February 7, 2021 | Worship

Prioritizing. It’s a struggle—especially with so many things that are vying for our attention. I feel like it’s extra hard these days, for me at least, with notifications constantly lighting up my phone, an email inbox that is never empty, targeted advertising knowing that I really love yarn and showing me a sumptuous hand-dyed superwash merino/cashmere/nylon blend at every turn—and that’s just the digital. Then, then checklists of things to do in real life, in real time. Looking at the list sometimes is just overwhelming in itself, because it never ends. I don’t know how you tackle your to-do list, but prefer to go for the low hanging fruit first. The quick wins that I can cross off. The problem with this is that there are always gonna be more quick win tasks I can add, but the big, looming projects are still there, and usually get carried over to the next day, and then the next because my list was not made in order of priority, but instead in the order that things popped into my mind. Of course, what’s a to-do list with kids at home distance learning and my own distance learning to contend with. Add other random attention grabbers, and it’s hard to make out exactly what it is that I was sent here to do. Sent here, as in what was I created by God to do? Does any of this ring true for you? I’d imagine that the details of what steals your precious attention away are different, but do you feel that sometimes the world is pulling you in one direction and God is calling you to another?

There’s actually a theory of economics known as the “attention economy” that operates on the principle that attention is a scarce resource—and for some of us it is more so than others!—and because you can only pay attention to one thing at a time, reasonably, and our attention span is actually a new currency that tech companies are benefiting from. Psychologist and economist Herbert A Simon says, “[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

The ways that the attention economy is affecting us is obvious to anyone who has spent much time on social media—Facebook has this obnoxious feature where if you refresh your feed—even by accident—new information populates it, the WORST when you’re trying to find an article you’d seen earlier but you can’t remember who shared it—but this all feeds into this idea that our attention is some sort of currency. Ever time you refresh, you never know what you’ll get. What the algorithm will have curated specifically for you based on your likes, your clicks, and your conversions—or purchases. This not only contributes to an entirely different user experience between two people, which explains partly why we  can begin to think everyone agrees with us when everything we see on facebook reflects our own social and political values, but it also adds to the thrill of that next dopamine hit as your brain craves the next place to divert it’s attention.

The Netflix film “The Social Dilemma” can do a much better (and scarier) job of explaining this last phenomena than I can, but I wanted to bring up this idea of limited attention this morning because, believe it or not, it actually is relevant. This isn’t just one of my own Attention Deficit rabbit holes I tend to wander down!

In our gospel text from Mark, we have yet another healing story. Last week we talked about the man in the temple with the unclean spirit, and this week we meet Simon’s mother in law with a fever. Actually, our text is a bit disjointed as we read it. It feels like it lacks focus. There are a few things happening. Remember from last week how we were talking about this being the beginning of Jesus’ ministry? This is early on in Mark—we’re still in Chapter One. Word spread quickly after he healed the man in the synagogue, and Jesus, upon reaching the house of Andrew and Simon just after this took place, heals yet again. This is a more hands-on healing. He sits down at Simon’s mother-in-law’s side, holds her hand, and lifts her up. The fever doesn’t only break, but it is gone. When we think about being ill in Jesus’ time, this is an incredibly scary thing. And I know I don’t have to tell any of you about how serious illness is, and how a fever is just the beginning of what could be a long and terrible path, we’re all on pins and needles in our own time, questioning every sore throat, every time we get unexpected chills or feel warm due to a virus that has proven to us that we have not yet mastered life and death. So with this framework in mind, imagine this scene. Jesus comes close to Simon’s Mother in law—and we never hear of a wife, so perhaps there is an absence already felt among those gathered there, making this fever all the more scary and real. Jesus holds her hand. He doesn’t just pick her up, he lifts her up. The language used is important, because to say he lifts her up indicates more than physical carrying. It is her entire spirit and being he holds in his arms. She—a woman—A WOMAN—with a fever. We don’t know if she was contagious, but imagine an outsider coming to a COVID patient’s bedside, offering the intimate gift of touch, of holding. He goes beyond getting her on the road to recovery—she is so well healed that she resumes life in the exact way it had been before. She is renewed.

The word of this spreads. This intimate act of healing happened with only a few witnesses—those present in the home of Simon, however, just in the past few hours word has spread, Jesus’ fam had grown, and people from all over the city gathered at the house to be healed, to be exorcised. Jesus started healing and casting out as many demons as he could, forbidding the demons from talking about him—again here comes that curious thing that I brought up last week—the demons always knew who he was from the start, but people had to be convinced again and again. Jesus performed healings on many that evening. I can imagine he flopped onto the floor at bedtime and crashed out hard—but also, what if he didn’t? The next thing we know, he’s sneaking out first thing in the morning to find a secluded place. It is still dark out. Something had been gnawing at him and he needed a deserted spot away from crowds and well-intentioned but not always one the same page as him disciples to go pray.

Here’s where I’ll start bringing attention economy back into this, so keep that all in mind as we move through what happens next.

While he’s praying, alone, we hear that Simon and company hunt him. Hunt. They don’t just look around in a game of hide and seek. They’re setting out with purpose to find him and bring him back. He is pursued. The disciples don’t have the luxury of knowing what we know yet—they don’t know that his mission isn’t to cure everyone everywhere, but it is to spread the good news, to preach the gospel. They’re stoked, they’ve found someone who they can gather massive crowds around. He can gain fame, and they’re working overtime as his handlers to make sure he continues to grow in popularity. So they’re out hunting him.

But the reality, the healings are the low-hanging fruit tasks for Jesus. They appear to be easy enough, human and divine that he is. He probably could spend all of his time casting out demons and holding hands if he wanted. He could have spent his entire ministry there, opening up shop on the porch at Simon and Andrew’s place, letting the afflicted come to him. There would be no end to the lines, because there will always be illness. There will always be something that torments humans, whatever demons and spirits they may be. These are the parts of Jesus’ checklist that he could just keep checking off all day, every day without ever getting around to those bigger projects. Jesus was the son of God, but he was born human, and had a scarcity of attention, just like the rest of us.

When the disciples tell him that crowds are waiting, everyone is looking for him for a repeat performance, Jesus has to firmly stand against that human instinct to do the easy, feel-good task again and again. He says, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”

I can’t imagine that it would have been any easier for Jesus to prioritize what he was supposed to do if he would have come to the world as it is now—his cell phone constantly pinging with twitter responses and appointment reminders. His attention being vied for at every turn. And yet, I can imagine that he, after unplugging for a bit, would have come to the same conclusion. His priority was not to just keep healing, God had sent him here with more purpose beyond the one-time shot of healing the sick. He was sent with a more long-lasting, timeless purpose of sharing the good news of God’s love, a love that extends beyond all human comprehension. A love that is, in itself, one that has the power to lift us and affirm in us wholeness as we are, because we were created by God who loves us as God’s children. Jesus healed and performed miracles, his compassion for his fellow humans compelled him to do this, but he was sent to do more than that. He had to keep moving along, continuing to proclaim the message, but he couldn’t stay in one place, because the message wouldn’t spread as quickly as the word of the healings. He couldn’t let his gift of healing get in the way of his calling to challenge systems that were unjust and to welcome more and more people into the loving kin-dom of God.

While we may have trouble prioritizing our own checklists and to-dos, we must remain ever thankful that Jesus understood the attention economy way before anyone in the tech-boom ever capitalized on it, and knew that his message was one that was life-giving and eternal. Glory be to god, and thanks be to Jesus for this little glimpse into the struggles and decisions he had to make in order to keep on task with proclaiming the good news so that we might be able to continue to be lifted up by it two millennia later and beyond.