13 November 2005
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer
Church of the Redeemer
New Haven, Conn.
Scripture: Matthew 25: 31-46
Alert to What? Part I
What do you pay attention to, and why?
I’m in a lecture hall at Harvard Medical School and a world-famous psychologist is about to speak to the 120 of us and an air conditioner in the wall starts to hum, rattle and vibrate. It’s clear that it is going to keep doing that. The professor says simply, “I’d like to direct your attention to the sound of the air conditioner and ask that you pay as much attention to it as you can.” Of course what happens, and he knows this, and we know he knows this, is that we thereby pay attention to the sound of his voice. We follow that and the sound of the air conditioner goes into the background. It’s not that we don’t hear it, but he builds it into our steady-state of awareness and we follow the bouncing ball of his voice and what it is he next wants us to pay attention to—which is, of course, his lecture. He said pay attention to the humming rattle but what we primarily paid attention to was his voiced directions.
It’s an old trick, recently rediscovered in politics and described by George Lakoff in his book on how the conservatives control the political debate in America because they set the language of the debate. “Don’t think of an Elephant,” the title of his book reveals his point: the person who gets to say that is the person who will make you think of an elephant, even when the donkeys try to change the subject.
Now no sermon should be without practical application—so before I direct your attention to the theme of scripture today, the presence and the re-appearing of God, let me give you a helpful application about how to pay attention. Our minds “hear” “yes” before they hear “no.” Which is why God lost out to Eve about the apple. What Eve heard when God said “do not eat the apple” was “eat the apple.” Not because she was evil, but because positive suggestion works better than negative suggestion, which the serpent understood. “You can eat the apple”—was his lead.
If you are in an emergency room and a disruptive dangerous event starts, what you say is: “we are all going to be very safe.” That tells people a positive possibility. Our brain, and hearts, like that. If you were to say, “Don’t panic!” what most people hear is an imperative to panic.
Try this with children. Or if you see someone walking out on a ledge, shouting, “Don’t jump!” isn’t as effective as “stay safe!”
So to get you to pay attention to this sermon, let me say that you need not pay attention to this sermon. You have many things on your mind and it is not necessary to pay attention to this sermon. Yet if you are, by now, paying attention to this sermon, it may be that paying attention to God’s presence could soon follow. God’s presence could soon follow your paying attention.
Yet we have an attention deficit disorder of our own to deal with. That’s a personal affliction of mine about which I am forever grateful to a New Haven psychologist who diagnosed and treated it 15 years ago when adults were not being considered for A.D.D. But our society has yet to be cured, diagnosed and cured of our great inattention to God and our endemic attention to everything else. Which is why our scripture is so important today: it is a story that reveals where to pay attention, where to pay attention to God.
But the level of anxiety, fear, and stimulation in our society is so high we can hardly focus on anything. We follow along with news cycles, not cycles of the sun or moon and stars.
Did you know that you can not think and watch T.V. at the same time! Being alert to your own thoughts and feelings, images or ideas, is not something our brain waves can do while they are being flooded by television.
This may be why we are often vaguely irritable when we turn off the T.V. We’ve temporarily lost track of our own minds. Not only is that uncomfortable, but it is not the will of God that we lose our mind. God wants an open channel to us. God wants us to channel God! And we can’t do that when we are paying attention to receiving T.V., even channel surfing.
When the T.V. goes off we are once again responsible for our own world, our experience. Returning from a vegetable state (“vegging out!” No?) is hard work, especially when we need to relocate the thread of our own consciousness (without which God cannot speak to us.)
The famous and profound Christian mystic and monk Thomas Merton only watched television two times in his life. I don’t know the second time for sure. But the first was that this great contemplative thinker saw a tidy-bowl commercial. Imagine having a mind and heart, a consciousness, that had never seen T.V. before and suddenly your brain is taking in a tidy bowl commercial, and that is all. Thomas Merton ended up writing the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz a letter saying that the American mind had made a religion out of cleanliness, had demonized the body, and made science and technology into a God! All that from a one and only tidy bowl commercial. I somehow think the second thing he saw on T.V. was the funeral of John F. Kennedy. Imagine…
So many of us in our America fear that the early onset of Alzheimer’s is what is going on. Maybe. Maybe aluminum cookware. Certainly mercury poisoning drove hatters mad in 19th century England, and lead-painted plates led to early deaths among the aristocracy in the 18th century. Maybe we are chemically losing our minds. It could be our mercury fillings, but our minds are not being filled by the spirit of God much either. And if it were, we would know how to pay attention and to what.
Now this is a sermon about how to think and act when God comes back. Of course for a lot of folks, it will be a meeting with God, as T.S. Eliot once said about the circular journey of the Christian mystic, “as if for the first time.” For a lot of us meeting God upon the Lord’s return will be more of an introductory meeting, a kind of “get-acquainted” session.
“Hi, I’m God, and I understand that you are you.”
“Well, yes I am. I didn’t quite catch your name? Ah…God. Yes. That’s your first name or last? Ah yes, both first and last. Sure, no problem. Like ‘Prince’ or ‘Madonna.’”
But leaving aside the great theological themes of the second coming, the judgment day to come, and all that that means or may mean about time—past-present-future—there is one human quality that stands out in all the Christian testimonies about God showing up in full force. And that quality is to be alert. To pay attention. A necessary watchfulness. Awareness. Be aware! So, what do you pay attention to, and why?
