Sermon of the Week
The Lord’s Prayer:
Bring Us What We Need.
A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on October 14, 2018.
The third in a multi-part Sermon Series on The Lord’s Prayer
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Matthew 6:25-34
and Exodus 16:13-18 (also in the body of the sermon text below).
We’ve come now to the heart of the Lord’s Prayer,
not because the focus of this week’s sermon is the most important.
It’s just as important as all the others.
But it’s more because we’re now half way through our sermon series
and we’re noticing a subtle but important shift.
After our first week,
where we examined the one to whom we pray:
our Father, in Heaven, the hallowed one
and then after looking at what we really mean
when we ask for God’s Kingdom
to come to earth as it is in heaven,
for God’s design for all of this to be done, fulfilled,
made real and true and real,
after that,
we notice a change this week.
These next two sermons are different,
because they turn our attention towards us,
toward our needs, and our concerns,
the things in our lives that have to happen
in order for us to survive,
and, more than that, to thrive,
to be the sort of people that God intends us to be.
We’ll do that through reflecting this morning
on an ancient story from the Book of Exodus.
We looked at Exodus a few weeks ago as well,
you may remember
as we considered the importance of Moses standing on holy ground
before the burning bush in wilderness beyond Midian.
There God called Moses, and told him
to go back to Egypt and to set the Hebrew people free.
And Moses was reluctant and afraid and not sure that he was the best choice.
But he went, and with God’s help, he led his people
out of centuries of bondage and oppression.
Through plagues and subterfuge and high-stakes chess,
Moses and the Hebrews leave Egypt
pass through the parted waters of the Red Sea
and enter the wilderness,
leaving their enslaved past behind.
One of the lessons of this story in Exodus
is how sometimes people grow comfortable in captivity
and find that freedom and liberty hard work.
And it’s true: freedom is hard.
When you have to get your own food and take care of your own business
that’s hard work.
They’re in the wilderness longer than they thought they would be.
and some of them looked back and wondered
hey, maybe slavery wasn’t so bad.
Out here we’re barely making it:
not much water to drink,
no food anywhere to be found.
Did God pull us out of Egypt just to lead us out here to die?
So this section of Exodus is all about the people
struggling to live into their freedom
and their complaints about all that to God,
which they aren’t shy in delivering to Moses,
and which Moses has to deal with.
But Moses deals with it.
He tells the people to trust the one who delivered them with a mighty hand.
They had literally walked through the red sea, for goodness sake
the waters parted on each side.
God would help them now
And God did.
God found them water.
God focused them on the task ahead,
and today, as we’ll soon find out,
God also gave them bread.
I invite you to open your heart and your minds
To this reading of God’s word (Exodus 16:13-18):
13 In the evening quails came up
and covered the camp;
and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp.
14When the layer of dew lifted,
there on the surface of the wilderness
was a fine flaky substance,
as fine as frost on the ground.
15When the Israelites saw it,
they said to one another, ‘What is it?’
For they did not know what it was.
Moses said to them,
‘It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.
16This is what the Lord has commanded:
“Gather as much of it as each of you needs,
an omer to a person
according to the number of persons,
all providing for those in their own tents.” ’
17The Israelites did so,
some gathering more,
some less.
18But when they measured it with an omer,
those who gathered much had nothing over,
and those who gathered little had no shortage;
they gathered as much as each of them needed.
And may God bless to us our reading,
And our understanding,
And our applying of this Word, to how we live our lives.
///
By now most of us are familiar
with a common complaint
that is lodged against our fundamentalist cousins in the faith:
their rejection of science as largely irrelevant
for the life of faith, and thus for the pursuit of Truth.
That’s pretty unfortunate,
for a number of reasons,
not just because it has led to all sorts of social problems
like our slow reaction to the changing climate, for instance,
but also because science can open up
a wealth of understanding for us
as we try to grasp our religious past.
John Dominic Crossan gives us a really good example of this
when he opens his chapter on this clause of our prayer
give us this day our daily bread
with an exploration of an amazing archaeological find.[i]
The world didn’t give much attention to this story, I think
because it was right around the time
that the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida
but that same week
on January 24th, 1986,
Moshele and Luvi Lufan, two brothers who lived in Israel
discovered what we now call the Kinneret Boat, or the Sea of Galilee Boat.
Some people, seeking to make an extra dime, call it the Jesus Boat.[ii]
Lake Kinneret is a harp shaped body of water
known to Mark as the Sea of Galilee (Mark 1:16; 7:31)
to John as the Sea of Tiberias (John 6:1)
and to Luke as simply the Lake of Gennesaret (Luke 5:1).
Back in 1985 there was a drought in the region,
and the water levels were so low in that lake
that wide swaths of the lake bottom were visible off Magdala,
on the western shore.
Moshele and Luvi looked out on that expanse
and saw it: the oval outline of a sunken boat. [Read more…]
