Manna and Mercy--July 29, 2025

Manna and Mercy--July 29, 2025

[Jesus taught his disciples to pray:]

"Give us each day our daily bread.
 And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us." (Luke 11:3-4)

This is what it looks like when God's kingdom comes: daily bread and reverberating forgiveness.  This is what it looks like where God reigns; there is manna and mercy all around.  And this, dear ones, is what Jesus thinks is worth having his disciples pray for.

As someone who memorized these words which make up what we call "The Lord's Prayer" (which many of us not only heard in worship on Sunday, but prayed corporately as well) at an early age, I have to confess it is very easy for me to hear each phrase in isolation, as though they are a random string of unrelated items on a grocery list.  It has taken me a good few decades to realize that together, Jesus offers us a holistic vision of how God reorients our hearts, minds, and actions as we pray.  That is to say, Jesus doesn't merely intend for us to pray abstractly for "God's kingdom" to come without any other fleshing out of what that means, before moving on to an unrelated reminder to God to keep feeding us (as if we were fish in a fish bowl and God were a forgetful child).  No, I am convinced that Jesus has given us a short description of what it looks like where God's kingdom does in fact come among us.  This is what to look for, what to picture, and what to hope for, as we ask for God to reign more and more fully "on earth as it is in heaven" (as Matthew's version of this prayer adds). 

And in particular Jesus singles out two forms in which grace sustains us all beyond our earning, for the sake of the common good.  In the Reign of God, everybody gets to eat.  In the kingdom that comes near, we both give and receive forgiveness as easily and naturally as breathing in and out.  In the Beloved Community, we free each other from debts knowing God has cancelled ours, and we feed each other knowing that God has provided enough for all.  And all of this flows out of the earlier petition, "Your Kingdom come," because this is precisely the sort of thing that happens when our priorities align with God's, and when our wills are redirected by the will of God.

Now, if I am anywhere close to in the right ballpark here that daily bread and abundant forgiveness (of sins and debts alike, apparently) are part of what it means for God's "kingdom" to come and God's "will" to be done, then it is worth considering what that tells us about God's own priorities.  Jesus seems to suggest that you can tell you have ventured into God's realm when nobody goes hungry, and nobody holds grudges.  You can tell God's will is being done when no mother has to bury a child who has starved in her arms, and when no one aims weapons into a village with the justification, "But THEY started it!" You can tell that our hearts are coming into alignment with God's, according to Jesus, when we care more about making sure everybody gets to eat today and less about the third-quarter profit report. 

The plural is telling, too: Jesus doesn't teach me to ask, "Give ME MY daily bread," as if I should only look out for my own interests and get my own order placed.  Similarly, Jesus doesn't invite us to pray, "Forgive ME for MY sins, which are entirely separable from whatever you choose to do or not to about my neighbor's sins." Instead, Jesus binds our forgiveness all together--we are asking for God to forgive the whole mess of us, and for God to make us into people who forgive those indebted to us as well.  We pray in the plural for manna and mercy, for daily bread and daily grace, because that is how God treats all of us in this beloved community.  That is the order of the day in the Reign of God and the Economy of Mercy.

Now, conversely, it is worthy of note that Jesus envisions none of the typical "stuff" we associate with kings and kingdoms coming.  Remember that Jesus lives in a time when people had heard the announcements of "coming kingdoms" before--it was the warning of the invading Roman Empire, which brought the claim of Caesar's rule along with occupying troops marching in formation, Roman taxation and torture, and the claim that the Empire could round up anybody it saw as a threat on trumped-up charges and make them disappear--or appear on a cross--without any means of stopping them.  In Jesus' day, people heard imperial heralds announce the coming of the latest Caesar's latest executive order, and it was always backed up with the threat of force and the point of a sword.  Jesus, however, doesn't picture any of that. He doesn't envision that God's kingdom means my "party" comes to power, or my preferred nominee for king, Caesar, or emperor gets to be on the throne.  He doesn't picture a wave of armed zealots "taking back their country for God" or killing their occupiers in revenge.  God's Reign does not advance by killing enemies or spilling blood, and God's kingdom never requires starving those you see as your adversaries.  Instead, we are brought back to daily bread (a day at a time, mind you) and a letting go of grudges all around.

If that wasn't what I intended to pray for when I woke up this morning, Jesus has it in mind to change us.  The rest of the world may continue to pray in self-absorbed or vengeful ways--and God is free to hear those prayers and say "No" to them, because of course, God is nobody's genie.  But for us who claim to be Jesus' disciples, we should be prepared for Jesus' way of praying to change our wants to align with these: for all to be fed, and for all to be freed with forgiveness.  And as God answers that prayer--both by feeding us and by teaching us to want all to be fed--we might indeed discover that the world comes to look more and more like it is the kingdom coming.  We might even dare to say that God's will is being done then, "on earth as it is in heaven."

What might happen to our hearts if we took seriously what we have been asking all along as we have been praying for daily bread and abundant forgiveness?

Let's see what Jesus does with us to as we ask it.

O God, give us today our daily bread, and forgive us such that we forgive everyone in our debt as well.