October 25, 2026
22nd Sunday after Pentecost
MINISTER
Rev. David J. Wood
SCRIPTURE
Deuteronomy 8: 1-3, Proverbs 30: 8-9, Matthew 6: 11
“Our Declaration of Dependence”
by Rev. David J. Wood
22nd Sunday After Pentecost, October 25, 2026
First Congregational Church of Camden
Scripture Readings: Deuteronomy 8: 1-3; Proverbs 30: 8-9; Matthew 6: 11
Over these recent weeks…and for a few more, we are slowly making our way through the Lord’s Prayer. Today we come to a turning point in the prayer…perhaps the center-point:
“Give us this Day our Daily Bread”
So much for lofty things: heaven, God’s holy name, God’s coming Kingdom, God’s will…We’re back to the nitty gritty reality of earthly, human existence…from the universal, cosmic, transcendent sphere and movement of God…to the, mundane, basic, everyday circumstance of our existence on the earth.
Let’s break this down a bit…
Let’s begin with Give us THIS DAY….
“How do you make a living?” A common question.
To which there is only one correct answer:
“One day at a time.”
To lose track of our days is to lose track of our lives. It’s reminiscent of one of the phrases heard often among participants in AA:
“One day at a time.”
I remember reading how one of the first things those who suffer from addiction need to recover is a sense of time…of the possibility that is present with the dawning of each new day…a recovery of a present that is not merely a repeat of what has gone before, and the perception of a future is open and not simply a fated extension of what has been.
And so we pray, “Give us THIS day”
That’s a contrast to a culture that conditions us to “seize the day…to assume a posture of aggression…to conquer the day ahead, to milk it for all it’s worth.
This prayer trains us to begin by receiving the day…this day…If we let it, it trains us into a disposition of receptivity and gratitude. The day is not a given…it is to be recognized as a gift.
In our reading from Deuteronomy, we read about the ancient Israelites and their pilgrimage in the wilderness after their miraculous liberation and exodus from Egypt… sfrom slavery, captivity.
For decades and decades they had been living on the edge of starvation…never sure of if tomorrow would come…and in fear that, if it came, what it would bring. In those days, their time was not their own…their days were oppressive, interminable and intolerable.
It was in the years after their liberation, as they made their way through the wilderness, that God required the daily gathering of food. It was called manna…it was their daily bread. It would appear in the fields fresh every morning and they were allowed to gather only enough for ONE day…it had a shelf life of 24 hours. They were gradually trained into a daily routine that was no longer driven by an insecurity and anxiety borne of scarcity…but their days would be lived in a freedom borne of trust…one day at a time.
They spent 40 years in the wilderness.
It takes time to get our days straight.
“Give us THIS Day our Daily Bread”
DAILY BREAD: is a place holder, a symbol of what we need to exist, to be, to survive, to thrive…to pray that it be given is to recognize that, like our days, such provision is not a given, it is a gift.
When so much in our lives is provided for us, so readily, so unthinkingly, we are especially in danger of forgetting our basic condition of dependence.
The truth is, most of us here, do not live in fear or anxiety about whether or not our basic needs for existence will not be met today…or tomorrow…or the day after that. We have on hand a whole lot more bread stored up in our oversized refrigerators than than we need for a one day’s sustenance…and we always have the means to get more from those huge local huge storage facilities we call supermarkets.
In the midst of our abundance, we can lose sight of the truth of how dependent we are…of how much of our lives require dependence on others in one way or another.
Which is why we can be prone to a certain kind of FORGETFULNESS of our dependency on what is provided for us. As the writer in Proverbs confesses:
give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with just the food that I need,
or I shall be full, and deny [or forget] you…
We, all of us, need to eat daily…the fact of our daily neediness for food is our common ground… our common need for daily bread is to recognize and recall our solidarity with all humankind.
Give us this day our Daily bread.
In recent years, Jennifer and I have had the great joy of becoming grandparents. I know, I know, we appear much too young for that…but it’s true.
Along with all the joy that comes with this sustained re-encounter with newborns, I have been newly astonished by just how utterly helpless and needy newborns are! (I’m guessing father’s have a tendency to forget that at a higher rate than mothers).
Infants have a highly developed sensory system (open eyes and ears) and a severely limited motor system (cannot move or fend for themselves)
• can’t even lift its head on its own for the 1st two months
• rolling over achieved at 4 months.
• stand at 9 months, walk at 12 months…
I’ve done a little research on this…and it seems that, among our fellow mammals, this condition is essentially unique to human beings. So much of our development is post natal. For example, in their first year, polar bear cubs shadow their mother, learn how to swim, and practice hunting, and begin fending for themselves…all in their first year!
The principal reason for our inborn helplessness is that we are ALL born prematurely! At birth, our brains are 70% smaller than adult brains. Size of a baby’s brain doubles in the first year.
