Forest Hills Mennonite Church

One of the most famous dinner scenes in Luke's Gospel comes in the midst of a short story Jesus tells. A young son abandons his family (after taking his half of the inheritance) and ends up very, very hungry.

Jesus invites his first followers—some fishermen—to join him in his ministry. As he does so, he steps into the complex worlds of subsistence economics, imperial occupation, and tense interpersonal relationships. All of it of it comes crashing together when Jesus sits down at a table for dinner.  

At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus is led into the wilderness. In the midst of human hunger, Jesus confronts the reality of evil and clarifies his own sense of calling.

"Throughout Luke's Gospel," Robert Karris writes, "Jesus is always at a meal, going to a meal, or coming from a meal." This summer, we're joining as houseguests at some of the tables Jesus visited, beginning with the woman who taught him table manners—his mother, Mary. 

Long before social media companies started fracking our attention, a French philosopher named Simone Weil was exploring attention as a spiritual practice—the substance of our love for God and neighbor. 

Worrying about the effects of new technologies on society is probably about as old as society itself. At the same time, it's entirely possible that the technological moment we're all in makes it much harder to give our attention to others and to the world. Thankfully, Jesus shows us a better way. 

What has your attention at the moment? How do you experience your own ability to attend to others and the world around you? Many people see our current culture as marked by a profound deficit of attention. If that's true, Christian tradition has deep wisdom for how we might begin to heal our ability to attend. 

After our journey through Lent, we arrive at our destination: the resurrection of Jesus. It's the dawn of new creation and the formation of a new community.