May We Reject the Crumbs of Empire

“Give us this day our daily bread…”

It’s a radical prayer already, because Jesus invites us to pray not just for our own individual daily needs, but to include the we of it all - to pray for what our neighbors need too. (The ones we like and the ones we quite honestly don’t.) Jesus invites us to be honest, to be needy, to be generous - to trust that a God who cares deeply for all of us is listening to our cries.

But there is another way - the way of individualism and looking out for number one, of playing the zero sum game where anything my neighbor gets is something I can’t have, and of dog eat dog competition where if we haven’t gotten the most, at least we want more than someone else. Consider for instance how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the U.S.’s segregated South.

“[Those in power] took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow… And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.” - 25 March 1965, Montgomery, Alabama

Lord, have mercy. Look into the nooks and crannies of our souls. Where is this willingness still lurking in us, to scrabble and claw against our neighbor for a few measly crumbs when you, God, are freely offering an entirely different kind of feast?

“May we look to you as our source of true provision. May we reject any crumbs tossed to us from the tables of empire.” - an adaptation of the Lord’s Prayer inspired by Lisa Sharon Harper

Lord, hear our prayer.

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If you’d like to respond to this prayer for our daily bread in a practical way, City Church is hosting a pop up pantry for our Wrigley and Lafayette neighbors this weekend. Email Brenna if you’d like to help serve. Shelf stable food donations can be dropped off at the bin in Wrigley Coffee anytime this week; donations can also be made to the community care fund HERE.