We are needful, needy, dependent beings before we are anything else. All the basic skills necessary to life take years to develop out of and through this state of utter dependence.
Scientists have also begun to wonder if this dependent condition is more than a biological necessity. As one scientific study concluded:
“This period of helplessness may be the evolutionary foundation for human adaptability, social collaboration, and even the emergence of moral sensibility….binding infants and caregivers into deep, long-term relationships of care.”
So it appears that this utterly dependent state may be…crucial to the process of being and becoming human.
Perhaps dependence is fundamental to our humanity…not just when we are helpless infants…but throughout the course of our lives. Such a view runs counter to our commonsense view that dependence is something to eliminate, overcome, outgrow, and out-live…not a condition to embrace, receive, recognize, and value.
For example, since 1964, the word “dependency” has become a synonym for addiction.
We seem to have a firm grasp of unhealthy dependence…
we have a firm grasp of all the ways that independence is healthy… I’m not sure we have a comparable understanding of healthy dependence.
Let me be clear, I am no way the diminishing the importance of taking responsibility for one’s life and developing one’s independence as one matures and establishes themselves in life…I have no need to diminish the importance of cultivating independence and self-reliance in ourselves and in our children.
What I am advocating is the recognition that our lives are an ongoing dance between independence and dependence. I am advocating for a kind of dynamic tension between dependence and independence…and that that tension is essential if we are to have a truthful understanding of the nature of our existence as human beings.
For all of us it is important to be
Heard,
Known,
and to be Seen by others.
That’s how we develop a strong sense of self-worth and dignity.
As we grow, dependence tends to naturally recede into the background of our lives…but there are times in our lives when it moves to the foreground, when we find ourselves in need of the care of others:
When we are facing illness or find ourselves in a financial crisis, an an episode of failure of some kind, or when we overcome by grief in the midst of the loss of a loved one…or of a job or of a marriage.
Such times in our lives, if we are paying attention, can be an awakening to the fundamental truth of our human condition. Our need for the care of others, our dependence upon what we cannot provide for ourselves is not shameful, to be shunned, or shied away from…
We are borne into this life through dependence…we never grow out of it…and as we mature, we recover our appreciation for it….the experience of dependence is not the exception to a mature life…it is what makes our lives exceptional.
Here’s my question for you today: Where is the community where people are liberated from the shame and humiliation of being in need?
I would propose that that community exists where a people have learned to pray by heart:
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
The theologian of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, is said to have written on a scrap of paper, perhaps just hours before he died: “We are beggars, that is true.” Years ago I remember reading this definition of the Church: “One beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.”
A community that has learned to truly pray this prayer, is a community that has come to know they are dependent beings—dependent upon God and one another. In such a community there is no room for condescension towards those who find themselves in a needful circumstance. The experience of need becomes an occasion for grace not for shame.
And so, together, we are learning to pray,
every day of our lives:
“Give us this day, our daily bread.”
One final word about these words at the turning point in the Lords Prayer: In praying these words we participate in the longing of God that ALL would have bread.
We pray give US this day OUR Daily Bread…not give ME this day MY daily bread. As has been said:
To eat bread is a material act.
To break it and share it is a spiritual act.
The reason so many go hungry is not a problem of PROVISION…there is enough food produced for everyone…to have daily bread. The problem is one of DIVISION…with how we have divided up the world…so that there are those who have and those who have not.
In America, it is said that we produce an abundance of food—wasting roughly 126 billion pounds of it every year—hunger in the U.S. is fundamentally an issue of financial access and a just distribution rather than food scarcity
• In Fiscal Year 2026, the US military budget surpassed the $1 trillion mark for the first time. For fiscal Year 2027, the Proposal is to add another 1/2 Trillion.
• Compare that to the less than $150 billion we spend every year on domestic food and nutrition assistance programs to combat hunger
And that number is not growing….just this past year, there has been an $11 Billion Drop in federal spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—known as SNAP—the program that serves more than 42 million, low-income Americans. Of those individuals, 5.5 million lost access to SNAP benefits since the passage of the tax bill passed recently—a number that includes at least 1 million children. Locally, that translates into 23,000 Mainers—including some 7,000 children—who have lost benefits. Additionally, changes in school lunch program could impact up to 22,000 students in Maine alone.
“O God, to those who hunger, give bread.
And to those who have bread,
Give a hunger for justice.”
Give US this day OUR daily bread.
Who would have thought that praying this prayer could have such political implications?
So, we are together, learning to pray as Jesus taught us to:
Give us this day our daily bread...
• To receive each day as a GIFT
• To receive as gift our need for God and one another.
• To rededicate ourselves to the just distribution of what God has provided so that all may have daily bread.
Give us this day our daily bread.
Amen. Let it be so.