Suckers for Irrelevancy
Prepare for Lent — Suckers for Irrelevancy Feb. 7, 2016
Luke 10:38–42
Good Morning.
What a fun day to be in worship. And what a great community to worship with. As some of you know I’ve been out for several weeks. In this profession there’s not that many Sundays when you can ever just “sleep in”. That piece was really pretty nice. Really nice. Kind of luxurious actually.
But I had a couple of big insight. First, I missed worship. I missed praying and singing, and being together. I missed contributing to that and being part of your contributions. Not just those from the front — But I missed the moms who stand in the back with their babies, and the babies who stay in the pews. And the ones who get to the sanctuary in plenty of time to collect themselves and those who come dashing in panting for breath 30 minutes in.
Sunday morning is a group activity. And it takes all of us — singing and praying listening together. Each one of us is important to the whole. You can feel that when we’re singing together can’t you? It’s about all of us — the people of God — coming together before God. So that was one big insight I wanted to share: don’t discount your contribution to everyone here.
The second insight is what I’m going to preach on this morning. It’s something I keep learning…and keep forgetting. Every time my regular pattern has been externally interrupted for a window of time, I see the same thing…. again. Within a few weeks that something starts to fade — then something else shifts and I see it again….before it starts to fade.
It’s this: a lot of our life is suffocated by rambling distractions. By meaningless information — we didn’t ask for or seek, but it is there and we are stuck. We are suckers for irrelevancy. And we’re so caught up in it that it is very, very difficult to even see the force it is exerting.
This Sunday I have no Tupac, 50 Cent or anybody else I don’t know. This is the last Sunday before Lent begins — Ash Wednesday is this week in the sanctuary.
I have a very to-the-point-sermon today: It’s a call to join the resistance movement. A resistance movement aimed at getting our sight back. Getting our lives back. And maybe most immediately, getting our time back — at least a few minutes a day.
I know that sounds grand. And when I tell you where it starts it’s going to sound pretty lame. It’s like all those kingdom truths, it just doesn’t look like all that much at the outset. (It’s like when Jesus says the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed…and people think, well that’s kind of pathetic).
Because listen the resistance movement — seeing again — starts with this kind of tiny, tiny mustard seed — the mustard seed of Being present. Being mindful.
I told you: it sounds limp — especially right now — when Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are full on. And against the incongruity of celebrating Black History Month while the prospects for young black men are arguably about as bleak as ever, in a moment of poisoned water in Flint, Michigan. A call to join a new way of life just by being just be present seems to warrant an “Are you freaking kidding me?” response.
And I know — I struggled for a way of saying it more muscle. It’s like returning from the Land of Oz and declaring “I saw a unicorn!” Because no matter how many times we hear it — we are destined to forget. And no matter how often we have felt the weight of the truth of it, we still succumb to believing that anything of value is one of bustling action. Forceful plans and urgent process.
But listen to me here please: We can’t give what we don’t have. Jesus knew we were destined to keep forgetting this. It was going to be hard, it was going to seem so limp. And he knew it. He knew we were suckers for irrelevancy and he had a solution for us.
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So today — I have three scenes from Jesus life where he diagnoses the problem – and each time his solution.
1. Jesus & his disciples are simply walking through Galilee but a crowd is pressing in around him. Luke says in chapter 12, there were “trampling on one another.” People were hollering questions, the Pharisees began to “oppose him fiercely and to besiege him with questions, waiting to catch him.”
Jesus tells a few stories and then in the middle says, Whoa! Stop. Look at that lily why don’t you? Stop worrying about what you look like! Look at this.
Time out everybody. Lower the noise. No one was looking at the fields, they were concerned about their stuff. Of course, right? How many of us looked — really looked at the sun rising this morning?
Jesus on a mountainside — the flurry of a campaign stop all around him — and he realizes that no one was really looking at the glory, the awe of God that was all around them, saying something to them.
Today we are dealing with far more distractions than Jesus’ disciples were that day. Just think about the massive amount of information every one of us receives and produces.
In 1986 we communicated the daily equivalent of 2 1⁄2 pages of information primarily by phone, mail and fax. Today, when you add cell conversations, email, twitter, social networking and texts, you and I each produce the equivalent of 6 newspaper worth of material — per day.
And what that adds up to? One way of visualizing the data we are producing is like this:
“If a single star is a bit of information, there’s a galaxy of information for every person on earth,” said Dr. Martin Hilbert, from USC’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.
Another way to visualize is if all the current information (as of 2011) were stored on books they would cover every inch of America stacked 13 feet high.
So if you feel like you are drowning in distraction and information? You are. And what’s the cumulative effect on us?
2. Jesus gave an example of what might happen:
This is from one of his stories about the sower. A seed falls on the ground and it starts to take root — sending out little leaves, but then it’s left — no one is looking at it, no one is paying attention to it … and the weeds just get bigger and stronger…and before you know it? It’s dead.
