What God Sees

What God Sees or Inattentional Blindness

A Sermon on 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13

By Griff Martin

For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith

On The Fourth Sunday Following Pentecost

June 17 2018

Incarnate and Resurrected God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing new reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter.  Amen.

It’s happened to all of us here….  We have suddenly noticed a store right there that we have never seen before, even though we have driven by that spot a million times and we say something about it a dinner that night, “Did you know that Torchy’s has opened a new location?” and then describe where we saw it and your partner looks at you and says “That has been there forever, have you never seen it?”… Or you are in the parking lot of a busy grocery store and you are on your phone in the midst of an important conversation and you walk right by your car without ever noticing it…. Or you do what I did in the midst of preparing this very sermon, you get lost in your thoughts about a biblical text (or something else related to your work life) and you walk out to get the mail and you are trying to look through the mail and sort what is junk and what is worth keeping and at the same time you are still thinking about that other thing and you walk straight into the large brick column that holds up your house, scratching your arm and hurting your chin, and then worst of all, the first words (okay the second words because the first words are not repeatable in the pulpit) the first repeatable words to come out are: “When did that get there?” as if suddenly a huge brick column that literally supports the weight of your house just appeared. 

Psychologically all three of those examples are known as inattentional blindness, which means when your attention is focused on one demanding task you might not notice unexpected things entering your visual field. Two psychologist discovered this with a simple test: they had folks sit at computer screens with a series of crosses in front of them and their task was simple, with each cross point out which arm was longer than the others, which is of course not what they were studying, along with the crosses on the screen there were other things, words, images, shapes. At the end of the study they would ask the participants beside the cross what else did you see and most folks would reply nothing because they had been told to look for a cross. The two psychologists wrote this about this phenomena they had discovered: “Because of this inability to perceive, this sighted blindness, seemed to be caused by the fact that subjects were not attending to the stimulus but instead were attending to something else ... we labeled this phenomenon inattentional blindness.”

Since then we have learned quite a bit more about this and it really is fascinating, for instance why do we this? Because we can’t focus on everything, so instead of noticing all the million things going on in front of us, around us, even within us we concentrate on the ones that we have deemed most important and then rely on our cognitive schema, the ways we have organized the world, to fill in the rest of it for us. 

I believe this term may be much wider than just in the psychological world, this term inattentional blindess might very well be a spiritual condition, a theological term: we focus so much on a truth or reality as we understand it that we miss the truth and reality of our God. This might explain so many of our problems of self worth, of knowing truth, knowing our very identity, finding our calling and the experience of being hopeless.

You might easily say so much of this comes from seeing things with our eyes and failing to see with God’s eyes. It might be exactly what the blind man was talking about when he was being quizzed over why he could suddenly see and he replied: “I don’t know…. what I know is that I was blind and now I can see.” 

And maybe many of us have a case of spiritual inattentional blindness, I certainly think that is what we see in this text today. 

Let’s start before the text even picks up, just to make sure we know where we are in the life of Israel as we start this summer focusing on David…. Let’s start with the blindness of Israel who for their entire story as God’s chosen people have operated under a system of high priest and judges, however that is not how anyone else does it, all the other nations have kings. So they whine about it, they complain about it. And God warns them a king is going to be a problem, power is a very dangerous thing (it’s a lesson we fail to learn). But they think this will be okay, so God tells Samuel to get them a king and he does, this tall handsome man, this Saul.

Israel’s inattentional blindness…. “God we want things the way everyone else has them, your ways don’t make sense anymore”… and we know this too, it’s every jealousy and envy and lust we have and hold, it’s those feelings that we deserve more, that we know better, that we might know better than God and God’s word.

And then Saul ends up being a real piece of work (exactly as God warned them), it’s okay at first until 1 Samuel 13 (take time to read this text later) when Saul does his own thing and essentially says to God, “Well I was waiting for you to handle this but you weren’t so I took things into my own hands.”

Saul’s inattentional blindness…. “God I knew how you were supposed to work and you did not do it like that, so I took matters into my own hands”…. And we know this too, it’s every prayer we pray telling God what ought to happen next and it’s every email we send telling someone else what we think they ought to doing or saying or preaching or so on.

And Saul’s failure just breaks Samuel, which is where our text picks up today. And Samuel is moping and mourning, he is upset because Saul has turned out to be a big old failure, Saul is an evil man and he is using his power in evil ways, Saul is not running things the way they need to be run.

