by Dr. Lani Wilson

Good morning; continued gratitude for your faithful prayer and fasting efforts. “For such a time as this…” For those of us who have been on this road a while longer than others, none of this is new. As ever, we just lift ourselves up and keep moving in faith and in trust.

And here it is: distraction. I know; wasn’t too crazy about the choice of this word a few days ago. But, it ain’t my party, so distraction. We all know what distractions are: To be prevented from giving full attention to something. The origins of the word are even more interesting.

late Middle English (also in the sense ‘pull in different directions’): from Latin distract- ‘drawn apart,’ from the verb distrahere, from dis- ‘apart’ + trahere ‘to draw, drag.’
Apple Online Dictionary

The archaic definition of the adjective distract was “insane, mad.” (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary). We have the Latin root that comes from words that mean “to draw, drag apart,” and by the 14th Century, it came to mean that one was not well at all.

The most famous use of it in the New Testament might be Jesus’ admonition to Martha. The Message translation of the verse uses the original sense of the root words.

But Martha was pulled away by all she had to do in the kitchen. Later, she stepped in, interrupting them. ‘Master, don’t you care that my sister has abandoned the kitchen to me? Tell her to lend me a hand.’
Luke 10:40 (TMB)

That’s kind of a no-brainer, right? The Nazarene tells one of His beloved devotees, Martha, that Mary has the right idea: To focus on Him and not get distracted by mundane things. Got it. However, in the Western world, the post-technological and current digital age in which we live, there are exponentially more things to pull us away from everything else. Sociologist Georg Simmel was the first to discuss the
18th - 19th Centuries’ concept of boredom in terms of “time-pressure and social acceleration.”

While not dismissing any of these accounts [NeoMarxists and Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucoult] I want to suggest that the cultural affect of boredom and the postmodern tendency towards, what I call, “extreme aesthesia,” might also be attributed to the unique velocity or tempo of life in the technological age. The work of sociologist Georg Simmel is important in this regard because he is one of first to interpret boredom through the modern experience of time-pressure and social acceleration, an interpretation that has had a significant impact on contemporary social theory (Adam, 1990; Virilio, 2000; Rosa, 2003; Scheuerman, 2004). According to Simmel, the rise of the rationalized, scientific worldview and the emergence of the instrumental money economy have stripped us of the enduring values and meanings that gave pre-modern life a sense of cohesion and purpose. The result is a shared experience of emptiness where life is reduced to the meaningless production and consumption of goods and services. And with technological innovations, we can produce and consume more things in smaller units of time, resulting in a life so accelerated that it is difficult to qualitatively distinguish which things actually matter to us. We are so busy, so over-stimulated and stretched thin, that we have become bored, blasé to the frenzy of everyday experiences. Yet, as Simmel reminds us, it is precisely because of this “blasé attitude” that we increasingly turn to more excessive, adventurous, and risky behavior. In our indifference we search for something, anything that evokes a strong aisthesis, momentarily breaking the spell of boredom.
Kevin Aho, Simmel on Acceleration, Boredom, And Extreme Aesthesia. 2007. Journal For The Theory Of Social Behaviour, 37(4), pg.448.

We’ve heard all of this before: Capitalism, money-economy, idle consumption, ennui, nihilism, rampant consumerism. Under the umbrella of 20th and 21st Century success, it is de rigeur to be busy “doing” and “getting.” Because the tempo of life has surpassed our ability to appreciate any experience other than to collect experiences, we are constantly seeking new ones to fill the vacuum left by an ever-growing appetite; the old “cat chasing its own tail” amusement. Bigger is better and if it’s there, why not? We have assumed that the blessings of “middle-classness” (i.e., bigger houses, more bedrooms, newer cars, designer-monogrammed goods, foreign travel) are indicative of modern life. We hear it everywhere, especially after The Great Recession, that it’s good just to have it “good enough.” This last economic shock not only made us refocus on how we were blessed to survive it but perhaps, it is prudent for “good Christians” to tone down this display of excess. We used to call it “poor mouthing.” But, isn’t it appropriate to take advantage of what God has gifted us? Instead, the root question might be, “Has S/He?” What if there are actually not distractions getting in the way of us doing God’s work at our jobs, in our homes, in our churches? What if we are the distractions?

