Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from January 29, 2006

“Daily Bread”

Rev. Thomas Ratmeyer

Scriptures:

Psalm 111

Matthew 6:1-18

The last Sunday in January is known in our congregation as Mission Sunday.  We enjoy the special opportunity today to celebrate our partnership, our relationship with so many people and organizations that respond to needs in our community.

I would like to take a moment, however, to ask whether “Mission Sunday” is, in fact, the best possible name for this celebration.  There are three questions that come to mind:

1.       Shouldn’t every Sunday be Mission Sunday?  Aren’t we doing mission, as the central calling of the church, a disservice by designating just one special Sunday a year with that name as if missions didn’t play as big a role at any other time?  Every Sunday, we give thanks for God’s blessings as well as giving back some of the gifts that God has offered us. In the Book of Acts, the early disciples very quickly assigned a few to the task of helping those in need because it is such an essential piece of the Christian community.   In Matthew, it is in the neediest that we encounter Jesus Christ.   Mission is central to the life of the church every day.

2.       A second question about the name Mission Sunday could be made with the scripture we just read in Matthew’s Gospel.  Is there not a danger for a self-congratulatory attitude about one’s giving inherent in a Mission Sunday, just in the way that Jesus warned against, when giving is not done in the secrecy of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, but instead is done with a public celebration?

3. Finally, not all the organizations that gather here today are faith-based organizations, and not all of them would describe their work to meet the needs of the poor and disadvantaged as “Christian Mission.”  Would you not be left out, in spite of your important work and our partnership, if we called this day “Mission Sunday?”

Maybe “Community Sunday” would say it better, in a couple of different ways.  First of all, today we celebrate that we are in community with one another, as people and organizations that join forces, ideas and a strong sense of commitment to fight hunger, homelessness, and other symptoms of drastic inequality in the midst of a very privileged and resourceful society.  Second, we, as a congregation reaffirm today our commitment to serve the community of which we are a part.  I am not just talking about the worshipping community.  I am not just talking about the people we know as members and friends.  I am talking about the people in the community that have a need for hands-on blessings, manifest in the most basic fundamentals of living—the hot meal and the place to sleep among others.

Jesus’ admonitions in Matthew’s Gospel are the call to the believers to be genuine in their piety.  For the reader, the admonition begins with the realization that in the Greek, what is translated here as piety, is the same word as righteousness.  We cannot be pious in the way that Jesus desires for the believers without taking righteous action.  There is no piety that exists apart from the need to act in the world, for the restoration of justice and work toward the equality of all.

Jesus takes for granted that his disciples will engage in the three central aspects of piety that the Jewish faith prescribes:  alms-giving, prayer and fasting.  Two-thousand years later in the Protestant branch of the Judeo-Christian tradition, only a little translation is needed.  We have replaced the regular practice of fasting with the regular practice of listening to someone preach.  Depending on the quality of the sermon, it can certainly feel like a little fast.  Spiritually and physically, it is, if nothing else, the period of time that one is prevented from going home for Sunday lunch.

Neither praying nor fasting nor giving are to be done with an audience in mind, for the sake of looking good in other people’s eyes, but for God alone.  Let me say to you who have come from the community and to the organizations that they represent:  Whether you are faith-based or not, you are fulfilling what Jesus asks for in a pious person.  You do the work of righteousness.  What you are trying to make others aware of is not your own good deeds but instead is the need that surrounds us and that we, as a society, do so well to keep from seeing.  There is no glamour that comes with your work and, if you are paid at all, there are no riches to be made in your jobs.  Your diligence might as well be called prayer, and the fasting that you do as you choose this work over other work is for sure a spiritual discipline.  You each have expertise in a certain area of helping those in need.  Community partnerships, like the one we celebrate today, make it possible for all of us to help effectively, because none of us have to duplicate or imitate the work that the other is already doing.  Instead, we can support and complement one another.   For that, we offer you our thanks.

Matthew’s Gospel puts the Lord’s Prayer at the center of this passage and, for that matter, at the center of the whole Sermon on the Mount.  There is difficulty and opportunity in the fact that this is one of the most familiar texts within the Christian faith.  The difficulty is, of course, that many of us know how to say it without having to think about it at all.  The opportunity is that, by virtue of our frequent repetition of the familiar words, they may indeed become an attitude that permeates the whole of our lives.

Such an attitude would take its hope for the work against inequality and injustice, for the work of feeding the hungry and housing the homeless from the assurance that God’s promise and God’s intention for all of this world has yet to be fulfilled.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth at it is in heaven.  It means that we are never ever allowed to be cynics of the variety that say, “There will always be the poor, let’s just give thanks that we are not among them.”  Instead we have to recognize that we do the work toward the kingdom.  If our own salvation is one that we don’t earn by our works, that is not to say that we are to sit still and wait for God’s realm to unfold before our eyes.  We are called to discipleship and service, working the salvation of the world.

Give us this day our daily bread.  When has that ever been the prayer for one’s own table alone?  It means “help us feed those who are hungry day after day until there are none who are hungry any more”.

Forgive us our debts—for we are not our own but God’s and owe to God life itself and everyday’s blessings.  This is not a matter of guilt but the humility of knowing that we are God’s children, part of God’s creation and heirs of God’s promise of salvation.

On this day, I ask God’s blessing on our work.  I pray that we might make a difference in the lives of those to whom we reach out.  I pray that through our efforts, as temporary and incomplete as they may be, somehow God’s grace may be proclaimed, in Jesus’ Name.  Amen.