Attention is the beginning of devotion.(1)
I’ve been turning that small sentence over and over in my head the way your turn a smooth river rock over and over in your hand or in your pocket, tucked away. The more I thought about it, the more the words rang true.
When we were children, the thing we yearned for most was attention from those we admired: our parents, or older cousins, neighbors and as we just saw, from our clergy and the adults in our parish. When we became the big kids, we noticed the little kids wanting the same from us. Hopefully we kindly have obliged as much as we had been obliged when we ourselves were small.
Likewise, when we were small, many of us fastened upon often the most ordinary things that completely fascinated us. Chin propped on hands, watching the orderly dotted line of ants moving in and out of an anthill. Searching through the day for a four-leaf clover, and along the way noticing the variations in the edges, tones, and patterns on all the rejected clover-leaves. Watching the industrious uncoiling of the tongues of what were then common butterflies like sulphurs, Monarchs, or blues as they competed with the bees for the clover or drank from the fallen, exploded sandplums under the trees. Learning how to tamp down your natural reaction when a bee landed on you until you could allow one to crawl across your hand with no fear because you know how not to startle it.
I remember thinking how amazing it was that this bee crawling over my arm would have visited this flower, and I would never have known it were I not here to see and notice it right at that moment—and that all around the world, there were millions of bees contemplating millions of clover flowers that I would never get to see. I became aware of how many hundreds of bees would visit this patch of clover in my backyard every day, whether I was there to observe them or not. Later I was given a piece of wild honeycomb by my Dad’s mother, whom we called One Granny, and saw where the bees’ destination as they flew away from me was. We marveled at how they could help create such sweetness from flowers that weren’t particularly pretty or sweet. I learned that bees made honey, but butterflies did not, nor did they make butter. Weird.
I learned to start paying attention. And certainly that started me on the path of devotion to creation in most of creation’s quadrillions of living creatures (not so fond of cockroaches or grubs or water snakes, all of which gave me the heebie-jeebies, to be honest). But I learned something else: the path to devotion ran straight through a way-station called amazement. I was young, and therefore brave enough to be openly amazed and filled with wonder. I didn’t care if that amazement could be mocked by others as being naïve—I was lucky enough not to even know that lots of people sought to be above amazement, thinking it made them look knowledgeable and worldly.
As I listened to Bible stories read to me by my mother, I began to notice when in the Bible it stated that a character was amazed, such as is implied this Sunday, when Jesus reads from Isaiah’s scroll in the synagogue. Those who heard him were amazed. And so the adventure of Christ’s ministry begins.
Today, in our gospel we hear the good news—that’s literally what “gospel” means. We hear Jesus at the beginning of his public ministry, and the framers of the lectionary have chosen for us to hear the very best news of God’s dream for God’s people as they live in community. What we are hearing is the SOCIAL good news—what God imagined for people in order to live their lives together.
Offstage—and because we Episcopalians hear other versions of the start of Jesus’s public ministry—it is hoped we remember that this inspirational start of Jesus’s teaching ministry, which he has been preparing for from infancy and youth in Luke’s full telling—comes after his baptism, which is followed by 40 days in the wilderness, fasting and being tested by the worst impulses of humanity.
First comes the temptation of greed, for gluttony, and taking shortcuts to get what we want rather than coming by it honestly. Then, the greed for power that only comes from selling one’s soul to the devil, as the saying goes. Then doing dangerous, harmful things and then expecting God to swoop in and save us from our recklessness—and of course, if God doesn’t act like Santa Claus, we are led further away from God by believing that God doesn’t exist at all. All of these temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness were also about extolling the individual with no consideration for how one’s action would affect others. In other words, all of these temptations we don’t hear, but that hang there just offstage, are basically from the narcissist’s handbook.
Jesus is tempted to do what he wants for himself—but the tempter forgets that Jesus had already rejected all that when he chose to be born to a brown-skinned teenage mother in an occupied territory. He was born to a family that had to flee for their lives and live as refugees simply because those in power suspected that families like his could upend the framework of oppression, cruelty, and division that kept them in power. In all these temptations, Jesus points out that signs of God’s wonder, love, grace, and mercy are all around us, no magic tricks or putting God to the test required. Being willing to be led by faith and the imaginative spark of God’s love made visible through us as individuals and as St. Martin’s parish.
Our faith and fidelity to the good news of Jesus calls us to celebrate the abiding love, grace, and mercy of our God and share those gifts with the world.
Perceiving the signs of God’s wonder all round us could even be said to start with our ability to see at all, given the complexity of the eye gathering light, the retina focusing that light, the optic nerve conducting that data accurately, and the brain receiving, interpreting, and filtering that data to turn it into something meaningful. This is a metaphor for both physical sight and imaginative sight. It is this sight I call on us to employ in our spiritual journeys and as we meet today to consider our past, celebrate the gifts this parish has and gives, and plan for a future of discipleship.
The life of faith is absolutely centered on developing and strengthening that imaginative sight, that allows everyone from scientists and poets and architects and artists and engineers and leaders and teachers and chefs and doctors and nurses and especially people of faith to see not just what is, not just what can be, but helps them inductively forge a path between where we have been, where we are now and where we could be. It is that life we are called to embody here at St. Martin’s.