In the scripture about Martha and Mary, Jesus was pointedly (and lovingly, we must note) telling Martha that Mary had chosen wisely. It is better to linger over His teaching, linger with Him at His feet than be busy for Him. Sounds contradictory because who would fix the food for all the people who followed Jesus everywhere? Martha was attending to an obvious need that had to be filled. Note that Mary had already sat down and was listening to Jesus.

She had a sister, Mary, who sat before the Master, hanging on every word he said.
Luke 10:39 (TMB)

The next verse says that Martha was distracted, “pulled away” by the work of serving in the kitchen.

But Martha was pulled away by all she had to do in the kitchen.
Luke 10:40a (TMB)

Apparently, Martha and Mary had both started out listening to Jesus. In fact it was Martha who brought Jesus into their home in the first place.

As they continued their travel, Jesus entered a village. A woman by the name of Martha welcomed him and made him feel quite at home.
Luke 10:38 (TMB)

It was only later on that Martha barged into their discussion with her pique that Mary wasn’t busy helping her in the kitchen. We know that these domestic responsibilities were definitive of a worthy Hebrew woman. As property, a woman’s primary value was in producing children and maintaining the domicile.

Later, she stepped in, interrupting them. ‘Master, don’t you care that my sister has abandoned the kitchen to me? Tell her to lend me a hand.’
Luke 10:40b (TMB)

What might Jesus the Risen Christ be trying to tell us in this age of timelessness, busyness, vacuous-ness, and overstimulation? Surely, they could all hear the ruckus that Martha must have been making as she worked alone preparing food for the people who were always surrounding and following Jesus. Jesus must have sensed her frustration and anger with her sister. It has been postulated that Jesus probably didn’t learn his trade from Joseph as a carpenter but as a builder. If so, Jesus knew how these homes were constructed as well as having grown up in one.

Artist's impression of a 1st century AD house in Palestine
bible-archaeology.com.info/housing.html

By modern standards, the houses of people in ancient Palestine were sparsely furnished. Ordinary people sat on cushions on the floor to eat, rather than sitting on chairs at a table. They slept on padded matting filled with stuffing. Tables, couches and beds were only used in the houses of the rich. Given this, Joseph of Nazareth was probably a builder rather than a carpenter, since the inhabitants of a small village like Nazareth did not need much furniture.
Ibid.

He knew that Martha was within a few feet and in earshot of all the talk, laughter, and moving around of many people in their little house in attention to Jesus’ teaching.

According to The Message Bible, the Greek translation of the text anticipates that Jesus will rebuke Mary.

But Martha was distracted with all the preparations she had to make, so she came up to him and said, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work alone?
Luke 10:40 (NET)

The NET note #136 to versus 40 states “tn The negative οὐ (ou) used with the verb expects a positive reply. Martha expected Jesus to respond and rebuke Mary.” But He didn’t. Instead, he says these now famous words.

But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things, but one thing is needed. Mary has chosen the best part; it will not be taken away from her.’
Luke 10:41 (NET)

Exactly who was distracting whom and what was the distraction?

In the Aho article the evolution of the modern concept of boredom is briefly explained, the contention of ancient and modern philosophers that boredom is both a cause and byproduct of either sin and/or overstimulation.

Although the experience of boredom has ancient roots that can be found in the Greek words for idleness (scholé, álys and argós) and an apathetic state of mind (kóros), the word that best captures the feeling is the Greek word akedía derived from kedos which signifies a spiritual lack of interest, an indifference that takes on a moral character insofar as it represents a sinful condition of the soul. (Svendsen, 2005: 49–51; Kuhn, 1976: 40) From late antiquity through the Middle-Ages, acedia was associated with a demonic tiredness or stupor of the soul that the fourth century monk Evagrius of Pontus simply called the “midday demon” (daemon qui etiam meridianus vocatur) who struck between the hours of ten and two (Kuhn, 1973: 43).
Aho, op. cit., pg. 448.

Thus, this “indifference” or “spiritual lack of interest” (akedía) was seen as a moral negative. But, as noted previously, by the 14th Century the word distract or “to be pulled apart,” not the notion of “idleness,” came to mean madness or insanity. How did this happen and why?

