God knows we really do need all these things like food and water, shelter and work, companionship and love. He knows we need all these and even still other things. And yet, those alone aren’t enough. We do need food day by day. And yet, someday the day will come when our body quits eating, when we are past the golden years into the time when our body no longer works, when food will no longer be enough to sustain us, when we have to face mortality. What will we need then? We will need to be right with God. In Matthew 4:4, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy when tempted by Satan, reminding us “Man does not live by bread alone.” And in this, Jesus reminds us that bread can become idolatry.
In 2019, Derek Thompson suggested in the Atlantic that work for college-educated Americans had become workism, “the most potent of new religions competing for congregants.” He noted, “No large country in the world as productive as the United States averages more hours of work a year. And the gap between the U.S. and other countries is growing. Between 1950 and 2012, annual hours worked per employee fell by about 40 percent in Germany and the Netherlands—but by only 10 percent in the United States.” Nor did the now-defunct Great Resignation change things. Not only was it predominantly in fields such as hospitality, but the work simply moved around, as the Great Resignation was really the Great Change Jobs.
Further, Thompson noted, “The shift defies economic logic—and economic history.” At the time, he suggested several causes for the development and spread of workism, including student debt, social media, the shift from jobs to callings. All valid. But if the diagnosis of the causes of workism is incomplete, the medicine will be as well. So, may I also suggest two more: fear and greed.
Why has work has become a functional religion for at least one class of people in America? Because our god is the thing we think will ultimately take care of us. And, because we think our work will ultimately take care of us, we make it our functional god. Or, if we step back just one more step, we think we are the one who will ultimately take care of ourselves, so we make ourselves our own functional gods. And self-worship leads to so much of our societal and moral mess today, because we are unwilling to let anyone else have authority over us, meaning we refuse to accept a God who tells us that some of our impulses and desires are wrong. Workism may be making work our god, but it even more may be us making ourselves our gods.
What is the antidote? Thompson suggests that we remember the purpose of work is to buy free time. Maybe, but readers of TWI will know our deep commitment to the idea that calling is a good thing, that work ought to be more than just a means to buy other things that we really desire. One of our very purposes is to pursue Dorothy Sayers’ challenge: “Christians must revive a centuries-old view of humankind as made in the image of God, the eternal Craftsman, and of work as a source of fulfillment and blessing.”
How might we avoid workism while also preserving an understanding of work as something more than a means to buy leisure? We might ask, with Thompson, how work has become workism, what drives the shift from work as a good gift of God to work as an idolatrous other religion. And the answer to both the fear and greed of workism is found in the fourth petition of the Lord’s prayer, “Give us today our daily bread.”
If we believed our daily bread would be given, we would rest.
As politics has shown, fear is a powerful motivator, sadly far more powerful than ethics for many, even most humans. Personally, Matthew 6 may contain the most difficult passage in the entire Bible for me to believe, at least if one wishes to measure belief by behavior. Jesus raises the question of trust, the question of belief in a good God who will provide abundantly for us. He teaches:
Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. (Matthew 6:25–34, ESV)
You see, I come from a long line of worriers. And that’s not to blame things on my upbringing. If one will permit the aside—students and young adults, yes, your parents messed you up. And you will probably mess your kids up just as badly, probably just in different ways, so let us all have some grace for our parents. But in my case, coming from at least a generation further back than my parents, at least one side of my family knows how to worry. It is one of our core competencies.
Another name for worry is fear. And here is what that fear does to me. It means I never quite stop working. And even when I technically stop working, my mind cannot fully stop. And it means I have real trouble saying no to an opportunity. And I try still to be a good father and husband while I do it, so I can end up grinding myself to a pulp. I end up in workism.
Because I have read all the same articles you have about how much money it takes to retire comfortably, and about how life expectancy is going up, and about how the long tail of life is getting more and more expensive. And I know college is coming for the kids, and how uncertain investments or jobs can be. And, so, I feel this deep drive—which is more a fear than anything—that I have to keep striving, keep driving forward. In case. In case.
