Reblogged from Huffington Post:
“I’m still the exact same person and I’m still a Republican and, most importantly, I’m still a person of faith trying to live life as a servant of God and the public. The only difference now is that I will also be doing so as honestly as I know how.”
“The Republican party is all about the government needing to stay out of people’s lives,” Fleck said. “I’m not a one-issue person and it’s not a one-issue party.”
Well said, Rep. Mike Fleck.
I borrowed this image and text from the NYPD Facebook page. It was written by Jennifer Foster, who witnessed the event and took the picture. In a world so full of criticism and negativity, it’s important to catch someone in the act of doing something right. This is Ms. Foster’s account of the event:
“Right when I was about to approach, one of your officers came up behind him. The officer said, ‘I have these size 12 boots for you, they are all-weather. Let’s put them on and take care of you.’ The officer squatted down on the ground and proceeded to put socks and the new boots on this man. The officer expected NOTHING in return and did not know I was watching*. I have been in law enforcement for 17 years. I was never so impressed in my life. I did not get the officer’s name. It is important, I think, for all of us to remember the real reason we are in this line of work. The reminder this officer gave to our profession in his presentation of human kindness has not been lost on myself or any of the Arizona law enforcement officials with whom this story has been shared.”
Nor has it been lost on us. Thank you, Ms. Foster and Officer DePremo.
There are lots of ways to feel or be powerless:
You can be trapped in the McDonald’s drive thru at rush hour, with a long line of cars in front of and behind you, and then realize after you order that you left your wallet at home. You can start telling an off-color joke to a friend or sibling, only to have your boss or your mom enter the conversation and ask you to continue with what you were just saying. You can propose to your significant other on the jumbo-tron at an NBA game, only to have that person say “no” in front of 10,000 people.
On a more serious note (not that rejected marriage proposals aren’t serious):
You can walk the hallways of your school in fear, watching your back for that bully who somehow always manages to find you anyway. You can cut every luxury and non-essential expense from your budget, only to realize that you still have to choose between paying rent and buying groceries for a week, because you’re hourly-wage job won’t allow you to do both. You can struggle for years to break a bad habit or overcome an addiction without much success.
There are lots of ways to feel or be powerless.
There is no such thing as absolute power. Every single person on this planet, up to and including the president of the United States, experiences powerlessness in some way or another. Officially or unofficially, everyone answers to someone.
In spite of this fact, or perhaps because of it, people everywhere are constantly trying to step over one another in an attempt to be top dog of whatever hill they happen to be climbing at the moment. In a social system where power comes in limited quantities, people try to take whatever they can for themselves, believing (rightly or wrongly) that with power comes security. So they grab whatever power they can get and use it to their own advantage. Powerful people fight one another for more power. People with this mentality tend to use phrases like, “It’s a dog eat dog world out there. It’s survival of the fittest. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. No one is looking out for you. You’re on your own.”
Compassionate and kind-hearted folks tend to wince at this kind of cynical talk. We don’t want to believe the world really works that way, but when we look at the facts, we have to admit that the world often does seem to work that way. What makes cynicism so enticing as a philosophy of life is its apparent realism in the face of difficult circumstances. Is this who we really are? Is this all we are? Or is there another way of being, of being of being alive, and of being human?
This morning’s gospel reading sets us down right into the middle of a particularly intense competition for power in the ancient Middle East. The religious authorities of Judea were engaged in an ongoing cold war with the occupying Roman government. Each side, through their official representatives, vied for the loyalty and obedience of the people. On the particular day in question, their conflict revolved around a common nuisance: Jesus of Nazareth, the latest in a series of so-called Messiahs who promised peace, liberation, and yes: power to the people of Judea. Each one would rise up, gather an army of zealous insurgents, try to overthrow the Roman occupation by terrorist campaign, and eventually fail. The religious authorities, on the other hand, had learned different ways of dealing with the occupation. Some, like the Pharisees, sought to empower Judean society by a return to traditional morals and values. In time, so they thought, God would intervene on their behalf to free them from foreign rule. Other groups, like the Sadducees, learned how to manipulate the strings of the political system from the inside.