And Michael Mitterauer claims that all the ends towards which Crusades were directed were “completely worked out” from the start: The history of the Crusades is often described as if they developed from the campaign to liberate Jerusalem, a Crusade considered legitimate because of its objective. In this interpretation, the Crusades against heretics, schismatics, and the pope’s enemies—seen as not being legitimate in the same way—simply grew from this basic model as a secondary form, as a later abuse, so to speak, of an initially just cause. This presumed priority is hardly defensible. The pope’s holy war against his enemies within the church predates the Jerusalem Crusade. Every element constituting the Crusades, including fighting against Christians, appears to have been completely worked out before Urban II made his call.

Paul E. Chevedden, Crusade Creationism versus Pope Urban II’s Conceptualization of the Crusades. Historian, 75(1), pg. 14-15.

The Crusades were never called the “Crusades” by Pope Urban II while they were waged from 1095 into the 14th Century and, ultimately, for 700 years. Nonetheless, ostensibly the major purpose of the Crusades was to rescue Christendom from the Saracens, the Arabs or Muslims. As the centuries passed, there were obviously many other reasons for “crusading,” as Mitterauer points out in the above quotation, Pope Urban II used the Crusades to continue his political war against enemies and consolidate Christendom under papal rule.

Riley-Smith, like many scholars, maintains that the roots of the Crusades are not to be found in the ongoing conflict in the Mediterranean between Islam and Christendom, but exclusively in internal developments in Latin Christendom. The willful omitting of the Islamic-Christian confrontation as a factor in the emergence of the Crusades seems to reflect the aspirations of our own time rather than the realities of the eleventh century. ‘The crusades were so much a Christian development,’ Riley-Smith says, ‘that it is almost as if Muslim foes would have to have been invented had they not already existed.’ He claims that ‘all of us, although with different emphases, now know that the subject of crusading is a religious one, whatever other elements were important to it, and that, whatever its casus belli, the roots of the First Crusade lay in the ideas, devotions and aspirations of Western Europeans.’
Ibid. (24-25)

Given the multiple origins and rationales for the Christian holy war throughout the Mediterranean over seven centuries, we can postulate that in part they were a distraction that advanced a political position for the papacy. They also gave purpose to individuals of the lordly class. The “apathetic spirit” or akedía first described in the 4th Century somehow became a description of insanity, distract, by the 14th Century. It was considered madness to be distractible or unfocused. Given that the ruling class of Western Europeans was solely focused on the Crusades, it may have made sense to assume that someone was mad if they were not focused on the one, supposed grand goal of recapturing the Holy Land, specifically Jerusalem. So for 700 years, all of Western Europe was one way or another tied into a war that eventually consumed all of the Mediterranean area: That’s a pretty serious distraction.

We have seen the evolution of the decentralization of spiritual life in community. With the rise of the middle class after WWII and the democratization of the pursuit of leisure (Aho et al), it can be said that we might be witnessing a mass search for meaning. Although there have always been millions in poverty in America, the goal of attaining middle class status (a house, the nuclear family, two cars, a dog, and formal education) seemed within reach for all Americans, except those for whom it was never intended: Anyone of color, more specifically, African-Americans, remnants of the enslaved humans who quite literally built the country. As more Americans found that postwar technology and prosperity promised leisure, the appetite for it grew, and we found ways to temporarily fill and satisfy it - until it didn’t.

For Simmel (1997a), boredom emerges insidiously as we are busily occupied with our workaday routines. It is on the basis of our harried busy-ness that we have difficulty responding qualitatively to the various tasks and projects we are engaged in. In short, it is modern life itself that ‘makes [us bored] because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all’ (p. 178). The result is an inability to distinguish which activity actually matters to us, creating a ‘devaluation of the whole objective world, a devaluation which in the end unavoidably drags one’s own personality down into a feeling of the same worthlessness’ (p. 179). If family obligations, work, exercise, shopping, and dining must all be efficiently performed within an increasingly compressed schedule, then it becomes difficult to identify which of these activities is more meaningful or significant than others. In our heightened state of nervous indifference all of our choices take on an equal significance; we do not have a strong emotional reaction to any of them. Things, says Simmel, begin to appear in “an evenly flat and gray tone, [where] no one object deserves preference over any other’ (p. 178). Accelerated existence, therefore, begins to exercise a tacit but elemental control over us, carrying us along with little or no conscious awareness of what is going on, ‘as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself ‘ (p. 184).
Ibid. (455)

Toward the end of the 20th Century the digital world accelerated every aspect of life to the point that there are so many options and priorities available, Simmel says that we cannot discern what is most important. The choices are dizzying.

