Hourly Bread

2024-46
sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
www.goodshepherdfw.org
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 14B), August 11, 2024
1 Kings 19:4-8 ; Psalm 34:1-8 ; Ephesians 4:25-5:2 ; John 6:35-51

Early last week I listened to an episode of Brene Brown’s podcast, Unlocking Us, in which she interviewed Richard Rohr. You may have heard of them. Brene Brown is a TED Talk veteran, bestselling author, and teacher of Sunday school kids at Christ Church Cathedral in Houston. Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest and bestselling author who’s really into the Enneagram.

At one point Brown quoted from Rohr’s book Breathing Underwater: “Only hour-by-hour gratitude is strong enough to overcome all temptations to resentment.”

Something about that felt simultaneously challenging and comforting to me. Imagine spending every hour of every day noticing the things we’re grateful for and thanking God for them. It follows on what I said last week, that everything good that happens in our lives is a gift from God. What if we just noticed that a lot more often—like, 15 to 20 times a day?

I’m not normally like that, though. Usually I move through my days on auto-pilot. I drink my morning cup of coffee while reading the news (which may or may not be a great way to move from resentment to gratitude)! I might go for a walk if I can get myself out the door, but I may instead let the computer glue me to my chair just a little bit longer. I drive to the church, and I may take surface streets if I have time, because it’s more interesting than sticking with I-5.

And so my day goes, and it’s easy not to notice the gifts I am given. So imagine my surprise, just in the past week, to be plunged into a situation where these hourly gifts from God became an overwhelming reality.

On Thursday morning Evan and I were puzzling over the fact that our copier/printer was broken again. (It’s working now, by the way, and I have no idea what changed. Kudos to Evan for finding a way to get our service leaflets printed for this morning.)

I checked my texts, and there was one from my child Sarah who was busy serving as a counselor at Camp Huston. It said, “Guess whose lucky streak got broken?” Yes, after over four years of avoiding it, Sarah had finally come down with COVID-19.

Now, in a normal week, this would have been disruption enough. I suddenly had to drive to Gold Bar and bring Sarah home to isolate for a few days. But we had picked the week Sarah was away to replace literally all the plumbing in our house.

Remember back when John McCain was running for president and he kept talking about “Joe the plumber”? Well, Joe was at our house, and yes, that’s literally his name. Joe had spent three days doing careful prep work so that when he finally did shut off our water, we would only be without it for one night—two at the max. As of now, the water was off.

Now, it's not like we didn’t have a plan. Christy and I had booked an AirBnB literally four doors down from our house. Brilliant, right? We only had that for one night, but if we needed a second night away, we could figure something out. Well, we had not anticipated sharing that AirBnB with an unregistered guest shedding virus all over the place. So I picked Sarah up, and we both wore masks in the car all the way home. Then I sneaked her into the AirBnB.

Meanwhile, Joe the plumber had a problem. The co-worker who was supposed to help him had bailed on the job. Joe was now working all alone, and some of the work was proving more difficult than he’d anticipated. He loaded up on energy drinks and worked late into Thursday night. No, strike that: he worked literally all night and kept working all day Friday!

At one point I asked Joe, “Do you have a bathroom in your truck?” Nope, no such amenity is provided. Anytime he heard nature’s call, he had to go find a place—a convenience store or something. I had never thought about such things before.

Now, Christy and I just had COVID ourselves a month ago, so we resigned ourselves to spending the night in the same room with Sarah, trusting in our temporary natural immunity. Friday was my day off, but Christy strapped on her KN95, got on the bus, and went to work. Sarah and I had to check out of the AirBnB by 11:00 a.m.

Now what? We couldn’t go home. Sarah’s active symptoms were receding into a profound exhaustion. And then Christy provided the solution. We happen to have a friend whose parents have moved from their condo into a retirement community, but the family still owns the empty condo! We called our friend Katrina, who said, “Yes, you can hang out there, but the HOA has strongly worded language about guests being there when the owner isn’t around. We’ll have to sneak you in and out.”

This involved parking our car in a public lot, then hopping into Katrina’s car so she could drive us into the residents’ lot. Sarah still had all her bags from camp, including her sleeping bag, and I had Christy’s and my bags from our night at the AirBnB. We got it all into the condo, and Katrina left us there, warning us that we could not leave the room until we left the condo for good. Sarah zoned out on the bed for four hours.

