entire category of everything we need physically. Now and again in the history of the Church there have been those who spiritualized this sentence in the Lord's Prayer, making it stand for heavenly bread in the sense of God's Word, the Bible. But as John Calvin pointed out, that's wrong. The simple meaning of these words is just what Jesus intended: God wants us to bring before him concerns and needs that are very earthy.

But we saw this a few weeks ago, too, when we thought about the request for God's kingdom to come and his will to be done not just in heaven but on earth. We said then that this reminds us that the physical, the earthy, the mundane is very much of concern to our God in Christ. We also said that this should not be at all surprising given that it was a very physical Jesus who gave the Lord's Prayer. We were not saved by an angel but by an incarnate Jesus. Our salvation has skin on it.

So the request for daily bread means we are to pray about everything we need physically. But notice that the Lord's Prayer does not begin with this. As N.T. Wright says, the danger in praying for daily bread is that we get to this request too quickly. We need to be careful that we do not start with bread but instead do what our Lord himself did, which is begin prayer with God's holy Name, the coming of his kingdom, and the exercise of his will. The word on bread follows those requests and so needs to be qualified by them, too.

We are right to pray for all that we need physically. But because we pray first for God's kingdom, the content of what we desire should be changed. We are not to pray for more than our fair share. We are not to pray for God to make us spectacularly rich. We are not to pray that we garner life's goodies at the expense of others who lose whenever we win.

The reason we cannot pray in selfish ways is because we first pray for the advent of God's kingdom in our hearts. If you mean what you pray when you ask for God to be inside you, then there are requests which you will not make because making them would be inconsistent with the kingdom for which you prayed first! If you arrange a meeting with your boss at which you earnestly talk about strategies by which you can become a more productive employee, you do not turn right around after that meeting and call together your co-workers so as to cook up schemes on how you can cheat the company! You cannot talk one moment about being a better worker and the next about being a worse one. So also you cannot pray for God's kingdom and then, when you get to the "daily bread" part of your prayer, ask for things that cut against the grain of God's kingdom of love and sharing!

Our wants and desires need to be influenced by the God whose Name, kingdom, and will make up the first part of the Lord's Prayer. But even once that happens, we will still have needs and desires. Being a kingdom-filled person will not eliminate all earthly needs! Among the needs that remain is the need for food, daily sustenance, and by extension the incomes that allow us to buy the things we both need and enjoy. And it is precisely such sanctified, natural needs that Jesus suggests we include when we pray to God.

But that brings us back to where we started: how can we pray for bread when we've already got more than enough? Since we are well taken care of in the food department, ought we to use this request for only the things we do not have? Instead of asking for daily bread, should we instead pray, "Bread I've got, O God, so give me this day my daily success at the office. Give me this day the parking spot I need and the stock option for which I long." If we're covered on the culinary front, is it enough to use the Lord's Prayer for other needs? Or does our abundance turn us in a different direction completely? Should we just forget all about ourselves in favor of praying for the millions who lack daily bread?

Let me say several things: First, yes, if we are "all set" where daily bread is concerned, we may use the basic idea behind this petition to ask for other things we need. But I don't want to leave it at just that. I don't want to say that since we mostly don't need to worry about food all we should do with this part of the Lord's Prayer is substitute other things. Instead I want to suggest that even in the midst of caloric abundance there is a way to let Jesus' words on bread transform us.

Perhaps on our lips a prayer for daily bread should mean that we do what we can to move away from the kind of numb, insensate state which makes us ungrateful for the food we so mindlessly eat. Maybe this request should make us slow down, wake up, open our eyes so that we can see the blessings of our daily lives as blessings. A request for daily bread can perhaps serve to remind us that even if we are on a diet, we still need to eat every day. So if you do eat every day, then this a most concrete expression of God's grace.

Where is God's grace? It's in that steaming bowl of mashed potatoes on your dinner table. Where is God's work in your life today? It's in what pops out of the toaster first thing in the morning. How do you know God cares for you? You know it when you open the refrigerator and see something that millions of people in this world cannot even conceive of: leftovers. Most of our world has no need of Tupperware or old Cool Whip containers because they never have any leftover food that could be stored in such containers!

Just here is where Deuteronomy 8 comes in. This passage is definitely the key chapter to the Book of Deuteronomy. The Israelites are on the cusp of the Promised Land. The hope of the covenant, the dream of generations, is about to be realized. But first things first, God says. Because God knows that no sooner will life shift from the harsh wilderness to the lush land and a new set of spiritual dangers will open up. Once the people's daily bread stops being God's manna and starts being loaves pulled out of an oven, the source of the food may get obscured. No one doubted the miracle of manna or the divine hand that rained it down every day. But what about the bread you yourself mix, knead, and bake? Is that just as much a blessing of God as the manna was?

Deuteronomy 8's answer to such questions is, "Of course!" But if you noticed when these verses were read, there is almost an edgy uneasiness about this chapter. The people are repeatedly commanded to remember and not to forget. They get hit over the head with this over and over again. And just in case anyone has missed the urgency of the first 18 verses, the last two verses round things out with dire threats. If you forget God and start chalking up his blessings to your own work, you will be destroyed!

That's pretty tough talk, but the shrillness of it clues you in that as he looked into the future, Moses got plenty worried. Keep in mind, too, that although Deuteronomy 8 represents the words of Moses, these words were not finally written down until a very long time later, well after Israel had settled itself into the Promised Land. But by that time the scribes of Deuteronomy were unhappily seeing the very forgetfulness Moses so feared.

