Distraction

This sermon was preached on Sunday 9th August, in the wake of Greater Manchester being placed in further coronavirus lockdown measures. The Gospel for the morning was Matthew 14:22-33. If you'd prefer to read a less political take on the passage, then you can read my sermon from 3 years' ago on the same passage here instead.

My little boy, Isaac has been trying to perform magic recently. His favourite trick is to put a toy on the table, and then cover it with his hat and then, when you're not looking, he will remove the toy from under the hat and show you that it has disappeared! It's been very interesting watching his technique change; he's progressed now from shouting "Don't look! Don't look, Daddy!" to realising that it's better to try to draw your attention elsewhere. Admittedly, shouting "Oh! Look at the bin!" is not the most sophisticated way for a magician to cover up their sleight-of-hand, but, you have to admit, it's 100 times better than someone climbing over you to put their hands over your face whilst telling you to close your eyes. Plus, you'd never get away with that method when putting on a magic show in today’s socially-distanced world.

I wonder whether Isaac has been learning his distraction techniques from our government? His method of pointing at something – anything – else to distract us from that which he would rather we didn't look at or question seems pretty similar to that of our government’s to me. Boris Johnson calls it the "dead cat strategy". Basically, to distract attention away from something you really don't want someone to see, you introduce a sensationalist, shocking thing for people to look at instead – such as the shocking example of distracting people from discussing a topic you'd rather avoid over dinner by throwing a dead cat on the dining table. You can be sure that when you do that that the conversation changes very quickly to the presence of the deceased feline in the middle of the food, rather than the awkward conversation you were trying to avoid. 

Distraction - a popular Channel 4 TV show from the early 2000s in which- Oh! Look over there!

Certainly in the wake of last week's rushed lock-down announcement, different government sources seemed to be experimenting with their own 'dead cats' by blaming certain sections of the public for not following the rules clearly enough. Black and ethnic minorites were blamed for not taking coronavirus seriously, and, in a valiant effort to show this for the racism it clearly is, other people have pointed to statistics that show recent rises are actually more prevalent amongst the young and the affluent, rather than amongst particular ethnic groups. But this – even this – is still a dead cat. It's still the distraction. The whole time, we're 'looking over there' instead of at what responsibility lies at the heart of our government for our country's appalling death rate and upturn in infection numbers.

We look at the dead cat. We look at the distraction. Always. It's easier. It’s instinctive. It takes conscious thought, practice and determination to look where the action is actually taking place – when watching magic, when ignoring propaganda, and when reading the Bible.

This is especially true in today's Gospel. Don't worry – I've not forgotten that this is a sermon! It's all relevant, I promise! Our Gospel today is all about distraction – from the very beginning.

Our gospel starts with Jesus retreating from the crowds to pray without distraction, finding some time alone, where it can be just Christ and his Father. And then, as the Gospel progresses, Christ famously walks on the water, and the disciples, distracted by fear of the storm and thinking of their own mortality and their impending doom, think he's a ghost, rather than seeing him for who he really is. And finally, Peter, whilst actually walking on the water is distracted by the wind and the waves, and breaks his attention on his friend and saviour, and ends up crashing into the sea.

But even when we read this Gospel passage, we get distracted. We, too, concentrate on the storm, and the waves, and Peter and the disciples, and the miracle of the water-walking, and... even the traditional message that we all know we're supposed to take away from this – the message to "keep our focus on Jesus" and before we know it, we've been too distracted to actually keep our focus on Jesus in this very passage! His actions in this story fade into the background compared with the rest of the excitement going on.

And that’s because Jesus doesn't actually do anything exciting in this story. He's calm. He goes off by himself to pray. He calmly walks across the water through the storm and quells the fears of his friends. He reaches out to catch his best friend when he falls and helps him back into the boat. He's calm, and he's caring, and he actively helps – and those qualities are all too often very easy to overlook, especially when we are distracted.

Even though we know we need to focus on Jesus, we fail to do so in this very passage.  As I said earlier, it takes conscious thought, practice and determination to focus where we know we should, and not at the distraction.

And if it's true in this passage, how much more true is it when we're not actually reading the Bible or are taking part in Sunday worship, and are all the more easily distracted by the events happening all around us in our normal week? When we’re distracted by the storm of coronavirus and the rising waves of rising infection rates?

How often do we look for Jesus in the people in whom we're being prompted to blame for our present circumstances? Even when we know Christ is found in all people, when we know that whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sisters, we do unto Christ, how much easier is it for us to be distracted by the excitement and the fear and the division, and forget to focus on what unites us all – Christ in all people?

Because that is the truth and it needs remembering. We are all made in the image of God, and we are all his children. Christ is to be found in all of us; we need the conscious thought, practice and determination to look for him.

And that is the challenge of today's Gospel. Ignore the dead cat; focus on the risen Christ.

Amen.