The Spiritual Practice of Boredom
July 7, 2024
Exodus 16:1-4, 31; Numbers 11:4-6, 16-20
Matt Goodale
Well today, since it’s my five year anniversary at the church, I had the brilliant idea of preaching to you on boredom. Yeah, I didn’t really think that one through did I?
You know, maybe subconsciously I chose this sermon to hedge for the next five years in case I’ve used up all my good sermon ideas and so if I can convince you that boredom is a legitimate spiritual practice, then you won’t have any reason to ever complain about my preaching! In fact, if you find yourself bored during the sermon today you’ll know it’s working.
This is actually a sermon idea I’ve had for a couple years, I’ve just never gotten around to it.
One of the reasons I’ve wanted to preach on this topic is because I think boredom is largely disappearing from our lives and our vocabulary. Living in such a fast-paced technological age where entertainment and stimulation are always literally right at our finger tips…this isn’t the world I grew up in…this isn’t the world any of us grew up in.
When we were kids, if we complained about being bored we’d be told to go find some sticks to play with or something. I distinctly remember hours of boredom as a kid and how I would give anything to avoid it. And as an adult now, I rarely experience boredom, because I don’t have to. If I’m bored, pick up my phone. If I’m bored, turn on a show. If I’m bored, play online chess. Kid Matt would be overjoyed to hear this is the life he would be growing up into…but it’s ironic, because as boredom has largely disappeared from my life, I think I miss it, and I think I’ve lost something in its absence.
I did a quick Google search this week on boredom and the Christian life and from modern bloggers to ancient theologians, pretty much everyone seemed to think boredom and the Christian life shouldn’t go together. I saw people argue that boredom leads to sin, or it means that you’re not joyfully living out the life God desires for you. Someone made the point that if you’re bored, then you probably aren’t doing your spiritual practices right.
So maybe I’m just the dummy going against the grain here, but I wonder, what if—what if boredom is one of the places in our lives we can encounter God? And what if boredom is actually a strange gift that nourishes us?
Our story today is one we’re familiar with. The Israelites are wandering in the wilderness after escaping Egypt and they’re hungry. They’re out of food and so they ask God for help and God provides. God sends food in the form of manna, a flaky bread that daily appeared on the ground outside their tents to be collected.
Can you imagine for a moment what it would have been like to be an Israelite that first morning you open up your tent flap to stretch and you find flakes of bread everywhere. And then you wake up the next day and the same thing and the next day and the next month and next year, everyday there is always enough food for you and the entire community, just sitting right there on the ground, waiting to be picked up and enjoyed. This is incredible! You just wake up and your food for the day is there!
And the Israelites were amazed by this and grateful…at least for awhile. Until they grew bored of it. After a time of wandering and always waking up to the same thing, the miracle of it began to wear off and it slowly turned to monotony. They grew bored of their daily bread. They want something a little more exciting. They want some meat. “Forget bread, God, hook us up with a nice steak and three course meal, if you could please.”
Every Sunday as part of the Lord’s Prayer we pray “Give us this day, our daily bread.” Why not, “Give us this day, our daily steak!” Or if you’re vegetarian you might prefer, “Give us this day, our daily salad with sliced strawberries, roasted nuts and balsamic glaze.”
We are told that the Israelites have “lost their appetite” for daily bread…they want something new, something different, something more exciting than the simple provisions God was giving them…they want the stuff they used to have all the time back in Egypt like fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic.
The miracle of daily bread (that they felt that first morning they woke up to it) has worn off and they’re ready to move on to the next best thing. I think we know a bit of what this is like…we know what it is like to lose our appetite for something that began as a miracle but has lost its shine.
We live in a fast-paced culture that markets to us the idea that happiness is always in something new or something more. We are shaped by social media, marketers and a consumer culture that promises us happiness is just one click and two days of Amazon shipping away. Do you feel unhappy? Try a new phone. Bored? Binge all nine seasons of the Office on Netflix. Worn out by the monotony of your job? Take a vacation! Want something more than a dull hum-drum existence? Lease this car, move to this exotic place, try these new pills.
Thank God for the age we live in, where we never have to be bored or discontent or experience dull living ever again. Thank God we never have to lose our appetite when there is always something new to try.
The Israelites would love 21st century America. It has all the fish, cucumbers, leeks and melons they could ever want. No more need for the dull monotony of daily bread.
I’ve thought about this as a parent over the last couple of years. I remember those first few weeks, even months of holding Iona and how I was so content with just sitting and holding her. It was my daily bread. It was a miracle I held in my hands. I couldn’t imagine ever growing bored of being a parent.
But then the months and eventually years pass, and while I still love being with Iona, I often find myself bored with the monotony of parenting each day. Each day, spending time with her is much the same thing, and I catch myself reaching for my phone or a book or something else that will entertain me and push the boredom and monotony of my day away. I’ve grown tired of stooping down to pick up the same daily bread day after day. The miracle has worn off.
