May 3, 2026 - Fifth Sunday of Easter: The Holy Quotidian: Chores

May 3, 2026  Fifth Sunday of Easter
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Leviticus 2:4-13
“The Holy Quotidian: Chores”
Douglas T. King

Anybody worried about what I am going to do with this text?  
I know, me too!  It feels like only Anne Peacock could do something productive with all this endless talk of grain.  But let’s see how we do.

“Lord of all pots and pans and things, make me a saint by getting meals and washing up the plates.”  This prayer is from a monk in a monastery in France in the seventeenth century.  Debbie Fondren wrote “Brother Lawrence was able to turn even the most commonplace and menial task into a living hymn to the glory of God.”  If only it were so for the rest of us.  

This is the second sermon in a series on the holy quotidian, how our daily routines and ordinary living can bring us closer to God.

What we do every day, why we do it, and how we do it, ultimately shapes and defines who we are.  The ways in which we empty the dishwasher, take out the recycling, drive to work, shop for groceries, are actually important.  If we engage in these everyday tasks with continual resentment, we risk becoming resentful people.  If we engage in them in a numb and distracted manner we risk becoming just that, numb and distracted.  And to be honest many of us have quite often approached the daily chores of our lives with some combination of resentment, numbness and distraction.  

Believing that these tasks could function as a way to deepen our spiritual life feels like trying to pull the proverbial rabbit out of a hat.  But imagine if we could do just that.  Not the rabbit out of the hat but deepening our spiritual life in the midst of our humdrum routines.  

The Episcopal Priest Tish Harrison Warren found a way to do this by slightly shifting the first activity of her day.  She used to start her day by scrolling through her phone, catching up on the news, and being entertained on Facebook and Youtube.  
She was first and foremost a consumer.  She writes, “We are shaped every day, whether we know it or not, by practices—rituals and liturgies that make us who we are.”(Warren p.29)

And then one day she became curious about making her bed.  Obviously not curious about how to make the bed, she knew how to do that.  She was just not someone that ever made her bed. I mean after all why bother, you will only be climbing back into it at the end of the day again anyway.  After surveying friends she found out that some of them were passionate bed-makers, so she figured why not give it a try.  And she made a discovery.  
Not a Martha Stewart discovery.  It did make her bedroom look neater but that was not it.

She writes, “After my makeshift sociological study on bed making, I decided that for Lent that year I’d exchange routines: I’d stop waking up with my phone, and instead I’d make the bed, first thing. I also decided to spend the first few minutes after I made the bed sitting (on my freshly made bed) in silence.  So I banished my smartphone from the bedroom.  My new routine didn’t make me wildly successful or cheerfully buoyant
as some had promised, but I began to notice, very subtly, that my day was imprinted differently. The first activity of my day, the first move I made, was not that of a consumer, but that of a co-laborer with God.  Instead of going to a device for a morning fix of instant infotainment, I touched the tangible softness of our well-worn covers, tugged against wrinkled cotton, felt the hard wood beneath my feet.  In the creation story, God entered chaos and made order and beauty.  In making my bed I reflected that creative act in the tiniest, most ordinary way.  In my small chaos, I made small order,” (Warren, p. 28)

Now I am not suggesting that making the bed and connecting it with God’s act of ordering creation is the answer for all of us.  But perhaps it is an example which can spark our imagination.  So much of our lives are taken up by the daily routines of maintaining our physical presence.  At first glance it may seem that those things impede our ability to grow spiritually, taking time and energy from other more ethereal pursuits.  

But as Christians we are deeply and doubly grounded in an incarnational sense of the divine’s presence.  We believe God is in the world.  First of all, the Jewish tradition from which we are born, has a deep faith that God is present in our midst
and that holiness is present in this earthly realm.  That is why the Old Testament is filled with instruction about how to do just about every aspect of our daily life.  Our scripture lesson this morning was a small portion of Levitical law.  It is easy to read through the endless detail of this text and much of the kosher laws and ponder whether God is a bit fussy and punctilious but that is not how we need to hear these texts. These texts are a reminder that God is invested in the daily details of our lives; deeply invested in how we live our lives; how we get through the daily grind; how we flourish or not in this world.

That is why Rabbi Jonathan Sacks refers to the book of Leviticus and all its rules for every aspect of life as “the democratization of the holy.” (Sachs p. 1)  God is present in each and every nitty gritty moment.  Or as Rabbi Sachs says, “The holy is where the transcendent becomes immanent.” (Sachs, p. 19)

And the second way we are grounded incarnationally is in Jesus Christ.  Our belief that God chose to take human form.  Jesus had to wake up every morning, wash his face, scrounge around for some breakfast, and engage in the daily rituals of life just as we do.  In a few moments we will gather around this table and remember a simple meal shared with friends.  The drudgery of our days is just as imbued with the presence of God
as our time together in worship, or when we pray, or any other traditionally labeled spiritual thing we do.  The only difference in any of these acts is how we choose to perceive them.

The challenge for us, is finding ways to incorporate this reality into our day to day, to recognize that existence itself, created by the divine, is permeated by its creator.  The great Jewish scholar, Abraham Heschel wrote, “Just to be is a blessing.  Just to live is holy.”  I hope one day we can be just like Brother Lawrence and be able to celebrate God’s presence in our midst in all things.  I hope we will be able to recognize ourselves as co-laborers with God and our daily actions as an opportunity to participate in God’s glorious creating and sustaining actions.

“Lord of all pots and pans and things, make us saints by getting meals and washing up the plates.”  

Indeed.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Sacks, Jonathan, Leviticus: The Book of Holiness, Maggid Books, New Milford, CT, 2015.

Warren, Tish Harrison, liturgy of the ordinary, IVP Books, Illinois, 2016.