Members of these last two groups saw Jesus as “just another self-appointed Messiah with his army of zealots.” As such, he was just another temporary nuisance and a threat to their power that had to be dealt with. So they brought him to Pontius Pilate, Rome’s appointed governor over the perpetually unstable and troublesome province of Judea.
Pilate, for his part, didn’t care about who Jesus was or the content of his message, nor did he care about the Pharisees and Sadducees with their incessant squabbling and competing strategies for survival. The only thing Pontius Pilate cared about was maintaining order and loyalty to the Empire. If this Jesus really was claiming to be the anointed one who would liberate the Judean people from Roman rule by military force, then Pilate would have to deal with him swiftly, in the name of maintaining civil order.
Jesus, for his part, was powerless: caught between multiple groups who were competing for power on a national stage. To the outside observer, he appeared to be a failed revolutionary: his closest followers had denied, betrayed, and abandoned him at the moment of truth. His own people had arrested him and handed him over for crucifixion, a punishment reserved for terrorists. Pilate’s job, in this situation, was to figure out whether Jesus really was a terrorist or not.
This morning’s gospel reading opens as Pilate begins his examination of Jesus. By all accounts, Jesus is helpless, powerless. He has been reduced to the status of a pawn in chess game between multiple powerful parties. The scene plays out as one would expect: Jesus is examined, cross-examined, tossed back and forth, and eventually executed, not because he was found guilty, but because Pilate could find no other way to regain control of a volatile situation.
But, when we look at the conversation between Jesus and Pilate in detail, a different picture emerges. The author of John’s gospel tells this story through the eyes of a Christian, writing decades after the events of Jesus’ crucifixion took place. As John tells this story, the positions of power are actually reversed. It is not Pilate who is interrogating Jesus, but Jesus who is questioning Pilate. Jesus makes no apology, confesses no crime, and concedes no ground. Reading this story is actually confusing to the modern reader because it seems like Jesus and Pilate are talking about two different things. In fact, they are. They’re not so much talking to each other as much as talking past each other. Pontius Pilate obviously doesn’t understand what this Jesus guy is all about and Jesus obviously doesn’t care about Pilate’s need to maintain order. Their conversation goes around and around but never really gets anywhere.
At one point Jesus says to Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world.” Pilate, thinking he’s finally found his opportunity, pounces and says, “So you are a king?” But Jesus wriggles away from his trap and returns the proverbial tennis ball back into Pilate’s court. “You say that I am a king.” Jesus says, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Their bizarre dialogue ends with an unanswered question in Pilate’s witty retort, “What is truth?”
Pilate never gets an answer to his question, presumably because he would never be able to understand any answer that Jesus gave him. In the language of John’s gospel, Pilate exists in “darkness”, quite apart from the “light” that Jesus offers. Pilate is an “unenlightened” being. The 21st century spiritual teacher and Catholic priest Richard Rohr would say that Pilate was “operating at earlier stage of consciousness” than Jesus was. Pilate was operating out of what Rohr would call a “tribal consciousness” wherein an individual is preoccupied by identifying with a particular group in conflict with all other groups. Competition and power are primary concerns for those who see the world through an “us vs. them” ideology like Pilate had. Jesus on the other hand, according to Richard Rohr, was operating out of a much higher, non-dualistic consciousness. He was not caught up in the petty us/them struggles of the world as Pilate knew it. In the eyes of Jesus, all people and all things are one in God. This is why Jesus was able to say to Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world.” I don’t think Jesus ever meant for us to think that he came from some far-off, magical kingdom in the sky where everyone is happy and sits around on clouds, playing harps all day. That is the stuff of fairy tales and story books. Nevertheless, Jesus’ kingdom is a reality and it truly is “not from this world” in the sense that it includes all people, all creation, and all other kingdoms in its wide, wide embrace.
As a king, the “king of kings” in fact, Jesus redefines power. In place of domination, Jesus holds up service as the ideal. He said to his disciples, “You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as this human being came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” At the Last Supper, we see Jesus leading by example in this regard as the Servant King. He gets up from the table, wraps a towel around his waist, and proceeds to wash his disciples’ feet. This was a task typically assigned to the lowest, most despicable slave. No one in his or her right mind would volunteer for this job, but Jesus told his disciples that this is what being a king, a leader was all about. Humble service, for Jesus, is one of the marks of true power.
