Sermon: Divided Attention and Cluelessness - Sabbath as Resistance to Multitasking

Amos 8:4-8

Divided Attention and Cluelessness

Sabbath as Resistance to Multitasking

James Sledge                                                                                       July 27, 2014

There’s an old joke about a preacher who, just before the sermon, performs the weekly ritual of taking off his watch and balancing on the pulpit so that he can see the watch face. A young boy, unfamiliar with this ritual, whispers to his father, “What does that mean, Daddy?” To which his father replies, “Absolutely nothing, son. Absolutely nothing.”

We preachers can sometimes drone on and on, oblivious to the need to wrap things up. But clock watchers in the pews are not always reacting to long winded preachers. Sometimes they simply have “more important” things they’d rather be doing.

Of course it’s difficult really to listen when you’re clock watching or paying attention to other things. I’ve heard claims that millennials, who grew up with the internet and cell phones, have brains that are wired for multitasking, but study after study has shown that when people, even young people, multitask, all tasks suffer.

Are you familiar with “phone stacking.” That’s when people who get together for a meal or coffee take out their smartphones and stack them on top of each other, agreeing not to check them until it’s time to go. If someone can’t hold out that long and must check email or update his Facebook page, he has to pay for everyone.

I’ve never actually seen this done, but it’s an intriguing idea. I say that as someone who has too often been guilty of checking my phone while in the midst of conversations with family or friends. More than once I’ve found myself embarrassingly lost in a conversation because my attention has been elsewhere. I’m trying to break free of my phone addiction because I know that I can’t really have a conversation while I’m checking my phone.

We all know that. We cannot be fully attentive to another while multitasking. Not everything requires our full attention, but you cannot really worship if you’re checking your watch, you can’t really make love while watching the game on TV, and you can’t really pray while checking stock quotes. Multitasking is a hazard to most anything intended to be deep and intimate. That’s especially of true of relationship with God and the life God wants for us.

In our scripture verses this morning, the prophet Amos is upset with wealthy people over multitasking.. They are keeping up with the expected religious obligations. They are marking the sabbath, but all the while they’re watching their clocks and keeping one eye on their profit margins. Outwardly they are attending to God, but inwardly they are making business plans, figuring out what corners they may be able to cut, what deceptive practices they might be able to get away with, in order to make a bit more.

Amos lived in a time when things were going well for Israelites in the upper tier of society, owners and CEOs and those with big stock portfolios. But it was not going well for the poor, and Amos warns that this will be the undoing of Israel because Yahweh is a God with special concern for the poor and oppressed.

In our day, a lot of people, even religious people, doubt that God actually intervenes in history. But I don’t know that this makes us much different from the wealthy of Amos’ day. They obviously didn’t worry about God intervening or listen to Amos. He was amazed at how oblivious they were to the plight of the poor, but such cluelessness is a common trait of multitaskers who always have one eye on profit margins or their bank account.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the now infamous remarks by John Schnatter, CEO of Papa John’s Pizza. He railed against Obamacare and how bad it was for businesses. It would force him to make more employees part time because providing healthcare for them would raise the price of a pizza 14 cents. Deny someone healthcare over 14 cents? Is that the sort of reasoning that happens when you multitask, always keeping one eye on profits? I wonder if that’s what Amos meant when he spoke buying the needy for a pair of sandals.

Amos had choice words for the wealthy. In one prophecy calls wealthy women cows of Bashan who oppress the needy, lounge is fine homes, and say to their husbands, “Bring something to drink!” They are clueless to the plight of the poor, a bit like Queen Marie Antoinette, who supposedly said of peasants starving for lack of bread, “Let them eat cake.”

Speaking of which, have you seen the Cadillac Escalade commercial about the “evolution of luxury.” It depicts an Egyptian woman on a huge gold throne carried by scores of slaves, perhaps some of the Israelite slaves who sustained Pharaoh’s oppressive economic system. And it shows a very Marie Antoinette-like women riding in an opulent carriage, doing a beauty queen wave to the crowds that watch her go by. Her face then fades into that of a gorgeous woman looking out the passenger window of an Escalade which pulls up to a fancy hotel. She climbs out in her finery and a servant takes her bag.

I wonder if he makes more than minimum wage. I feel certain the prophet Amos would be as amazed and appalled at the cluelessness of whoever conceived of or approved this commercial as he was any “cows of Bashan.” Let them eat cake, indeed. 

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As I wrote this sermon, caught up in prophetic critiques of wealth, multitasking, and cluelessness, I begin to wonder if there was any good news for me or those like me. I hope I’m not a cow of Bashan or Marie Antoinette, but I’m doing okay. I have a nice home and a small stock portfolio. I eat well thanks to grocery stores with minimum wage employees and to migrant workers making even less. I have nice clothes, an iPhone, and big screen TV, all made by workers in Vietnam, China and other places with scant rules on worker safety or minimum wage. Does the prophet Amos (or Walter Brueggemann) have any good news for me?

I think so, and, not surprisingly considering the topic of this sermon series, it’s connected to Sabbath. Not so much to a particular Sabbath day, but to the practice of truly stopping that such a day teaches. Truly to stop, to cease, to rest, is to become present to God and to those around us in a manner that is uncommon in our world.

It can be difficult. Sometimes when I try to stop and be still, things I need to do or plans I need to make creep into my mind, and it begins to whir and run off on its own, making it hard to be present to God whose native tongue seems to be silence.

Similar difficulties can impact our ability to be present to others, making it hard to see them. And so an Israeli life matters more than a Palestinian one in Gaza. The safety and well-being of me and mine matter more than that of a child from Honduras or Guatemala. My political party or ideology matters more than the good of others or the nation.

But I can learn Sabbath stillness. With discipline and faith and the help of the Spirit, I can learn to stop, to be still, to be silent, to be totally present… to the other, and to God. And when that happens, all sorts of new possibilities began to appear for my life with God, and for my life with others, even those who are strangers, even those who are enemies.

With the Spirit and faith and discipline – in other words, with the habits of disciples – who knows what might be possible.

This is the fifth in a 6-part sermon series based in Walter Brueggemann’s book, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now. Each sermon is inspired by one of the six chapters in that book. The fifth chapter is “Sabbath as Resistance to Multitasking.”