Texts: Genesis 29: 15-30; Luke 11: 1-5

One of the biggest arguments my parents ever had, that I remember, occurred when my father went out on strike. The International Typographical Union had been formed in 1852 organizing printers and typesetters who required sufficient education to set metal type and divide words appropriately -- remember hyphens? The machines were incredibly noisy, making it the perfect occupation for deaf and hearing impaired persons who could meet the educational standards required. My father joined the union in 1936 and in 1986, just before its dissolution and merger into the CWA, received his 50-year pin. He once told me that he had been a scab -- that’s a person who works while others are on strike -- for a week during 1935 and carried that as his mark of Cain; that was one of the reasons he so vehemently supported the strike about which he and my mother argued.

My mother had grown up in rural Alabama where labor unions were seen as a tool of the Communist party which was trying to organize steel workers in Birmingham. She never really overcame her suspicions of unions, partly because unions seemed to cut across all the old racial and social divisions that formed her early thinking. Even though she was a woman conditioned by her time, she argued with my father about the strike. In good family tradition, of course, I argued with them both as Caesar Chavez began organizing farm workers and I refused to eat grapes. We -- and I say we because farm workers are part of all of us-- finally won with a contract that recognized the UFW as a legitimate bargaining tool. Their battle for fair pay and decent working conditions isn’t over, of course, but with the help of all of us, it can be continued until every worker has the pay and conditions so necessary for a decent life.

Laban, about whom we heard this morning, was probably not the first exploiter of a laborer but certainly is one of the more famous of the early ones. There was the slave labor of the Pharaoh. but that is really a different matter. Laban was a man who promised a certain reward for honest work and then cheated his worker. Not much different than many of the employers who hire day laborers now.

Although the Fourth Commandment sets aside a day of rest for workers and the prophets railed against those who cheated the poor, it is really the line in the Lord’s Prayer that sets the theological framework for fair pay for labor. “Give us our daily bread,” Jesus prayed. That’s really quite extraordinary in a time when people lived on the margins, oppressed by a religiously sanctioned upper class and an empire that did not care whether people had their daily bread or not. In fact, it’s really quite revolutionary.

Think about it. Jesus has this in the same prayer as the statement, “your kingdom come.” Luke’s text does not contain the softening effect of “on earth as it is in heaven.” There’s no pie in the sky, as Joe Hill categorized it. It’s right there in front of us: Your kingdom come. Give us this day our daily bread. The kingdom envisioned was a radical change of the social order right here on earth. Jesus hasn’t prayed that some will be fed and others get more; no, he’s only asked for daily bread. In other words, that’s what we should pray for; nothing more, nothing less. It constitutes an egalitarian view of society that few of us would be willing to support.

That’s not to say that we would refuse others their daily bread, just that we want a bit more than that. It’s part of our human nature. I’m no different than anyone else; I know that. But what would this reordering of society mean? For us here and now? For the future? It does mean that a redistribution of resources is required. It’s pretty clear that a great deal of hunger, perhaps not all, but certainly a major portion, has less to do with resources available than distribution.

Let’s look at just one example: Russia. Most of its wheat crop has been destroyed because of the drought and fires over the summer. Last week, there was an interesting discussion on NPR with some American wheat farmers. Some of them are holding back their grain supplies hoping the price will go higher for exports to Russia, needing wheat now but which will be desperate as wintertime approaches. The U.S. and Canada have the wheat. From the farmers’ point of view, they have suffered from low wheat prices for years; in fact, because of the economy, many farmers have gone belly up, so the tool to get the higher price is to withhold the wheat even here at home. Remember when a 5-pound bag of unbleached flour was 99 cents just a few years ago? Now it costs $2.79.

These are issues of faith not only market economy because our market economy is ultimately an issue of faith. Our rapidly increasing world population has an ever increasing demand for food and resources. Last week, spurred on by his reading of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and the theories of the Reverend, yes, Reverend, Thomas Robert Malthus, James Lee attacked the Discovery Channel offices and posted a list of demands regarding what he considered Discovery Channel’s glorification of humans over the rest of God’s creation. Now, it may be easy to dismiss him as an eco-terrorist or paranoid schizophrenic but some of his so-called “demands”, in spite of the incendiary language, raise troubling questions for us as a society. Malthus was troubled by what he saw as an increasing world population in relation to the resources available to feed it, and decided that starvation and misery were part of God’s plan to keep us virtuous. He opposed all forms of public assistance to the poor believing that such assistance would only make the poor breed -- his term -- and increase their number. There’s a residue of that in political arguments now propounded by people who support the so-called Tea Party.

Jesus in his prayer offers us a different way, different than that of the unjust employer Laban, different than that of Malthus, which I believe is not pro-environment, and different from those who would deny food to the hungry. We live in a nation blessed with enormous resources and as the leading consumer of the resources of other nations, we have a special responsibility to develop policies that support sustainable agriculture and resource distribution. Policies concerning resource allocation also affect our own nation. The poor, including the working poor, in our nation should not have to grovel in order to obtain a basic minimum standard of living, which is what many of them have to do now. Give us our daily bread is the cry of Jesus. As a people of faith we must hear that cry and develop sound policies so that there is sufficient food and shelter for all.

Let us pray: O God who gives us our bounty, endow us, we pray, with creative solutions to the problems of hunger faced in our community, our nation, and our world. For you demand nothing less. Through Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.