In a similar vein, Jesus’ kingdom is “not of this world” because he rules by compassion and mercy rather than by violence and judgment. Forgiveness, according to Jesus, is the most powerful act any person can ever commit, whether king or peasant. Victory is not achieved when your enemy is defeated. Victory is won, according to Jesus, when your enemy becomes your friend.
Obviously, Jesus’ ideas seem “out of this world”. They were incomprehensible to Pontius Pilate. They were foreign to the Judean religious authorities. They still sound bizarre to our ears in the 21st century. We’re still operating out of a lower level of consciousness where our competitive, tribal concerns keep us from seeing the big picture, the whole of reality in which we live, move, and have our being.
When it comes to Jesus’ kingdom, we’re simply not there yet. We might not ever get there in this lifetime. But we, as those who claim to be Christians, who claim to follow Jesus, have an obligation and a responsibility to take Jesus’ words and Jesus’ life seriously. What Jesus is offering Pilate (and us, by extension) in today’s gospel reading is a new of being, of being alive, and of being human in this world.
Something inside each of us cries out for this. Even though we tend to give in to the temptation toward cynicism, even though we tend to trust in the power of warfare, weapons, and bombs to make a better world, even though we tend to seek power rather than service, there is nevertheless a deep longing within our souls for a world and a life where we will not have to live in fear and mistrust. Something inside each of us knows that this is not how the world was meant to be.
Something about Jesus awoke this longing within people. In some way that we still don’t fully understand, he embodied, even incarnated this alternative way of being in the world. In Jesus, the longing took on flesh and showed us what it could do if it was given the chance to run free over the face of the earth.
I have seen moments and known people in whom the Spirit of Christ does run free and raises them up above that immature, ego-centric tribal consciousness. I remember one such person who made an impact on my life when I was in high school. His name is Phil. He was a grad student and one of the leaders of a youth group I attended. Through him, I discovered another way of being, of being alive, and of being human in the world.
Phil was the first person I ever knew outside of my family who made me feel accepted for who I am. He spent time with me, mostly just goofing off and hanging around. He didn’t care that I wasn’t popular or influential in school. He didn’t preach to me. He didn’t have any kind of religious sales pitch for getting me to sign on the dotted line as a Christian. He just seemed to care. During my freshman year, when I was going through a hard time and even contemplating suicide, Phil was the one I trusted enough to open up to. He wasn’t a pastor or a therapist, but he knew how to love people like Jesus did and that’s what made the biggest impact on me.
Over time, I gradually came to see something in Phil. Looking back, I think I would call it the Spirit of Christ. And that, more than any sermon I’ve ever heard in my life, is what made me want to live as a Christian. I had been going to church ever since I was a baby, but I never had any desire to make that spiritual path my own. After my experience of seeing Christ in Phil, I wanted to follow Jesus too. Since that time, almost seventeen ago, I’ve been through several crises of faith and endured many seasons of doubt, but I keep on going back to the Christ I saw in Phil: Jesus who is the friend of the friendless, the one who welcomes the outcasts, the one who “eats with tax collectors and sinners”, the one who lives above and beyond this world’s sick systems driven by competition and lust for power, the one who offers me an alternative way of being, of being alive, and of being human in the world.
Each and every one of us is called to be a ‘Phil’ to someone, somewhere, at sometime. None of us is perfect, so we’ll each do it in our own small, temporary, imperfect, and partial way. But when the moment comes and the Spirit moves us, will we have the faith to set aside our twisted hunger for power and competition? Will we take up the mantle of compassion, humility, mercy, and service when it is needed? Will we allow Christ live again in us, so that someone else might hear and respond to the call of that same Spirit in his or her own way? If that hunger in our hearts for a different world, a better world, is true and not just an illusion, if this world’s sick system of power-hungry competition is not finally an expression of all that we truly are, if there is another way of being, of being alive, and of being human in the world, then it is absolutely imperative that we open our hearts and minds to this Jesus, so that Christ can live again in us, continuing in our community today the same ministry he started in Palestine two thousand years ago. May it be so, even here, even now.