Hence you get a double-whammy in this chapter: you have Moses' grave forebodings as to what effect prosperity would have on the national soul. But that original urgency then gets magnified as it is refracted through the lens of those who later set down Moses' words. These writers knew Moses had been right to fret about this. The people did forget. They did chalk up their daily bread to no more than their own skill, efforts, and deserving.

"Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it," the old adage warns. For centuries Israel had wished for the reality of the Promised Land. God delivered on his promise but God knew that with the goodness of Canaan would come danger. Prosperity has its perils. It is no less so for us. We pray for daily bread in a place where the getting of daily bread is no problem. Somehow we need to peel back the layers of our over-fullness so as to recover a fresh sense for the gifts of God that surround us.

The manna in the desert was the original "daily bread." It had to be a daily bread because the stuff would spoil and grow maggots if you tried to stockpile any overnight. The manna at once fed the people while at the same time keeping them on a short spiritual leash. Each new day required a fresh infusion of God's presence. But the presence of God--and knowing that you live moment by moment in that divine presence--is the key to the manna, as Deuteronomy 8:3 reveals. The manna was a great gift and yet Moses says God gave it to the people so as to humble them! The manna was humble pie in the sense of keeping Israel keenly dependent on God. The "trick" would be to maintain this sense of dependency in the Promised Land.

In a recent article Rev. Stephen Shoemaker reminds us of an insightful observation once made by Walker Percy. Percy noted that the English word for "boredom" derives from the French verb bourrer, which means "to stuff." The more stuffed we are with the riches of life, the more bored we tend to get. We cram our mouths with food and stuff our lives with, well, stuff and still we feel restless, still we feel the need to "try something new" and "liven things up." Yet what sometimes lies behind that is sheer boredom. We're bored stiff, bored insensate, bored to the point that we can't even see how good we've got it.

"Give us this day our daily bread," therefore, should be a way to break the cycle of over-stuffed boredom. Our Lord's words on our well-fed lips need to be a spiritual wake-up call to see anew what we have and to give thanks for it. And maybe, just maybe, it is a reminder, too, of our need to do with a little less. And here I don't mean doing with less in the sense of going on a diet but doing with less in the sense of intentionally just denying yourself this or that new thing so as to focus on the typical things which surround you.

For instance, in the culinary world today there is a lot of experimentation going on with various ethnic cuisines. Actually that has been going on for a long time but people slowly got bored with just Thai food or Japanese cuisine or Indian spices and so in more recent years "fusion cooking" has become the rage in which chefs experiment with what classic French food could taste like with an infusion of also Mexican spices.

Of course, once in a while we all enjoy variety, and if God had not wanted us to enjoy what we eat, he could have made a flavorless world. Still it says something about us when we dismiss someone who refuses to try such flavor experiments as a bland "meat and potatoes" kind of guy. What's wrong with meat and potatoes? What's wrong with bread and water? Can we revel in simple food and give genuine thanks to the God who gives it even when we intentionally keep our dinner plates simple and uncluttered some evenings?

However we do it, we need to find ways of giving thanks for all we have. I have no simple solutions for myself or any of us as to how we can foster a sense of divine dependence, but our Lord's prayer challenges us to do just that. We cannot look to God for our every need unless we can also be thankful to God for what we every day receive.

Finally, though, the more mindful we are of these concrete, if not literally tasty, blessings in our daily lives, the more mindful we may become of the millions who go to bed each night without having received this day their daily bread. Earlier in this message we said that we list before God our physical needs only after we first pray for the coming to earth of God's kingdom and will.

When Jesus was here on this very earth, he took care to feed the multitudes from a single loaf and fish. He was regularly seen breaking bread and sharing skins of wine with all the wrong people, thus giving the Pharisees cause derisively to label Jesus a glutton and a drunk. Jesus was neither, of course, but he did enjoy a good meal and quaffed his share of wine. But the real problem for Jesus' critics was not that he liked nice food (we all do) nor that he could savor a fine goblet of wine (most like that, too). No, the problem was the company Jesus kept when he ate and drank: tax collectors, women, prostitutes, Romans, "sinners" and any number of others who were not welcome in the synagogue.

But they were Jesus' kind of people and, as often as not, his chosen dinner companions. Somehow you get the feeling that the man who urged us to pray "Give us this day our daily bread" was saying something about that request when he fed the hungry and tore off his own hunk of bread before passing the crumbly loaf to the folks whom his religious contemporaries regarded as "all the wrong people."

As a real human person, Jesus needed daily bread as much as each one of us in this room this morning. As a real human person created in God's image, Jesus enjoyed his food and drink even as we all do. But as the Son of God, Jesus knew that you cannot pray this day for your daily bread without wishing that same divine gift on all God's children.

In the Lord's Prayer we praise the great Name of God our Father in heaven. But he is the God and Father of all. In the Lord's Prayer we beg for the coming of God's kingdom and for the doing of God's will on earth. But it is such a hungry planet which we ask God to invade. In the Lord's Prayer we pray for God to give us our daily bread. But if we are already bored with the food that over-stuffs our lives, then what right do we have to ask such a thing? Then again, within the grand scope of God's sacred kingdom how dare we ask such a thing unless we genuinely hope that God's grand kingdom banquet of never-ending abundance will finally come for all?

We do not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Are we bored with bread? If we are, then may God by his Holy Spirit renew our hearts and sharpen our spiritual taste buds lest we, sooner or later, get bored with also the words that come from the mouth of Him who alone can feed us now and forever. Because if we become bored with God's Word, then we starve . . . forever. Amen.