Poolesville Presbyterian Church
02.15.15; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: James 2: 1-13
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
Daily bread. Just what is that? What is it that we need, each and every day? Is it our way of giving thanks for all the stuff we have?
Our sense of our own need for stuff is pretty solid, pretty intensely well developed. How do we know what we need? Well, we need the stuff that the world tells us we need. When I was a kid, I knew my family needed a television. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to watch Batman reruns and Star Trek reruns and the Rockford Files and football, in 19 inch black-and-white glory. That was what we needed, as we watched from across the room.
“Which one of those little bunches of specks is our team, Dad?” “The ones with the red jerseys, son.” “That’s not helping, Dad.”
For a while, until there was color, and we could see the uniforms. And then, of course, 19 inches became 25 inches, with one-a-them newfangled remote controls. Which became 32 inches, with surround sound. Which became 54 inches, rear-projection, and high definition digital, purchased for a Superbowl party nearly a decade back. That television started to die a few months ago, as the wildly complex little array of mirrors at its heart began to come apart. And the Superbowl was coming up, and we couldn’t risk having something that didn’t work, so after some research and waiting for an appropropriate sale, the replacement was gathered.
Two fingers thin, 60 inches and so high def that you can see every pore and every drop of sweat on the faces of the players. It’s necessary, or so we think. We can’t have less an a sixty inch screen! It’d look so small! It’s essential, or so we tell ourselves. It gets used every day in our house, or just about every day. As I also use a coffeemaker, my smartphone, a netbook, and at least one of the three internal combustion powered vehicles that allow me to scurry all over the DC metro area.
Do these count?
What is really essential in life bears no resemblance to the carefully manipulated desires that consumer culture implants in us. I think about my time, my desires, the things that fill my day. How many of them represent what could meaningfully be described as my “daily bread?”
Here, we come to a transition in the great prayer that Jesus taught, as it goes from directly invoking our relationship with God to speaking to our own lives. And this request is straightforward, as straightforward as it comes. Give me what I need to live. Give me my daily bread.
Digging a little deeper into what Jesus means by “daily bread” reveals something of a conundrum. The word “daily,” or rather the Greek term from which Bible translators get that word, is epiousios. There’s a problem with that word. It has nothing at all to do with the idea of “daily,” or something that happens during every 24 hour period.
In fact, the biggest problem with epiousios is that it occurs only two places in all of the Greek language. It’s in Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus says it as part of this prayer. And it’s in Luke’s Gospel, in the same prayer. That’s it. Up until it was written into the Gospels, there’s no trace in any Greek literature or letters or anywhere of anyone else ever using that word. So what to make of it? Scholars, well, they’ve had to guess.
It’s an educated guess, them bein’ scholars and all, one that rises from the prefix and the root of the word. Epiousios we can break out into “epi” and “ousios.” Epi, meaning necessary, apt, or appropriate. Ousios, meaning “substance,” or “the nature of a thing,” or just its “stuffness.”
“Give us this day our necessary-stuffly bread” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, but that’s what that prayer appears to most directly mean.
What is necessary stuff? What do we really and truly need? I need a warm place on this savagely bitter day, true. But I do not need, not really, the computer on which I wrote this sermon. I do not need the television, or the PS3, or that Alienware Alpha Steambox my son keeps trying to convince me to buy. None of them are necessary-stuffly things. In fact, almost all of what is around me and fills my life is really not “necessary.” And yet those yearnings continue, endless hungers.
We have trouble seeing our actual needs. And from that difficulty seeing what we need, we have difficulty being who we need to be.
The Book of James has something to say about our daily bread, and about what matters if that prayer is to mean anything. This “letter” is more an essay or sequence of essays that establish the most essential nature of the Christian ethical life. It has been traditionally attributed to James, the brother of Jesus, and as it is perhaps the most theologically Jewish of the books of the New Testament and written in a Greek that seems shaped and formed by Hebrew and Aramaic, a majority of contemporary Biblical scholarship sees no reason to challenge that.
James is one of the most practical, rubber-meets-the-road books in the New Testament. By genre, it’s a book of Wisdom, the only one in the New Testament. What that means is simple. Wisdom concerns itself with how we human beings should act if we’re to get along in the world.
Wisdom teachings are found elsewhere in the Bible, in Proverbs, and in Ecclesiastes, and in Job, as well as in a number of the Psalms. Those books teach the basics of how to live, and particularly how to live so that you are playing well with others and doing well for yourself. They teach thrift, foresight, and patience. They teach that life is to be enjoyed, but that sustained enjoyment is best found in moderation. They teach that the wise do not speak without first considering the impact of their words. They also teach about what does and does not matter.
What doesn’t matter, as far as this little section of James is concerned, is wealth and power. We see shine and sparkle, and immediately assume that it confers some superiority to an individual. They have nice things, they dress well, they are surrounded by the trappings of material prosperity, and that must mean something, right?
And here we human beings, living in this culture and this age, encounter a challenge. We prefer the rich, so much so that this becomes our goal for ourselves. The trappings of wealth become our own desire, our own yearning. We have been trained to want the larger and the brighter and the better, and it is this desire...this hunger...that lines us up, our minds filled with fantasy, whenever the Powerball gets to the half-a-billion mark.
That yearning is directly challenged by the words Jesus offers up in that little prayer. Want only what is truly necessary for your life, Jesus says. But how do we even know what that is? How can we tell, we who live in a society that feels like it is so disconnected from the real that “necessary” seems like a dream?
There’s a word I’ve known for years, one that’s been surfacing a whole bunch in my reading over the last several years. It’s a German word, one that’s used in the archaic German spoken by the Old Order Amish in Lancaster County. Yeah, I know we call them the “Pennsylvania Dutch,” but “Dutch” is just a mis-speaking of “Deitsch.” In the peculiar version of German they still speak, one of the core values of the Amish folk is called Gelassenheit, which roughly translates into calm, content humility.
It is that spirit that moves those folks to set the seemingly strange rules that govern their community. If a thing makes you proud, or makes you stand out from your brothers and sisters? You don’t want it, because it will tear at the heart of community. No jewelry, no ornamentation, no LTE Wifi hotspot in your buggy, none of it.
A phone? Not necessary in your house, although there’s a single land-line shared by neighbors Electricity? Nope, not in the home, although you can have a diesel generator to power your carpentry tools or a washing machine. Tractors? Not in the fields, but you can park one in the barn and use it to bale hay. So long as they have steel wheels, so you’re not tempted to drive it on the road. At every point, gelassenheit is the measure of whether one should have a thing or not.
It’s a strange thing, and the Amish are a peculiar and alien culture, but they seem to get that idea a little better than we do.
And so as we pray this prayer, whenever we pray this prayer, it reminds us...challenges us...to remember what our Creator offers up, and what is truly necessary.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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