The Algorithm Doesn't Want you to Listen to this Sermon

A Sermon About Attention, Compassion, and the Things We Look Away From.

Today’s lessons center around questions of perception. Perception is worth our wrestling. Our faith has a lot to do with what we are willing, unwilling, or unable to see. So I want to organize my thoughts today around those themes: what we are unwilling to see, what we are prevented from seeing, and what we do see.

What we are unwilling to see

Lent is a good season to talk about what we are unwilling to see.

A little over a year ago, I was driving Silas to school. We were at the corner of Griegos and Fourth Street, and a man was panhandling. I was carefully avoiding looking the man in the eyes. Silas piped up from the back of the car, asking why the man was out in the cold. I said he was likely unhoused. Silas asked, “Why doesn’t he have a house?” Then, before I could come up with an explanation that a then six‑year‑old could understand, he simply said, “That’s so sad.” And I could hear the sadness in his voice.

I won’t forget that moment, because I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I had experienced sadness for an unhoused person. Anger about the situation, frustration with our city, our country’s inability to act, yes. But sadness? I had held back my sadness. I had trained myself not to see. And more than anything, I believe God feels sad about the plight of the unhoused, about our inability, our unwillingness to look for solutions, to build housing, to keep people safe.

We easily go to explanations. We hide our emotions. And that trend isn’t new. Jesus’ own disciples in today’s story ask, “Who sinned?” They want someone to blame. Too often we turn questions of faith into questions of blame. Whose fault is it?

Behind that question is another question: “How do I avoid this fate?” There is a fear behind the interactions with the man born blind in this story, a worry that we could suffer too.

I’ve quoted John Swinton before. He’s the theologian who refuses to talk about “able‑bodied people” and “disabled people.” Instead he talks about “the disabled, and the temporarily able‑bodied.” The laugh I get at that line is always a bit awkward. Temporality hits too close to home when it comes to disability.

This year on Ash Wednesday, a colleague called my attention to the prayers for the day, where we ask God to “forgive our blindness,” to “forgive our deafness,” as if these were moral failures. There’s the assumption again: who sinned? What went wrong?

The Deaf community, the blind community, would infinitely prefer we keep our moralizing out of their disability. I changed the words this year: “God forgive our unwillingness to see,” and “God forgive our unwillingness to hear.” Words matter. And words aren’t enough. I know I need to do more to uncover my eyes, to look upon the people from whom I too easily look away, consciously and unconsciously. It helps to have an observant small person in my life, who sees the folks I’ve trained myself to ignore, and who sees my discomfort and asks me about it.

Already you can hear, inherent in the question of who and what we see are questions of power.

What we are prevented from seeing

There is power in perception, and the world knows it. There are very powerful interests who work to keep us in the dark, to keep our attention scattered, to keep us from seeing clearly.

Recently I listened to an interview with Namwali Serpell, professor of English at Harvard. She was asked about studies showing that students, both in high school and university, are being assigned fewer novels, and that undergraduates are struggling to read. The average reading level for the American public has dropped to fifth grade. It’s easy to look on these students with judgement. They should learn to focus. But Serpell said something surprising to the interviewer. She believes these studies place the blame in the wrong place. It is easy to blame undergraduates for not wanting to read, but we should really be looking at the tsunami of pressure those undergrads face from tech companies. We often individualize sin, when really we should look at sinful systems.

Serpell said there is a way in which even she sometimes can’t put down her phone, so how would we expect someone without a fully developed prefrontal cortex to resist that pressure? She said many of her students find it a relief when she has a no‑phones, no‑internet‑connected‑devices policy in her classroom. A relief. That’s the word that stayed with me. Because it suggests that beneath the constant scroll, our souls are hungry for a kind of seeing that is slower, deeper, more spacious.

I know many of us feel this. We live in days where the news feels like pressure. So many articles. So many clips. So many stories. We are online, and our emotions and our attention are online in a way human beings have never experienced before. The algorithms are learning how to keep you angry, because anger keeps you scrolling. If you spend a good portion of your day angry at the administration, at the president, the algorithms have won. They have kept your attention. The algorithms are learning how to provoke fear, because fear keeps you clicking.

