Last Sunday in my sermon, I was thinking with you about how in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was trying to bring his listeners somewhere. He wasn’t just teaching, he was preaching. Our selection was not the nice and warm parts we associate with the Sermon on the Mount-instead of blessing, we heard him use shocking language about cutting off hands and plucking out eyes that cause us to sin: more maniacal dictator than savior. In doing the work of interpretation, we can hear that Jesus is offering a sermon, not an instruction manual for sound living. These wild words speak to imagination, not obedience. Jesus is telling the people to imagine, really imagine, to know that it’s possible to be free from sin. It’s not as simple as plucking out an eye, it’s not even as simple as declaring that Jesus is our Lord and Savior. Instead, it’s possible by God’s grace, in resurrection and love. As Christians we learn that is a reality beyond sin and brokenness. Whatever shame or violence or hatred we are stuck in, there is a way out.
Jesus uses shocking language because his listeners, like us, need a little prod to pay attention. I recently came across a wonderful book review of Alexandra Horowicz’s On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes. Realizing how city living had dulled her senses, Horowicz took eleven different walks around her neighborhood, trying to share the perspective of her companions-various “experts” from her dog, to her toddler, to a geologist and a font specialist. Her walk with a blind acquaintance is one of the most evocative.
Some of our obliviousness is a survival strategy; if my mind judged the new burger special at Wendy’s to be as important as whether or not a car was turning into the street in front of me, I wouldn’t live very long. I want to listen to the person in front of me talking about her family, not the sound of traffic outside, and I would be a bad priest if I didn’t were putting my attention elsewhere. The problem comes when we get cagey in our selection; where our ignor-ance is willful or inflicts pain, where we don’t see because we just don’t want to deal.
Horowicz writes,
Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawn-mower, the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance.
This awareness of our unawareness has particular theological significance. I wonder about what would have happened between Michael Dunn and Jordan Davis if they could have seen each other more clearly, untethered by racism or anger; protesters and police in the Ukraine; or Pussy Riot and Vladimir Putin in Russia. On a personal and global scale, we need a wider lens.
This Sunday, we welcome Allison Reynolds- Berry, a community organizer from REACH to tell us about their “Say Hi” campaign (read more below). Small actions like knowing our neighbors and actually seeing each other make for a safer, and stronger, community. Violence at home is an isolating experience, but when people are connected to each other, it can be easier to leave an abusive situation. How can we see our neighbors, our near ones, more clearly? How can we see the work of God around us more profoundly? Where are we not looking, and what can we see?