It is this willingness to imaginatively engage the gospel in our lives today—the very thing that God used to create all that is-- that is the very gift that God implanted in us that most marks us as being made in God’s own image and likeness. It is this ability to give attention to the beauty potentially all around us that commits people to a life of faith. It is a life that sees God’s call to us not as a burden, but as a gift and honor, providing purpose to live a life that really matters, one that seeks to unite rather than divide. There is beauty in each and every heart and face here, and there is just as much beauty and worth in those outside these doors. And that beauty gives hope to a world that desperately needs it.
And so our readings today invite us to set our imaginations free, metaphorically and literally, for the sake of the world. Psalm 19 starts at the cosmic level of God speaking creation into existence, and creation answering back a resounding song of praise, all the way down to the words we lowly humans speak. Everything in creation is speaking—except for one might think, God. But God speaks THROUGH creation here.
Creation itself attests to the truth and beauty of God’s love for us! The Law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul—as Jesus reads from Isaiah. This is all that is needed for enlightenment- to have God’s judgments, God’s love, and God’s mercy to be revealed to us and in us. We then enact our faithfulness to act on that enlightenment in keeping God’s Law of Love, Grace, and Mercy. Our attention to the prophetic Word is the guide to living a life of worth, rather than depending upon one’s own judgment (presumption). Temptation and sin will capture your heart at times, but God’s loving plan for us laid out in God’s commandments can reset our focus and our commitment to living a life centered in community.
Paul’s brilliant metaphor of unity in Christ by being unified with each other is a call to imaginatively understand the purpose of the gospel of Christ: it wasn’t just to save us after we die. It was to save us from living lives disconnected from anything but our own selfish needs and wants. Paul invites the church in Corinth, which was being divided by the narcissistic culture that surrounded them, by class and wealth considerations. Paul urged his audience to instead understand that everyone is part of Christ’s body and therefore worthy of respect, dignity, and most importantly, LOVE in action. We are more powerful when we care for each other and respect each other than we stand silent in the face of cruelty and dehumanization.
Paul reminds us that everyone in Christ’s body are imaginatively and in reality the only visible bearers and enactors of Christ’s presence and work in the world—and that the world around them was literally starving for that presence, for that making visible of God’s love through how believers in Christ live their lives for the sake of God and for the sake of others. Paul, who had never seen Jesus in real life, nonetheless joined himself to the same Body of Christ through his sudden awareness of Christ’s love reaching out to him even as he persecuted Christians in his earlier life.
And then we conclude with Jesus, fresh out of being tempted, proclaiming how his ministry will be the fulfillment of prophecy. He does this not just by reading from Isaiah’s scroll, but imaginatively engaging with it. Jesus announces that he is here to do five things in our common life together:
1 to bring good news to the poor,
2 to announce freedom to captives,
3 to restore sight to those who cannot see, perception to those immune to wonder,
4 to free people from oppression (which can also be linked to the first task), and
5 to proclaim the year of God’s favor, a Jubilee year, a year of community and rejoicing and giving thanks for the many ways we are cared for by God so that we can care for one another.
Jesus then closes the prophet’s scroll and announces that today those prophetic words have been fulfilled within his audience’s hearing. This is Jesus’s work for the sake of the world. And as Christ’s Body, each of us commit to taking up our own parts in embodying that jubilee message for a world mired in scarcity, suspicion, and, too often, cruelty. As individuals, and as St. Martin’s. We work together to strengthen each other for this holy witness and discipleship.
What would it mean for the Scriptures to be fulfilled in your hearing?
How would that happen?
Would we expect God just to wave a magic wand, and poof! everything would be perfect?
Or would it mean, as witnesses to Christ and the Body of Christ in this place, at a time such as this, for us to perceive our world holistically, the good and the bad, and commit to expanding the good by our conscious participation in it, by truly acting together in fellowship to all creation and all people as true children of God? Would it mean realizing the amazing witness we are and can be even more emphatically by taking seriously the joy and blessing of being God’s children and Christ’s body here at St. Martin’s? We have each of us received God’s love, grace, and mercy. We have promised to give that same love, grace and mercy to others.
We live in a world that runs on dividing those who should declare their common cause with one another and dividing them, often by giving them scapegoats and othering those already marginalized. We live in a world where we are told that all are equal as long as, in George Orwell’s warning words in his book Animal Farm, as long as some are more equal than others. As long as some have more liberty than others. As long as some can oppress others by denying their membership in the human family.
No.
God calls us to proclaim a world where we are ALL sustained by God’s grace, but somehow preaching and urging mercy gets derided as “hateful.” A world in which those who preach God’s grace and who urge us to remember our essential unity; our potential to imagine a better, more faithful world for all through commitment to all, results in death threats.
Which is exactly what happened to Jesus after his glorious proclamation of the kernel of his gospel for the sake of living in a Godly community. Seriously. Look it up. Oppressive empires have always acted thus.
Beloveds, 2025 is the 60th year of this parish’s existence. We are now charged and responsible to prepare a firm foundation for the next 60 years and beyond.
We are called to look with the heart, with the soul, with the imagination, and with gratitude for the blessings God has given, is giving, and will give us in our lives together as Christ’s body. We are called to attention to God and each other—and attention is the beginning of our devotion to God and to each other as the people of God and the people of Christ’s Body known as St. Martin’s through the help and mercy of God that we embody. Our devotion begins with our attention—and our brave witness to God’s love, grace and mercy.
Amen.
Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Ellisville, MO on January 26, 2025.
Readings:
Citations:
1) Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays, p. 8.
