6

If we were not so familiar with the Lord’s Prayer, we would be shocked at the instruction to pray for daily bread. If this teaching had come from the lips of anyone other than Jesus himself, we would consider it an intrusion of materialism and even selfishness into the spiritual realm of prayer. Prayer is spiritual, right? Well, yes, and, no. For here, right in the middle of the greatest prayer, is a very down to earth, tangible request: “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Yet, when we think about it, we realize that such prayer is completely consistent with Jesus’ way. For he cared about even the most ordinary concerns of human life. He provided wine for those who were celebrating, food for those who were hungry, rest for those who were weary. (See John 2.1-12, 6.1-14, Mark 6.31) He went out of his way to find and be with the “little people”: the poor, the sick, the powerless, children, sinners.[1] So because he was concerned about the little things, Jesus invites us to pray for daily bread.

I talked last week about the importance of habit. That’s why we memorize the Lord’s Prayer and why we do the same things in church week after week and year after year. We need the habit. So when we know the Lord’s Prayer, we don’t have to worry about thinking up something to say to God. All we have to do is to say the words out of habit, by heart, and the words of this prayer will lead to other words.

This is critically important when we think about praying for our daily needs. Imagine what it would be like if Jesus had not taught us to pray for the little things or forbidden us to pray for them! What if the only things we were allowed to talk about with God were the weighty matters, the important things, the profound issues? We would be paralyzed in fear. We would be terribly alone and never able to pray. How could we come before the Creator of the universe with little, trivial requests if the Creator didn’t care about our little, trivial needs. We would fear getting squished by God like we step on a bug that is bugging us. But Jesus teaches us to pray for the little things, even a Starbucks coffee and sweet roll I often enjoy for breakfast.

Richard Foster writes, “We pray for daily bread by taking to God those trifles that make up the bulk of our days. Are we unable to find a babysitter to care for the children while we are at work? Well, then, we pray for daily babysitters. Do we need a little space to think things out? Then we pray for daily solitude and rest. Is it a warm sweater or gloves that we need because of the bitter cold? We ask for clothing, day by day. Are we struggling with a relationship at work or at home? We ask for patience and wisdom and compassion — daily, hourly. This is how we pray for daily bread.”[2] So let’s work with two thoughts this morning that will help us learn more in Jesus’ school of prayer.

First, prayer is basically request. This is what Jesus teaches. We pray basically to ask and request things from God. The Bible as a whole and the Lord’s Prayer in particular leave no doubt about this. But we are often uncomfortable with this, especially with the idea that we would be requesting things we want from God.

A couple once gave the speaker from a conference a ride back to the airport. As they rode along and visited, the conversation turned to difficulties the couple’s son was having in his business. The speaker inquired as to how they were praying about it and what their experience in prayer had been. They were astonished. Should they really pray for their son’s business, they asked? Certainly they would have quickly and easily prayed for his health or for his salvation. But business? And especially business in which they had a personal interest? That seemed to them entirely out of the question.[3] And maybe to us as well.

At my first church in Bellevue, Washington, a group of women met every week for prayer and Bible study and once a month they asked to be served communion. So one of the ministers would join them on those occasions. Since there were three ministers, my turn came every three months.

One of those dear souls would frequently talk about answers to prayer — at least it seems frequent in my memory — and how she often prayed for her daily needs. The need she talked about often was finding a parking place at the Bellevue post office. In very truth, that was an amazingly important need. At that time the post office’s parking lot was much too small for its size and finding a parking space was often nearly impossible. You would see people circling the block time and time again trying to find a place to park. So this woman prayed for her “daily bread” — a parking place at the post office — and was always delighted when “God answered her prayers.”

Now I was just out of seminary and I knew a lot more then. I know I never said it to her but I was positive that God had a lot more important things to do than worry about that lady’s parking at the post office. But I’ve thought about this a lot over the years. I don’t know as much now as I used to know. Maybe I’m a little wiser, even in the things of God. And I know this: too much prayer is too spiritual and if a parking space is our need of the day, then pray for a parking space. We need to get over our discomfort and our resistance to praying for ordinary, earthly, tangible, daily needs.

Oh, yes, there is some truth behind such discomfort. Prayer is never just asking, nor is it merely a matter of asking for what we want. God is not a cosmic butler or divine fix-it man, and the aim of the universe is not to fulfill our desires and needs.[4] But Jesus teaches us to pray for what concerns us and too often we have found prayer impossible because we thought we should only pray for wonderful, spiritual things.

Dallas Willard writes, “Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about ‘good things’ that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God’s love.”[5] Prayer is basically request. We pray for our daily needs and until we learn to do this, we cannot grow in prayer.

But praying for daily needs leads to a question. Does it do any good? What if God doesn’t answer our prayers? We talked some about this a few weeks ago when we talked about “Expectant Prayer.”[6] But the question persists even more strongly when we think about praying for daily needs. Does prayer for daily needs do any good?