This is a reblog from my friend and colleague in the Utica Presbytery, Rev. Herb Swanson. Herb is the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Lowville, NY. He previously spent 25 years working in Thailand where he was fostering greater understanding and dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism.
Here is an excerpt:
That’s worth thinking about—being a follower of Jesus but not a Christian. That’s what Paul was. Peter and the other disciples all died before there was a Christian religion. They followed Jesus while remaining devout, practicing Jews. One of the things that seems to be happening in our increasingly secular society is that small groups of followers of Jesus are reinventing the church in ways that make more sense in the 21st century than do traditional churches. Maybe something we should be aiming for is to be more Christ-like and less Christian. Worth a thought.
Click here to listen to this sermon on our church’s website
A middle aged man goes to see his doctor for a physical. At the end of the examination, he asks, “Well Doc, do you think I’ll live to be a hundred years old?”
“Let’s see,” the doctor said, “do you smoke?”
“No,” the man said, “absolutely not. Never.”
Doc: “OK then, do you drink?”
Man: “Not a single drop in my entire life.”
Doc: “Do you eat a lot of sugary or fatty foods?”
Man: “No way! I’ve always been very careful about what I eat.”
Doc: “Do you drive very fast?”
Man: “Never! I always drive 5 miles an hour below the speed limit, just to be sure.”
Doc: “I don’t quite know how to ask this one, but have you had a lot of girlfriends?”
Man: “Absolutely not. I’m celibate and I’ve been celibate for my entire life.”
Doc: “Then why on earth would you want to live to be a hundred?!”
Why indeed. You and I live in a culture that has mastered the art of denying death. Everything from anti-aging cream to plastic surgery is designed to keep us from facing the reality of our own mortality. Consumer advertising and commercial television keeps us distracted from thinking about death until we absolutely cannot avoid it anymore. At that point, if we so choose, they can give us drugs that will “make us as comfortable as possible,” effectively tuning us out until our bodies stop functioning. Our culture’s goal, it would seem, is to first ignore and finally numb the dying process so that we won’t ever have to come to grips with it.
Of course, the wisest among us don’t wait until that point to reflect upon their own mortality. They find their own way to accept it and even make peace with it. For these people, thinking about death doesn’t have to be something dark or morbid. In fact, it can give their lives a sense of meaning and purpose. People who know and accept the fact that they are going to die live with a conscious awareness that they have a finite amount of time on this earth and it’s up to them to make the most of it.
If you knew that you only had a week, month, or year to live, how would you choose to spend that time? What do you want your life to stand for? When other people look back at your life, what would you want them to remember about you? These are the questions that a wise person asks in the face of mortality.
When we accept that this life will not last forever, we realize that it cannot be an end in itself. Like the man in the joke, we have to ask ourselves: what’s the point of living to be a hundred years old if all you’re going to do is eat Brussels sprouts? The truly wise among us realize that life cannot last forever, therefore the truly wise among us also realize that each life must be lived for something larger than itself. Every mortal life, it seems, is a means to an end.
In spite of our culture’s death-denying attempts to distract or numb us, each of us has probably known, met, or heard about at least one person who made his or her mortal life meaningful by dedicating it to something larger than himself or herself. We tend to respect or admire such people when we meet them. Their examples might even inspire us to look more deeply at our own lives, face our mortality in new ways, and discover meaningful possibilities within us that we hadn’t noticed before. It’s a beautiful thing when that happens.
However, it’s at this point that our cultural programming kicks back in and tends to shut us off toward the next step in our development. Our culture is so individualistic that we don’t even think about the larger social bodies of which we are a part. We tend to stop with ourselves and not notice how it is that an awareness of mortality applies to larger realities.
