The Practice Of Paying Attention

May 12, 2024 - Matthew 17: 14-21

On Saturday morning at 9am, I gathered with about ten other members of the board of PADS, the Elgin-based organization that seeks “To respectfully and compassionately empower persons and families who are in need of housing to become self-sustaining by providing shelter, needed services, and professional guidance.” It’s unglamorous work, sitting in a boardroom on a beautiful morning that I could have spent on a long bike ride or working in my garden. I’m not trying to impress you with my level of self-sacrifice. I’m, honestly, pretty suspicious of self-sacrifice these days. I’m becoming less and less convinced it takes us all to the healthy places we want to go. No, I’m telling you how I spent the bulk of my Saturday this week to share with you how I think change happens.  

I can understand how someone would read today’s scripture passage and conclude that if we want to see healing and positive change in the world, in ourselves, or in people we love then we just have to believe hard enough. Why couldn’t the disciples cast out the demon in the boy? Because of your little faith, the Matthean Jesus tells them. I wish I could tell you the Greek clears everything up nicely and doesn’t make Jesus sound quite so mean. But unfortunately that’s not the case as far as I can tell.

In this passage, Jesus is downright frustrated with the disciples and their lack of faith. There’s no getting around that. But I have lived long enough to notice that just because I make a wish list of things that I want to change, it doesn’t mean they will. Even our most fervent prayers are not always answered with the solutions we’d prefer or on the time table we’re wanting either.

So, you won’t be able to convince me that the reason we can’t end the housing epidemic or the violence in the Middle East or abuses of power in our own country is because we just don’t believe or care hard enough. That’s not an interpretation of this text I can personally swallow. In fact, I think that interpretation likely leads to a paralyzing frustration with ourselves or a profound resentment of the people around us who don’t express the same opinions as us with the same fervor.

There are demons in today’s story after all. We don’t talk a lot about demons in the broader culture unless it’s in a horror movie. But we do practice a lot of demonizing of each other. That can lead to violence pretty quickly – either emotional or physical harm. But it’s also a pretty ineffective technique to solve the problems that plague us. The trouble is when you demonize a person or a whole group of persons, you don’t actually address the problem. You actually let the problem off the hook, assuming the way things are is all the better we can ever expect. Instead of blaming people in need of housing for their problems, we can address the issues - both individual and system-wide - that leave a person without adequate housing.  

Now, my experience with folks in this church is that we’re less likely to demonize unhoused folks than some people. But we might be more tempted to demonize government officials, non-profit leaders, or folks across the political aisle for their inability to solve this complex problem or even see it the same way we do.

In the scripture though, Jesus is usually pretty upset with people who have hurt, neglected, or discriminated those who are experiencing something harmful or challenging to them. He goes around casting out demons. I have never met a demon. And while I am certain that there is real harm, suffering, and evil in the world, I’m not certain that I’m completely separate from it. So, I’m pretty grateful when someone helps me see how I’m part of causing the harm. I may not always agree. But sometimes I do, and I’m glad then to try to make helpful change.

My point is, Jesus doesn’t cast out people. He casts out the things that are harming them. Can we do that, too? Can we love people but not accept the violence, hatred, and harm they bring? Can we do this for ourselves? Who does this for us? How do we surround ourselves with folks who love us but who also help us see when we’re the ones causing harm, too? Because we can try demanding that everything and everyone be perfect – or become perfect in one sudden moment. But that’s not usually the way healing or change actually works. Those things take place on the quantum level - infinitesimally small increments at a time.

I once had a teacher who warned that “real change is more like erosion” than anything else. The same way the cells of these human bodies slowly regenerate themselves, that’s the pace often of the changes we want to see in the world. We’re lucky if they happen one inch by one inch at a time.

In this passage Jesus declares to the disciples that if they had faith the size of a mustard seed, they would be able to say to this mountain, “Move from here to there”, and it would move. That’s a nice sentiment. I’ve never seen it happen all at once. But I do think it’s true. I think we can move mountains one spoonful of dirt at a time.

For me, the housing crisis is a pretty big mountain. In Elgin the rental market is so tight that there is a less than one percent vacancy rate. So landlords can ask for a security deposit that is three times the monthly rent and even consider moving an applicant to the head of the line if they can provide twice that security deposit. That’s a practice some social service agencies are implementing just to get their people into a safe, secure housing situation. And getting folks into even that situation can be made more difficult by their inability to hold down a job or otherwise overcome the challenges of their own mental health condition, substance abuse, or other disability. We are not living in a county or a country that has figured out how to care for all of us, yet.

It’s an overwhelming problem that will take many different people working at many different solutions to address. It can be stressful to understand the gap between housing conditions as they are and a world in which there are much better housing conditions for many more of us. It can be tempting to say there is nothing I can do so why try. It can be tempting to want to look for someone to blame and make them the reason it’s not worth trying, too. But that is not a theory of change I can subscribe to or that I find supported in this passage. No. I prefer the idea of a faith the size of a mustard seed being enough to sustain our actions one day at a time over the course of a long period of time until we see more of the change we seek and toward which God calls.

So, I will keep showing up in the ways I am able and with the time and energy that I can joyfully share, believing that with the help of God, my showing up day after day makes almost nothing impossible. All along the way I want to celebrate the progress made, too. Even if it’s not the final product I hope to see, celebrating every inch of progress made helps me keep faith and see how far we’ve come, even if we still have a ways to go.

I think it’s a kind of spiritual practice to do this – to approach change like this – with patience and persistence. Another spiritual practice of mine is reading poetry to anyone who will listen or just aloud to myself. I love poetry read aloud. So, today I gave you a well-known excerpt from Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes as the call to worship.

Let me read it to you again: “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”  

May you go forth, with a patient, persistent, mustard seed size faith.

May you trust that it is enough to move mountains, one spoonful at a time.

May you pay attention to all the little things there are to celebrate

that make for healing and good, wholeness-bringing change in the world

and may that cause you to be so astonished,

you can’t help but share it with someone else, too.

May it be so. Amen.