Sermons

Are You Mostly Focused or Mostly Distracted?

December 19, 2010
Fourth Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 7:10-16; Romans 1:1-17; Matthew 1:18-25
The Reverend Stephen P. Bauman

There’s a growing a body of research that suggests human brains are being rewired in response to the exploding growth of our interface with technology. Parents are learning about this at their children’s schools as teachers negotiate the issues of information bombardment - some might say, information distraction - the ubiquity of electronic communication and the struggle for deep, sustained, focused learning. An emerging group of studies indicate that ever greater access to information bits may be inversely related to depth of knowledge and developing wisdom. We seem to be swapping out an ability for sustained focus for adaptive information gathering, which researchers describe as a more “surface” activity. A famous Atlantic Monthly article captured the negative side of this idea entitled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

We’re in the early stages of sorting through all the ramifications of our technological evolution, but reporting as one statistical outlier, I find that I can have a problem deciding which bit of bombarding information is the most important, which deserves extended focus and which can be quickly tossed aside. News, messages, tweets, advertisements, mail, searches, and now even taxis exhaust the limits of my attention and retention. General conversation suggests this is an emergent experience for many of us, exacerbated at this time of year by a least a multiple of ten. Seasonal sensory overload - SSO is the acronym I’ve coined.

Some mornings I can’t decide whether the stuff we do in here adds or detracts from the problem. Sometimes it feels oddly surreal to dress up in robes and process in an ornate building lighting candles, ringing bells, singing sentimental carols in an age awash in technological wizardry and cultural overstimulation. Other times, maybe most times, this seems an act of quiet rebellion, even revolution on behalf of what really matters.

Hard to say what perspective any given person brings who walks through these doors at this time of year. None of us can really know what particular bits of information predominate for any other person who shares our pew, or what they’re thinking about while sitting here. Are you mostly focused or mostly distracted?

Well, whatever case may be, I invite you to name your multiple preoccupations and then set them aside for the next few minutes. Allow yourself the luxury of scaling back your attention to a small event with an improbable meaning. That’s our job today and for this next week. The old story doesn’t sound like much in the telling, really. After all, it’s old. Nothing to compare with events roiling our world and the astonishing fare of our cultural stew.

It concerns an illegitimate pregnancy in an inconsequential backwater town among poor, simple people. Just the sort of people who are the first to be affected by the machinations of the powerful, just the sort of inconsequential people we’d quickly overlook as we scan the web, the tube, the stores.

And then, the old story has the added burden of being overly familiar. You know the basic characters and plot lines. You remember roughly how it begins and how it ends. You recall certain details with greater clarity than others. Angels, shepherds and so on. The bits of details are clearer than a deep summary sense of their collective meaning.

Today we drill down to one particular character who gets one of the top billings, but no lines. An enigma, really, apart from the little Matthew reports. But to really hear this bit of the story, we have to shift gears from the day’s preoccupations. From the thralldom of a thousand distractions we need to shift our thinking down to just one vulnerable man of the disposable masses - Joseph, the cuckolded fiancé, caught in a serious personal predicament of seeming little significance in the grand scheme of things. Just one tiny throw-away information bit.

The ancient law called for the death penalty when a woman committed adultery. By rabbinic practice over the centuries that penalty had been reduced to divorce and public disgrace. Matthew reports that Joseph was a “righteous man,” meaning he wanted to protect Mary from humiliation while still getting out of the marriage. He didn’t want to impose an unnecessary hardship.

Then a surprising thing happened. Certainly within his rights to play out his role as the aggrieved party, Joseph chose another way, the way of trust and love, and in response to a dream, he takes Mary as his wife after all and receives her child as his own.

This was a small act in comparison to the size of decisions within the purview of Caesar or Herod the King. But an act that changed the world, nevertheless. Interesting, isn’t it? - the juxtaposition of the large, consequential decisions among the world’s power brokers and the small, unimportant decision of a simple man caught in a personal dilemma. And then the way the story has it, discovering that God was not cavorting in human affairs on the scale of the Caesar, but in the birth of this single, out-of-the-way child.