One of the most common concerns of most college students I heard over two and one half decades was that they didn’t know what they wanted out of school, out of life, out of others. It was reflected in a lack of enthusiasm about almost everything; an un-rootedness. After 2006 as the Recession sank in, that changed to a dire concern for basic survival for themselves as individuals and for their families. Increasingly, I counseled and advised young adults age 17 or 18 through their mid to late twenties who were less concerned about their own futures but for their parents’ survival: Food, housing, electricity, gas for cars, if they still had them. We went from the expectation and distraction of getting more and moving into true middleclass-ness to the hope that we could keep a roof over our heads and have enough to eat. For many of us, the latter was always the reality, but there was the expectation that somehow, we could and would rise to some future, distant, muted approximation of Veblen’s leisure class (The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, 1899, by Thorstein Veblen). What was and is our distraction?

‘Martha, Martha,’ the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things…’
Luke 10:41 (NIV)

But the Lord said to her, ‘My dear Martha, you are worried and upset over all these details!’
Ibid. (NLT)

The Lord answered, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things.’
Ibid. (CEB)

As Martha waited for The Nazarene to defend her and usher Mary into the kitchen a few feet away to help, in that instant Jesus was both consoling and refocusing Martha. He understood the good intention of her labor: Food preparation, caring, nourishment, hospitality, love. And He also understood the best expression of her original invitation: His presence, His place in her heart, His peace. She and her labor had become her own distraction from Him and ultimately, the God to Whom He would soon return.

Sociologist George Ritzer (2002) has pointed out that, in a “McDonaldised” society, sensations are provided by means of massive clock-driven enterprises that use technology in the most rational, efficient, and cost-effective ways to create a myriad of affordable, consumable experiences, vast “cathedrals of consumption” embodied in the biggest Vegas casinos and shopping malls, in mega-churches and amusement parks (p. 13). Indeed, in the age of globalization, one does not even have to leave home to have these experiences. The cheap manufacturing of personal computers and Internet access, for instance, has made it possible for any American to fill the emptiness of their own lives with instant pleasures by playing video games, maxing out credit cards on gambling websites, endless shopping on eBay, or looking at extreme forms of pornography. As Cornell West (1996) says, “this pattern of hedonism and cheap thrills,” made possible by globalization, technological innovation, and easy credit, has made any talk of race, class, or gender difference, as it pertains to boredom, “irrelevant” (p. 109–111).
Aho, op. cit., pg. 458-459.

This chasm created by the ever accelerating social fabric is held by tenuous threads. Community is now more virtual than real. People are so easily distractible, so busy doing what the social fabric says is appropriate that we are prone to proposing last-minute “meetups” or making long term appointments – just to stay in touch, in the same town, in the same church, in the same family. Two hours on a Sunday is a chore, an outdated occasion from another century, over-bearing, over-burdened, overdone. We have become our own distractions. No wonder churches are empty: Everyone is somewhere else on their way to someplace else getting back from something else. Koinonia was never meant to be a virtual exercise.

‘There is only one thing worth being concerned about. Mary has discovered it, and it will not be taken away from her.’
Luke 10:42 (NLT)

‘Only a few things are important, even just one. Mary has chosen the good thing. It will not be taken away from her.’
Ibid. (NLV)

‘There is really only one thing worth being concerned about. Mary has discovered it—and I won’t take it away from her!’
Ibid. (TLB)

O God of forever, Jesus the Risen Christ told us that “there is really only one thing worth being concerned about.” In a world that tells us that we have to be concerned about a myriad of significant things, all equally valuable and good, help us find that “one thing” that is real. Help us to look for the Unseeable, search for the Invisible, long for the great Mystery Who is Christ Himself. He said it 2000 years ago and He is saying it to us now.

“But few things are needed. Really, only one thing is needed” (Luke 10:42a NIRV).

www.publicdomainpictures.net

Insert your own name below in the verse that The Christ spoke.

“________________________ has chosen what is better.

And it will not be taken away from him/her.”
Luke 10:42b (NIRV)

Thank You, Jesus, for being the better Choice. Please keep us from being our own distractions.

Amen.