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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
I don't think we should stop praying about our needs. What we'll find though is that God is interested in how collaborative we can be at getting those needs met. So today, we are at our midpoint in the Lenten series called How to Pray. It's page 82 in your journal. And the journal is where we map out the entire teaching year.
Speaker 1:Sinking our teeth into prayer through the season of Lent is perfect. So perfect, you have to kinda wonder, who plans these things? We do. We plan all of these things. And honestly, it's one of my favorite parts of the year as a pastoral team.
Speaker 1:Every spring, we dream about what the next commons teaching year will look like. There is a method to this madness. It involves looking at the Hebrew scriptures, the teachings of Jesus, a New Testament letter or two. It means considering the seasons of Lent and Advent. It gets creative when we wonder about relational health and spiritual practices.
Speaker 1:All that to say, If there's anything that you want to hear us speak to next year, I would invite you to send in a pitch. I can't promise anything. After all, we do our best to think for the whole church not just one or two pet projects that includes yours and ours, but I think it could be really fun to hear from you about what you'd like to hear from us. So you can send an email to Jeremy Scott or myself or all three of us, or just stop and chat with us about it. Okay.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about Lent. A major focus of Lent has always been our inner life. We use these forty days to prepare for Easter. But what does that mean? Prepare for Easter.
Speaker 1:The series, how to pray, is your hint you pray. And if you fast, it's a prayer. And if you repent, it's prayer, obviously. And if you get serious about being more generous, that's prayer too. And it's through prayer that you make your soul more hospitable to the work of new life.
Speaker 1:That's Easter. So that brings us to how to pray, and thankfully, Jesus teaches us. Now I'm curious and I'm gonna ask you to raise your hands, so prepare yourself introverts. Did you grow up reciting the Lord's prayer? If yes, raise your hands.
Speaker 1:So interesting. Okay. I I just wanted to see that. I was really curious about it. Until I was about 15 years old, I don't remember praying or even hearing prayers that weren't either the Lord's prayer or hail Mary or now I lay me down to sleep.
Speaker 1:That's a freaky little prayer by the way. So when Jeremy opened up the series saying that the Lord's prayer from Matthew six isn't just a prayer we repeat but a prayer to reshape our imagination. I loved that but I also got thinking, I don't know if a reshaped imagination happens overnight. Maybe the Lord's prayer will be all you have for say fifteen years before you start to see the world through its lens. So last week, we got through the start of the prayer.
Speaker 1:Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And I can't tell you how much I appreciated Jeremy's careful work with this idea of God as father. Boiled down, God's not really your mom or your dad, but there's something in the metaphor of Abba that speaks of a trust so constant, a love so unbreakable, this nudging presence that makes our father feel like a pretty good starting place.
Speaker 1:And I'd just add, as I mentioned at the 7PM service during our question and response time last week, starting a prayer with parental language has, at times, dampened my imagination and sent me on a search for something more. Now hear me. I am a big fan of prayers repeated just as they are. We should teach them to our children, and I know personally that they can ground you through really disorienting times. But don't be afraid of maybe a tiny intuition that something is off when language of faith doesn't seem to include you.
Speaker 1:It could be a metaphor that doesn't fit the basic fact that you feel like you just don't know the stories of the bible as well as you should or a prayer that hasn't quite clicked in with meaning for you. I would just say bring yourself to all of that. Search for language that liberates and know that this tradition, it is yours too. So before we get to the first of four human centered petitions in the Lord's prayer today, I'm going to offer the Lord's prayer from the first nations version of the new testament and I hope you find something for yourself in it. So let us pray.
Speaker 1:Oh, great spirit, our father from above, we honor your name as sacred and holy. Bring your good road to us, where the beauty of your ways in the spirit world above is reflected in the earth below. Provide for us day by day, The elk, the buffalo, and the salmon, the corn, the squash, and the wild rice. All the things we need for each day. Release us from the things we have done wrong in the same way we release others for the things done wrong to us.
Speaker 1:Guide us away from the things that tempt us to stray from your good road and set us free from the evil one and his worthless ways. A hoe, may it be so. Amen. It's good. Right?
