A man bought a mule from a farmer. The seller assured the buyer that the mule was compliant and would obey any command. Yet no sooner had the buyer started for home than the mule sat down in the middle of the road and refused to move. Nothing the man did could get the beast to budge. So the man hightailed it back to the farmer, nursing a slow burn.

When he reached the seller, he got in the man’s face and accused him of false advertising. The farmer said scarcely a word. He just picked up a two-by-four and gestured to the man to follow him. The two men walked down the road, saying nothing until they reached the recalcitrant animal. Whereupon the man wielded the two-by-four with great force and smacked the mule over the head. Move, the man said. And the animal complied.

He will, said the farmer. But first you have to get his attention.

Some of us are as obstinate as that mule. It’s hard to get our attention.

Beginning at 5:18 this evening, some of the leading companies in America will fork over up to $2.7 million dollars for a thirty-second blow to the head. They are paying for attention. They are paying to get us to pay attention. Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi-Cola, GoDaddy.com, and the other usual suspects want to arrest you just long enough to persuade you just well enough that you will see things their way and throw your money back at them to help them pay for their ads.

Now I am on shaky ground here this morning, getting into this subject of Super Bowl commercials. Last week a local television newscast did a story about a Methodist pastor in Grapevine who is asking his whole congregation to watch the Super Bowl commercials. He wants them to think about what the advertisers are doing, how they are trying to turn material goods into spiritual goods in order to satisfy desires in people that only God can satisfy.

Well, Kim saw that story and just kind of harrumphed about it, declaring it a shallow gimmick to get attention for the church (which worked, by the way), and she made it clear to me that I should not get any ideas like that for us. Church ought to be deeper than that. And now you know who the really deep one is in our family. So the next time you think I have gone so deep in a sermon that it flies right over your head, blame Kim. She’s the brains of the operation, don’t you know?!

But what is really going on here? The world is God’s good creation. God has made us to live in a harmonious way with nature and with one another. Both the earth and human beings have the capacity for remarkable fruitfulness. But the ecology and the economy both of this good creation are distorted and thwarted by the effects of generations of sin—whether the sin of greed or the sin of neglect. God has to get our attention, and since knocking us upside the head with a two-by-four has not seemed to work, God finds another way to get our attention.

I mean, there was Noah’s flood, and there were Egypt’s plagues, and there was the parting of the Red Sea, and there was a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, and there were two tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments, and there were manna from heaven and water from a rock, and there were … and there were … and there were. What good did any of that supernatural stage show do to convince us to pay attention and do things that would set the world to rights again?

So God comes close to us as one of us in Jesus Christ. And in this moment in our text from Matthew 17, when Jesus is on the mountain praying with his closest three disciples, the veil that separates the visible and the invisible world becomes thin enough that we can see what is going on from a spiritual perspective—from the other side, so to speak. In that moment, it is like standing on the other side of a one-way mirror. For the first time you can see something other than your own reflection. What Peter, James and John saw was not what they projected onto Jesus. They did not see him as their friend or hero or leader. They saw him the way God sees him. They saw him in his glory.

We call this the transfiguration of Jesus. His face was transfigured. He looked the way you might look if having your feet on the ground meant having your head in the clouds. He looked like he belonged more to the realm of heaven than earth. And when Moses and Elijah appeared with him, conferring about—well, we don’t know what they were conferring about—the plan of salvation probably, the suffering ahead maybe, the promise of power surely—we see that everything God has been up to comes into focus in Jesus. The voice from heaven then belts out again the very thing that Jesus heard in his baptism: This is my beloved Son. But then God adds this coda: Listen to him.

Now, why do you suppose we need to hear that admonition? Listen to him. Do you think maybe God knows how hard it is to get our attention and keep it? Do you think God knows about our Spiritual Attention Deficit Disorder?

Here’s a little test (don’t consult your bulletin): What was the name of the first hymn we sang this morning? What did Mark just say Jesus held together in perfect tension in his ministry? What book of the Bible was our epistle reading from today? Listen, you can’t all claim early-onset Alzheimer’s. This is just a matter of listening with intent to learn and recall. And this is one reason we come here week by week. We need to be reminded to pay attention to Jesus, because we are inundated with information all week long that promises something about life other than what Jesus promises. You can’t follow both roads.

