Blessed are those who are Attentive

Image Credit: Joe Schumacher, A photograph of an arrangement of leaves from an Euonymus alatus, or “Burning Bush,” 2011.
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) From Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt University Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://act.library.vanderbilt.edu/artworks/55954 [retrieved August 25, 2026]. 

Proper 17 (22), Year A
30 August 2026

Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45b
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28

 

Every day many things compete for our attention. There are the mundane things like cooking, doing dishes, getting the oil changed, doing laundry, paying bills. Then there are the things that want to entertain us, perhaps a TV show, or a game, or listening to music. Often times the internet and smart phones win the battle for our attention, we scroll social media endlessly, or jump from site to site whether it be news, sports, or celebrities. More than once have I picked up my phone with the clear intention of doing something very specific, only to get distracted by the first app I saw, and five minutes later I wondered why I had picked up my phone in the first place.

There are other things that seek our attention I have not yet mentioned. Creative things like woodwork, painting, making music, writing. And people, of course, whether family, neighbours, friends, or strangers, for we all long to be in relationship, and yet we have become used to our privacy and to “Bowling Alone”.¹ “Bowling Alone is what Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam calls a life increasingly lived apart from community. But what Putnam describes is not a life with more leisure, or more time, just a life more and more lived apart from community. That is why in the western world loneliness has become an epidemic.

In a world of many demands we wonder how we make time for God. One way to describe making time for God is prayer. But we have difficulty with prayer because we don’t know what to say or how to pray. The disciples also did not know how to pray which is why they asked Jesus to teach them. We may also mistake prayer simply for getting what we want (for didn’t Jesus say, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you²?), the only requirement being that we first tell God what we want. But getting what we want is not a relationship, at least not a meaningful one, besides, we don’t always get what we want, and so we are back at the question of why we should pray. And without a reason to pray we don’t pray very much.

But what if prayer is not about getting what we want?

Sam Wells writes about prayer that prayer essentially is about showing up. And he says because prayer is about showing up, it is not necessarily about words.³ Wells compares prayer to the relationship of spouses or friends of many years who spend their time together not necessarily talking all the time, but simply by being in each other’s presence.

Remember the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10 where Martha works hard to fulfill the obligations of the hostess while her sister Mary simply sits at the feet of Jesus and takes in every word. Mary is the one who simply shoes up. Mary is present.

This is not to say that we can’t speak in prayer. If prayer is being present to God who is always present to us – whether we know it or not – then speech that makes ourselves present to God is the right kind of speech, like the speech of the prayers of the liturgy, or like the words of scripture, or pouring ourselves out before God, for this pouring out counts on God’s presence. Our prayer may also simply be the sighing of our heart.

Wells talks about prayer as showing up in a chapter entitled, “Being With God.” Being with God is about giving God our attention, which means a letting go of our agendas, not because they are not important, though they may not all be, but because we can trust God to look after them for this time of prayer, and always.

Wells gives the reader one poignant prayer that epitomizes what attention means. It goes like this, “God of compassion and mercy, if I love thee for hope of heaven, then deny me heaven; if I love thee for fear of hell, then give me hell; but if I love thee for thyself alone, then give me thyself alone.”⁴

But we’re not used to just being present, to just pay attention, except for the bird watchers among us. We talk when there is silence in order to avoid the silence we call awkward; and we like being busy, for that is how we derive purpose and importance; and because we are afraid of boredom, we like to be entertained.

And so it is hard to make time for prayer, in part because we do not know how to pray, in part because so many things compete for our attention.

Once, many years ago, I came upon a shepherd. He was alone with his flock and his dogs. There were little ewes, and to me it was an idyllic scene, including the shepherd’s tattoos which were not common in those days. Yet I know nothing about the life of a shepherd.⁵

In our first reading we learned that Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro. This was on the Sinai Peninsula, his father-in-law Jethro was a priest of Midian, and Midian was perhaps 150 km to the east, across the Gulf of Aqaba.

I imagine that keeping a flock, shepherding a flock, is a demanding task, and that the animals keep you on your toes. But I imagine also that keeping a flock and seeking pasture for the herd give you lots of time when you can think, when thoughts come and go, or when you do not think at all. And other than the games Moses could play in his mind or in the sand, or the songs Moses could sing, that there was no entertainment. I imagine it was the sort of thing we long for when we leave the city, quiet and away from it all, even though we usually travel with our gadgets.

And I imagine that the disposition of a shepherd is one of paying attention, to where there is pasture and water, to whom the pasture belongs, to wild animals and other dangers, to the well-being of the flock. And so, because Moses did not have many things compete for his attention, and because his disposition was one of paying attention anyway, Moses noticed the burning bush.

²(…) the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. ³Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up.”

God gifts God’s own presence and Moses receives the gift because his disposition is one of paying attention. Moses receives his vocation and revelation by the grace of God. But Moses pays attention. Moses is present. Moses makes room for God, makes room for the Holy.

We may say that we are not Moses. Moses was special in ways that we are not. But if we say that, we miss the point of the story, for as in prayer when we make ourselves present to God, we do so in the awareness that God is always present to us and to the world, and we have learned that it is in our making ourselves present to God that we receive God, that we see the burning bush, that God speaks to us, that God transforms us. It may not be as spectacular as in the story of Moses, and it may be hard at times, but we trust in God’s presence. And you know what, in being present to God we are also present to one another, including those we love but do not see (the communion of saints), and those from whom we are separated by distance, difference, or discord, because God is all in all. That this being present to God leads us also to one another is most perfectly illustrated in the story of Moses, for the encounter with God leads Moses back to his people. And so the story of Moses and the burning bush is an invitation.

In his book, “Leisure, the Basis of Culture”, the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper regards leisure not in the sense that we have come to understand leisure as time to be filled with leisure activities.

Rather, Pieper laments that our life has been taken over by work, and leisure activities can be work of sorts. His concern is not that we work too many hours, or that workers do not have enough rights (though that may be true); and his concern applies equally to people who are retired and who therefore, in a wage-labour economy, have no work (though they may have plenty to do). His concern is that we value everything in terms of efficiency and productivity, that our life is about the things we do and bring about. Although this seems a gain, Pieper says that this is a loss, for this way of looking at life places us and our accomplishments at the centre and as the goal of our life. Pieper says that this perspective is problematic not only as we age and our accomplishments decrease, and we may – God help us – think of ourselves as a burden.

Pieper says a life that is defined by one’s work is problematic because when we thus make ourselves the centre of our world, we are no longer open to revelation like Moses was in the wilderness, or Jacob at Bethel (Genesis 28). Remember Jacob’s exclamation upon waking in the morning: Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!

When life is defined by our work and abilities we may never realize that God is in this place.

Pieper asks, “What happens when our eye sees a rose? What do we do when that happens? Our mind does something, to be sure, in the mere fact of taking in the object, grasping its color, its shape, and so on. We have to be awake and active. But all the same, it is a ‘relaxed’ looking, so long as we are merely looking at it and not observing or studying it, counting or measuring its various features. (…) But simply looking at something, gazing at it, ‘taking it in,’ is merely to open our eyes to receive the things that present themselves to us, that come to us without any need for ‘effort’ on our part to ‘possess’ them.⁶

God is the rose. God comes to us, but like Moses, we need eyes to see and ears to hear, and an attentive mind and soul to notice the burning bush, to be open to God’s presence which is simply gifted to us and is all around us.

Amen.