Well, what would we do when Christy got off work? Could we go home yet? I called Joe, and he predicted that he might—might—have the water restored late that evening. Nope, that wouldn’t do. We decided to go to Christy’s dad’s place in Bellevue, a large house where Sarah could get in the door, go straight to a room all by herself, and not interact with her elderly grandpa at all. And Christy and I wore masks around him and only hung out with him outdoors before going to bed. I texted Joe and insisted that he go home, get a good night’s sleep, and resume work in the morning.

I don’t usually share such long personal anecdotes in a sermon, but I hope you see the point. I’m not used to having to make hour-by-hour decisions to meet my basic needs and those of my family. But other people do. I’m not used to having to decide whether to break the rules just to have access to a restroom and running water. But other people do.

The thing is, for most of the past few days, I have not felt all that stressed out. I have felt focused and accomplished. And I’ve noticed something else. Nearly every hour, I have felt remarkable gratitude. Just look at how robust our safety net is! When we couldn’t do for ourselves, others were there at every turn to give us what we needed. All of these people—and all of these situations—are in some way gifts from God. And yes, seen another way, they are all marks of unearned privilege.

Last week we had a guest at our 10:30 service: the Rev. Jeffrey Boyce, a deacon who is our diocesan missioner for the unhoused. In a conversation at coffee hour, he talked with us about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Remember that from school? At the bottom of the pyramid are our basic physiological needs: do we have food, shelter, access to a restroom? At the next level is basic safety, and we can’t make this a primary concern before our physiological needs are met. Then come belonging and love … self-esteem … intellectual fulfillment … aesthetic fulfillment … and finally self-actualization and transcendence.

I think a lot of people assume that all the church’s talk of God is primarily about transcendence. It would be nice to have that, but who has time? We’re too busy trying to achieve self-actualization, or intellectual and aesthetic pursuits. This is the language of the privileged who have all the needs at the bottom of the pyramid consistently met. But no … God doesn’t meet us merely at the level of transcendence. God meets us day by day—and hour by hour—at the very bottom of the pyramid. If we don’t see that, it’s only because we’re not accustomed to the need for hourly gratitude.

Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Do you see? The bottom of the pyramid.

You can also turn Jesus’ words into a metaphor for transcendence, and that’s not wrong. In that same podcast, Brene Brown and Richard Rohr pointed out that when religion doesn’t move people toward the contemplative, mystical, and transcendent, it becomes part of the problem instead of the solution. We always need to be about “healing, forgiving, reconciling, and peacemaking,” which cannot happen if we don’t first have enough to eat. God is definitely at the top of Maslow’s pyramid as well. God is found at every level of the pyramid.

But Jesus didn’t speak kind words to the self-made and self-assured. His audience was a whole race of people who were oppressed, downtrodden, barely getting by. Every day they worked hard for their food and frequently suffered through disease and tragedy. And, of course, they didn’t have indoor plumbing! When Jesus preached, his congregation was far more like the people who have been camping our woods than like most of us sitting in these pews today. In that same podcast, Brene Brown said, “I don’t trust a spirituality that doesn’t have dirt under its nails.”

“Only hour-by-hour gratitude is strong enough to overcome all temptations to resentment.” This morning, our house has a working toilet, but still no running water otherwise. Joe’s work will continue both today and tomorrow, and I could feel resentment about that ever-slipping timeline. Life does throw us for loops, so we need a prayer practice. Not just daily, but hourly. That doesn’t mean selling everything and moving into a monastery. But it does mean turning up the dial on our capacity to notice the blessings all around us.

What if God’s primary work in the world is simply offering us the means not to die yet? Of course, we will all die eventually—that’s a given. And many people die way too young, and not necessarily at the hands of other humans. I assure you, I don’t understand why that might be any better than you do.

But when we taste and see that God’s world is good, and when we keep the taste of God always fresh in our mouths, maybe we can walk in love as Jesus urges us to do. This once-weekly occasion of praise and prayer is only the bottom of our pyramid of spiritual needs. But raise your hand if you can think of a time when you have found yourself thanking God outside of a Sunday church service.

Yeah, that’s what I thought. After the service today, share some of those stories with each other. Let those stories serve as fuel for your hourly practice of gratitude. And later today when you pray again, try this one on for size: “Give us this hour our hourly bread.” Amen.