“Give us this day our daily bread”
Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up, and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. – James 5: 13-16
But now more than ever the word about Jesus spread abroad; many crowds were gathering to hear him and to be cured of their diseases. Meanwhile, he would slip away to deserted places and pray. – Luke 5: 15-16
Jesus offers us assurance that asking God to act in our lives and in the world is an act of trust and belief that we are not alone in our need. Our prayer asking for daily bread, I believe, speaks about what we need as food for our bodies and our spirits. The meeting of needs with the power of prayer helps ease suffering. With what we call intercessory prayer we become mindful of the needs of the world and remember that God is the Source of All Gifts.
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all. – Richard Wright
No prayer is hollow – whether it is answered in one way or the silent way. To name the night is to be like God, speaking light to formless voids, putting rhythm and rhyme to the pell-mell that compels us. To pray is to trace the edge of chaos and find a way to contain it, not control it. Even if the story we pray is only a fiction, it might be a fiction that will save us. Or it might change us. – Pádraig Ó Tuama, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community
In a society where we are often taught that self-sufficiency and independence are marks of mature adulthood, something to strive for and achieve, it can be hard to acknowledge that we need something or someone. But that is exactly what prayers of petition invite us to do, to name our or other’s needs before God and the community in pursuit of wholeness and abundant life. When we pray in these ways, we are joining our prayers together as a response to our culture which often tells us we can only rely on ourselves and we should make it on our own. When we pray together, we are mindful that we are connected to one another in the deepest ways, that we depend on one another and our community, that we are responsible for one another and that we belong to one another.
Some of the last words the author of James shares with the people to whom he is writing in the epistle are an encouragement to this kind of interdependence. Throughout the letter, James envisions prayer as one of the core communal practices that bring wholeness and healing and a future of blessing and abundance for all. Asking for what is needed, relying on communal support, is what makes prayer “powerful and effective.” James writes to “the twelve tribes in the Dispersion” or diaspora, meaning those believers now living outside their ancestral lands. For those who may have lost their connection to land and community, who may be isolated and alone, strangers in a strange land, this concluding call to interdependence–to relying on one another–is not only a way of demonstrating compassion, but a pathway toward interconnectedness and belonging.
An interviewer who spoke with prayer bead makers and sellers in Khartoum in the Sudan noted that many of them carried with them prayer beads that had been used by their family members in generations past. The physical presence of prayer beads across generations connected practitioners to their ancestral and cultural lineages. This is especially true for those have been forced to migrate from their homelands and the places where their ancestors are buried. For them, the prayer beads themselves and the practice of praying with beads helps them re-member their lineages and experience the presence of those who are dead or left behind. Like the diasporic believers to whom James addresses his letter, their prayers and prayer beads become a pathway toward interconnectedness and a reminder of interdependence with communities near and far. How might we intentionally practice our intercessions and petitions in ways that draw us into interdependent community with past and present, near and far siblings in the Body of Christ?
Depending on where you have Worshiped, there is often a time for Prayers of Petition “Prayers of Joy and Concern” during the Service. We do this in many different ways, sometimes offering up the latest on someone who is ill, asking for people to pray for someone facing a surgery or a job interview. We are often quite comfortable asking for help from God when it concerns others. “Give us this day our daily bread” reminds us that we, ourselves, are also included in that “us.” Just naming our needs can open our eyes to how better to love ourselves, which after all, is another reminder from Jesus that we are to “love others as you love yourself.”
And so this morning, let us take a moment to ask God for what we may need and to pray for someone we know.