“Give us this day our daily bread”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, September 28, 2025
Reading: Exodus 16
I wonder if you’re familiar with this image. A humble man sitting down for a humble meal. There’s nothing extravagant about the food—bread and something in a bowl, a honking big Bible and some reading glasses on top. But there is something extravagant about his posture. Whole body bent forward in prayer, offering thanks for this modest meal. When I see it, it reminds me to give thanks for every good gift, no matter how humble. Like that last breath we all just took.
We’re in a series here at the church on the Lord’s Prayer, and our line for today is brief: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Not our daily favourite food. Not our daily desert. Not our favourite too much while others go hungry. No. Our daily bread. But which item on the table is actually the bread? Bread is a biblical image for teaching, spiritual sustenance, the Word of the Lord. It’s also an image for the Lord’s Supper, the bread that becomes the body and blood of Christ. Bread can mean all these things and more. A preacher I admire says that if you can believe Jesus is hiding in humble bread, you’ll start to ask yourself where else could he be hiding?
The prayer for daily bread recalls the story of the manna in the wilderness. The Israelites are longing for slavery back in Egypt. They are doing what we all do: remembering inaccurately. ‘Remember Egypt where there were steaks and the drinks were free?’ ‘Uh, no, we were in chains and Pharaoh tried to exterminate us.’ There is no worse slavery than thinking you’re free when you’re not. So, they ask for bread. And God says, ‘careful what you wish for.’ God rains down bread from. When the Israelites wake up, the ground is strewn with bread, all they have to do is go gather it. Those who are strong and gather a lot find, at the end of the day, they have the same amount as those who are weak and gather only little. Anybody tries to gather more than a day’s worth, it rots. One day’s worth is all you get, gotta trust God for tomorrow. And on the day before the sabbath there are two days worth of bread, so no one will have to work on the sabbath. This is what our Israelite forebears eat for 40 years in the wilderness. It’s white like coriander seed, and it tastes like wafers made with honey. Doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that’s every meal for the next generation—some 44,000 meals in a row.
A friend of mine visited the south for the first time and was offered grits. He wasn’t so sure, but he wanted to be open to new cultures. He said, “I’ll just have one grit, thank you.” Grits are a kind of gruel we southerners eat. Food for poor people originally, they just taste like whatever else you put in em. When you’re from north of about Maryland and they put grits in front of you, you ask, “What is it?” The word manna in Hebrew just means “what is it?” Because the Israelites don’t know. And they find out it’s God being generous.
When Jesus says we’re to pray for daily bread, he’s referring to the manna. Not bread for a week or a month, but just for today, or two days if tomorrow is a sabbath. The same amount for everyone, not too much, not too little.
One of my favourite things about Jesus is the way he eats his way through his gospels. You can’t open two pages of the gospels where Jesus isn’t eating somewhere. If you open your Bible to the books about Jesus, there are crumbs all over the pages. He is the very hungry caterpillar. You gotta imagine him talking most of the time with a mouth full of food. And if there isn’t enough food, no problem, bam, he just makes more. And he has a particular thing for bread. He likes it so much he compares himself to it: “I am the bread of life, who has come down from heaven.” He is the manna. Unearned, a gift, enough for one more day. We rarely imagine Jesus as fat, but I think we should. It suits me. More importantly it suits the gospels.
And that’s why we Christians have been feeding people ever since we met Jesus. The church is a place where if you’re hungry you can find a meal. Do I mean physical bread? Or figural bread—spiritual teaching? Or the sacrament—bread that’s also Jesus? Yes, yes, and also yes. Bread is all those things. Where I come into our church most days in the basement with my bike there are racks and racks of bread. It smells good, makes me hungry, and I thank God for our food bank, feeding our neighbours. I’ve told you this before: our church has six kitchens in it. Six! Our good forebears who built this building wanted there to be five groups eating together, and a sixth could roll up and ask, “room for us?” And we would say “sure, come on in, there’s a whole kitchen waiting for you.” And one of the things I’m proudest of in my three years and change here is the community meals Dayle Barrett has organized. We’ve fed thousands of our neighbours. Thousands. And at these meals we don’t just hand out food—crucial and lifesaving as that is. We eat together, make new friends, leave different. We awaken community.
All that, from simple, humble, magnificent bread.
I was listening to a nerdy history podcast recently. They mentioned a year in the 6th century where volcanos erupted worldwide and the weather across Europe was several degrees cooler, the sun never really shone. So crops failed. And everyone knew what that meant: starvation. Since the agricultural revolution some 12,000 years ago, if your crops fail, your family and most of the village die that winter. And to think I’m annoyed when the grocery store is out of my favourite soft drink. If you’re one crop failure away from starvation, I’m guessing you know what a bite of bread means: life, instead of death, a future with hope. In the wealthy west, our health problems are more often too many calories, not too few, so it’s hard to get our head around how important bread is. But you don’t have to miss too many meals before you remember, oh, right, we’re animals, and without regular food, we deteriorate, we turn on each other, and we die.
That’s true of the Word of the Lord too. Without it, we perish. If anything, scripture says, the Word of the Lord is more important than physical food. It’s a bread more hearty and sustaining than any chewed or swallowed sustenance. And we’re to long for God’s word more than we long for food when we’re hungry.
