"Pay Attention," a sermon delivered in Christ Chapel on October 22, 2004, by the Rev. John Lane Denson '54 upon the end of his two-week Visiting Fellow stay at ETSS

I am deeply grateful to all of you students, faculty, staff, and Dean for the honor of this Fellowship -- in both caps and lowercase -- that you have offered me these past two weeks. I am especially grateful, as well, for the gift of this great pulpit. I am honored to stand where giants and apprentice giants have stood and will stand again. I am especially mindful that John Hines has preached in this place, that he was our founder, and that I had a very small part in that founding.

My colleagues of the Class of 1954 -- may God hold them close -- would not go all maudlin on me, but would surely remind me of the irony of this moment. They'd be swift to point out that before I make too much of being "back home" again, I take careful note of Jesus' admonition in Matthew's gospel today that "prophets are not without honor except in their own country and in their own house" (Mt 13.57).

I would like to suggest at the outset of this preachment that we are not human beings whose vocation is to have a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings whose vocation is to have a human experience. And further, that our faith as Anglican Christians is collegial and covenantal. It is not contractual and confessional.

The late poet and word maven John Ciardi once was asked, "What are human beings? What does it mean to be human?" His answer was, "We human beings are what we do with our attention."

Paying attention is easier to say than do. So here's a delightful little test. There's an old story, familiar to many of you, that tells of a worker at a factory that had a high security rating. Each day, he would check out at the gate pushing a wheelbarrow full of sawdust. The guard would poke through the sawdust, run an electronic device over it, then, finding nothing, allow him to pass.

Finally, after years of this little exchange, there came a time when the guard was to be transferred. As the workman came through on the guard's last day, the guard said to him in a hushed voice, "My curiosity is killing me. You're surely smuggling something out of this factory. What on earth is it?" Cautiously, the workman answered, "Wheelbarrows."

What does it mean to be human? We answer that question in so many different ways. Our answer affects our stewardship of ourselves, our neighbors, and our environment. It often results in hostility and greed, fear, superstition, and even religious wars. The church answers this question by the way we live and witness, and that is perhaps of more critical importance in these days than ever in our service to our Lord's great imperative to love.

The gospel and the whole Judaeo-Christian sweep through history, as well, is about paying attention. It was paying attention that turned Moses from a common sharecropper into the deliverer of his people. It was paying attention that transformed David from an adulterer into the apple of God's eye. It was paying attention that turned Paul from a hatchet man for the Pharisees into a fool for Christ. And it was paying attention that turned old Peter from a traitor into the keeper of the keys. But in every instance, that attention was theirs alone to give. We human beings are what we do with our attention.

"What does it mean to be human?" To be human is, indeed, what God imagines for us. Our Prayer Book Catechism puts it well when it says, to be human is to be created in the image of God, to be the creature of God's imagination, to be free to choose: to love, to reason, to create, and to live in harmony with God and all of creation.

To tell that story by God's grace with our own unique spiritual grammar is our ultimate vocation as Christians. To become a community where such grammar may be freely parsed and styled in our own personal ways and language is no less the life and mission of the church -- and especially of its seminaries. For indeed, as it has often been said, we are not first of all human beings who are called to a spiritual awakening. We are spiritual beings by virtue of God's imagining us who are called to a human awakening for, indeed, there can be no greater incarnational theology than that.

It is this attention that God wants from us, but in every instance by God's grace, this attention is ours alone to give.

The church at large today seems often to find itself in a vocational wilderness, seemingly always preoccupied with itself, wondering over and again what is its ministry and to whom, but rarely reaching beyond its own boundaries. It struggles for relevancy, it yearns after authority, and it is bewildered why the world simply does not seem to notice.

Ironically, what Jesus told the tempting devil in the desert, God must again tell the church today. Religion's proud towers are for princes and tourists. Its intricate doctrines are for the angry and the arrogant. Its pretensions to power are just warmed-over Caesar outlined in fancy script.

The kingdoms of this world are humanity's mistake, not our glory. Can you imagine Jesus vested in silks and sitting on a throne demanding that we do him homage? Rather might he be here at table erasing centuries of warfare, turning us to discover our common humanity across all our boundaries, real and artificial, easing us out of our historic enigmas and into the shared language of love.

Can you imagine Jesus recommending that we put aside our stewardship of the natural environment out of deference to the economy when there wouldn't be any economy if there weren't first a healthy environment? Cannot you imagine that striking Jerusalem image of Jesus as mother hen gathering her brood of the world's disenfranchised millions?

The princes of our communion have been keeping careful watch on right-thinking and especially on the Episcopal Church's errant and inclusive tendencies to insist on our giving our attention to love over orthodoxy and to grace over law. They have anguished over finding some means for sanction -- and just now in their Windsor Report, they have found it. They've not ordered us, of course, but requested of us, perhaps to avoid any hint of tackiness, that we might take certain steps toward being restored to our senses. So what does one do when an 800-pound primate knocks at the narthex door? Why, we grab and hold on to our baptismal certificates, of course, and run to beat hell.

The gospel tells us that God is love, not that God is faith or that God is religion or even whether God is germane. God loves by grace, not by orthodoxy. The gospel asks not whether we or this church have relevance or power or fame, but whether we pay attention and make way for justice and peace and a fair concern and respect for all. It says that we please God most and show others whose we are by the way we love one another. That kind of attention is what God wants from us, but in every instance, by God's grace, it is ours alone to give.

The Great Commandment to love upon which depend all the law and the prophets and by which all so-called orthodoxy must be validated never once asks whether we're right or wrong, but frankly, whether we pay attention. For to be human is, indeed, what we do with our attention and to whom we give it. This is our vocation here in this place, not to become more spiritual, for God's great creative and fertile imagination has already seen to that, but that we become more human, for that is God's purpose for us.

Jeremiah got it right when he understood that God's covenant is within us, written on our hearts that God will be our God, and that we will be God's people (Jer 31.31-34). We express that covenant most profoundly at our baptism and in the great statements by which we are sealed in God's love -- to continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers... by persevering against evil... by proclaiming the Good News... by seeking and serving Christ in all... and by striving for justice and peace among all people, and by doing what is so sorely lacking in our time... respecting the dignity of every human being.

I am confident that this place and its people under God will keep that collegial faith as covenant, not be swayed by those who see it as confession and contract, and we will search out Christ together in us all, and continue to take its part in revolutionizing the world. To do so can be a lifetime -- surprised by joy.

The poet Maya Angelou suggests something like this when she recalls a woman in her audience who took offense at certain remarks she had made and who confronted her with the boastful claim, "But madam, I am a Christian!" Whereupon Angelou replied, "Already?"