Speaker 1:So one of the things I felt compelled to do during this series is take an inventory of all the ways that I have prayed. And I define prayer here as unmistakable prayer. So it wasn't looking at all of the creative forms of prayer, which I am down with, like looking out a window as prayer or reading fiction as prayer. Don't knock it until you try it. All that stuff is amazing.
Speaker 1:But for this inventory, I mean like prayer prayer. Like explicit, recognizable forms of prayer. And the list keeps growing, but as of today, here's what I can trace. As a kid, all I really knew were repeated fixed prayers in mass. The Lord's Prayer and Hail Mary.
Speaker 1:I remember trying to learn the rosary in catechism, totally failing at it, and hearing my great grandmother pray the rosary in German before she died. And in high school, I got into prayer walks down long Saskatchewan farm roads. And I was looking for direction in my life and noticing God in the beauty of being outside even in Saskatchewan. And in college, I started journaling my prayers. I filled books of these things.
Speaker 1:I've got a trunk full of all of those journals, so bless. And in my twenties and thirties, I dove into prayer books and contemplative practices. I did all of them, Centering Prayer, Lectio Divina, Taze, Breath Prayer, Labyrinth. Oh, I love a prayer labyrinth. In my forties, I've been matching prayer with meditation and silence.
Speaker 1:I surprised myself through COVID by writing prayers for this community and turning them into a book, and I still love prayer books. I literally have two copies of the same one, Celtic Daily Prayer, one for the office and one at home. Now that's a lot of prayer, isn't it? You kinda think I do this for a living. But seriously, why have I prayed in all of these forms?
Speaker 1:What have I been looking for? I think it's safe to say that I have always been trying to meet a need. And as my needs change over time, so do the shape of my prayers. Today, we focus on just one line in the Lord's prayer, the one about bread. And we'll talk about what to do, about what you need, we'll talk about us and our daily bread and polyvagal meets prayer.
Speaker 1:So here it is, Matthew six verse 11. It's so short, I'm gonna read it twice. Give us today our daily bread. Give us today our daily bread. This is the part of the prayer that kicks off a set of four succinct petitions about our human needs.
Speaker 1:And to really just stretch it out today, we're gonna take it word by word. So the first word, give. It is the main verb and it is a command. The part of speech is imperative. And my basics of biblical Greek textbook says this about imperatives.
Speaker 1:There is no more forceful way in the Greek language to tell someone to do something. So you get that. Right? When it comes to our needs, Jesus seems to say, go ahead. Boss God around.
Speaker 1:And maybe I'm over stating it a bit. This is after all a very common Greek imperative. It means to give, permit, yield. But what I love about it is just how clear it is, bold even. Bring your needs to God because you believe God will act.
Speaker 1:Now you likely have a relationship with prayer like this already. Maybe it even sounds like what we call a laundry list of all the things you want God to do for you. Like, God, just make it better. God, just open a door here. God, just bring me the love that I want.
Speaker 1:And the problem with the laundry list is that honestly, it gets a bit boring. I don't know about you, but I get tired of prayer as a chore. Give me, give me, give me what I need. I've prayed prayers like this for decades. And when I look down, oh, look, the same old laundry pile is still there.
Speaker 1:If you ever felt this, praying about needs that seem to go unmet, you are not alone. Even so, I don't think we should stop praying about our needs. Maybe it's just enough to name those needs in the presence of a friend, a lover, and of course, the living God and to trust in the power of just being heard. What we'll find though is that God is interested in how collaborative we can be at getting those needs met. So the scholar Anna Case Winters says Matthew six eleven has a double frame of reference, meaning there are two interpretive levels going on here.
Speaker 1:On the one hand, it's clear that the prayer looks to God and petitions God to respond. But there is an equal and important balance, the assumption that humans play a part. After all, who plants the seed? Who harvests the grain? Who kneads the dough?
Speaker 1:Who mans the food stall? Who sets the price of bread? Us. We do. And I wonder, as many times as you have prayed the Lord's prayer, how often have you thought about how political this prayer for bread might be?
