Scripture: Mark 1:1-8; Isaiah 40:1-8
This is one of those sermons that it’s a little embarrassing to be giving. Actually I guess every sermon is a little embarrassing for me—since I’m a heavy introvert and also since I often think that it takes some nerve to stand up here every week and think I’ve got something to say that at least touches on something of importance. So I try not to think too much about the nerviness and just go ahead and do my best with this particular, somewhat strange, form of communication.
But this week is more than just the normal embarrassment, because the topic I decided on is not one that I am particularly well-qualified to speak about, in fact is one that I am particularly unqualified to speak about. It’s a topic suggested to me, I’m doubly embarrassed to say, not by the scriptures or by any profound process of thought or prayer, but by the AOL homepage and a crossword puzzle.
One day earlier this week I went to answer some e-mails with the question of what I was going to preach about this Sunday also in the back of my mind. The headline that always pops up when you access America Online said something about President Bush making a comment on the bombing of what I believe was referred to as the Israeli hotel in Kenya. I of course knew that Cindy would be speaking to us this morning from her experience in Kenya, and I also knew that the Kenya Cindy is familiar with would normally not attract the attention of very many people in North America, and in fact the Kenya Cindy is familiar with was not now attracting anyone’s attention very much. What made Kenya newsworthy, what put it literally on my screen, was the fact that there had been a terrorist action aimed presumably at Israelis. We don’t pay attention to what happens in Kenya, I thought to myself, unless it involves Al Qaida, terrorism, and a threat against Israelis. I took note of this with some sadness and went about my business.
Later on in the evening I picked up a crossword puzzle, which I often do to clear my mind at the end of the day, and one of the first definitions I looked at was let’s say 17-across, heed. The answer, it turns out, was “pay attention”, which I took to be a sign from God. Oh, I get it, I thought. AOL calls my attention to the fact that it takes a terrorist bombing to get us to pay attention to a place like Kenya and then the crossword puzzle tells me to pay attention. I think I’m supposed to preach about paying attention.
So, with that kind of direct guidance from beyond, I settled on “attention” as my topic for the morning. The trouble is that signs from God, at least the ones I’m familiar with, the signs from God that come to me, don’t come accompanied by sermon outlines. I wasn’t told what I am supposed to say, and furthermore I realized, as I said at the outset, that I am a particularly unlikely person to be giving a sermon on the need to pay attention. People setting up the worship space here at JABA will often ask me where things go, and I almost always will think for a moment to pretend that I might know, and then confess that I don’t. (Of course I guess the people who ask haven’t been paying attention either or they wouldn’t have to ask.) But I do know that noticing things, paying attention, is not one of my strong points. Sometimes Ava will say something like: Notice anything different about the dining room…and once in a while I will get it right.
On the other hand, in my own defense, not only am I not the only one who is like this, but, I tell myself, just because I don’t pay attention to everything doesn’t mean that I don’t pay attention to anything. In fact this is true for all of us, at least to a degree. While some of us may be a bit better at focusing in on something, keeping our attention focused, or noticing details, mostly the issue is not really whether we do or don’t pay attention. We all pay attention to something. The question is, what? What do we choose to pay attention to, and why, and how do we decide? These are enormously important questions for each of us, soul questions if you will. And complicated, because there are so many things that try to claim our attention, and even so many things we may judge worthy of our attention. It’s hard to know how to even begin to reflect on the subject. This is not just one sermon, it’s a dozen sermons. In a way it’s every sermon.
But for today, let me try to keep it simple and stick with the issue as it was first presented to me, by AOL. The observation about Kenya was not meant to be, at least on reflection I didn’t mean it to be, a simplistic or moralistic one. It’s not that we shouldn’t be paying attention to statements made by the president or that a terrorist attack aimed at Israelis is of no concern or that Kenyans themselves would not consider the event as being important. Nor does it make any sense to berate ourselves or anyone else for not having daily life in Kenya in sharp focus at the front of our consciousness all the time. There are lots of places in the world that it would be good to keep track of and pay attention to, including different places in Charlottesville. We’re not going to keep track of all of them. And there is no reason to feel bad if Kenya is not one of those places we keep up with. So why should I feel saddened because it seems to take a terrorist attack to bring Kenya up on the screen?
Because the truth also is that what gets our attention is too often dictated by people with power. I realize that this is almost a truism, that this is almost a definition of what having power means, that people with power by nature are those who are able to define what it is we pay attention to. Nevertheless, there is a sadness here, that those without power don’t have a chance, don’t get their voices heard by much of anyone, aren’t even seen by most people, for all intents and purposes don’t have their existence recognized.
I had this brought home to me in a different way earlier in the week. Last Monday Incarnation Church across the street hosted a meeting of a group called the Interfaith Council on Public Policy at which Rob Bell, Mitch Van Yahres, and Criegh Deeds were present to have a dialogue with a few members of the religious community around Charlottesville. One of the issues that came up for discussion was the death penalty, and it was mentioned by Rob Bell actually, who is in favor of the death penalty, that it is presently applied unequally according to race, not as is commonly assumed so much the race of the perpetrator, but the race of the victim. Murderers of white people get the death penalty in Virginia much more often than murderers of people of color. Some murders attract the attention of our criminal justice system more than others, not that I particularly want that kind attention paid, but in my mind it’s another example of those with more power in the society being able to attract more attention, even in death.