Not too long ago, all of our ancestors were closer to the earth. Subsistence farming was the world’s profession. Today, at fancy restaurants, farm-to-table is a big deal because most of us are so far from the sources of our food, we’ll pay top dollar to feel closer to it. I hear from those who hunt or fish or farm that there is something especially gratifying about eating food you’ve grown or caught. I’ll never know. The lore in my family is I caught a tiny fish as a kid. My grandparents dutifully cooked it and tried to get all the little bones out. I picked at it very carefully, tiny on my plate, till I said, “I’m not enjoying this as much as I thought I would.” Translation: why doesn’t this taste like fish sticks?!
See food is never just food, just fuel, just calories. There’s something deeply distorted in our culture treating food like a car treats gasoline: just fill up every now and again. You tell me who you eat with, and I’ll tell you who you are. To share a table together is to share life. Lovers eat together, families eat together, friends get together for cups or food. Danny Meyer wrote an outstanding book on leadership based on his experience starting restaurants—called Setting the Table. He owns The Shake Shack that’s opening up everywhere now. He says people think restaurants are about food. And that just shows how wrong people can be. Restaurants are about hospitality. If you make someone feel special, ennobled, treated with kindness, they’ll come back forever. Miss out on those things and it doesn’t matter how good the food tastes you’ve already lost them.
And so, Jesus gathers us to eat together. To continue his kinds of meals. He doesn’t say ‘believe the following,’ or ‘recite this’ or ‘mind this rule,’ he says eat this bread, drink this cup, until I come again. And he invites to his table all sorts of folks we wouldn’t invite to ours. The poor, the marginalized, those who don’t normally get invitations elsewhere: they’re in the seats of honour. Jesus’ table is backwards from ours, but he invites us too—at the Lord’s Supper. When we come up here for bread, we hold our hands out, empty, like a beggar. And God fills them with enough grace to feed the whole world.
A friend of mine writes of coming up for communion. The body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation. Only she doesn’t move on. She wants more. She imagines that she stands there eating until the bread is gone, the cup empty. Jesus is all she hungers for. Left to herself she would leave nothing for anyone else. Don’t worry, the church says, there’s all of Jesus in a little taste, a little touch of the lips.
As if that’s not enough. Jesus’ meals have even more significance. They’re the fulfillment of what the prophets promised long ago. One day, they said, God himself is coming. This will be unlike any other religious figure—prophet or priest or king. No this will be God’s own everlasting presence. And what will he do when he comes? He’ll throw a feast. A banquet for a wedding. An unending party. I should really let the prophets speak for themselves.
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud over all people; he will swallow up death for ever. He will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth. (Is 25:6-8).
A feast that destroys death. Now that’s a meal worth joining in. It’s not just for those who can afford it, members of the right club. No, Isaiah lists the invitees this way: “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy, and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” (Is. 55:1). So, when Jesus goes around eating and drinking, he’s making an announcement. This is God in person. The wedding feast long promised. The banquet hoped for, for ages. And if you want in, you’re in. Can’t promise the people sitting next to you are the ones you’d have chosen. Might be your worst enemy. But the food will be life changing. And you’ll never want to leave.
That’s why we have six kitchens. And community meals. And the Lord’s Supper once a month. And a food bank. Because Christ meets us and makes us his people over food.
Daily bread—does that include other things? Can we ask for, I dunno, whatever we want? I was a teenager watching my beloved Duke basketball in a game going badly. And yes, I was praying things would turn around. My dad scoffed, “Are you praying? That’s not going to help. Well. Duke makes a huge comeback. And the ball’s in the hands of our worst shooter at the last second. He hoists one up. And it hits every part of the rim and backboard before going in. Sort of like Kawhi Leonard’s famous game winner in this city (when the stakes were a little higher). I asked him, so who’s the smart guy now, eh? I didn’t. But I should have. So, is it okay to pray for your sports team, a parking place, other small things? Yes, it is. Prayer is opening up our desire before God. We don’t get everything we want—God’s not a genie in a bottle granting wishes. And the more we pray, opening our desire before God, the more our desires change. We start to want what God wants. Mother Teresa prayed famously “Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God.” Like Duke losing in basketball? Okay, we can start there. Like food for hungry children? Yeah, we get there eventually, and then we do something about it. CS Lewis said this:
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
I don’t usually pray for Duke basketball anymore. But praying for daily bread, for the basics of life, teaches us how to pray for other things. Like the neighbour we don’t like. Praying for the hungry to be fed sends us volunteering to help. And eventually we pray that Christ would transfigure all creation.
In other words, the more you pray, the more God will transform your prayer. From your sports teams and parking spots to, well, just being with God. Longing for divine presence, listening to one another’s heartbeats. Mother Teresa was famously asked by a reporter what she says when she prays. Nothing. I listen. Okay, well what does God say when you listen? Nothing. God listens. Poor reporter was confused enough already, but Mother finished him off this way: “And if you can’t understand that I can’t explain it to you.” Prayer is about being with God, not making God our servant. And we learn that by praying daily for bread. Amen.