People are mortal. We know that. We accept that fact, at least theoretically, even if we choose to ignore it for our entire lives. However, not many of us stop to think about other things that share our mortality. These things might last much longer than we do, but they too will one day fade from existence. Families are mortal. Surnames and lineages come to an end through a lack of offspring. Churches and other faith communities are mortal. There comes a point when dwindling membership and a lack of funds causes an institution to close its doors. The same thing is true of entire religions at large. There are very few people on this planet who continue to worship the gods of Mount Olympus in the same way that they were worshiped by Greeks in centuries past. Nations are mortal. The Roman Empire was once the dominant superpower in the world, unlike anything else that had come before it. Where is the great Roman Empire today? Buried under the rubble of history and preserved in ruins frequented by tourists in Bermuda shorts. Species are mortal. Dinosaurs no longer roam the earth like they did 65 million years ago. Finally, even the planets and stars are mortal. One day, our very own sun will burn up all of its hydrogen fuel and explode into a violent supernova, momentarily becoming the brightest star in some distant sky.
If coming to grips with our own individual mortality is difficult, accepting the mortality of families, churches, species, and stars feels almost impossible. Yet, the same truth applies to these larger mortal beings that first applied to mortal human beings: it is in facing mortality that we find meaning.
Let’s look at this idea in relation to this morning’s reading from Mark’s gospel. The story opens as Jesus and his disciples are leaving the great Jerusalem temple, the epicenter of Jewish worship in the first century CE. Jesus, as usual, is walking away from yet another fight with the established religious leaders of his day. In the previous chapter, chapter 12, you can read about Jesus butting heads with representatives from almost every major Jewish sect and community: Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, and temple scribes. The conflict between Jesus and the organized religion of his day had reached such a boiling point that Jesus, in his frustration, was about ready to give up on it. When this morning’s passage opens with him leaving the temple, he’s not just out for a stroll, he’s right in the middle of storming out in a huff.
It’s at this point that Jesus’ disciples, in their usual tactless and somewhat dimwitted manner, decide to stop and admire the lovely architecture of this religious icon and national monument of Judaism. They say of the temple, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Jesus is unimpressed. He says, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”
He’s talking about mortality of the temple: this central symbol of religious and national identity for the Jewish people. They were under the impression that this sacred building would stand forever under divine protection. For them, the temple was immortal. It was an end in itself as a center of worship. The idea had never occurred to them that it might not be there one day.
As it turns out, Jesus’ prediction was spot-on. The Jerusalem temple, like any human being, was mortal. It was eventually burned to the ground by the Romans during an uprising in the year 70 CE. It was never rebuilt. The site where it once stood is now occupied by the Dome of the Rock, one of the most sacred places in Islamic religion.
The destruction of the temple was unthinkable to the average Jew, but to Jesus it was inevitable. The wisdom of Jesus did not stop with an awareness of his own individual mortality, but extended to embrace the mortal and finite nature of all things. Just as it was for individuals, so it is for temples, religions, countries, species, planets, and stars: to face mortality is to find meaning.
If our great struggle in life is limited to ensuring the continued existence of particular people, places, institutions, or things, then we have already doomed ourselves to failure. Nothing lasts forever. We need to accept that. What Jesus said about the Jerusalem temple, we could say about anything: ““Do you see these? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” All things are mortal.
The sooner we realize this truth, the sooner we can get on with the business of asking the really important questions about existence in reality. Concerning our individual selves, we can ask: “What am I living for? What will people remember about me when I’m gone? What will be my lasting contribution to the world around me or the universe as a whole? What is the meaning of my life?”
We can ask these same questions about our mortal families or this mortal country. The day will come when the United States, like the Roman Empire, will only exist as a chapter in a history book. Accepting the inevitability of this fact, we need to ask ourselves as Americans: “When that day comes, what will that chapter say?”
As Christians, we can also ask these same questions about our church, our denomination, and our religion as a whole. We need to get over this ego-centric idea that God will protect and preserve us from our own collective mortality. Just look at the way Christianity itself has changed over the last two thousand years. We shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that the Christianity we practice is identical in faith and form to the Christianity practiced by the Apostle Paul or St. Augustine of Hippo. We identify ourselves as Presbyterians, but if John Knox and John Calvin (the founders of Presbyterianism) were sitting in this church right now, they would be horrified by much of what they would see. Likewise, if a Christian from the year 2412 were to time travel into this sanctuary right now, that person’s faith would likely seem so foreign to us that we wouldn’t even want to call it ‘Christian’ at all. Just as Paul and Calvin have shaped us, our faith will shape the future long after we are gone and the pressing crises of our era have ceased to be relevant concerns. What will be our lasting contribution to that future?