This issue of seeing isn’t just for the phone addicted. In the past, people picked up a newspaper in the morning. They might have watched or listened to the evening news. But news wasn’t on 24/7, in the waiting room at the doctors office or the airport. Alerts didn’t come pinging into your pocket every few seconds. Our attention is being commodified, and certain stories are being buried on purpose in the onslaught. It’s easier to blame young people for not having an attention span than to ask what multi‑billion‑dollar companies gain from getting them to scroll faster.

When the world would sell our attention in minuscule blocks, it becomes an act of resistance to lavish our attention on a good book, on a project in the garden with our fingers in the dirt, on art, on a friend or family member. Claim space in your morning for prayer, for stillness, for time without the device. Take the time. Take back your time.

To see more clearly

I want to conclude this sermon with an invitation: to see more clearly. To see with more nuance.

There’s another side to this attention game we need to talk about. The algorithms that determine what we see prefer stories that polarize us. They prefer to sort us into simple black‑and‑white categories. We find ourselves waiting to hear certain language from our coworkers, from our relatives, to determine whether they the good guys like us or whether they are bad guys. We sort. Nuance, complexity, compassion and complication are being lost. The loss is to our peril.

This week it is true that our country continued a massive bombing campaign in Iran. There are serious questions of whether we are following the law, whether those who have ordered these attacks have the authority to do so. Questions persist about the timing, and whether the administration benefits from distracting the media from certain other inquiries.

This week it is also true that two synagogues were attacked in America. Antisemitism is on the rise in the United States and around the world. And naming antisemitism does not mean we shy away from critiquing the policies of the Israeli government.

Standing with our Jewish neighbors, and standing with our Palestinian and Iranian neighbors, they belong in the same moral universe. Seeing clearly requires us to hold more than one truth at a time. Even when it doesn’t feed the algorithm, even when it doesn’t fit black and white definitions of whose side we should be on. Because our world is more complex, more multi-colored, than we are being led to believe. And the demands of justice are not always simple, clean, and clear. They don’t fit in sound bites. God asks for more of our attention, not less. God asks us to see the people right in front of us. God invites us to see, to really see, the whole person, the whole story. God invites us into a kind of attention that takes time, takes discernment, takes a willingness to watch for the subtle action of the Spirit. God invites us to look on the world with more love than suspicion.

I spoke about this a couple weeks ago. Often really seeing means taking a second look. The stories about Minnesota that came below the fold in the newspaper were stories of a community of resilience and resistance: of daycare parents banding together to make sure kids were picked up safely from school and parents weren’t picked up by ICE. Taking a second look at what happened in Minneapolis means seeing the churches that built ministries to deliver food to people who were homebound, afraid to leave their houses while Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers surged in their city. Far more people were fed than were arrested. That was the bigger story. The bigger story wasn’t about intimidation by federal officers, it was the city, the community, who stood up to care for one another who said in the face of racism “not here.”

What other places in our world could benefit from a second look?

Who are the women who continue to stand up and demand justice? Do we see their courage?

Who are the LGBTQ+ people who insist upon their rights, their visibility? Do we have the courage to stop asking questions of sin and to see them for the glorious people they are?

Who are the disabled people who continue to move through our lives with grace and humor, inviting us to trust that when our bodies move differently, we will still belong?

Who are the little kids who help us not look away, who help us stay connected to our emotions?

Where is God inviting us to see? Despite all the distractions the world throws at us, despite our fears? Where is God inviting us to see?

My prayer this Sunday of Lent is simple:

May God forgive our unwillingness to see: the disabled, the unhoused, all the people from whom we look away. May God forgive us our unwillingness to see.

May God help us to lift the blindfolds so carefully fashioned for us by the powers of this world.

May God give us the courage to take a second look, and to see the Spirit breaking through, in love, in care, in the community around us.

And may we follow Jesus, the one who always sees us, the one who is never preoccupied with sin. May we follow Jesus who looks on us, on the whole world, with love.