Father Joshua Daniel

Year B Proper 11

Sermon Text: Mark: 6:30-34, 53-56

(Pictured: Qumran, Judean Wilderness, Palestine)

(Audio cuts out half way)

 

 

 

There is much to like in Robert Fulghum’s well-known book, Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Here are just a select few insights. 1. Share. 2. Play fair. 3. Put things back where you found them. 4. Flush. And last but not least, 5. Take a nap every afternoon. There is real wisdom there. Jesus also has a thing or two to say about the importance of children, the importance of seeing the world through their eyes. Later in Mark Jesus quite provocatively says, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” More on that later (like in October, which is when we’ll read that passage). For every thing that children do know–and in some ways know better than we do–there is something that hardly any child can appreciate. And that’s what I want to focus on today. The blind spot for all children. Boredom. This is a sermon about boredom. A sermon–to the horror of children everywhere–meant to celebrate boredom.

I’m not a culture warrior. I don’t get overly concerned about the “war” on Christmas or whether prayers are spoken over the intercom before school. But one of the cultural trends that does concern me is the growing lack in boredom. The decay of boredom. The pervasive desdain our culture has towards it.

And I speak about this not from a safe distance, eyeing all you sinners. But rather as someone who personally struggles to be bored. Someone who, as a parent, fails to adequately bore my children.

Almost a year ago I got the first upgrade to my phone in seven years. I went from an iphone 4 to an iphone 7. It was magical. After several failed, what I will generously call “updates” to the phone, everything because a negotiation. I would open it and ask, Will you work today? Will you tell me if someone calls? Will you not leave me holding the bad with bad directions in the middle of a trip? Sometimes–in fact, I think it’s fair to say, many times–the answer was no. No, I will not help. Not today, sorry.

But the new phone never talked back to me. I could make calendar appointments. I could check my mail any time I wanted. I could listen or watch news as I cleaned the dishes after super.

Living the last three years so far away, my family travelled by airplane more than we ever have. Switching phones was like the difference between travelling in an airport with multiple connections with young children in tow to flying direct without children.

What I mean to say, dear people of God, is that the struggle is real. With my new phone the problem of boredom became real. It became real because boredom–for at least the first few weeks of having the phone–almost disappeared completely from my life.

I won’t lay out the clinical case for the dangers that screens (like my magical, wonderful new phone–but also tablets and other small and large TV devices) pose for our individual and collective mental and physical health. As far as I understand them, though, many researchers are very concerned about the effect screens are having in our culture.

Imagine all the events in your day as large stones in a sturdy vase. There’s a rock for walking the dog, there’s a rock for the current project at work, for the drive home, for preparing the day’s meals, for getting ready for bed, etc. At the end of the day the vase is full of different sized rocks. But there’s still plenty of space in between them. Screens have become the sand that fills up the empty space in the vase.

Where there might have been some empty space between different events in the day, my phone often fills up that gap. I struggle to find “downtime” now. To sit and be still.