Finally, as members of this church, I think we need to ask these questions about our mortal congregation. This little church has been in Boonville for over two hundred years. We take great pride in our history and our building. Maintaining the integrity and beauty of this place is a chief concern for many people in this room. But all of us together need to hear Jesus saying to us what he said about his own temple: “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” This place, this building, and this congregation are all mortal. They will not last forever. “All will be thrown down,” as Jesus said. If our only motivation in coming here week after week is to keep the doors open and the lights on, then we’ve already failed. We’re like the man in the joke at the beginning of this sermon: we have no reason to live for another hundred years. Wise individuals live with a conscious awareness of their inevitable death and then adjust their lives accordingly, so as to make them as rich and meaningful as possible. It is no different with wise churches.
This church will die eventually. Whether it’s in ten years or another hundred years, it will happen. We need to remember that. We need to embrace that truth for ourselves so that we, as a church, can make the most of the time we’ve been given right now. Knowing that this church will one day die and “not one stone will be left here upon another,” we need to ask ourselves, “Why are we here? What is this church living for? What will be our lasting contribution to the life of this community after our doors are closed and our lights shut off forever? What is the meaning of our life together, as a church?” Those are the real questions that we need to be asking, not just once for a special project or a mission study, but continually. We need to set these questions before our eyes like a carrot dangling in front of a horse during a race. These are the questions that need to drive us, propel us, or perhaps lure us forward into the future.
As we explore these questions within the conscious awareness of our church’s impending death (whenever that will happen), I believe we’ll start to see a slow-motion miracle in progress. Even as we are facing and embracing death, I believe that we will also start to experience a kind of resurrection. It’s been my experience and observation that the most vibrant, active, and growing churches are the ones who have found their reason for being, the meaning of their existence, outside themselves. These churches are passionate about spiritual growth and community service. Their members gather together, Sunday after Sunday, not to maintain what they have, but to seek what they desire. There is a yearning deep within such people for “something more.” They are hungry for silence, prayer, scripture, and sacrament. They long to deepen their connection with the sacred mystery of divine love. This love, in turn, leads them out, away from the church and into the streets of this community where love demands to be shared with hurting people through compassionate word and deed. This is my vision of a church that faces mortality and finds meaning. When the day comes that “not one stone will be left here upon another,” such a church will live on in a state of resurrection, even if our doors are closed, our lights shut off, and our roof caved in. Even then, even if our church dies, it will live.
As a church, as individuals, as a country, and as a species, may we be people who live with a consciousness of death. May we face mortality and find meaning. In the midst of these piles of rubble, where stones have been thrown down from the broken remnants of our sacred temples, may we walk together the path of our own, continual, slow-motion resurrection, following in the footsteps of the Living Christ, the Risen One in our midst, the faithful friend who abides with us and guides us on our way.
Lifted from Facebook via Gary, my “step-uncle-in-law”:
Add your thoughts here… (optional)
Some weeks, when you’re writing sermons, you have to do a little extra research. Usually, this involves a trip to library to find a particular biblical commentary or an article in a scholarly journal, but this week, my “extra research” involved digging around in old boxes of lost junk and VHS tapes in order to find a John Travolta movie. The movie I was looking for is from 1996. It’s called Michael and it stars Travolta as an angel sent from heaven to help two people find true love.
All in all, John Travolta plays a rather un-angelic angel. He smokes cigarettes, curses like a sailor, and starts fights in bars. He has wings, but no halo. When someone asks him why he doesn’t fit the stereotypical angelic image, he simply responds, “I’m not that kind of angel.” However, in spite of his rough appearance, Travolta’s Michael is the real deal. He offers these occasional moments of insight and wisdom that just blow your mind.
One such moment comes when Michael confronts another character and indicates that he is aware that she has ulterior motives regarding a certain situation. Stunned and thinking that he must have the ability to read minds, she asks him, “How could you possibly know that?” His brilliant response: “I pay attention.”
Paying attention is almost always good advice, whether you’re an angel on a mission, a hunter in a tree stand, or driving a car. It also happens to be, in my opinion, essential to a healthy spiritual life. In fact, I don’t think it would be wrong at all to say that spirituality itself is mainly an exercise in paying attention.