And I’ve noticed that how I feel is such a contrast to Iona’s experience of the world. She delights in the simple pleasures that quickly become a dull monotony to me. She wants to sing the “Baby shark” song over and over again, and finds just as much joy in the eighth time as the first. The only song she wants to listen to in the car is “We Will Rock You” by Queen and still cheers at the guitar part, while I would give anything to listen to something else. She wants to draw hundreds of airplanes with sidewalk chalk and I’m done after two.
Iona, I’ve noticed, never grows tired of stooping down to pick up God’s daily bread for her and delight in the miracle of it. And it makes me wonder…what happened to me? What happened to us? How, as a culture, did we end up where we are…with little appetite for the simple joys and pleasures of life found in the very ordinary routines and rhythms of God’s daily bread for us? How did we end up like the Israelites, bored by the miracle that was saving their lives?
In our story, the most striking part of it is that God actually gives the Israelites what they want. They’re bored of their daily bread, so God gives them exactly what they ask for…until it makes them sick…until it’s coming out their noses.
We have also been given everything we could want and it’s making us sick. We have access to near constant entertainment and diversion and noise so that we never have to be bored again, we never have to sit in silence alone if we don’t want to, we never have to confront what that boredom and that silence brings out in us.
There’s a song by Twenty-One Pilots called Car Radio. And it’s the story of how the singer’s car radio was stolen and so now he hates driving his car because it’s so quiet and he has nothing to distract him from his thoughts now; he has nothing to mask what is real.
The Israelites reminisce about Egypt as if it was some vacation where they could eat anything they wanted. They want to go back to it rather than have to eat God’s daily bread again. They seem to forget that yes, they had everything to eat in Egypt, but they were also slaves.
In 21st century America, we have access to anything we want anytime…any form of entertainment or numbing or escape or distraction we want…and we are slaves to it. We spend so much of our lives now with a screen in front of our face…always either entertained, distracted, numbed, and somehow still deeply unsatisfied with life. The melons and leeks and cucumbers of Egypt taste great, but they never fill us up.
And so this got me thinking. A lot of commentaries point out that what led the Israelites to rejecting God’s daily bread was boredom. So boredom should be avoided through healthy spiritual living.
But I think that’s too simplistic. I mean, we’re human, it’s not as if we can just turn off boredom. We get bored, it’s ok. I think the issue the Israelites have, is that they’re too uncomfortable with their boredom…they want to get rid of it, so they run away from it. The same way we do with ease now.
And so I wonder, what would happen if we learned to see boredom not as a sign of something gone wrong in us or as something to avoid…but if boredom is an invitation to experience God’s daily bread again, anew?
Boredom will always creep in eventually and when it does we have a choice. We can avoid it at all costs…we can run to our phones or entertainment options or other addictions of choice; we can fill our life with more noise, more productivity…or we can lean into the boredom to find the manna…to find the daily bread in it.
Remember we learned that manna in Hebrew literally means “What is it?” When the Israelites walked out of their tents on that first morning and saw flakes of bread lying on the ground they said, “What is it?” When we’re bored, when the noise has died off because our car radio is stolen, when we hit that uncomfortable space that has us reaching for any distraction we can get our hands on, we finally have the space to ask, “What is it God? What is it that you have to give me today? What is the daily bread that has already fallen from heaven and all I need to do is slow down enough to notice and collect?” And that’s where faith comes in, I think.
In Greek, the word for faith is pisteuo. And it literally means to trust. So when the Bible talks about having faith in God, it doesn’t mean believing all the right doctrine, it very literally means to trust God. To trust that God is good. To trust that God has your best interest and the best interest of our world in mind. And it means to trust that this very day, God has already given you all the daily bread you need to live on.
To have faith is to trust that each day brings with it more daily bread to nourish you. Sometimes it will not feel like enough. Sometimes we will wonder why God can’t do better and give us some meat. But faith is learning to wake up each day with the trust that God has already given us everything we need.
A life of faithfulness, a life of following Jesus and waking up everyday to collect our daily bread isn’t always exciting or glamorous…Jesus never promised it would be. God’s daily bread isn’t always flashy. But it is life-giving. It is the life that never runs out, that is always enough to fill you.
God’s daily bread can take the shape and form of many things if we have the eyes for it. It might be a beautiful sunrise, or an hour spent pushing your kid on the swing, it might be warm bath on a cold night or a meaningful conversation with a loved one. And sometimes it may be the gift of boredom itself. Because if there’s one thing boredom does, it doesn’t allow us any escape from the present moment. And the present moment—this moment right now—is the only place we will ever encounter God.
Amen and may God give us this day our daily bread.