Loading...Sermon June 5, 2016
The Rev. Rebecca S. Myers, LSW
The Church of the Nativity and St. Stephen, Newport, PA
Third Sunday after Pentecost Track 2 Proper 5
When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’ Luke 7:13
Please be seated.
I am very task oriented. I get focused on a project and all of its steps. I want to complete it. I’ll find myself writing an email to someone and totally forget to ask how they are. Sometimes I know someone’s been ill and I’ll finish the email, look at it, and realized I never acknowledged their illness or asked for an update. Luckily I know this about myself and don’t always send an email right away. I’ll look it over with time enough to add a sentence or two asking how things are going.
The grocery store is really hard for me. I don’t particularly like going to a grocery store anyway. I get into a space where I’m only concerned with shopping for what I need. People can be right in front of me and while I don’t run over them with my cart, I often don’t see them and will totally ignore people I know!
In preparing for this sermon, I discovered a name for my behavior – inattentional blindness. According to the website Scholarpedia, “Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice a fully-visible, but unexpected object because attention was engaged on another task, event, or object.” //www.scholarpedia.org/article/Inattentional_blindness
The research on this issue is fascinating. The most famous experiment involves showing people a video and asking them to count how many times three basketball players wearing white shirts pass a ball. After about 30 seconds, a woman in a gorilla suit comes onto the scene, faces the camera, thumps her chest and walks away. Half the viewers miss that. In fact, some people look right at the gorilla and don’t see it. Read more: //www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/but-did-you-see-the-gorilla-the-problem-with-inattentional-blindness-17339778/#KvVvlLyVD6ocgKx5.99
In today’s Gospel, Jesus has left Capernaum on the northern point of the Sea of Galilee. Remember from last week, Jesus healed the Centurion’s slave while in Capernaum. The walk from Capernaum to Nain was 32 miles, about the distance from here in Thompsontown to Dauphin. A large crowd is following Jesus. I imagine Jesus was tired, but maybe not…maybe people were used to walking 32 miles at a time. Google maps says such a walking trip would take at least 11 hours.
And yet, given all of that – tired after a day’s walk with a large crowd of followers -- Jesus sees the funeral procession coming out of the gate of the city. It was a large funeral procession, yet Jesus not only sees the funeral bier, but also sees the woman weeping. Jesus is not so focused on his own comfort or his own journey, or his large group of followers. Jesus sees the weeping woman.
We hear that Jesus had compassion for her. Compassion is “a deep awareness of and sympathy for another’s suffering.” It also involves wanting to do something to lessen the suffering of another. https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/compassion Jesus was deeply aware of all that was going on around him. Jesus knew this widow was suffering and grieving. Jesus stopped in the midst of his own journey, with his own followers to acknowledge the woman’s suffering and to do something about it. Jesus did not have inattentional blindness. Jesus was aware of everything going on around him.
The conclusion of the research on inattentional blindness says we as human beings can’t really eliminate it. Often we do need to focus on the situation right in front of us. However, I do think I move too fast sometimes. When I slow down and take my time, I see lots more of what’s happening around me. I see the person I know in the grocery store. I remember what’s going on in a person’s life and include it in the email. I remember what’s happening with someone and write an email just to say I’m thinking about you or I’ve prayed for you today.
Being seen is a wonderful gift. Seeing what’s happening around us and who is near us, allows us to offer that gift of being seen to others more often. It allows us to offer compassion and comfort to others. We’ll never be as perfect at it as Jesus was and it’s important that we try.
Amen