Samuel’s inattentional blindess… “God this did not turn out right and there is someone awful in power and I am just going to sit here and complain”…. And we know this too, it’s every snarky political facebook post or jab and it’s all the complaining we do without taking any real action to change things, it’s thoughts and prayers without the work to change anything and the end result is just tragic: racism, war, sexism, school shootings and it’s 2,000 kids separated from their parents at the border (and these are not partisan issues, these are what the church must be speaking about in our days) 

And it’s here in the text that God now steps in and the truth is God is not real happy with the way things are going…. God’s chosen community is lost and running about doing no good for God, a powerful and dangerous man is in control and God’s very prophet can’t even stand up and do the right thing by offering words of hope or a call to action.

So God steps in… “Samuel, get your anointing things ready. Things are not looking good and we have to make some changes now. I’ve spotted another leader for us who can get us out of this mess.”

And Samuel loses his vision again, “Oh God we can’t do that… Saul will find out and kill us.”

More inattentional blindness… God has laid out the plan for us, we know God’s will and suddenly that looks too scary, that might get us in trouble, that might actually cost us something…. We know this too, it’s every time we know the right, the prophetic thing to do…the thing God is calling us to do and instead we retreat to safety, comfort, complacent and not rocking the boat.

But to his credit, Samuel does eventually go with the plan and he heads to Bethlehem of all places, what good could come from there? And once there everyone is terrified. And rightly so, the priest and the king have a thing, a connection and the priest often speaks for the king, so if he is here something must be wrong. 

More inattentional blindness… this guilt that we just so naturally carry that assumes something about us or the way we are doing things is wrong because we are humans and we carry original sin, right? Except that is not at all how God sees us.

And Samuel says nothing is wrong, I am here to share worship with you. So let’s sacrifice this heifer and praise our God. And Jesse, I need to make sure you and your family are here. Bring all your boys (there is some major inattentional blindness there, but we don’t fix that in this text, actually we still have not truly fixed it yet). 

And here Jesse starts parading out his boys… handsome, wise, winsome. And Samuel thinks there might be something to them but it’s just not quite right. And here we have more inattentional blindness, actually the main one in the text and maybe all of life…. Samuel is looking at appearance only and Jesse forgets the youngest one, or maybe not forgets because he has already discounted him enough he has forgotten him a long time ago. 

And here is the central blindness in this text, the way they see things and the way God sees things. It’s verse 7 when God speaks and God says: “Looks aren’t everything. Don’t be impressed with his looks and stature. I’ve already eliminated him. God judges persons differently than humans do. Men and women look at the face; God looks into the heart.”

And there it is… the very Gospel… 

Humanity looks at external, God looks internal, 

God sees what we often miss, 

God chooses the unlikely to be the source of salvation, 

God sees a meaning we often miss, 

God sees hope in what we call hopeless and sees salvation in that which we call lost, 

God finds the forgotten and restores the ones we rebuke. 

God sees what we miss. 

God sees not with our eyes, but with the heart which is to say God sees with true emotion, intellect, wisdom, vulnerability. God sees from that central place that is within all of us yet is so neglected. 

Back to the science of inattention blindness, psychologist have found two ways to decrease this phenomena. The first is simple: attention, making sure your eyes are open and you are not lost in thought. The second is similar, but it has to do with ecological validity, which means that we don’t see the things that we don’t expect to be there, so expectation.

And once again it’s science and theology because isn’t that the very problem of our spiritual blindness as well, we don’t pay enough attention and we already know what to expect.

And time after time God has saved my from my inattentional blindness… 

when I learned to include someone I had previously excluded, 

where I myself was included where I had been excluded,

when I welcomed the stranger and erased the false borders created for me,

where I saw hope in what I believed was hopeless, 

where I find faith where I only had fear, 

where I was so lost and God found me, 

when I looked in the mirror and finally saw God’s beloved, 

when the cross turned into an empty tomb, 

when someone’s pain became a calling.

To see what God sees… that is grace, that is salvation, that is how we are saved and that is how we save the world.

There are a lot of parallels between this text and our world today. I believe that God is looking to anoint and raise up some new voices to speak to all the brokenness that is around us today.  But once again God is reminding us, don’t look at things they way the world does, instead see more.

Pay attention and practice the presence of God.

Have higher expectations, expect to see the Kingdom and work of God.

All is not lost. All is not hopeless. God is doing a new thing, something new may even be born here among us this day, can you believe it, can you see it?

Amen and Amen.

*artwork: Heart and Soul, by Jan Camerone, jancamerone.com