Speaker 1:Jesus always had an eye on the economic situation of his audience. It was primarily poor. In particular, his audience carried a great deal of debt due to heavy taxation of an unjust Roman system extracting more and more from the poor. They paid imperial taxes and local taxes resulting in lost land, forced labor, and revolts. These were brutal times.
Speaker 1:So when deep Jesus teaches the crowd to pray, give us bread, This isn't a prayer that bypasses their very real need for bread. But here's the thing, bread is never just about you. Jesus was all about a new society made possible because we show up and we share with our neighbor. Now, in the history of interpretation, one of my favorite thinkers is Gregory of Nyssa, a doctor of theology in the Eastern Church writing from the March. And Gregory was like, look, Jesus wasn't talking about spiritual bread or some kind of mystery bread that you save in your pocket for eternity.
Speaker 1:And in a paper titled Eating for Eternity, the Social Dimensions of Gregory of Nyssa's interpretation of the petition for daily bread quite a lot, love academics, the authors say it like this. For Gregory, eating bread is a deeply spiritual activity with profound importance not only for one's soul but also for the well-being of one's neighbors. Gregory wrote about the importance of guarding. It's active. Guarding against our greed.
Speaker 1:If we begin to desire so much more than what nature requires of our body, if we get hooked on luxurious goods and require more and more resources, there will be profound social implications. Preach it, Nyssa. It's like the guy knew about our world too. What Gregory cared about was that the bread we need to survive comes from just and loving practices both in creation and community. He put it like this.
Speaker 1:If you should wish to enjoy pleasant sensations in the goet, that is the mouth to the stomach, let hunger and not heaping satiety upon satiety nor ruining your appetite through overindulgence be your delicacy. In other words, enough bread tastes so much better better than way too much. With our habits of consumption, that is a truth for our time and it is one that could actually reshape the world. So let's talk more about daily bread. The next word in the verse.
Speaker 1:Because here's where things get even more interesting. The bread is described with this unique adjective, epiusios. And this is where we get daily as in our daily bread. And what's so interesting about this word, epiusios, is that it doesn't occur anywhere else in Greek literature except for the Lord's prayer in Matthew six and Luke 11, which makes defining it tricky. Guesses include bread that is necessary for today as in daily or some footnotes like that n r s v u e say necessary for tomorrow.
Speaker 1:And Amy Jelevingne retro translates the term back to Jesus's Aramaic where she says, you can get something more like bread for tomorrow or bread for the future. So why do we say daily if it could mean so much more? Well, here's where we zoom out a bit. See, you can't run into bread as a Jewish reader and not think about Exodus. And in Exodus 16, Israelites have fled slavery and are in the desert and they are grumpy and they are hungry.
Speaker 1:And they say, if only we would have died in Egypt. At least there, we'd die beside pots of meat and piles of bread. And Yahweh hears this and says, oh babes, I got you. I'll do something about this. I will rain down bread from heaven.
Speaker 1:There will be enough for each day. But that's not quite enough for them. The Israelites push their luck and take more than they need. And the result is that the daily manna rots to high heaven. So for six days, they take only enough for each day.
Speaker 1:But then time slows down as God reminds them of a sacred rhythm. You work for bread for six days and then you rest on the seventh. Moses said to them, this is what the Lord commanded. Tomorrow is to be a day of Sabbath rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. So bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil.
Speaker 1:Save whatever is left and keep it until morning. So they saved it until morning as Moses commanded and it did not stink or get maggots in it. Eat it today, Moses said, because today is a Sabbath to the Lord. You will not find any of it on the ground today. This Exodus story, it lived in Jesus' body.
Speaker 1:So when he teaches his audience to pray for bread, he points to a world where provision is a given. Our daily bread is about enough food every day for everyone and it's about what Jesus had in mind when he pointed out how he embodied the Sabbath itself, not one day a week, but every day. One of the first things Jesus does in the gospel of Mark is redefine Sabbath. Remember how he walked through the grain fields with his disciples and they plucked off heads of grain for a snack? Only the pharisees said, you can't do that.
