Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

Here is my message from Sunday. The scripture passages were Isaiah 55:1-12 and Matthew 6:5-13:

Bread is not as much of a staple in our diets as it used to be, especially if you, like me, have a doctor who is constantly telling you to cut out the cards, or perhaps you’ve even eliminated bread altogether from your diet, either because of allergies or for dieting reasons. And so for us, asking for our daily bread, which is the petition we move onto today in our look at the Lord’s Prayer, might seem just a little out of touch, not part of our daily reality. Although when you go to a restaurant and they bring good bread to the table, and I’m not talking about the artisanal stuff or those that are so hard on the outside that a turtle could use it as a shell. I’m talking soft, warm bread, melting with butter, and if it has pasta accompanying it, which my doctor also says I should be avoiding, that can be like heaven. And since I see some of you shaking your heads and salivating like Pavlov has just rung his famous bell, I know that you know what I’m talking about. But, that’s more often the exception to the rule these days.

It’s not like we don’t consider bread important, after all when we are talking about amazing inventions, we don’t compare it to the invention of fire or the wheel or even the printing press. Instead what do we say? It’s the greatest thing since? Sliced bread. Apparently sliced bread is the high point of human existence. But, unlike today, bread was a staple in the ancient world. It would have been found in every meal, and it wasn’t just a side, it would have been the main course. It would have been accompanied by fruits and vegetables, and occasionally, but rarely, especially for the poor, meat would have been present. In fact, because of its ubiquity the word bread could be used for food in general, not just bread. But, bread was also more than just about bread, because it also represented hospitality. When strangers or friends appear, bread is brought out as part of the table. We even still say the same thing, as we talk about breaking bread together. Which means sharing a meal, and there’s something special that happens over a meal. When we share a meal together, or with someone else, there’s a bond that comes into place that few other things can do, and I think that’s a portion of what Jesus is talking about here. And yet, of course there is so much more to it as well, because there is a direct practicality to it.

Gluttony Versus Hungering and Thirsting For Righteousness

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 6:25-34:

At the beginning of the Gospel according to Matthew, we are introduced to John the Baptist and are told that he wore a camel hair coat, which was not very comfortable, to say the least, and that his meals consisted of “locusts and wild honey.” I’m hoping that the honey makes the locusts a little more palatable, but I don’t really want to try it to find out. What these statements about John tell us is that he was living the lifestyle of an ascetic, or someone who denies themselves of any worldly pleasures in order to try and contain and control, or tame, the body.  Around the third century, some Christians started moving out into the Egyptian desert to live solitary, ascetic lives, to replicate what John the Baptist had been doing, in the hope of dedicating their full lives to God, and to do that to cut everything out of their lives they thought was unnecessary, or distracting to them. And so like John the Baptist, they limited not only what they ate, but the amount they ate as well. Known as the desert fathers and mothers, they began what we now know as monastic communities.  They were also the ones to talk about the sins that would become the seven deadly sins, which includes the sin of gluttony. It is also then little wonder that it is Pope Gregory the Great who does the final compilation of this list of sins and begins promoting them since he is the first pope to come out of the monastic community and thus had been steeped in their ideas, so that even while he was combining and eliminating different sins that he would leave in the sin of gluttony, the one sin that truly deals with ascetic lifestyles, or the lack thereof.

Now gluttony is probably the hardest of the sins that we will deal with, at least for me. In our new Wednesday’s with Wesley group this week we were talking about Wesley’s advice for Methodists, as well as his general rules, and we were talking about that there are some rules that it’s really easy to say we will follow, but they are the ones that we don’t have any problem with to start. But the rules that actually apply to the things we really do, or want to do, those are the ones we dismiss or say they don’t really apply anymore or we make excuses about why they don’t apply to us, or why we aren’t really violating them. I want to do that with gluttony, as I’m guessing most of you do as well, because whether we want to admit it we are all gluttons at one point or another, although we are much more likely to point out this sin for others.