Give us today our daily bread.

What is this?  or  What does this mean?

In fact, God gives daily bread without our prayer, even to all evil people, but we ask in this prayer that God cause us to recognize what our daily bread is and to receive it with thanksgiving.

What then does “daily bread” mean?

Everything included in the necessities and nourishment for our bodies, such as food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, farm, fields, livestock, money, property, an upright spouse, upright children, upright members of the household, upright and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, decency, honor, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.

-Martin Luther’s Small Catechism

 

Over the past month, we’ve been hearing all about “Our Daily Bread” at RLC. We’ve heard that God provides– beginning with providing a relationship, then providing food to eat, then providing call and purpose to our lives. One Sunday remains, with the focus that God provides clean hearts.

Let us focus for a moment on the phrase “cause us to recognize what our daily bread is and receive it with thanksgiving” from Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, his attempt to summarize the basics of Christian faith. As he explained the Lord’s Prayer, Martin Luther recognized that God is generous and loving enough to provide enough for all people (however unfairly we might divide and hoard it), so the point of the prayer isn’t to entice God to give out more food, drink, clothing, shoes, or anything else like that. The point of praying like this is to remind ourselves daily that God does, indeed, provide for our needs. In fact, our brother Martin suggested that we should pray the Lord’s Prayer every morning when we awake and every night when we lie down to sleep. 

We need frequent reminders that all we have is not our own, but an abundance of gifts from our God who loves us. Praying “give us today our daily bread” at bedtime might cause you to reflect on the meals you ate in the day, the people who worked to prepare them, the workers who stocked the shelves where your groceries were bought, the farmers who tended the crops, the workers who harvested the fruit, the truckers who delivered the freight, the rain and sun and soil that nourished the growth, and ultimately the God who provided each of those into this world.

Now imagine the same thankfulness for the clothing you are wearing today: the cotton grown and processed, the wool sheared and carded, the leather tanned and treated, the designers and factory workers who turned fabric into fashion, the cargo plane or ship that brought your clothes to their spot on the rack or the delivery person who dropped the package right at your door. How dependent we are on one another! How we all depend on God who so generously provides!

We learn, by praying, to recognize that we should truly thank God for all we have and all that was done so that we might enjoy it. We see how generous God is toward us. Once we do recognize that all our possessions are simply God’s gifts to us, we may learn to be better stewards, or caretakers, rather than seeing ourselves as owners or earners of our stuff. Everything is from God, and we are called to use it wisely so that everyone has a reason to thank God for daily bread.