Here’s how I answer that. For all the time that I was at my previous church, there was a retired minister who served with me named Ray Blackstone. Ray didn’t want to be paid but was a faithful colleague doing pastoral calling, assisting in worship, and so forth. Ray was diligent in his pastoral prayers to pray for world peace and an end to strife among nations, peoples, races, religions, and families. He prayed for an end to hunger and poverty and homelessness. He prayed for humans to live in the harmony that God intends for us. Sid McCollum often prays in similar fashion here.

Why were Ray’s prayers not answered? Obviously we still have wars and nations, peoples, races, religions, and families striving against and too often hurting and killing each other. We certainly have continuing hunger and poverty and homelessness. Much that is unharmonious plagues the human race. Are not our needs for food and shelter and clothing and harmony daily needs? Does praying for such things do any good?

If we try to answer this from a purely observational viewpoint, we will likely say “no.” But as we’ve already seen when talking about prayer, there is always more than meets the eye. Perhaps this can best be illustrated by the experience of Bishop Desmond Tutu and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I’ve been rereading Tutu’s book about this which he wrote about five years ago, a book called No Future Without Forgiveness.

When Nelson Mandela became president, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or TRC was charged by the South African government with the task of dealing with the decades long, hideous legacy of apartheid. In his book, Tutu writes, “The President must have believed that our work would be profoundly spiritual. After all, forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation were not the normal currency in political discourse. There it was more normal to demand satisfaction, to pay back in the same coin, to give as good as you got, for it was more common to have the ethos of “dog eat dog” in the jungle world of politics.… Forgiveness, confession, and reconciliation were far more at home in the religious sphere.”[7]

That is why when Tutu was appointed to the TRC, he asked the secretariat of the worldwide Anglican communion to alert the nuns and monks of the religious communities of his church to the desperate need for regular intercession during the life of the commission. Tutu says that everyone on the TRC, even the non-Christians and people of other faiths, knew that they were surrounded on a regular basis by the fervent prayers of Christians. Tutu believes that whatever the TRC may have achieved — and some call it a miracle — was due in large measure to the cloud of witnesses surrounding and upholding them.[8] To be sure, all is not yet well in South Africa but many of the gains that were made have persisted and could not have happened without prayer.

Long before that, Tutu preached Memorial Church at Harvard University. He came to Harvard on his way to Oslo to pick up his Nobel Prize in 1984. A special service at Memorial Church was packed to the rafters with nothing left but standing room only. Recall that the 1980s was still a time of particular anxiety in South Africa. Nelson Mandela was still in prison and even his release a fantasy hardly anyone could imagine. The guardians of apartheid were still firmly and brutally in control. So Memorial Church was filled with activists eager to do something about it, and to do it there and then. Their moral and political temperature had risen higher and higher. Whatever Tutu said, they would do.

Peter Gomes, the pastor of Memorial Church, wrote, “[Tutu] rose into the pulpit after minutes of cheering from the throng, and in his lilting, musical almost hypnotic voice, he said, ‘I’m going to tell you all what you most need to hear, the single most important thing you can do for South Africa.’ The sanctuary fell silent as [they] waited with bated breath, ready to follow him anywhere at any cost. ‘Pray,’ he said softly … ‘Pray. Pray for my people. Pray for us and with us, daily. Pray. That’s what you can do. That will change the world.’”[9]

So it will. The problem is not that God doesn’t answer. The problem is that we stop praying. We don’t follow pastor Ray’s example or Bishop Tutu’s example. We want to act. But we need to pray. Pray for daily needs. Pray for food and shelter and clothing and parking places too, if that’s our need. And pray not just for our own needs but for the daily needs of all God’s children. And don’t stop praying.

Too easily we give up on praying, my friends. We pray for awhile and find it hard or boring or too religious or too demanding. Then we need to hear again what Jesus teaches — pray even for the little things. If we are faithful in that, God will teach us the big things too.

When we pray like this, our lives are bent towards God like a sunflower turns to the sun and we live daily, constantly in the presence of our Father in the heavens. Praying for our daily bread is the most important thing we can do. For when we are faithful in that, God will teach us to be faithful in much more. So pray, pray, pray, and pray and do not stop praying. May our faithful God, grant us the courage to truly pray … for our daily bread. Amen

[1] Richard J. Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home (San Francisco: Harper, 1992) 185.

[2] Foster, 186.

[3] Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998) 242.

[4] Willard, 242.

[5] Willard, 242.

[6] September 19, 2004.

[7] Desmond Mpilo Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999) 80-81.

[8] Tutu, 81-82.

[9] Peter J. Gomes, Sundays at Harvard: Sermons for the Academic Year (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1995) 18.