Setting our Mind on the Story of Christ

An imaginary image of an open tomb in the Adirondacks - image generated by ChatGPT

Romans 8:1-11

Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

My colleagues and I in the Religion Department at my high school have been focused on attention for the past three years. We have wrestled with the ways our smart devices compete for and capture our attention, interrupting us with vibrations and noises and offering a constant stream of intermittent rewards. We have wrestled with the ways our political and media culture preys upon our deepest anger and fear to draw our eyes toward its content and, of course, toward its advertisers. And we have wrestled with the advent of Large Language Models in artificial intelligence that can court our attention like sycophants, offering a steady stream of affirmation before politely asking whether we might like them to explain themselves further.

In all of this, one of the remarkable revelations has been that each one of us already possesses one of the most fiercely contested resources on earth: our attention. Everybody wants a piece of it. Entire industries and enormous fortunes are built around the promise that our attention can be monetized. It is startling to realize that we possess something so valuable, and yet most of us barely notice it. We take our attention for granted. We often spend it thoughtlessly and give it away for almost nothing. This is why my colleagues and I determined that one of our two primary goals as a Religion Department is to form the attention of our students: to make them aware of their attention, to help them notice where they place it, and to understand how what they attend to changes them.

Paul understood something that our modern technology and marketing companies – and my colleagues in the Religion Department – have been rediscovering: capture a person's attention long enough, and you can begin to form the person. “For those who live according to the flesh,” Paul writes, “set their minds on the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.” Paul uses this language of “setting the mind” throughout his letters, and the phrase is richer than simply thinking about something. Paul understands that what captures our attention does not merely occupy our thoughts: it trains our desires, shapes our imaginations, and forms the people we are becoming. 

It is tempting to read this portion of Romans and reduce it to a simple moral choice: choose the Spirit and live; choose the flesh and die. This is something like the two-wolves story we heard in the children's sermon: feed the good wolf or succumb to the evil one.[1] There is something appealing about this way of understanding the world because it leaves us in control. We stand above the conflict, calmly deciding which wolf to feed, which path to take, which person we would like to become. This kind of moral framework can be developmentally appropriate for children, who are learning agency and building upon simple concepts and stories. The problem comes when a framework appropriate to childhood becomes a prison for an adult’s spiritual life.

Remember that Paul has spent the preceding chapters of Romans dismantling the assumption that there is some neutral, sovereign self that is standing above the conflict, calmly deciding which side to choose. As Paul confessed in the passage we heard last Sunday, “I do not understand my own actions...For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” The two-wolves story imagines that we stand above the conflict deciding which wolf to feed; Paul insists that the conflict runs through us. Paul is not giving us a first-century version of “put down your phone and practice mindfulness.” He is not trying to give us a more perfect set of rules to live by. Rather, Paul is prompting us to ask a much deeper set of questions: What power is organizing our perception of reality? What commands our imagination? Where are our minds habitually set?

Because whatever commands our attention eventually teaches us how to see the world. It gives us a story about what is real and what is illusion, what we should fear and what we should desire. But a story can capture our attention, soothe our fears, and give us the illusion of control and still collapse when it encounters reality. No story can finally bear more weight than its truth can hold. The question, therefore, is not simply which story is most compelling or gets us what we want. The question is which story is true enough to hold us when reality refuses to conform to our expectations. This is why Paul points our attention toward the person of Jesus. For Paul, Jesus does not simply tell us the true story of reality. He embodies it. His whole life traces the pattern written into creation itself: birth, death, and resurrection; relationship, estrangement, and redemption. Jesus does not offer us a more effective strategy for controlling reality. He reveals the pattern by which God is already redeeming it.

And when Jesus tells stories, his parables invite us to see the world according to this same pattern. Consider the Parable of the Sower that we heard this morning. It is a strange story to tell people obsessed with outcomes. The sower appears almost careless. Seed is scattered on paths, among rocks, into thorns, and onto good soil. Much of it never produces anything at all. By almost any modern measure of efficiency, the sower is doing a terrible job. And yet Jesus offers this as an image for how the Kingdom comes among us.

The Kingdom is not a machine into which we insert the correct choices and receive the desired outcome. God's grace is scattered abundantly, extravagantly, almost recklessly. And Jesus invites us to imagine ourselves less like machines responsible for producing the right outcomes and more like soil being cultivated to receive God's abundant gifts. The question is not whether we can control the harvest. The question is what kind of attention we are giving to the seed already being scattered around us.

At the end of this service, every one of us is invited to participate in this story as we witness the death and proclaim the resurrection of our sister Julia. She was born. She lived a full life. She died. And today we commend her to God, trusting that the pattern revealed in Jesus – the pattern of death and resurrection, estrangement and redemption – is true enough to hold her and true enough to hold us, even in death. Jesus led the way, and Julia followed. So too will we follow Julia into the Memorial Glade, and the pattern will go on, ringing with truth as our chapel bells ring out over the lake.

Amen.

[1] The children’s sermon reflected on a famous Native American Proverb, which tells of a battle of two wolves inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, lies, inferiority and ego. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy and truth. The wolf that wins? The one we feed.