Preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster on 3 October, Harvest Festival. Gospel reading Matthew 6.25-33
‘Give us this day our daily bread’
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This is
one of those phrases that we say in the Lord’s Prayer, but perhaps don’t pause
on it and ponder very often.
To pray
‘give us this day our daily bread’ is to pray some very powerful and deep words.
It is about
grace. Grace is the way in which God gives of God’s own self to us,
gratuitously, freely, without charge. Amazing!
‘Give us
this day our daily bread’ is about savouring what we have and extracting every
ounce of goodness from life.
‘Give us
this day our daily bread’ is about looking forward, to the future, in an
utterly non-anxious way.
Grace.
Savouring. Non-anxious anticipation. These three things that flow out of the
Lord’s Prayer all speak into the harvest thanksgiving we make today and to the
way we navigate the cares and concerns of the world at the moment.
Ponder
our gospel reading, where Jesus tells us not to be anxious but to focus on the
gifts of God in creation. The petition, the request, ‘give us this day our
daily bread’ encapsulates and distils that message.
That
reading speaks of gifts freely given in creation, of savouring the moment we
are in and a non-anxious anticipation of what is to come.
Yes, we
might say, but that’s hard when people are, quite reasonably, feeling worried: where
will my next tank of fuel come from? Will I eat or heat this autumn and winter?
What will come of the ecological disaster that is unfolding in front of our
eyes? And more besides.
So the
Gospel of Jesus Christ responds:
From
first principles. Everything in the world is fundamentally a gift, freely
given. Life is not cheap, but it is free at source. I didn’t do anything to
earn being alive; and nor did you. There is nothing anyone has ever done that
could have brought the creation, with its abundance, richness and diversity
into existence.
A gift
is not an entitlement.
So we
savour what we have. Last week the Church celebrated St Therese of Lisieux.
Therese invites us to see God in the little details of life. Considering lilies
in the field or birds in the air, the beauty of the little things is profoundly
of the Gospel.
The
Gospel moves us to notice beauty, and when we notice beauty then we can savour
it. It may be the tiniest pleasure like a beautiful little flower, a robin
redbreast: savour it. When you can savour those things then you can savour
yourself more, and as you savour yourself anxiety loses its grip.
And what
of non-anxious anticipation? That is
the application of knowing life and all that you have to be a gift of God. That
is the awareness of the little things of beauty and beginning to savour them
day by day.
To be
sure, being non-anxious when there is so much to be anxious about is hard: paralysing
anxiety is not easily cast out. When anxiety and fear take hold of us they have
a physiological impact that drags us down physically as well as mentally, and
indeed spiritually. Savouring God’s moment means we act now, rather than wait
for the future to come.
What the
gospel invites us to is to begin to place our anxieties and cares into the
loving heart of God. Our fears, anxieties and worries then are not solely about
ourselves.
‘Give us
this day our daily bread’ is a petition that is encapsulated in Jesus being the
Bread of Life: it references the manna God gave to the Israelites in the
wilderness, when they had just sufficient for each day; it takes us to the
lavish Feeding of the Five Thousand in the Gospels, to the intensity of the Last
Supper and the glory of the Banquet of Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread
takes us into the mystery of the Eucharist.
It asks
that our material, bodily needs are met, so that we do not go hungry in body,
or in soul. That is echoed in our Harvest Thanksgiving too. And as Jesus says
in response to Satan, ‘we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that
comes from the mouth of God’.
‘Give us
this day our daily bread’ is a prayer that keeps us in the here and now, in the
present moment. Daily bread is about the present, not about yesterday’s stale
bread, or tomorrow’s not yet baked bread, but what we have to face here and
now.
So this
Harvest Thanksgiving let us give thanks for grace, for all good gifts around
us; let us savour what we have and be alert to its beauty; let us be
non-anxious as we anticipate more than just tomorrow, but the coming kingdom of
God, where ‘sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life
everlasting’.
