Epiphany 8A 2011-02-27
Matthew 6:24-34
We have all been there. Maybe it is reduced staff size, mounting deadlines, and increased work demand. Or maybe it is two children, multiple sports practices, piano lessons, book reading group and a sink full of dirty dishes. A busy world has us overlap our tasks, trying to fill little gaps in time with several items on our to-do lists. Many things compete for our attention. We listen to voice mail while scanning our email. While sitting in a lecture hall or conference room, we scan news headlines during class or meetings. Maybe when we are feeling particularly rushed, and we just think our time is so pressed, and we are sitting in traffic, we shoot off a text message or read our email on our phones.
We are multi-taskers, at least that’s what we want to believe. In such a busy world, we feel like we have no alternative but to split our attention multiple ways in order for us to get things done. We spread our effort across many too many active projects. Like a juggler with too many balls in the air sooner or later it catches up to us. Numerous studies suggest that multi-tasking takes it toll through degraded performance, low throughput, and even create bigger logjams, contributing to an increased feeling of needing to multitask even more.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, one article gives the following scenario.
Imagine that driving across town, you've fallen into a reverie, meditating on lost loves or calculating your next tax payments. You're so distracted that you rear-end the car in front of you at 10 miles an hour. You probably think: Damn. My fault. My mind just wasn't there.
By contrast, imagine that you drive across town in a state of mild exhilaration, multitasking on your way to a sales meeting. You're drinking coffee and talking to your boss on a cellphone, practicing your pitch. You cause an identical accident. You've heard all the warnings about cellphones and driving—but on a gut level, this wreck might bewilder you in a way that the first scenario didn't. Wasn't I operating at peak alertness just then? Your brain had been aroused to perform several tasks, and you had an illusory sense that you must be performing them well.
We are confident in our ability to multi-task. We think we are good at it. It has been noted by many that we have always had to multi-task. After all, the inability to walk and chew gum has been a long-standing reason for derision. What researches see being lost however is the ability for people to focus on one topic for a lengthy amount of time. The 18th century English Earl, Lord Chesterfield once wrote. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”
In this age of electronic gadgets—cell phones, mp3 players, laptops or tablets, and the like—we are promised more productivity, which will in turn lead to a more abundant life. We think the quicker we get things done, the more time we will have to spend on the good things of life. But it seems in turn we are becoming ever more enslaved to multiple masters.
And does this surprise us? While our society is all about information and task scheduling, the notion of having a split attention and being enslaved to two masters is nothing new. Jesus addresses the topic in his Sermon on the Mount. ““No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and wealth (or Mammon as it is worded in some other translations).” Jesus here takes on one of the common pairs that demand our attention, but wealth is not the only cause of our divided attention. But he realizes that money issues are big. The concerns about money turn us into anxious folk. We wonder if we ever have enough. Soon our attention is divided between many options, and in the end, we might have very little to show for it.
In this section of the sermon on the mount, Jesus is calling his disciples to a singular focus upon God. Once again, let us hear the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
If our hearts are entirely given to God, it is clear that we cannot serve two masters; it is simply impossible—at any rate all the time we are following Christ. It would of course be tempting to show how far we had advanced in the Christian life by endeavoring to serve two masters and giving each his due, both God and Mammon. Why should we not be happy children of the world just because we are children of God? After all, do we not rejoice in his good gifts, and do we not receive our treasures as a blessing from him? No, God and the world, God and its good are incompatible, because the world and and its good make a bid for our hearts, and only when they have won them do they become what they really are. That is how they thrive, and that is why they are incompatible with allegiance to God. Our hearts have room for only one all-embracing devotion, and we can only cleave to one Lord.
If multi-tasking changes our brains, then multi-devoting surely has implications to our lives, to our souls. Are we afraid that we might miss something by devoting ourselves to only one God? Are we afraid that focusing on Christ alone will take away from our lives, robbing us of some other goodness offered by another master? Do we constantly need to scan the other possible masters hoping that they can add something that Christ cannot?
They certainly do add other things. To begin chasing after masters other than Christ is to go down a path of never-ending Anxiety. Fear. Uncertainty. Once we begin seeking after other gods, for that is what they will become, we will be forever attached, bound to them in ways that only drain life and hold us in slavery. We surely chafe under such suggestions. Again Bonhoeffer wrote:
If we love God, we hate the world, and if we love the world, we hate God…. We shall indignantly repudiate the suggestion that we hate God, and will be firmly convinced that we love him, whereas by trying to combine love for him with love for the world, we are turning our love for him into hatred. And then we have lost the single eye and our heart is no longer in fellowship with Jesus.
And yet, for exactly such a thing does Christ come to us and bring us into his life. Our rejection of God urges God ever closer. Christ comes to us to break the oppression of these other gods and turning our attention ever more toward him. His attention never wavers or is divided. Christ remains loyal and true to the task appointed to him in saving fallen humanity. Christ’s yes for us overrides any NO! we may level against God. He remains faithful and singularly devoted to the task given him by the Father.
Thanks be to God. Amen.