Selective Attention

Scripture:

Jeremiah 29:4-7

Luke 17:11-19

Preached 10/13/2013

It was a cold January morning.  A man stood at a metro station in Washington D.C.  Then he bent over, and began to unpack his violin.  He tightened the bow, rosined it up, put the instrument on his shoulder, and began to play.  He played six Bach pieces that morning, for about 45 minutes.  It was rush hour, and in that 45 minutes, about 1,100 people went past him in that station, most of them on their way to work.  A middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing.  He slowed his pace, stopped a few seconds, then hurried on his way to keep on schedule.  Four minutes into his performance, the violinist received his first tip.  A woman threw a dollar into his open case without even stopping to listen to the music.  A little bit later someone leaned against the wall by the violinist to listen to him, but then looked at their watch and started to walk again. 

The one who paid the most attention was a three year old boy.  His mother tried to drag him along, but the little boy insisted on stopping to look at the violinist.  Finally, the mother gave him a very firm push, and the boy continued to walk, turning his head back the whole time.  This action of stopping to look and listen was repeated by several other children.  All the parents, without exception forced the children to move on.

In the 45 minutes the violinist played, only six people stopped and stayed for a while.  About 20 people gave money, but kept walking at their normal pace.  The violinist made $32.  When he finished playing silence took over.  No one applauded.  No one noticed.  And no one knew, but the violinist who had just finished playing was Joshua Bell, one of the most talented musicians in the world.  The Bach pieces he had just finished playing were some of the most intricate ever written.  He had been playing on a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.  And, two days before, Joshua had played to a sold out crowd in Boston, where the average seat to the performance cost $100.

It sounds like an urban legend, right?  But it did actually happen.  On January 12, 2007, violin virtuoso Joshua Bell took a cab three blocks from his hotel and set up shop, so to speak, on the landing of the Plaza Metro Station in Washington, D.C.  Gene Weingarten, a literary historian and journalist chronicled Joshua’s experiment for the Washington Post, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the article.  A world-class violinist really did give a free concert in a crowded train station, and almost no one noticed or appreciated it.  How could this happen?  How could more than a thousand people miss the incredible experience right in front of them?  Maybe they were busy, running late for work, looking at their phones or listening to their own music on head phones.  And maybe, in the middle of a train station, they just weren’t looking for an incredible experience in the first place.

What we look for has a powerful effect on what we see.  It’s not just that Joshua Bell experiment—lots of scientists have studied this phenomena, called selective attention.  MRI techs miss gorillas put into scans.  People miss curtains changing colors, people leaving screens, bears walking across stages, all because they weren’t looking for them.  We all do it.  Selective attention is how we can hear our friend talking to us in a busy restaurant.  It’s how you can hear your name called in the middle of a conversation with someone else.  It’s even how parents can wake up to the slightest sound that their child makes in the night, while sleeping through sirens blaring outside the window.  With selective attention, we cue ourselves into certain stimuli—like our names, or perhaps, for those DC commuters, the signs to their trains.  And since our brain can only process so much information at one time, when we’re cued into one kind of stimuli, we don’t notice things that don’t fit.

Selective attention impacts more than just whether or not we hear our name in the middle of a party or notice a fantastic violin concert on our morning commute.  Selective attention impacts our faith lives, and our relationship with God too.  Let’s go back to the Jeremiah passage.  The passage that Neal read for us this morning needs some historical background to make sense to us.  So, as the reading itself says, this part of Jeremiah is a letter that Jeremiah wrote to the exiles.  Jeremiah was from Judah, which was the southern kingdom of Israel.  When Jeremiah is writing this letter, Judah is being taken over by Babylon, though it’s still trying its hardest to resist this conquest.  Judah had already been paying tribute to other nations for years, and Israel, the northern Kingdom, had been crushed about 150 years earlier.  Judah saw what happened, and did not want to be part of the same.  However, Babylon is clearly winning the fight, and has already sent some of the people into exile. 

