Praying to a God in exile

 

Luke 11: 1-13
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
July 27, 2025

Hungry refugee older child with light brown skin, dark hair, and brown eyes taking tinned food from a volunteer with gloved hands while sitting in a tent. 

I chose the First Nations Version for the scripture this morning because this translation of the Lord’s Prayer was used at General Synod earlier this month and I thought it would be good to look at this prayer in another context. Using this prayer also reminds us that every week we worship on the unceded lands of the Lenape and the Nanticoke peoples. As we were planning worship, I read the passage aloud to Diane and she noticed the use of the word “frybread” in place of the usual translation for “bread”. The Greek word ártos can also mean “daily provision” which is how it is used in the Lord’s Prayer.



Frybread, on the other hand, has its origins in the forced removal of the Navajo or Diné people from their native lands. In 1864 the U.S. government instigated the deportation and ethnic cleansing of the Navajo people. In other words, a genocide. More than 50 forced marches over a four-year period to an internment camp in eastern New Mexico resulted in almost 3,500 deaths due to starvation and disease. In the midst of this forced relocation, the U.S. government gave the Navajo people staples of flour, sugar, lard, and salt—what would become frybread and also a symbol of colonialism, trauma, and later become associated with diseases like diabetes.



The First Nations Version of the New Testament employed a 12-member translation council from many First Nations peoples, two of which were Navajo or Diné. My thinking is that they must have chosen to use the word “frybread” for a good reason. To put this story of persistence in prayer in a context similar to the one Jesus lived and died in, a context of living in exile in your own country.



Even as we pray this prayer, it can be easy to forget that Jesus was not White but a brown-skinned Palestinian Jew and that is precisely why he was executed by the state, because of who he was. Jesus has more in common with the Navajo, with Emmett Till, with starving Palestinians and Jews protesting genocide, and with immigrants in this country than he does with White Christians.



So, in that context, this story of persistence in prayer could be about the Long Walk of the Navajo and might go something like this:



Then Creator Sets Free added, “Suppose, after walking all day in the hot sun, men on horseback pointing a rifle at your people, you went to a friend in the middle of the night and said, ‘I need three pieces of frybread! A relative of mine is starving, and I have nothing for him to eat.’ But your friend says to you, ‘Quit bothering me! I cannot help you. My children and I are all exhausted.’ Do not give up! If your friendship is not enough, then your friend will do it just because you will not give up asking.



Or the bread could be emergency biscuits purchased by our government to distribute to populations who are suffering due to famine or forced starvation, like Sudan and Gaza. 500 tons of life-saving rations that were ordered to be destroyed by our current administration.



Or the bread could be unleavened bread or matzah that the Israelites ate the night before God would bring them out of slavery in Egypt.



Or the bread could be part of the meal that fed a multitude, with baskets of leftovers.



Or the bread could be that which was blessed and broken at the table of betrayal and desertion.



Or the bread could be go-bags given to our homeless, unhoused friends and neighbors.



When Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, he is teaching them to pray to a God who is in exile, a God who is deported, a God who is powerless. To a God who is a kindred spirit on the journey, who suffers and weeps with those on the forced long walk, the perp walk to the unmarked vehicle, the line to receive housing assistance, the line to receive emergency food in which you could get shot. Jesus urges his disciples to be persistent in prayer because God is not free until everyone is free.



What does it mean for people of privilege to pray to a God who is oppressed? First, it is an admission, a confession that we are not free either, that no one should be satisfied until all are liberated. How can we make justice if we have not joined with those who suffer injustice, sometimes at our own hands? How can we love mercy if we are not merciful with those in need of mercy? How can we move humbly with God if we only seek our own counsel?



For a people of privilege to pray to a God who is oppressed means we are a community that is willing to be oppressed ourselves, to disrupt our lives not only for each other but for those in need of liberation.



Black liberation theologian James Cone wrote, “The Christian community, therefore, is that community that freely becomes oppressed, because they know that Jesus himself has defined humanity’s liberation in the context of what happens to the little ones. Christians join the cause of the oppressed in the fight for justice not because of some philosophical principle of ‘the Good’ or because of a religious feeling of sympathy for people in prison. Sympathy does not change the structures of injustice. The authentic identity of Christians with the poor is found in the claim which the Jesus-encounter lays upon their own lifestyle, a claim that connects the word ‘Christian’ with the liberation of the poor. Christians fight not for humanity in general but for themselves and out of their love for concrete human beings.”



If this nation actually was a Christian nation, if we actually cared about people, we would make the right way, the legal way into this country crystal clear. We wouldn’t be picking immigrants off the streets with armed masked thugs. If we actually cared about people, we wouldn’t deinstitutionalize people without any support or services, only 40 years later to declare drug use and homelessness a crime. If we actually cared about people, we wouldn’t strip them of their basic humanity. We would invest in education, healthcare, and housing as human rights. If we actually cared about people, we wouldn’t be funding a genocide.



When we pray to a God who is in exile, when we are persistent with our prayers, that frybread, those emergency biscuits, that broken bread, those go-bags, that can of food on the communion table—it all becomes resistance to the evil we unleash on one another. They become the beginnings of liberation, our intention to travel the good road no matter what. They become the dance of hope, the tools, the art supplies of repair, the outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible mystery called love, what we know as sacrament.



It will be so when we make it so. When we become the prayer. Amen.

Benediction


May we be a living prayer
Creator is in all things, all creatures, all people, all lands and waters
When we live in reverence with everything around us,
God is there with us
When we join ourselves to the oppressed
God is there with us
Let us go persisting in the Ways of Love
Amen.