Who hasn’t been in a crowded auditorium, stadium, arena, or
other large meeting place filled with people chatting about anything and
everything when all of a sudden you hear over the public address system, “May I
have your attention?”
Sometimes those kinds of announcements have some element of
emergency, sometimes they are simply instructions about the next step. If
you’re in a busy airport and the announcement happens to be from your airline,
you listen carefully in case of a flight delay, gate change, or in worst case
scenario, a flight cancellation.
Those kinds of announcements typically succeed in getting
our attention.
Our culture right now is like a large crowd of people in a
crowded assembly hall where every surface is a hard one and the sound of our
chattering is bouncing back and forth in ways that make it almost impossible to
hear with any certainty what others are saying. It’s so noisy that should a
critical announcement need to be made, we likely won’t even hear it. And, if we
do hear it and don’t like it, we will dismiss it as propaganda or fake news
from one side or the other. The noisy gongs and clanging cymbals of our
cultural conversations right now are stunningly void of love.
Perhaps like no other time in my life, I am grateful for the
season of Lent that begins today – Ash Wednesday. It seems to me that this is a
perfect moment for us to assume that God is saying to us, as we begin this
journey toward Easter, “May I have your attention?” That the synoptic gospel
writers connect Jesus’ baptism, the forty days of fasting in the wilderness,
and the temptations from Satan to be the kind of Messiah religious people
wanted rather than the Messiah God sent Him to be as one issue, seems to me like a very “attention getting”
context for Jesus.
He is about to begin His ministry in and among the people of
Judea and it won’t be easy. He heard the voice of His father declare “This is
my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Immediately He is led into the
wilderness (“The Spirit immediately drove him” according to Mark 1:13.) to be
tempted by Satan. It was a kind of “razzle, dazzle, a miracle a day will keep
the Romans away” approach to getting Jesus off track when it came to mission.
Apparently those forty days of fasting in the wilderness had
prepared Jesus in ways that enabled Him, as the authentic human Jesus that He
was, to stick to mission. Satan’s first big attempt at winning is met by Jesus’
absolute obedience to what His Father sent Him to do. In Matthew’s words, “then
the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.”
(Matthew 4:11)
God had Jesus’ attention! I hope He has mine – and yours.
I know that if I faithfully spend the season of Lent – or
any time in my life for that matter – clearly focused on Scripture reading,
prayer, reflection, repentance, seeking, and a whole host of other verb forms
that can describe our relationship with God, I am offering Him my attention
which can lead to obedience.
It did for Jesus. It can for us.
There seems to be an awful lot of “razzle, dazzle” stuff
going on all around us. Sometimes it is from the politicians. Sometimes it is
from religious people who would take us off track when it comes to mission. In
either case, if you listen carefully this week, you just might imagine that you
are hearing God say “May I have your attention?”
Lent can be a perfect time to stop, listen, and say “Yes,
God, I’m listening.”
