11/7/54

Scripture: Deuteronomy 8: 1-3; Matthew 4: 1-4.

So much of our mortal life is taken up with daily bread -- earning it, using it, planning for the next meal of it! This is much more necessarily true in other parts of the earth than is our own land where there is comparative abundance. But the need for bread, and the necessity for procuring it press so insistently upon people that we forget that life is far more than bread. Life is ideals and purposes. It is essential to recognize that the two go together. They may never be treated as separate compartments.

Abraham Rihbany, writing nearly 40 years ago, had some illuminating comment on “Our Daily Bread.” Born and reared in the Near East, yet living by preference among Yankees in America, he drew upon his own experience in order to shed light, for others, upon this theme. Rihbany had heard it said, not by merchants, industrialists or scientists, but by up-to-date religionists of that time, that it seemed inconsistent with spiritual realities to pray, as Our Lord taught us, “Give us this day our daily bread.” To some of them it seemed at best a beggar’s lazy petition. And it was sometimes suggested that the phrase be omitted from the prayer, because it pertains to “material things.” At any rate, we get our daily bread by working for it, don’t we?

Indeed we do! As we gather here in the weekly hour of worship, the pressure of daily work relieved while we experience Sabbath rest, we are yet reminded of the Scriptural conviction that man must earn his physical living by the “sweat of his brow.” There may have been an idyllic moment at the beginning of time when all things were provided in Eden for man and woman to enjoy. But man was not fated to live in perfection. And the God of things as they are requires of mankind effort and toil for daily bread. It is just as well for us to recognize, in realism, that there is terrific secular pressure upon the bread-earner who may be worshipping in the pew on Sunday, but has to face the pressure from Monday through Saturday. And for too much of the time the pressures are in direct opposition to Christian ethics.

This is not to say that business is invariably, or even necessarily, unethical or dishonest; it is not. Nor is it to say that manufacturing or labor are all greedy; they are not. Standards of the whole business world have risen markedly, especially in the kinds of business activity and professional life from which the large majority of Christian folk have come. Few members of any church are, for example, in the same kind of employment wherein the so-called Kefauver Committee uncovered such widespread corruption.

One facet of the matter is that the standards of the business and professional world are set by such concepts as “legality” and the general “secular usage of acceptability.” By and large, this puts the standards moderately high. But they are still far short of such moral absolutes as “the second mile” which characterize a fully Christian ethic.

Many a man is, in his work, expected to go by the standards usually practiced in business. He may be actually restrained from going far above or beyond them lest it prove costly to the business and hence imperil his job, or, if he is self employed, jeopardize his competitive position. It is well, and necessary, for us to proclaim and defend Christian perfection. But it must be done in the clear recognition of the difficulties that lie in daily labor and business, and the extraordinary hazards of applying our Christian absolutes to the earning of daily bread.

However, it is spiritual laziness, and ethical treason, to be satisfied with just “getting by” with the usual secular standards. The circus seal or the trained bear may perform his tricks very creditably for the food and recognition that he gets immediately. But man has a deep spiritual urge to be much more than a seal or a dog, a pig, or a bear. Mortal life demands bread; but human life demands far more than bread. We have to have ideals, just as insistently as we have to have material necessities and comforts. This is the theme of this day in American Education Week, and it is a right kind of emphasis.

Now to return, for a moment, to our friend Mr. Rihbany, and his contemporary American religionists, who suggested that it hardly seems spiritually consistent to pray for bread, as if to substitute such petition for the work of procuring bread.

We have to work for daily bread, surely enough. And the Oriental, says Rihbany, knows that full well. But the Oriental (and remember that Jesus was an Oriental by birth and surroundings) -- the Oriental also perceives that just by working for his bread, a man does not create it. He simply finds it. He may plant seed; cultivate, water and coax it; fight the weeds and other pests that threaten it, nurse it along with all his strength and attention. Perhaps he will have a harvest - but in what degree of productivity he knows not. Perhaps a hot wind, or a hail storm or a flood or a plague of insects will wipe away all prospect of fruit for his labors.

The prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” is a note of pure gratitude to the “Giver of all good and perfect gifts.” The Oriental, says Rihbany, does not know “material things” as the Occidental knows them. “To him, organic chemistry does not take the place of God.” For God is the center of his totality. Back of his prayer for daily bread is the mystic contemplation of ages expressed in the modern poet’s psalm:

Back of the loaf is the snowy flour,

Back of the flour is the mill;

Back of the mill is the wheat and the shower

And the sun and the Father’s will.