So in 2 Peter, Peter remembers that moment on the Mount of Transfiguration. He must have remembered the voice that told them to pay attention to Jesus. And so he says, We ourselves have heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain. He remembers. But then again, he was there. What about us? What about us who didn’t hear that voice? Peter says that we live on the other side of prophecy now. What was said then is all the more confirmed now. We think, “Oh, if only we had been there with Peter, James and John, we would never forget, we would never lose focus, we would always pay attention.” Right, but it wasn’t long after this that Jesus was taken into custody and all the disciples either denied him or fled from him. Peter says that we should have all the more reason to listen to him, since we have seen all the things he has done now by his living presence in the world. You will do well to pay attention, he says, to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

But what is it that Jesus has told us that we must pay attention to? What is it that he is telling us that we must listen to him about?

Some of you know that I just returned from the politics-free zone we created at the New Baptist Covenant. I am really annoyed and amused—depending on what moment you catch me—at the idea that this group meeting in Atlanta this week was a surrogate for the Democratic Party and involved some kind of liberal agenda. First of all, although Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and Al Gore all spoke at the meeting, because all of them are Baptists who want to see Baptists cooperate on things we can agree upon, both the Southern Baptist Convention and key Republican politicians were invited to participate. They declined, and then they proceeded to accuse the group of partisanship. When you are invited and decline, you lose the right to make that claim. It makes me wonder if Bill Gates were a Baptist and he were one of the organizers of the meeting, would people be up in arms about how it was really a ploy to sell his Vista operating system and not about his work to rid the continent of Africa of AIDS and other diseases? Well, there was agreement among us to stick strictly to the agenda of Jesus. And we did.

The agenda of Jesus that we tried to pay attention to together is recorded in Luke 4. When Jesus began his public ministry, he went to his hometown synagogue and pulled out the Isaiah scroll and began to read: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, deliverance to the captives, sight to the blind, liberty to the oppressed, and to declare the year of the Lord’s favor. And then he sat down (as was the custom of the rabbis when they would preach)n and he delivered a sermon so short you’d think the people would have cheered—the way you would have if I would just go and do likewise. Today this word is fulfilled in your hearing, he said. But instead of cheers, he got jeers. They took him to the brow of the hill and wanted to cast him down to his death. Why?

Because listening to Jesus means doing what he says and adopting his priorities for our lives. Instead of getting Jesus to do our bidding, he bids us to do his. And his bidding is that we alter our lives in ways that seek to heal the earth and help those who are barely scraping by upon it.

Today we will go downstairs and do something quite simple and yet quite profound: we will overpay for a bowl of soup in order to pay for another bowl for someone who is hungry somewhere on this earth. We know this will not solve world hunger, but it may teach us to pay attention to the matter of how and why a world that since 1965 has produced enough food for the whole human population can still see children going to bed hungry and starving to death. And then maybe we will stop electing officials who will take huge contributions from huge agricultural businesses so that they will offer farm subsidies that make it impossible for poor farmers in other countries to bring their products to market and care for their families. Or at least maybe we will urge a change in someone’s vote. Or at least we will begin to see the connections between hunger and other things, so that if we can solve other things we might have a chance to feed some people and save some lives and change the world after all.

We are smart enough to believe that we can’t ever entirely solve homelessness or erase poverty or reverse global warming or turn sinners into saints—no matter how hard we try. But maybe we are not being asked to do so entirely— entirely by ourselves. But if we do something, it might lead us to do something else and then something else and then something else. Way leads on to way. And when we follow the way of Jesus—the one who is himself the way, the truth, and the life— he adds his power to our efforts. Paying attention in small ways may have large effects if we learn to pay attention to the way of Jesus.

Our problem is not that we lack solutions to the ills of the world; our problem is that we lack to the will to address the ills of the world. And we will find the will only when we find the way of Jesus. And we will find the way of Jesus only when we pay attention continually to the God who is trying to get our attention. This is my Son. Listen to him. Pay attention, people!