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Let’s focus…on the wrong thing!
- Gethsemane Lutheran Church
- Jul 19
- 7 min read
How long do you think I could preach a sermon while standing on one foot? Is that a dumb idea? What if I like one leg better? What if I think one leg is “the better part?” What will happen if I keep doing this? What am I missing by standing on just one leg when the other leg is perfectly fine?
You need both legs for balance. And you need both Mary and Martha because what each of them is doing is important.
For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been hearing Gospel stories about themes related to hospitality. Sending out disciples without any material goods and nothing to sell except to heal and announce the nearness of the kin-dom of God—these disciples were tasked with receiving hospitality in the towns where they visited, not providing for themselves but trusting in God and trusting God to direct them to the presence of the people who would receive them graciously and feed them or give them clothes when their own clothes wore out because they took no bag, no purse, and no extra sandals!
Last week’s story was about the Good Samaritan—a parable about providing hospitality to someone in desperate need, even if that person might be a cultural enemy. This story was told in the context of a discussion about who is a neighbor—a neighbor is the person who saves you in your own time of deepest need.
Part of what’s important about telling these stories is that Jesus is not announcing some separation between the material world and the spiritual world, the world of tangible stuff and the world of spiritual being. Material needs are important; humans need things to be able to live and to live abundantly.
But it would be a weird dinner party if your friend invited you over to their house, and you show up, and they seat you at their dining table and present food to you in the way a waiter might do at a restaurant and your friend spends the entire time in the kitchen doing whatever people do in kitchens: prepping the next course, mixing more drinks, cleaning up the pots and pans. They provided you with hospitality—they fed you—but how would you feel about a dinner party that ends up being only dinner and…no party? You might call that host’s behavior insensitive, at best, but probably rude.
But wouldn’t it also be weird to be invited over to your friend’s dinner party and they sat down with you at the table and showered you with attention in all the ways humans show attentiveness: warm, open body language and plenty of eye contact and questions to indicate they’re really listening to your stories and thoughtful responses…but there’s no food. Well, it’s not a dinner party if there’s no dinner, and you could hardly call that a party either.
For hospitality to truly be hospitable, you need both Mary and Martha. One is not better nor more important than the other. And hospitality must be concerned with timing—in this story from Jesus’s life, Martha is doing the work, but in her focus on that work, she’s neglecting the relationship with her friend Jesus.
But Martha won’t suffer in silence—she complains about her sister, though she doesn’t even speak directly to her sister but goes over her head to complain to Jesus first! This could have been a story of sibling rivalry, but the story of Mary and Martha does not turn into the story of Cain and Abel. Who remembers what happened with Cain and Abel? (Story from Genesis about two brothers, the sons of Eve and Adam, who offer sacrifices to God but God appears to prefer Abel’s sacrifices of animals over Cain’s sacrifices of grain. Cain becomes jealous and kills his brother Abel.)
Martha and Mary are not fighting with each other, but perhaps they are living out their individual preferences for interacting with people, even beloved friends who are guests in their home. But the grace that Jesus gives is when Jesus calls Martha to the present moment: you are worried and distracted by many things.
And this is the message of grace to all of us, right here and right now. Who here is worried and distracted by many things?
You ever go to the restaurant and see people sitting together but not talking? And maybe they’re staring at their phones? Yeah.
You know the difference, when you’re with someone and when you’re really present with that person. Talking does not necessarily have to be involved; silence truly can be golden because non-verbal communication is always going on too. But how do you communicate your attention, how do you set aside distractions so that you can be present to another person?
That is incredibly vulnerable and it is also incredibly crucial to human life. I think that attention and intention and presence—I believe this is the better part that Jesus is talking about. How will you ever recognize the difference between truth and lies if you don’t stop sometimes and reflect and pay attention?
We live in a time where people are talking about the “attention economy”—there are entire industries built around grabbing people’s attention or keeping their attention. And I’m not calling this “evil” because these industries aren’t setting out with a goal to hurt people; they’re trying to sell products and services, which I don’t believe is an evil activity at all.
But people who can operate well within this attention economy, people who can attract or keep the attention of a crowd of other people, they do have power, which they can then use for good or evil, which is a whole other conversation.
I wanted to understand more about this attention economy so I listened to a podcast hosted by Ezra Klein who works with the New York Times, and he interviewed Kyla Scanlon, an economist who writes about markets and economic concepts in a way that will make sense to younger folks. It was fascinating to hear this young woman—I think she’s 27 years old—interpret the effects of artificial intelligence, and how economic policies are shaping Gen Z who are in their teens and twenties right now, and how the attention economy works and is monetized.
What really struck me is that as much as she talked about technology and social media, she still had books that she referred to—remember books?! And at the end of the interview, her recommendations on books she suggested reading were written decades before she was even born, and her favorite one: C.S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters!” She summarized that book—in case you haven’t read it—as a discussion between demons about how to keep a person distracted enough that they’ll come to accept evil because they can’t tell the difference anymore.
This is the danger of distractedness, and it is nothing new. Jesus could recognize this danger in his friend Martha so he challenged her to set aside her distractedness and choose where she wants to put her focus—what is the better part and what cannot be taken away?
If you’re here and you’re still listening to this and haven’t drifted away to look up something on your phone—and I’m not calling you out necessarily because I do it too—then you’re attempting the path of Mary in this gospel story. You’re here to sit at Jesus’s feet, which is the posture of a student: ready to learn and listen and ask questions of a wise teacher. Wisdom is not a commodity that you can purchase with money; wisdom is a choice you must make over and over again. And you learn to listen that way, to sort things out for yourself and determine the truth.
In her interview, Ezra Klein asked about economist Kyla Scanlon’s idea of AI creating an abundance of intelligence that will create a scarcity of truth, and Scanlon responded this way:
“I think truth is really valuable. It’s the most important commodity of the present moment. And it’s something that is increasingly scarce — and once you lose it, it’s very difficult to regain it.
“And I think A.I. is going to create a lot of information and noise. It’s going to become increasingly important for people to be able to sort the truth out from all that.
The A.I. does hallucinate quite a bit. If you’ve ever talked to ChatGPT, it can make things up — and if you point that out, it will correct itself. But even then, you still have to be able to source what the truth is and what that means.
“That’s also the problem with social media, too. Those algorithms are designed, and the incentives are perhaps not aligned to the user — they’re aligned toward the corporation. So for anything that people can get addicted to — and there’s a monetary incentive for them to get addicted to it — it will happen.
“I think there is a world where A.I. can be a source of truth — but right now I don’t think it is. People take everything it says at face value. The number of “@Grok, is that true?” that I see on X — where people are asking the A.I. to validate a tweet, rather than go and do the research themselves and work that muscle in their brain — is concerning.
“Because you do have to have a radar for truth. Because it’s so easy to get taken advantage of right now. There’s just so much information, there’s so much noise, and it’s just nonstop.
“It’s very easy to make mistakes — and a lot of people do. And you have to be able to know what’s true and what isn’t and have your own moral and value compass.”[1]
That part isn’t changing—the need to set aside distractions and focus on what’s important. Pay attention to what time it is and notice the people around you. Your attention is valuable currency, in this economy as well as to God, who delights in you just as you are, not only valuing you for what work you can do.
Amen.
Pastor Cheryl
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