For these exiles, and for the people left in Judah to watch its conquer and destruction, there was a theological crisis.  The two main schools of theological thought were this:  Judah’s defeat meant that God had abandoned it, or Judah’s defeat meant that God had been defeated by the Babylonian gods. The tangible symbols of God being with the Judeans—the king, their land, the temple—were all being taken away by the Babylonians, and the people of Judah couldn’t stop the destruction.  It seems as if they were surrounded by it on all sides.  And so, perhaps it seems natural that their attention would be focused on threat, destruction, and pain, as a way to protect the little that they had left.

 And Jeremiah tells them that this isn’t the place to put their attention.  Instead wallowing in their pain, Jeremiah tells the exiles to focus on living their lives in the place they are.  Jeremiah tells them to live full lives—to build houses, plant gardens, to marry and have children.  And, most importantly and most revolutionarily, Jeremiah tells exiles to start looking for God where they are.  Rather than buying into the common notions that God must either be defeated or absent, Jeremiah tells the exiles that God is indeed among them still.  And he tells them to pray, even though they’re in a foreign land.  He tells them to pray for this land, essentially telling them to focus on love, hope, and possibility, and find God in these rather than in a king, a temple, or land. 

 And then, there are the ten lepers who Jesus healed.  If we were the intended ancient audience of the story, we would have known the focus of their attention.  Since we’re a bit removed from the writing of this gospel, I’ll bring us up to speed.  Jesus had told all of them to go and show themselves to the priests.  Lepers only went to priests for two reasons.  First, to be diagnosed with leprosy.  We can assume that the people with leprosy in the story were past the point of needing diagnosis.  So, the second reason that a person with leprosy would go see a priest: the celebration, cleansing, and re-integration ritual after leprosy had been cured.  The priest wouldn’t be the one to cure leprosy here.  The priest would just be the person to do the celebration and cleansing ritual that allowed a formerly ostracized person to return to life in the Jewish community.  And so, the nine Jewish lepers continued on their way to the priest, focusing their attention the socially acceptable thing to do after healing. 

But not the Samaritan.  For him, presenting himself to a priest for the cleansing and re-integration ritual wasn’t an option, since he wasn’t part of the Jewish community in the first place.  And, without that societally dictated acceptable focus, his attention was freed.  He saw what Jesus had done for him.  He saw that Jesus, a Jew, had healed him, a Samaritan man with leprosy.  He cried out with joy.  He was grateful. And, with his attention focused on joy and gratitude, he saw Jesus once again.

And isn’t this our goal too?  To see God, to see Jesus, to see the Holy Spirit moving in our daily lives?  No matter if we feel like the exiles and the lepers still diseased and ostracized, or the triumphant, healed lepers, God is there with us.  And if we focus our attention on the right things—as our scripture readings put it, joy, gratitude, the life that goes on in the midst of pain, we can see God in our midst too, no matter what else surrounds us.  . 

If we focus on the ways we have been conquered, we don’t see God’s victories in the middle of our difficulty.  If we focus on what society says we should to, we don’t see that new life that Jesus offers us.  If we focus on the mundane—perhaps our busy schedules and making it to appointments or catching the train—we miss the beauty and the miracles in front of us.

No offense to Joshua Bell.  I’m sure he really is a magnificent violinist.  But God is a much better artist.  We are all surrounded by God’s miracles at this very moment.  Can we see them?  Can we see how the people sitting next to us are more than a collection of cells, but miraculous, living expressions of God’s love?  This room is more than wood and metal and glass, but a true sanctuary where we encounter God through the Spirit’s movement in simple words and musical notes.  Can you see it?  This community around us is a wonderful collection of people and places where we can show God’s loving, constant presence. Can you see it?

God is here.  Let us keep ourselves open for God’s presence.  Let us keep our attention focused always for that presence moving, acting, and guiding us to see more beauty, more hope, more love, and more miracles, that we’ve ever thought possible before.  Amen.