No one was watching to the seed.
This was one of the stories Jesus explains — the seed, he said, is the word of God. Another way of saying it is life with God; The Spirit’s vibrancy, ongoing direction, energy in our life. Jesus tells people to just stop, be aware, watch, pay attention:
We have so many seeds being thrown at us daily — and apparently 6 newspapers worth of information we are dishing out to others.
How do we cope? Well in different ways, right? Different personality types, different drivers for each of us.
One way is to simply try and keep up. And we do that with multitasking. Or by simply shutting down. Avoidance. We do it by freaking out — getting sharp around the edges. We cope by working late in the night, cutting out the things we think we can put off.
But for many of us — we try to keep drinking by continuing to multitask. Doing several things at once.
Show of hands on us hardy souls who email while we are also on the phone or even conversation with a physical person — Multitasking is simply the price we perceive we have to pay for responsibility. Or relevancy. Or competency. Or so we say.
There are a slew of studies that show multi-tasking actually undermines the qualities we thought we were getting:
- 10% drop in our I.Q scores.
- Our productivity decreases as much as 40%.
Tell it to someone who’s listening…cause that’s not us!
We are not that different from Martha –this last scene I want to show from Jesus this morning:
Luke 10:38–42
Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying.
But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing…
This is the well known story of Mary and Martha. This is a well-traveled passage of scripture.
Just an aside: There’s lots to say — Martha doing her job. Mary bolding moving her way past the men who would have been gathered — learning at the rabbi’s feet — Mary puts herself right at the front. And that’s just cool. And I’d love to encourage every parent to read this to their daughters — I know I did — to show them just how radical this action was in 1st century Jewish life.
But today’s I just want to point out just how much Martha is the emblem, (paradigmatic is the $10 word) image of you and me. Of our lives right now. Martha is our normal life. Martha is the patron saint of our multitasking, overscheduled, overcommitted days. Trying to make it good for everybody around her — And we think that’s just the way it’s supposed to be.
Martha is busy doing her job. Her job as a woman in that culture, her job as a homemaker, her job as a hostess. Not a person in that room likely would criticize her for doing her job….no one but Jesus realizes that the stress over her job is costing Martha her life.
Martha, Martha, you are so periespato — that’s the Greek word used there. It means the feeling of being pulled or dragged in different directions.
Martha had God sitting in her living room and didn’t even realize it. She didn’t see God when he is two feet away from her.
Distracted — perispato — by what? What could possibly be more important that God in your living room?
That kind of says it all to me.
Behold I stand at the door and knock. And knock. And knock.
At least Jesus got into Martha’s living room.
There is a better way of coping. Not just coping. But living. There is a better way of living amidst the noise. Jesus keeps trying to tell us. Stop. Look around. Breathe. Appreciate this moment right now. Practice pausing.
“Martha, Martha, you’re so distracted. There’s so much going on. Just stop for a minute”
Neuroscientists have found that there our brains are created to need a break. Our brains literally need time to just look around without an agenda- without a point. Our brains need to just BE. — -without watching TV or playing video games or scrolling through the news feeds .
Just like there are some important mental connections that happens only when we sleep — there are some processes that only happen when we daydream, pause, go on a walk, etc.
Okay — so since these studies have come out — being the good, efficient capitalists that we are — researchers started asking the question of just what sort of downtime is “the best”? Is there a ranking system in terms of which ones are most beneficial?
Well, lo and behold there are differences in the quality of downtime.
While there are many different kinds of rest, the type of break that means the
most is when we stop and experience awe. That’s right: Awe.
Awe as in “an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration or fear produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful.”
The most transformational downtime we can have is that in which we are face-to-face with the eternal, the majestic, the glorious, the cosmic, the non- ending, always-beyond-us Mystery.
- It’s what was going on in Martha’s living room that day two thousand years ago.
- It’s what was happening when Jesus told them to stop, just look at that lily.
They believe that when we enter the vastness of awe, our brains at a biological level try to make sense of this new information — this vastness — this open bigness changes us — — making us believe that we too are bigger, freer, more spacious.
People who experience awe report having more time to give, more expertise to offer more of everything. Fine. That’s good. You can’t give what you don’t have.
But Jesus wants even more than that for us. There is one out there who wants my dying breath to have no regrets, there is one out there who wants my heart to beat with anticipation for each new morning and lay back down in the night feeling secure and important, there is One who desires that I would have life and have it to the fullest.
That’s what he wanted them to see that day on the mountainside. That’s what he wanted them to tend, and practice by telling them the story of a little seed. That’s what he wanted Martha to see in her living room that day.
He wanted this glory, this fullness of his Father, to be the fullness in them too. It started with just stopping and just being.
- by Rev. Laura S. Truax
