May I Have Your Attention

We are a distracted nation.  I see folks walking down the sidewalk in front of my house, their faces in their phones.  Having no idea of what’s going on around them.

Kids in restaurants with their parents, what might be quality family time, but in their phones.  And sometimes it’s also the parents captivated by their phones.

We’re bombarded with hundreds of messages daily seeking to get our attention.  Overwhelmed, I sometimes have several tens of thousands of e-mails awaiting my attention at my inbox.

With such competition, how can God possibly get a few moments of our undivided attention?  Only when things get catastrophic, or unusually emotionally disturbing.  Or sometimes so radiantly beautiful it knocks our socks off.  Or when something so deeply speaks to our heart that we’re speechless.

The little vignette in Luke is all about attention.

Jesus is an itinerant, homeless street preacher who happens upon the home of two unmarried sisters.  He’s tired and hungry and initially they must be overjoyed to have the change of routine this visitor presents.

Not only does Jesus violate custom by imposing on these two women, but he’s soon pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable.  He soon fills the house with his presence, takes it over.  He invites both women to “tremble forth into their souls” as he expounds on what makes for life – humility, generosity, patience, truth, justice among other matters.

But Martha is too busy with extraneous busyness.  She is all about herself – me, me, me she proclaims three times.  Jesus notes her distraction, and yet there she might be, before Holy Ground – at his feet.

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.  Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”  In his rebuke, Jesus invites Martha to also sit as his feet also where Eternity is revealed.

In that moment, the presence of the Lord is asking both women, “May I have your attention?”

In the midst of our infernal busyness of phones and meetings, that voice still echoes, “May I have your attention?”

The summons comes through the excruciating pain of ICE raids.  The stories of inhumanity cry out to the heavens.  Pain our Lord embraces utterly and completely.  Holy Ground.

Matilde, from Mexico, age 54 – not a threat to anyone, every day worked her taco cart, providing for herself in Pacoima.  Every day, early in the morning she set up her business, selling tacos and tamales near Lowe’s.[1]

As ICE agents began swarming the parking lot, grabbing up anyone with dark skin, she began hastily taking down her stand.

One agent, no identification ran up to her, provided no warrant, never asked about her immigration status, but grabbed her from behind and held her in a suffocating bear hug.  “I could feel his vest on my ear.  ‘I told him I couldn’t breathe.’”

The agent pulled up her shirt exposing her bra.  As she tried to pull her shirt down the agent applied more force.

Matilde can’t exactly remember what happened next because she fainted from lack of oxygen.  She came to on the ground crying, “I can’t breathe.  I can’t breathe.  “’My chest hurts.’

But they didn’t listen.  They ignored me.”

“I looked up at the tree where I had a picture of the Virgin posted and began to pray, ‘Virgin Mary, please help me, don’t abandon me.  I don’t want to die.”

Another agent came up who identified himself as a paramedic.  She told him that she had high blood pressure and was a diabetic and that her chest was hurting.

Though someone dialed 911, they left her on the ground unattended.  Videos taken by bystanders show her now on the ground unconscious.

One woman in the crowd screamed in Spanish at one agent, “You have Latino blood!”  Another, “Does it feel good doing this?

When Matilde arrived at the hospital, the doctor told her she was fortunate that her veins weren’t too clogged.  Otherwise, she would have to have been rushed into open heart surgery.  She was told that she had had a minor heart attack.

In all 29 years she has lived in this country, she could never have imagined that America would have come to this.

She is now kept sleepless many nights from anxiety and pain.  Because of the bruises on her arms and legs she can’t do much, not even cook.

She and her husband had come here for the opportunity and to send money back to relatives still in Mexico.  They have raised a family, paid taxes and abided by the laws of their new home.  Her 28-year-old daughter is a nurse and her 15-year-old son wants to go to college. 

“We both suffered from our sacrifice…but we wanted a better future for our kids…we wanted things just to be better.”

To stand before both the pain and the hope of Matilde’s story is to stand on Holy Ground.  If God doesn’t have your attention through the aching humanity of this story, you are as hopeless as Martha.  Just flitting about, a complete flibbertigibbet.

And yet, I would imagine, Jesus still asks of the Martha in each one of us, “May I have your attention?”

While overwhelming sorrow and pain is the Holy Ground Jesus enfolds in his own being, so also is unimaginable beauty.  Gaze upon the Milky Way and perceive the Holy asking, “May I have your attention?”

As the hymn proclaims in the second verse, “Lord, how thy wonders are displayed, where e’er I turn my eye, if I survey the ground I tread, or gaze upon the sky.”[2]  Yes — may I have your attention?

This week I opened the science section of the New York Times and gazed upon spectacular beauty revealed in the photo covering the entire lead page, God had my complete and undivided attention.  It was our universe; that’s right, the whole shebang laid out right before my eyes.[3]

With a new telescope in Chile, we will now be able to stitch together, photo by photo, the panorama of the entire universe in exquisite detail.  Looking back almost to the time of the Big Bang. 

Thousands of galaxies in this one small frame, dating back to almost the beginning of it all.  Millions upon millions of galaxies we’ve never before seen.  Imagine the billions of stars they must contain with multiples of planets orbiting most of them.  It astounds with Glory.

This was a story of the Vera C. Rubin telescope perched high in the mountains in northern Chile.  Dr. Rubin and her team were the ones to first postulate the presence of dark energy and dark matter.  Dark matter is that mysterious energy propelling the ever- increasing expansion of the universe, gaining velocity with each passing second.  Discoveries that would transform the study of astronomy.  One of her colleagues commented, “She was the ultimate role model for women in astronomy in the generation after her.”[4]

Just as an aside, this, the Befuddled Administration, in their signature legislation passed this week – the Big Bodacious Boondoggle — reduced funding to the National Science Foundation by 56 percent – a significant reduction in any D.E.I. efforts.  The sort of effort that would bring a stellar scientist (pun intended) like Dr. Vera Rubin to the fore.  How crazy is that?  But I digress.

And how many might have sentient life?  Boggles the mind.  The beauty of it all held me in rapt attention.  All I could murmur was, “Thanks be to God” — “Gloria in Excelsis.”

With every new dawn our undivided attention is requested in a hundred different ways.  It may be the invitation to dwell in the pain and distress of a fellow human being.  It may be in the lingering beauty of an embrace.  It may be in the anticipated birth of a baby. In it all, the summons of such, Eternity addresses our puny existence, “May I have your attention?”  Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.  And those with eyes to see, let them see.  Amen.

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[1] Ruben Vives, “Outrage and criticism over immigration sweeps,” The Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2025.

[2] “I Sing the Almighty Power of God,” The Hymnal 1982, No. 398 (New York: Church Hymnal Corp., 1985.

[3]Kenneth Chang, Katrina Miller, “Technological Marvel’s Stunning First Images, The New York Times, Science section, June 24, 2025.

[4] Katrina Miller, “A Powerful Telescope, with a Legacy to Match, The New York Times, Science section, June 24, 2025.

July 20, 2025
Pentecost 6, Proper 10

Genesis 18:1-10a; Psalm 15;
Colossians 1:15-28; Luke 10:38-42

“May I Have Your Attention”