There are those who would disagree with me on this. They might say that spirituality is about “getting God into your life”. While I can respect that metaphor, I don’t really see God as a person who walks around, into, and out of things. For me, God is that ultimate reality in which we all “live, and move, and have our being” (as the apostle Paul says in the book of Acts). That’s why I think spirituality is all about paying attention to the God who is already here: around you and within you, revealed in the stuff of everyday life.
I can see hints that Jesus himself perhaps thought of God in this way. Whenever people asked him to describe his ideas about God or God’s vision for the destiny of the world, Jesus used metaphors from everyday life: a woman baking bread, a farmer sowing seed, crops growing, birds nesting, and parents loving their kids. For Jesus, God was not an abstract philosophical concept, but an intimate and loving presence that knows us better than we know ourselves and “is closer to us than our own hearts” (Augustine). In order to reflect this intimacy, Jesus most often referred to God as “Abba”, a Hebrew word that technically means “Father” but could more accurately be translated as “Daddy”. Even today, little Israeli kids call their dads “Abba”. Jesus’ preference for this term was meant to make a point: he saw God as his Father, but not in a specifically male or authoritative sense. For Jesus, God as Father is “Abba”, “Daddy”: the intimate and affectionate presence of unconditional love and care in the universe. And it is through the regular, everyday stuff of the universe that this presence is made known to us. Therefore, according to Jesus, it’s important to pay attention to the little details and patterns of life.
If we know where to look, we can see Jesus leading by example in this regard all through the gospels. We read about the times when he stepped away from the crowds in order to pray or meditate. We can hear it in the sermon on the mount and in his many parables. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus’ capacity for paying attention fuels his insight into human nature and empowers his criticism of the pious powers that be. As usual, this passage opens with Jesus confronting educated religious leaders. Most commentaries and sermons on this passage focus on Jesus as the social critic who exposes hypocrisy among the religious elite. What I want to focus on today is the spiritual stance that allowed Jesus to become such an erudite critic of society.
The phrase that struck me as I was preparing for this sermon comes in verse 41: “[Jesus] sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.” He sat down and watched. You’d be amazed at how much you can learn by just sitting and watching. In this world of high speed downloads from the information superhighway, most people are slowly losing their patience for the learning process. We think education is just a matter of filling a person’s brain with pieces of data as quickly and efficiently as possible, but there’s something important that comes in the way we acquire and assimilate information.
When the famous scientist Jane Goodall was a little girl (about four years old), she wanted to know where chicken eggs came from, so she made her way into a chicken coop, sat down, and watched patiently for several hours on end. Eventually, she got to see a chicken laying an egg. As an adult, she made use of that same patience in the hills of Gombe, Tanzania, where she revolutionized the study of chimpanzees in the wild. Her study method was the same as the one she used in the chicken coop as a kid: sit down and watch.
This time, it took her six months to get close enough for contact and real learning. Most of the established scientists at that time criticized Goodall’s amateurish methods. She named the chimps, rather than number them. She preferred to pay attention to her test subjects in their natural environment, rather than take them back to a laboratory and analyze them. Her fellow scientists were certain that such unorthodox methods could never yield real scientific results. However, it was Goodall’s “sit down and watch” approach that changed the way we think about chimpanzees. She was the first to observe their behavior in groups, their use of tools, their expressions of emotion, and their practice of organized warfare. In time, she even won the acceptance of the chimpanzee tribe, simply by sitting and watching. They eventually came to her and began interacting with her up-close on a voluntary basis. Much of what we now know about these animals comes from Jane Goodall just sitting and watching, against the advice of other, more established scientists.
There was even a spiritual benefit to her sitting and watching discipline. The relationship she nurtured with the natural world in Gombe shaped her relationship with the Divine. Although she is not religious in any traditional sense, Jane Goodall has a very deep awareness of the same intimate presence that Jesus talked about. She says, “I don’t have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I don’t know what to call it. I feel it particularly when I’m out in nature. It’s just something that’s bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it’s enough for me.”