Speaker 1:It's unlawful on the Sabbath. And Jesus said, that's funny. The Sabbath was actually made for humankind not the other way around. And later he'll say, come to me when you're weary and I will give you rest. Talk about holy Sabbath in human form.
Speaker 1:For Jesus, grain and bread and sourdough starters are all reminders of the dream of Sabbath. That rest, restoration, and provision for tomorrow can be lived realities today. So our daily bread is about today, but it is also about a new kind of tomorrow. But I hear you. You're still wondering how to pray about all the needs that we have right now.
Speaker 1:The need for peace in times of war, the need for healing when bodies and relationships are broken, the need for safety and security and holy checks on power, the need for daily bread. You still wonder what to do if you lose your paycheck or your kid has a need that's a challenge to meet or you simply wanna feel the closeness of God again and trust that it's for you. Well, the last word in Matthew six eleven is this emphasizing word today. And if you were to diagram in the Greek this verse, the modifier of time would just sit at the bottom of a nerdy little chart there to remind you that time matters. What good is last month's bread or the loaf that you bake next year when your need exists today?
Speaker 1:The truth is that none of us can meet any of our needs alone. Go back to all of the ways that I have prayed in my life. You think I made any of those up? I made none of them up. They came to me from our faith ancestors, this rich tradition.
Speaker 1:Without them, I'd be completely spiritually lost. We survive in body and mind and soul because we learn to trust each other. And how we actually learn to trust each other is an evolutionary marvel. Holding today my last point about prayer. Come on a little voyage with me.
Speaker 1:Hundreds of millions of years ago, we all started with one system of survival. Scientists call it a reptile brain. This brain was not social or cooperative. When it was in danger, it would just freeze. When threatened, this creature played dead because that usually worked.
Speaker 1:Predators don't eat dead things. We didn't stay there. We developed a second system commonly known as fight or flight. And this system prepares a creature for action through increased heart and respiratory rates and blood flowing to your muscles to get you to move. This was a huge step forward for social species like us, helping us to survive.
Speaker 1:But we didn't stay there either. We developed a third system to survive beyond fight, flight, or freeze, and this system reaches throughout our whole body to calm us and bring our heart rate back down. It affects our facial expressions and the sound of our voice. And this system makes it possible for us to trust and to feel safe. Our bodies use all three systems in reverse order.
Speaker 1:We begin with system three, and if trust is broken or a problem is not solved, we head for system two. And if we can't fight or flee, we drop down to system one. Have you ever had such bad news that you fainted? Or you know someone who did? They fell all the way through to that reptile brain.
Speaker 1:But that's not even my point. It's kind of cool as it is. My point is that this model of survival known as polyvagal theory, that is the vagus nerve that exits the brain stem and wanders through your entire body, taking information from your brain to your organs and back to your brain is always already meeting your needs. And you hardly notice it. You are designed and you have evolved to get your needs met.
Speaker 1:I wonder if we could just go a little easier on ourselves about praying to get our needs met. Because remember, you cannot meet your needs alone. The farmer grows your food. The therapist points out your family system. The friend makes the joke that only you get.
Speaker 1:The stranger gives you a smile that makes you feel seen. The doctor prescribes the meds that haul you out of your depression, the pastor reminds you how much your prayers are alive and being answered in your own body. These are the ways that our prayers get answered. Someone you meet today is already baking your bread for tomorrow. Now, all you have to do is look around you and meet the needs of another.
Speaker 1:Just start at home and go from there. Maybe that's the prayer that God has been waiting millions of years to answer. Let us pray. Our good creator, ground of being to sky above, sacred is your presence. We ask for your collaboration to come, your love to be done on earth as it is in divine friendship.
Speaker 1:As we open our hands, place in them our daily sustenance. As we open our hearts, make light the heaviness we carry. May we see the best in each other even when we are hurt. And may we not fall into traps we lay for ourselves and others. Set us free as we are being set free.
Speaker 1:For everything now and always is yours, the strength and the beauty world without end. Amen.
Speaker 2:Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Speaker 2:Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.