Surely this is one of the reasons this story has hung around as long as it has, this revelation that while the world’s powerful gyrating egos play out their dramas, holding populations hostage to their whimsies, God slips in to reveal how real power manifests in the world. Here’s my strongly held point of view: this bit of information is a lot more important than others. Miss this bit from among all the other bombarding bits and you’ll miss a whole mess of other really important derivative truths. I’d go so far as to say you’ll miss what it means to be human in the highest and best sense.

In Joseph we have the character of the story who is most like us. It’s easy to imagine him trying to get to sleep after learning about the pregnancy of his wife-to-be, spent, exhausted from anger, frustration and humiliation, grappling with his conscience, tossing and turning, unable to find the position that will give him peace. In his restlessness a dream angel whispers in his ear.

Victimized by circumstance beyond his control Joseph is presented with a variation of life he would not have chosen for himself, trapped by his options yet surprisingly, wanting to do the right thing. Barbara Brown Taylor suggests the whispering angel says something like this: “Joseph, don’t be afraid. God is here. It may not be the life you had planned, but God will be born here, too, if you permit it.” [1]

So Joseph does the unexpected thing. On the face of it, he takes the more difficult path, the narrow road as his step son will describe it about thirty years later. Joseph will take Mary’s predicament on himself, and together they will give birth to love. And to hope. And even joy. Joy to the world! We will soon sing.

Sixteen Advents ago I was speaking with a young man about various issues in his life. Among them, his need to do certain things that he knew were in his best interests, to capture his courage, as it were, for making important life-stage decisions. At one point he mentioned he was embarrassed to tell me a little discipline he tried to include as part of his decision-making. “It’s a very little thing,” he said. “Sometimes, when I think of it, I ask myself this question: ‘Are you ready to accept joy in your life? Are you ready?’” I now know this was an important bit of information so I hung on to it.

And I understood his embarrassment. This was a deeply spiritual question that he asked, close to the heart of what it means to welcome God into the world wherever one happens to be, whatever the circumstance. I told him that he had asked an audacious Advent question. Would he mind if I shared it with others? And so I have done this over the years when the time seems right, when I have someone’s attention, when they’ve scaled back their focus to some bit that was very important, like Joseph.

He said that he wrote that question on a slip of paper and stuck it in his pocket so he wouldn’t forget it. He then produced a well-folded bit from his pocket with the question neatly printed. He added, “The funny thing is that once you ask that question, ‘Are you ready to accept joy in your life?’ it’s very, very hard to answer, ‘No, I don’t think I want it, not today.’” He said this reminded him to ask God to bless whatever endeavor he was engaged in, or in whatever circumstance confounded him. He had an unusual sort of spiritual innocence, which isn’t to say he had lived a sheltered life - far from it.

But there, in that little exchange, I found a complete sermon. To ask the question, “Are you ready to accept joy?” is to slip into Joseph’s skin for a moment. And considering his circumstance, doesn’t it seem an odd question to ask? How could he expect to find joy when it seems he’s been taken advantage of? When his honor has been damaged, his plan so disrupted, his love seemingly betrayed?

But this led him to certain decisions, difficult decisions that welcomed joy into the world. Oddly, we don’t speak much about joy in our daily lives. I wonder if we consider it an actual option, as an available and natural way of living. Perhaps we’re too sophisticated, or too cynical, or just simply too distracted to consider joy an actual option. It almost sounds surreal. Importantly, our ancient stories reveal that joy does not exist in some pristine alternative universe, separate from the travails and struggles of our lives. Instead, they reveal that joy comes whenever we’re able to disarm ourselves enough to honestly welcome God into our world.

Now again, here at the end, my perspective is that this information is among the most important you’ll receive this December. You’re welcome to disagree with me, of course. But don’t leave here today without hearing the simple bit that some information really is more important than other information, just as some food is more nutritious than other food. It does matter what we think about in the day and what we dream about at night. Like Joseph, the meaning of our lives hangs in the balance.

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Believing the Impossible,” Gospel Medicine, Boston: Crowley, 1995.