Now it would be foolish to exaggerate the piety and moral rectitude of the Oriental. He is lamentably lacking in rising to the heights in his best traditions, as is also the Occidental. Nevertheless, he knows that from seed time till harvest; or from the very idea of manufacture through selling, to the “filling of the order,” his attitude needs essentially to be religious.

As for the baking of bread, Rihbany remembered how the whole process was a religious exercise for his mother, from drawing the snowy flour out of the barrel where it was kept, to mixing it with salt, water and the yeasty lump from previous kneading, through the baking in community ovens fired by twigs and dry grass. Every movement, every step of the process, was carried out in the conscious recognition of the Giver of daily bread.

We have indeed to work for our daily bread. But our work does not wholly guarantee it to us. For, beyond our work, we are yet dependent on justice and mercy and providence.

The life of Our Lord is interesting to us because he lived so much of it as we must live it. He was born into a home of humble means and respectable toil. He knew well the effort and skill that must go into the carpenter’s trade, for he worked at it. He knew the demands of other kinds of toil for he associated intimately with those who performed other types of work for their daily bread -- shepherds, fishermen, vineyard keepers, financiers, soldiers, tax collectors, physicians, and so on.

There came the time when he was baptized and the holy spirit came upon him with a force and reality that may have meant a real ecstasy of spirit, and also a divine urge to proclaim the will of God. The next step, after his baptism, was a solitary, searching meditation in the wilderness while he wrestled with the meaning of his call to a divine mystery. There in the wilderness he was assailed by various kinds of tempting possibilities and certain specific temptations. Staying there for days, without having brought along a stock of supplies, he was hungry. One of the temptations was for bread.

He had been blessed with the sense of being flooded with the Holy Spirit -- a sense of power and of mission, a sense of special calling and extraordinary ability. And he was searching for the spiritual direction that would use his ecstatic power rightly. Probably doubts assailed him almost immediately. Is that not usually the approach of temptation (doubt)? “If thou be the Son of God.” Suppose the intimations received from his youth onward in the hills of his home town of Nazareth were false? Could it be that the Voice at his baptism had been only a trick of the imagination? It is always a presentation of the devil in us that conscience is a figment; that prayer is just a projection; and that God (unproved) is only a defense mechanism. Anyway, what’s the harm of doing a little experiment. If you’ve newly gotten such an unusual power, why not get some food for yourself easily. A man has to live, you know. “Self preservation” is the first law of life! Just see if your can’t get these wilderness stones turned into bread! Why not?

Many elements entered to strengthen this false plea. Jesus’ physical hunger was a factor at that moment. The need of other people was a factor. Heaven knows how the Roman taxes ground down the Hebrew people so that they all needed more bread. If it could just be made available quietly and easily, away from the tax collector’s scrutiny -- what could be more evidently right? And, after all, if he were really Son of God now, wasn’t it all right to share in the Father’s power? Many a son does throw around a bit of extra weight in proportion to the power of his father. It all leaves a subtle, but powerful temptation. Yet it leaves unanswered the more profound question: From what motive? By what power? Toward what end?

Christ’s compassion, and evident unfairness and injustice, gave this temptation terrific force. But notice the answer to the temptation. Jesus would not forsake the comradeship, nor ever use for himself, powers given for use only in love. He would not center his mission in an economic crusade. He would not live merely for a time, nor forsake a Cross for a bake shop. Man does live, in part, by bread; and economic righteousness is a Christian concern. But man does not live by bread alone. Jesus knew it, and he knew that people had known it, in a way, for a long time. For he was quoting from the ancient Deuteronomic code when he said, “It is written, ‘man shall not live by bread alone; but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’”

The famished Bedouin, lost in the desert, and finding treasure, cried, “Alas, it is only diamonds.” Man, in his deepest hunger, always cries, “Alas, it is only bread.” He lives by bread; but not mainly by bread. He lives in ideals. He lives in God. And the circumference of his life cannot be drawn until the Center is set.

Carlyle said that not all the “Finance Ministers, and Upholsterers, and Confectioners of modern Europe --- in joint stock company,” could “make one shoeblack happy above an hour or two.”

We live by forgiveness; by the Presence and eternal life. We live when justice rolls down like waters [Amos 5: 24] from the snow capped mountains. We live when love lifts us out of self into the wondering joy of someone else.

We live by ideals that tend persistently and unfailingly to lift our necessary daily bread until it becomes a sacrament.

----------------------

Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, November 7, 1954.