Today I want to
continue to talk about the Lord’s Prayer and focus on these two petitions:
“Give us this day our daily bread” and “Forgive our sins as we forgive those
who sin against us.”
Both of these
petitions deal with what it means to be a spiritual person.
We live in an
age of deep spiritual longings. Right
and left, people are turning to prayer and meditation. There’s a remarkable interest in Buddhism. The Dalai Lama has become an international
media star. People speak openly and
matter-of-factly about encounters with angels.
Daily on network television people consult mediums to learn about the
well-being of their departed loved ones.
For the most
part, I think this interest in spirituality is a good thing. I think that only good can come of learning
to meditate and pray, and the Dalai Lama seems to be a genuinely good and holy
man.
The problem is
the way people define spirituality.
People seem to think that spirituality is confined to the realm of prayer and
meditation, that it is about angels or conversations with departed loved
ones.
A second problem
with the current fascination with spirituality is that people fail to recognize
the dark side of spirituality, that there is darkness as well as light in
spiritual places.
But the biggest
problem is that people divorce spirituality from everyday life. The Lord’s Prayer has the antidote to this in
its central petition: “Give us today our
daily bread”. So far everything the Lord’s Prayer has said sounds nice and
spiritual: Our Father in Heaven – that’s
good because it puts God in heaven at a safe distance from us and where God cannot
interfere too much in our lives.
Hallowed be your Name – that’s also good. We are perfectly prepared to
hallow and praise God’s Name as long as it doesn’t get in the way of our
pleasure and self-centeredness. Your
kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven – even this is OK. Presumably, God’s kingdom will not come and
God’s will will not be done any time soon.
And then, the
Lord’s Prayer throws a monkey wrench into our plans: “Give us today our daily bread.” Suddenly, we’re not praying nice spiritual
thoughts. We’re asking God for something
that we really need. What’s spiritual
about bread?
Here the Lord’s
Prayer exposes the fundamental mistake of so much new age spirituality – the
dichotomy between the spiritual and the material is false. It is just as spiritual to hunger for bread
as it is to meditate for hour after hour.
It follows that everything we do with our bodies is spiritual. Thirst is spiritual. Sleep is spiritual. Sex is spiritual. What we do with our bodies matters.
So much of
modern spirituality is Gnostic.
Gnosticism was an early Christian heresy. The Gnostics taught that spirit was good and
matter was bad. They assumed an absolute
division between the spiritual and the material. But this is not what the Bible and the
Christian faith teach. They teach that
God created the world and declared it good and never changed his mind. To be sure, the world is a mess. It is broken and flawed. It is the arena for
fire, flood, earthquake, famine, and plague, but it is still God’s good
creation.
And so in the
Lord’s Prayer Jesus teaches us to pray for our daily bread. Bread means bread. It is not a metaphor or code word for
spiritual sustenance. When we pray for
our daily bread, we are praying for nourishment for our bodies, and we are
learning that taking care of our bodies is a spiritual act.
Secondly, I want to point out that the Lord’s Prayer exposes the terrible
fragility of human life. David Read, a great
Scottish preacher who was for many years the pastor of Madison Ave.
Presbyterian in New York, was a prisoner of war during World War II. In his
autobiography he tells the story about sitting down to a beautifully prepared
French meal in a small country restaurant in Normandy in the summer of 1940. Ten
days later he was a prisoner of war begging for bread. Read goes on:
“When in our first camp the ration for the next day was issued every
evening – one loaf to be divided among eight men – the words ‘Give us this day
our daily bread’ took on new meaning…. If I were to ask God for anything at all
at that time, my first thought would be bread. It was the immediate need for us
all. Lofty thoughts about not considering
material things and asking only for spiritual strength.were, I confess, not in
the picture. This was a need, a desperate, all-consuming, really humiliating
need.” (Holy Common Sense, p. 51)
Human life is
terribly fragile. And if we needed to be reminded that life is fragile, the
events of Sept. 11, 2001, taught us that lesson anew. But we could already have
learned from the Lord’s Prayer not to take anything in life for granted, even
our daily bread. The day could come as quickly
for us as it did for David Read when there would be only one prayer on our
lips--“Give us today our daily bread” – and we might find ourselves praying
that phrase with a fervor we’d never known before. For that matter, we might find ourselves
praying for water or even the air we breathe. Life is God’s good gift, but the
Lord’s Prayer reminds us that it is indeed a gift.