The last three weeks lectionary Bible readings—especially Matthew’s gospel and Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians are about being prepared. Keeping awake. Not being drowsy. Making the most of the gift of the moment. Acting right now for eternal life. The extreme ethic of the early Christians was a life pleasing to God because soon, very soon, was the coming of the Lord, again!
So it’s the “alertness” I want to lift up from scripture.
We have trouble enough preparing for the repetition of Christ’s first coming, Advent, with Christmas, we hardly know how to prepare for Christ’s second coming! (Perhaps that’s why the Puritans didn’t get “into” Christmas much—saving their focus for the coming time.)
And it seems to me that if, as we would say, God were ‘really” coming, it wouldn’t make any difference if it were the first or the second time! And so “the alert” is the same and the necessity of being alert just as crucial. A person’s, a people’s, religious life is—after all—what we pay attention to: what is our ultimate concern and how do we stay aware of it?
Now I’m not talking about something I don’t have any experience with. Not only have I read Walker Percy’s novel, The Second Coming; not only have I taught the Apocalypse—albeit to high school students—but I had a second-coming meeting with God last spring on Elm Street next to Battel Chapel. It happened in a “chance” meeting, a re-meeting, with 80+ year old William Sloane Coffin, former Yale chaplain, not everyone’s favorite person. And I’ll want to tell you about that “chance” “second” meeting and what it said about staying alert, and to what, in the second part of this sermon next week.
But we have an alertness problem we need to clear up if we are to be alert to God, first time or second time. We are in a bit of a fog these days.
As the bumper sticker says: “if you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention!” And most of us have outrage-fatigue, and we’ve tried to move on. And really as the joke goes, “we’re too poor to even pay attention.” Too poor and downtrodden by the avalanche of things we are supposed to be paying attention to.
Whatever the Biblical situation is that we are alerted to, to pay attention to, quite honestly we are almost incapable of doing that because our own cognitive situation is so pathetic. And that’s the word for it.
Here’s a story. My good friend the Buddhist nun practices meditation. She teaches meditation—which is really nothing more than a style of paying attention—to blue color Portuguese people in New Bedford, Mass. Real people who really are wanting help in knowing what to pay attention to in life, and how to do it.
My friend’s order sent her to Russia. There, she said, fellow meditators report that everyday Russians are just out of their minds, just cannot concentrate, and most don’t even know it. The fog of inattention is so great they think it’s normal. When you think of the number of top line accidents caused by front line people in Russia you begin to wonder if it might be an epidemic of inattention, lack of awareness, lost alertness: Chernobyl, the Russian fighter jet that shot down the Korean passenger plane, the self-sinking of their premier nuclear submarine, the repeated failures of Russian space missions, the botched rescue of the opera house hostage situation, or the elementary school hostage situation. Or the number of missing nuclear war heads. You wonder if it’s not a nation asleep at the wheel!
I wonder if they forget people’s names like we do? Of course anyone who has read a Russian novel knows that remembering a Russian’s name is no easy task. War and Peace is actually only 20 pages long when you take out all the changed names!
You could probably find examples of our own attention deficit disorder.
But for part one here, there is a direct, if overlooked, answer to the question of this sermon: what do you pay attention to, and why? That direct answer, and it is true for all of us in our unregenerate state, is: our ego. We pay attention to our ego, religiously. That we do know how to pay attention to!
Here at the church we’ve been looking into getting a burglar alarm system. Companies have told us about motion detectors, alarms that go off when something moves in a room. Our egos work like that: hyper-vigilant to any threat to our mental security and our physical survival. It’s normal animal behavior—like the twitching whiskers and the scanning ears of a cat. But it’s not spiritual behavior and it has nothing to do with the presence of God.
We live in an ego state of road rage: always alert to our defense: “who do you think you are?” Alert always to our offense: “do you know who I am?”
We know how to be nice, to make nice, unless or until someone else crosses our path that we feel totally entitled to. All church conflict is rooted in ego. The minister says to himself, herself: “who do they think they are?”--deciding what color to paint the office—or not deciding what color, as the case may be! And the committee member says, “Who does he think he is!” And more, “doesn’t he know who I am?”
Now I grew up with almost no available ego. My parents made me a Christian before I was a human. So I know the value of the fight to have what we therapists like to call a healthy ego, even ego recognition. But it hasn’t made me happy or blessed. It’s only allowed me to function. It seems to me at this point that the only good purpose for a healthy ego is so you stop getting in your own way and so that you stop missing God by paying attention to everything else—like cars, money, clothes, bodies, things like that.
An ego is temporary rescue from the worst of you, your Id, and the world. An ego is first aid. But when Jesus says to the man on the stretcher, “get up and walk,” it’s my belief that that means, “get up! You can throw your ego like your old legs away, and really walk in the spirit!”
Egos are like bumpers and car doors: they just keep getting dented!
What do you pay attention to and why?
Well, a sermon cannot be just a good question, but needs to offer a good response, if not answer or solution.
There is a way to be alert, so alert to the presence of God that you know just who to pay attention to and how to pay attention, what to do or say and how to both be yourself and forget your ego all at the same time.
Now do not reread today’s scripture. Do not think about the themes of attention. Do not wait expectantly for next week. And do not expect that there is a wonderful presence that has been awaiting your return for years, wherein your mind and your heart may abide in harmony and alertness for now and forever more. O.K.? Do not, I say, wait expectantly for the Second Advent, God’s great return.
Amen.