And the root of that worry is this: at some fundamental, instinctual level, I am convinced that I provide my daily bread, that I’ve got to do it on my own, that I’m the provider. And yet, Jesus teaches us something quite different: that God is the provider and that he’s good: “Give us this day our daily bread.”
So, the way to get what we need day-by-day is, at the end of it all, to ask. To ask, not to earn.
Any promised gift immediately raises the question of the reliability of the giver. Promised gifts from Nigerian princes via email, for instance, prove rather unreliable. When Jesus teaches us to pray “Our Father,” he uses a term of both deep respect and deep endearment, a term of trust and affection and love, of deep familiarity but also deep respect.
Can I trust God for my daily bread? Well, that depends. Is he trustworthy? Here the two presentations of the Lord’s Prayer in the Bible are helpful. Jesus gives the Lord’s Prayer in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6, shortly before the passage quoted above. But the Gospel of Luke, chapter 11, also records it. There are small differences between the presentations, differences related to what Matthew and Luke are respectively emphasizing as Gospel writers and also to the fact that Jesus, over a three-year public ministry, probably taught people to pray multiple times. Like any good teacher, he could well have phrased all these same petitions slightly differently himself as he taught different groups of people in their own situations.
Luke follows the Lord’s Prayer immediately with a somewhat curious sounding parable:
And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:5–13, ESV)
What is Jesus saying here? And why does Luke order it to follow the Lord’s Prayer? Because Jesus is reminding us of who God the Father is, that when we pray to him, he is so much more than a grumpy old man who does not really like us, but eventually gives in so we will stop bothering him. Instead, Jesus says, God is a deeply loving Father, one who loves to give us what we need.
Some—and I am certainly blessed to be one—have wonderful fathers, and this image makes inherent sense, because it matches the human father we have. But this image of God as father can be so very tough for others, because we had or have a human father who was something very different, one who hurt or harmed us or ignored us. And one can quickly then—because God is termed our Father—map all the problems of a bad human father onto God, to envision him as a begrudging benefactor who does not have time for us at best, abusive at worst, or just a really angry old man.
When the Bible talks about God our Father, it means God being everything a human father should be, not what we often are. God as “our Father,” is what even the best human father ultimately points to. And God looks at us wanting to give us good. John 3:16 does not say, “God the Father really hates you and wants to smite you, but Jesus got in the way and took the bullet.” No, John 3:16 says “God [meaning God the Father] so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.”
This raises a curious question. Why ask? If God knows everything, he already knows what we need. In fact, in that passage from later in Matthew 6, Jesus said exactly that. To quote it again, he said, “and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.” He knows what we need before we ask, and yet he tells us to pray and ask. God wants to hear it. Why?
Well, not because we pray and God suddenly says, “Oh, man. I was distracted. Glad you brought that to my attention. I had missed your email.” No, he knows—better than we do—exactly what we need. God does not tell us to pray for our daily bread for the sake of him learning something. He tells us to pray for our daily bread for the sake of us learning something.
God tells us to pray this to remind us that we are actually in humble dependence upon him. This petition implies our essential neediness, our own inadequacy. We are actually people who need to be given even our very basic needs. This petition exposes and debunks our own myth of self-reliance. We are not providers, but instead we are little children who need to be given even our most very basic needs.
In other words, we must realize that Bart Simpson’s blessing was funny, but terribly wrong. Way back in Season 2, when asked to pray for the food, Bart prays, “Dear God, we pay for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing.” Instead, this petition reminds us that such self-reliance is—even if terribly funny as a quip—actually a myth. We are people who need things. So, why does God tell us to pray for them? Because we need to know from where they really come.
And here we get to the question of functional belief versus orthodox belief. If you are a follower of Jesus already, you hopefully know that it is just fine to laugh at Bart’s blessing, but we do not actually believe it. Yes, we do pay for the food, but we realize that the money we used to pay for the food was God’s gift to us, even when that money is the salary or wages from working really, really hard.
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