Jane Goodall’s practice of sitting and watching revolutionized her own spirituality and the study of chimpanzees. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus’ similar practice of sitting and watching placed him exactly where he needed to be in order to gain a very specific insight into human nature and the subject of generosity. He was in the right spot at the right time to notice something that everyone else had overlooked. Loyal Jews were probably going in and out of the treasury all day, leaving their offerings for the priests and temple maintenance. Well-known and wealthy sponsors were recognized for their substantial contributions. On a purely practical level, their large donations mattered more than the many small donations that were often left anonymously. Among the smallest of these small donations would have been the two copper coins left by a woman who had lost everything and was, by ancient standards, of little importance to anyone. Jesus, sitting and watching, understood the significance of her gift. When viewed in terms of actual numbers, her donation was trivial. But when viewed in terms of percentages, it was huge. Two pennies to her was a larger percentage of her income than two thousand dollars would have been to the super rich philanthropists whose contributions kept the temple running. But Jesus, sitting and watching, was the only one in a position to notice and realize the significance of this woman’s gift. Jesus paid attention. He saw what no one else would see, therefore he knew what no one else could know. After sitting and watching, he walked away with more insight about the nature of generosity than any of the hypocritical scribes and Torah scholars who worked there every day. Sitting, watching, and paying attention provided Jesus with fuel for championing the cause of poor and outcast people. Sitting, watching, and paying attention exposed the corruption and hypocrisy that lurked just below the surface of Jesus’ polite and religious society. Sitting, watching, and paying attention allowed Jesus to see the hand of God at work in his life and the world at large. His vision of what this world could and should be was shaped by the simple practice of sitting, watching, and paying attention.
One of my favorite contemporary teachers of the art of paying attention is a man named Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. Dr. Kabat-Zinn is the person who first introduced the practice of eastern meditation to the practice of western medicine. His word for “paying attention” is mindfulness. He writes:
With our cell phones and wireless palm devices, we are now able to be so connected that we can be in touch with anyone and everyone at any time, do business anywhere. But have you noticed that, in the process, we run the risk of never being in touch with ourselves? In the overall seduction, we can easily forget that our primary connection to life is through our own interiority — the experiencing of our own body and all our senses, including the mind, which allow us to touch and be touched by the world, and to act appropriately in response to it. And for that, we need moments that are not filled with anything, in which we do not jump to get in one more phone call or send one more e-mail, or plan one more event, or add to our to-do list, even if we can. Moments of reflection, of mulling, of thinking things over, of thoughtfulness.
What Jon Kabat-Zinn is asking is this: is there any regular time in your day when you set aside moments for just sitting and watching or paying attention? Such moments can open you up to the kind of transformative insights that Jesus and Jane Goodall derived from their respective practices of mindfulness. It may feel like time wasted, but it is really essential for productivity and creativity. Even if it’s just a few minutes of quiet with your coffee before the kids get up, make use of it. Don’t try to fill that space with radio, TV, or reading. We get enough information coming into our heads all day. Let this be a time for being not doing. Although Jon Kabat-Zinn hesitates to use this term, I have no problem calling it spiritual. Through the regular practice of paying attention, we are able to nurture our conscious connection with ourselves, with the world around us, and with God.
Try it sometime. Just sit for a few minutes. Watch. Pay attention. The insights you gain from this act of mindful observing may be about the world (like they were for Jesus), they might be about God, or they might be about yourself. Given time and regular practice, you’ll begin to notice what other people pass by, just like Jesus did with the widow and her two coins. If you let them, these insights of stillness have the capacity to transform you into a wiser, more aware, more peaceful, and more compassionate person. In short, you become more Christ-like. As people of faith, especially as those who identify as Christian, we need more of this kind of inner transformation in our lives. We need to be more like Jesus.
Jon Kabat-Zinn sums up the importance of this task nicely in his own words:
It is the challenge of this era to stay sane in an increasingly insane world. How are we ever going to do it if we are continually caught up in the chatter of our own minds and the bewilderment of feeling lost or isolated or out of touch with what it all means and with who we really are when all the doing and accomplishing is sensed as being in some way empty, and we realize how short life is? Ultimately, it is only love that can give us insight into what is real and what is important. And so, a radical act of love makes sense—love for life and for the emergence of one’s truest self.
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 