Finally, think
carefully about what we are praying for.
Jesus teaches us not to pray for MY daily bread but for OUR daily
bread. Praying to “Our Father” reminds
us that we never pray alone, so praying for “our daily bread” reminds us that
we never eat bread alone. “Bread is a communal product…. The farmers in Iowa,
the bakers in New York…” The drivers of the trucks that deliver bread to
Smith’s or Albertson’s make bread a corporate endeavor. None of us eats or lives alone. (Willimon and
Hauerwas, Lord, Teach Us, p. 76)
One of my
favorite prayers is a table grace by Samuel Howard Miller, a former dean of
Harvard Divinity School: “O God, if we thank you for bread and meat, for
home and family, for work and friends, for comfort and security, and have no
pain of heart, no anguish that others are homeless, helpless and starving, then
leave us without your blessing until we learn the ways of mercy. Deliver us from the sin of indifference and
bless to us what we now enjoy by the courage and kindness with which we share
it.” It is a false spirituality that
would teach us to pray for bread for others without actually doing anything to
provide that bread for them.
Have you heard
the story about the man who dropped into an Episcopal Church one morning just
as the congregation was reciting the words from the General Confession? “We have done those things which we ought not
to have done and we have left undone those things which we ought to have done…”
And he exclaimed, “These are my kind of people!”
Well, they are
our kind of people, too. Jesus taught
his disciples to pray, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against
us.”
I want to make
three points about this petition: First,
what is this sin for which we are seeking forgiveness? Secondly, why do we pray
for the forgiveness of OUR sins rather than MY sins? And thirdly, is Jesus telling us that
forgiveness is conditional on forgiving others?
We usually don’t
have much trouble admitting that the world is not as it ought to be and we are
not as we ought to be.
But we have a problem
with the word sin. It has an unpleasant, off-putting, old-fashioned
sound to it. It is something we
associate with fundamentalists who seem to almost revel in cataloging sins,
usually others, not their own. Do you
remember the now infamous remarks made by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in
the days following Sept. 11, to the effect that the terrorist attacks were
God’s punishment for the sins of abortion, feminism, and homosexuality. In other words, the Christian fundamentalists Falwell and Robertson were pretty much
agreeing with the Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden on that point.
However, at its heart sin is more than an infraction of a divinely
created list of rights and wrongs. Sin
is the state of alienation and estrangement from God, from one another, and
from our deepest and truest selves. Sin is a network in which we are all
involved from the moment of birth.
My friend Rabbi Jonathan Miller and I have an ongoing friendly argument
about original sin. I believe in it; he doesn’t. Now, by original sin, I do not
believe in original GUILT. I don’t
believe that we are all guilty of some crime or misdeed committed by our
original ancestors. But, I do believe
that all of us are part of a web or fabric of alienation and estrangement.
I remember hearing ministers in the church I grew up in challenging us
to try to spend a single day never doing anything wrong – never going over the
speed limit, saying an unkind word, lustfully desiring an attractive woman or
man. That might be a useful exercise,
but I think it would be more instructive to try to spend a single day loving God
with all our being and loving our neighbor as ourselves. For that matter, we might even try to spend a
day loving ourselves as we should – exercising, eating healthy food, and
getting enough sleep. I feel pretty sure
that none of us can spend an entire day either doing those things which we
ought to do nor refraining from those things which we ought not do.
Under the conditions of human life as we know it, sin is a permanent
condition. Therefore, in the midst of
the Lord’s Prayer Jesus teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive
those who sin against us.” Traditionally
Episcopalians have prayed “Forgive us our trespasses” and our neighbors at First
Presbyterian have prayed “Forgive our debts”.
The New English Bible translated the Lord’s Prayer “Forgive the wrong we
have done as we have forgiven those who have wronged us.” “Debts” is closer to the actual meaning, but
modern liturgists have settled on “sins”.
