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Good morning. On Monday the Social Metrics Commission produced a report on poverty in the UK. The commission – with expert members from across the political spectrum and chaired by Philippa Stroud, a Conservative peer – found that overall poverty levels have changed very little since the millennium and that currently over 14 million people are in poverty in the UK. In recent years rising levels of hardship have affected especially children, larger families, lone parent households and pensioners, but perhaps the most striking statistic is that more than 4 million people in the UK are trapped in deep poverty, struggling week by week to make ends meet, with incomes at least 50% below the official breadline. Christianity’s most hallowed prayer – the Lord’s prayer, which Jesus gave to his disciples when they asked him, ‘teach us to pray’ – knows about the breadline. As prayers go it is very short and concise – just five lines and five petitions in the version we have in Luke’s Gospel – and one of the petitions is devoted to the simple request to avoid falling below the line: ‘give us this day our daily bread’. The fact that the prayer is so very concise and compressed suggests that in understanding it we need to pay careful attention to precisely what it does say, and all the more so where the prayer is in a certain and striking way repetitive – as if to make a point. The prayer could have said, so you might thought, ‘give me this day daily bread’. But it doesn’t say that – it says give us daily bread; and in case you have just missed the first person plural, it is not just ‘give us daily bread’, but ‘give us our daily bread’. The point is clear and underlined – Jesus instructs his disciples to pray for bread for all, for sustenance not just for me as an individual, but for an ‘us’ which includes, as Christians would see it, all people. When he has finished teaching his disciples how to pray, Jesus speaks to them in parables, parables about trusting God to answer prayer. And he asks rhetorically – ‘Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion?’ ‘No, of course not’, we are supposed to say. And yet we know only too well that there are mothers and fathers who, existing below the breadline, cannot give their children the simple things for which they might ask. The Government insists that tackling poverty is a priority and Baroness Stroud says that the issues highlighted by the Report show that there is a pressing need for a visionary and concerted approach to the problem – in particular as it bears on children. The prayer, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ sets a worthy goal for such action – that all should live above, and none below, the breadline.