There is an alternative. It is not to accept what others tell us is worthy of our attention. It is specifically to pay attention to those without power. It is to refuse to be dictated to. It is to set our own agenda for what we are going to pay attention to, and to let that be people who have not enough attention paid to who they are. So this is something to do for Advent, a spiritual discipline if you will. To decide from within ourselves what it is we are going to pay attention to and to pursue that with will and determination.
This is a spiritual discipline because it is not just a given, we don’t do this naturally, and it doesn’t come easily. What AOL considers important confronts me every time I decide to check e-mail, and that means I am not confronted by the realities in Kenya that when I think about it I know I ought to be confronted by and would deem more or equally important. I can easily pay attention to what the Daily Progress thinks is important just by picking up the morning paper. But Archie and others have consistently reminded us that what the Daily Progress thinks is important is not all there is. To pay attention to some other reality, even in Charlottesville, requires some concerted effort, and it is, I believe, a spiritual discipline because it is a matter of where our heart and mind and soul is directed.
A spiritual discipline is to not to let our attention be drawn to things that present themselves to us but to focus our attention, which is to say to direct our spirit, in the direction we have chosen, which we may pray is the direction that God may be directing from some hidden place within us.
And this all is of course more than just a matter of what we may arbitrarily choose to pay attention to. It’s a matter of what at some deep level we need to pay attention to, what God would have us pay attention to. We have a clue for that in Jesus, who precisely set forth a different vision of who ought to be paid attention to, and it was not those who held the power. It was his consistent spoken and lived purpose to pay attention to those who were not recognized as being worthy of attention.
To prepare for Jesus then, as Isaiah and John the Baptist urge us to do, is to prepare for a change in which everything will be turned inside out and upside down, and that will affect what we hear and what we see and who we see and what we even think about, and what we think we ought to think about. It reaches to the center of our being, this question of what we are to pay attention to.
I feel a need to add one other comment. Very often in our activist style when we say pay attention we also mean doing something about whatever it is we are paying attention to. To pay attention is to respond in some way, and if we don’t then we probably take that as an indication that we haven’t really paid attention. There’s obviously something morally questionable about seeing a need and doing nothing about it, or offering only prayers when something more concrete is also called for. But there’s another side to this too.
Ava and I met, as some of you know, on a trip to Guatemala which took us also to an area in Chiapas, Mexico where we visited some refugee camps of indigenous Guatemalans who had fled from their country because of the violence that had been directed at them from the military. They were now preparing to return to Guatemala, but they were a community in desperate need. Our delegation of white, middle class, North Americans was gratefully and warmly received by people who were impressed that we would care enough to make the trip to come and see them. A village council was called where we all, through interpreters, were asked to say something about ourselves. The Mayan representatives, when it was their turn to speak, started out by saying something about what their role in the village was, but quickly it turned into a plea for help. Each person in turn—school teacher, health promoter, whatever their job—all had a project that needed money, and each one made an appeal.
After this went on for a while the Catholic sister who worked with the community and who was accompanying us brought an end to the meeting and asked the North Americans to leave. We went off at some distance and could tell that an animated discussion was taking place, or I should say that mostly Sister Lucy was saying things to the community. What she said, she later told us because she wanted us to hear the same thing, was that what they had done was not good. That they should not speak or act as though the North Americans were people who had something to give and they, the Mayans, were the ones who were needy. She wanted them to know that they had something to give too and that they did not always need to be asking for something. She wanted them to know that they could also ask us what it is that we need. How can we help you? She wanted them not to be cast in the role of “the needy” or of “beggars”. She wanted them to be equals to the North Americans, not recipients of their charity. And she didn’t want them competing with each other for our money. Our very presence had unleashed an unhealthy dynamic in a society where being united and working together was a fundamental value and absolute necessity. And, of course, Sister Lucy wanted us to hear the same message, that we were equals of people in that village, not dispensers of charity, that we were needy in our ways too, not people coming here to generously offer our help or provide our North American money and our North American solutions to their problems.
Cindy and I have talked about this and I know there are similar ambiguities at work in relation to African peoples and communities, and I dare say in relation to communities much closer to home. Paying attention is one thing. Knowing how to respond is something else again, and can be filled with ambiguities. In a world with as much to fix as ours, what appears to be a solution to one problem can sometimes make other problems worse. And sometimes what needs to be fixed is not so much someone else’s problem as ourselves, which is one lesson I take from John the Baptist’s call for repentance. In any case, paying attention is not the same thing as thinking that we have to have solutions to problems. It is simply paying attention, praying for other and ourselves, keeping watch over others and ourselves. Those are all in themselves good things to do during Advent, and every other season of our lives. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 8, 2002