May 10, 2026 - Sixth Sunday of Easter: The Holy Quotidian: Broken Shoelaces

May 10, 2026  Sixth Sunday of Easter
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Mark 7:24-30
“The Holy Quotidian: Broken Shoelaces”
Douglas T. King

Do you ever have one of those days?  You go to pour the milk for your cereal only to discover the carton is empty.  There is a fender bender traffic jam on the 64 and you are late getting to the office.  To make up for the poor start to your day you decide to treat yourself to a fancy cup of coffee and the barista gets your order wrong.  When you get to work you end up getting into a heated disagreement with a coworker over something entirely inconsequential.

There are things that happen in our day, over which we have little control and they upend our plans.  And then there are things that happen in our day, over which we have control, and we bungle them completely.  The joke with my wife, Marta, is that the smaller the issue is the more likely I am to completely lose my mind over it.  If the sky is falling I am completely prepared to respond calmly and with focus to an actual crisis at hand.  Now, if I break a shoelace tying my shoes in the morning I am likely to run screaming around the room doing a spot on impression of a three-year-old in mid-tantrum wailing at God “woe is me, how could you let this befall me!”

Unfortunately for my spiritual health there are quite a few broken shoelace moments in our daily lives.  The writer Rod Dreher writes, “Everydayness is my problem.  It’s easy to think about what you would do in wartime, or if a hurricane blows through…It’s a lot more difficult to figure out how you’re going to get through today without despair.”
 
As in so many things in this life, we often forget that we have an actual and very real choice in how we respond to broken shoelaces, spats with spouses and all the details of our days.  Today is the third sermon in my series on how the quotidian can shape our spiritual lives.  Yes, even the pratfalls and bungles of our days offer us an opportunity to grow closer to the divine.

When we have a day when everything goes according to plan it is easy for us to be lulled into the notion that we are indeed the masters of our own fate.  Heck, the new client loved my ideas, the kids actually enjoyed the dinner I cooked and somehow I even found five minutes at the end of the day to pick up a book and read.  I’ve got this.  Life is clearly under my control.  

But when things go sideways, we are reminded that not only are all things not under our control but we could use a little help from a lot of different places including primarily from the divine.  We have been given the gift of a God who has chosen to take on human form. Jesus lived through his own share of broken sandals, bickering disciples and much worse.  In this morning’s text we heard the story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman.  Jesus was looking for a quiet moment away from the breakneck pace of a ministry of teaching, healing, and confrontations with Pharisees.  Even the Son of God needs a moment to catch his breath.  But it was not to be.  He is once again confronted with the endless need of those surrounding him.  But to make matters worse, this was not even someone from his people.  Now he has a foreigner asking him to provide healing.  Will the whole world be on his doorstep next?  His curt response is not Jesus at his best, in fact it is awful.  “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  

Frankly, I have always loved this text.  It gives me great comfort that even Jesus can be off his game once in a while. But what happens next is what is most important.  The woman is quick to politely yet forcefully respond to Jesus’ rebuke, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”  At this point Jesus could have certainly not been listening.  What does the Son of God have to learn from some random, foreign woman, after all, she already has two strikes against her!  But Jesus does listen and what’s more, he repents.  He reaches beyond his tiredness and frustration and preconceived notions of boundaries and finds an opportunity for learning and healing.  “…the demon has left your daughter.”  His broken shoelace moment becomes a time for him to grow in his understanding of his role as the savior to all people.  

Our broken shoelace moments give us the chance to grow in our understanding of how we are called to be disciples of Christ.  Tish Harrison Warren writes this about how she would like to respond to her broken shoelace moments, “I need to cultivate the practice of meeting Christ in these small moments of grief, frustration, and anger, of encountering Christ’s death and resurrection—this big story of brokenness and redemption—in a small, gray, stir-crazy Tuesday morning.”  (Warren, p. 56)

It is easy for us to overlook the potential for little moments in our lives to also be important moments, important spiritual moments.  If we have an argument with someone and realize that the debate was more about our ego than any other issue we have the opportunity to repent and realize that God has called us to live lives of humility, valuing relationships over saving face.  When too many little things go wrong in a day and we doubt that we have the strength and fortitude to carry on we have the opportunity to repent of the notion that we can get by on our own strength alone.  When anything that occurs in our day serves to show us that we are less than perfect, we have the opportunity to be reminded of our God who is perfect, present in our lives, and perfectly loving us every day.
 
I am not sure I will ever stop having a tantrum when one of my shoelaces breaks.  But I hope to grow enough in my faith that one day, after I calm down, I can recognize that I have been given an opportunity to repent and turn toward the one who has promised to bring healing and wholeness to every part of me that is broken in any way.

Thanks be to God even for broken shoelaces. Amen.        
  
Warren, Tish Harrison, liturgy of the ordinary, IVP Books,
 Illinois, 2016.