Amanda McMillen, “May I have your attention please?”

This morning I’d like to try to hold your attention for about 12 minutes - no more! - while talking about the subject of attention. So it’s a little bit of a social experiment, and if it doesn’t work and you find your mind wandering, well then it will probably just prove my point anyways.

So here’s my question: What do you pay attention to? That changes of course in any given second, but what is it that consumes much of your brain space? The risk in my asking that question is that now you’re trying to figure out what you’re thinking about and your mind is now elsewhere, because in any given minute of the day, you might have 40 different trains of thought running at the same time, taking your attention from one subject to another. My own attention often feels fractured between the grocery list in my head and the reason I came into this room that I just can’t for the life of me remember now that I’m here. Not to mention theological/existential thoughts in between remembering to buy toilet paper and sweet potatoes this week.

What we pay attention to gives us insight into what we care about, what consumes our thoughts and our hearts. Paying close attention to another person is integral to the act of loving. And author Ann Voskamp said that “what we pay attention to is how we spend our lives. Pay attention mostly to the news, and we spend our lives on the headlines.” So, attention is love, and as human beings, our attention is also fickle. In our day and age of social media, endless news cycles, and experiencing relationships online, attention can be hard to pin down.

In our passage for today, James writes about the importance of prayer. And prayer is an act of focused attention. Philosopher Simone Weil wrote that “prayer consists of attention, the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable, toward God.” Poet Mary Oliver in her poem Praying wrote that in prayer you just “pay attention, then patch a few words together.” 

James, in this text for today, says that if you are suffering, you should pray. If you are cheerful, then you should praise. If you are sick, then you should receive anointing of oil and be prayed over in order to be healed. In all things, good and bad, you should direct your attention to God in prayer. This is because prayer is efficacious. Prayer does something. Of course, as soon as I say that we all wonder - well what about the times when it feels like prayer doesn’t do anything. But Jesus tells us to pray often and he teaches us HOW to pray in the Lord’s prayer. Prayer is an act of faith and humility - I do not have the solution to a problem, I may not be able to conjure the thing that I most want, and so I am asking someone else to do it for me, the one who is above all and in all and through all things.

Now of course, from experience we all know that praying in response to things good and bad is easier said than done. This is part of what it means to be human. Remember our attention is divided. We are everywhere all at once. Not only that, but we are primarily focused on ourselves. The theologian and church father Saint Augustine wrote about the sinful self as curved in on oneself - homo in curvatus in se as Martin Luther later termed it - literally navel gazing. We are obsessed with introspection, self-reflection, and self-betterment as a form of understanding and then (hopefully) controlling oneself and one’s life. 

Picture a magnet at your belly button and another behind your eyes. There is an inevitable force, called Sin (capital S), that keeps our attention focused on the self. And if what you pay attention to reflects what you love, then we are completely head over heels infatuated with ourselves.

So what are we to do? We SHOULD pray. Prayer is worth something, prayer does something, prayer is for the good times and the bad. But so often the human instinct in the face of trials and joys is to turn to self - to worry and to despair when things go wrong, and to pat ourselves on the back when things go well. Our natural inclination, remember, is self-focus - it is, in the face of suffering or sickness, to fully rely on oneself for strength; and in the face of cheerfulness, to praise one’s good choices that brought you to where you are today. We need some kind of force stronger than Sin to pull us from ourselves and direct our attention to God. We need someone to straighten our backs, over and over again, and free us from the inward curve of self-obsession. 

This is what Jesus tells his disciples in John:  “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day.” “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’” 

The magnetic force of Jesus, which draws us to himself, which lifts our eyes up to the hills, is stronger than that of Sin. While we were still sinners, Christ died for the ungodly. Jesus pulls us towards himself, in prayer and in everlasting life.

And this pull, this being drawn to God, did not cost nothing. Even the language we use to discuss attention illustrates the difficulty here - we pay attention. It is something we are purchasing, it costs something. We pay attention to one thing at the expense of another. 

Well if that’s the case, then Jesus has paid it all. While your attention and my attention is divided, while we find ourselves curved in on the self day after day, while we find ourselves forgetting to pray once again, hoping that we can solve our own problems, Jesus’ attention is like an arrow on a bullseye. Jesus’ attention, which is to say Jesus’ love, is directly on us, at all times, and it cost him his life. Because of Jesus, we are, in an ultimate sense, freed from self-obsession, freed from ourselves. Our Sin is forgiven, and the magnetic force of Sin has been ultimately defeated. Our eyes can lift up onto the hills.

I want to end with a poem by Rabbi Levi Yitzhak, called “Song of You” that I first heard and fell in love with when I was in seminary. This poem brings words to Jesus’ attention on God on the cross, that he draws us into along with him:

Lord of the World

Lord of the World

Lord of the World

I’ll sing You a little Song of You.

You-You-You

Where will I find You?
And where won’t I find You?

So-here I go-You,

And-there I go-You,

always You, however You,

Only You, and ever You.

You-You-You, You-You

East-You-West-You,

North-You-South-You,

You-You-You

The heavens-You. Earth-You.

On high-You, and below…

In every direction, and every inflection.

Still You. However You. Only You. Ever You.

You-You-You.

James writes that the prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. Jesus is the righteous, and his prayer by the power of the Holy Spirit is powerful and effective for us. Our prayers do not have power based on the strength, or even the sincerity of our faith, but rather on the strength and sincerity of the one to whom we pray. 

So let us pray now, in Jesus’ righteous name:

Jesus, heal us. Heal our hearts, our wills, our minds, and our bodies. Draw us close to you, where our attention is wonderfully captivated, and we find ourselves eternally captured in your love and mercy. Amen.