By Amy Butler
This week the Lord’s Prayer and the national budget crisis crossed paths in my mind.
I thought more this week about the Lord’s Prayer than I have in a long, long time. That’s kind of a strange thing to say, because we say the Lord’s Prayer every single week in worship. But you know how it is. Sometimes you get in the routine of repeating words without really thinking about what they mean.
I got to thinking about the Lord’s Prayer because our summer joint adult Sunday school class is carefully working its way through the prayer, line by line. Since everyone around here is traveling at the end of the summer, each week a different teacher facilitates the discussion. Last week was my turn.
My assigned phrase was “Give us this day our daily bread,” and the more I thought about it the more I remembered again what a radical Jesus was. Everything he said and did was meant to illustrate a different reality that he represented. He liked to call this reality the Kingdom of God.
It was a different paradigm, a break from things as we have always known them, an opportunity to see our lives and our world in completely different ways. Jesus taught that God was always at work ushering in this new reality, even in the face of fierce opposition.
Jesus spoke the words about bread in an economic situation that was rather dire. The disciples and the people who followed him around the countryside were quite familiar with the quest for enough to eat. Roman rule exerted quite a bit of pressure on the whole society, with crippling taxation and no safety nets to speak of. Of course the people would be praying for daily bread. They were hungry!
But in his book The Greatest Prayer, John Dominic Crossan suggests that the phrase is not really a desperate, one-time prayer in response to one’s stomach rumbling. Rather, it’s a prayer about justice and wholeness, about suffering relieved in a world where everybody has enough to eat today — and tomorrow, and the next day.
It’s a prayer to upend systems that oppress the poor and distribute resources so that some have so much food they are throwing it away at the end of the day while some watch their children slowly die of starvation because there’s no food to be had anywhere.
So, I thought it quite timely that we sat on Sunday discussing this ancient text just 10 blocks from the U.S. Capitol building, where arguments about debt and budget have dominated the lives of our legislators and their staffs for months now, reaching yet another level of crisis just this last week.
The truth is that we have a big problem of inequity in our country — and in our world. I wonder what would happen if Jesus’ prayer about enough bread for everyone — every day, as a regular matter of course — would ever come to be. One might even feel discouraged that this radical message is still radical 2,000 years since Jesus first prayed it.
I wonder what it would take for us modern-day followers of Jesus to fully understand and embody the radical message of Jesus. What would we do? What could we change? What would happen to us?
The Lord’s Prayer and the budget crisis converged this week, and these are the questions I kept asking myself. I wonder if I – or any of us who make the audacious claim to be followers of Jesus — would ever have the courage to truthfully answer them.