Like the prayer for bread, the prayer for forgiveness brings us down to
earth and grounds us. Praise and worship
bracket the Lord’s Prayer: First we
bless God’s Name and implore God to rule on earth as in heaven, and at the end
we acknowledge the divine glory: “For
the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours.” But in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer Jesus
reminds us that we are not angels but creatures made of the dust of the
ground. We need bread, we need to
forgive and be forgiven, and we need to be protected from evil.
Secondly, why do we
ask to forgive OUR sins, not just MY sins? From first to last the Lord’s Prayer
is the prayer of a community, not just an individual. It is a prayer we pray with others, even when
we pray it in the isolation of a hermitage.
We pray to “Our Father”; we pray for OUR daily bread; and so, too, we
pray that God would forgive OUR sins.
We do this because
sin is inescapably corporate. It is not just about cheating on our taxes, being
unfaithful to our spouse or partner, or saying four letter words. We do plenty of wrong as individuals, both
those things of which we are aware and those casual cruelties we may do
unconsciously. But the truly enormous
wrongs are those we do corporately, with or without conscious awareness.
In the 1930s
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the classic account of corporate evil in his book Moral Man and Immoral Society. Niebuhr’s point was obvious but it bears
repeating. Good people with good
intentions can do very bad things indeed.
Individually, most of us are pretty good. We try to raise our children with advantages,
take care of our elderly parents and lend a hand to our neighbors.
In the Review Journal this morning I read of
the investigation of a couple of foster homes in Las Vegas. When we hear
terrible stories of children being mistreated or abused, we think, “How awful!
How can people do things like that?”
But think of
this. These foster homes are located in
the middle of our neighborhoods. They are surrounded by other homes. Did no one
in these other homes wonder about how the children in these foster homes were
being treated? Have we become so isolated that we nothing of the lives of the
homes right next door to us? And what of the foster care system? Did its representatives fail to give adequate
oversight because their budget had been cut? You and I are not personally responsible for
foster children being mistreated, but we are responsible for a system which
allows such evil to take place. And if that is the case, what is that but
alienation, estrangement, or, in a word, sin?
Sin is never just
an “I” problem; it is always a “we” problem.
The best example is probably slavery.
Slavery was never just a Southern sin.
The railroads transported goods produced by slaves. Even the endowments of Harvard and Yale are
founded on fortunes amassed by families who benefitted from slavery.
Thirdly, when Jesus tells us to ask God to forgive our sins as we
forgive others, is he saying that forgiveness is conditional? Is he saying that God will forgive us if we
forgive others? In our more realistic
moments we know that no one would ever receive forgiveness if forgiveness were
conditional.
Why then the
apparent condition? I don’t believe
that God’s forgiveness is conditional, but I believe that it is terribly
difficult to receive forgiveness, maybe impossible, if we stay stuck in our
anger, our inability to forgive others.
Forgiveness is
hard, terribly hard. In his book Letters
to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, C.S. Lewis remarks, “Today I succeeded in
forgiving someone I have been trying to forgive for twenty five years.” I can identify with that. At my 25th college reunion a
friend who had hurt me deeply asked me for my forgiveness. I had been unable to forgive him, so his
offer of reconciliation felt like receiving a “get out of jail free” card. Another story in the gospels tells us that Peter
wanted to know exactly how many times he had to forgive his brother before he
could finally let him have it. Thinking
he was being magnanimous, Peter asked, Would it be enough to forgive him seven
times? Jesus replied, “No, Peter, but
seventy times seven.” God has forgiven
us seventy times seven trillion. Do you
think we might eventually learn to forgive each other at least a couple of
times?
The great
theologian Karl Barth once remarked that too much Christian preaching speaks about an
obligation which must be met in order to receive a gift, whereas the real
message of the New Testament is about a gift which then leads us to an
obligation. (quoted in William Willimon, The
Gospel for the Person Who Has Everything, p. 23.) But “Jesus told us about
a God whose love contains no "ifs" at all.” (Willimon, p. 27)
The rhetoric of sin
is one of the things that makes the church such a strange place. Someone has been spreading the rumor that the
church is a bunch of good people who want to do nice things for others. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us otherwise. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us that we are so
destitute that we must beg for our daily bread, that we are in a state of alienation
and estrangement from God and our neighbor, and that without divine aid we
would be overcome by the darkness around us.
Our Father in
heaven… give us today our daily bread and forgive our sins as we forgive those
who sin against us.
