This is a sermon I preached at Camas Friends Church in Camas, WA about the Attention, Empire and the Good Samaritan on March 8, 2026

Empire's Algorithms

I have been thinking a lot about attention recently. Last fall I taught a first year class for Guilford students called "Boredom as a Superpower" that looked at the ways in which our ability to focus and hold attention is being targeted by technology companies. The class explored what we called boredom practices to help us slow down, be present, and get use to not always having input, stimulation, and distraction around us. The underlying claim of the class was, if we’re willing to allow ourselves to get bored it can increase our attention which can be like having a superpower today.

Recently, I read and loved the book Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. In the book they describe attention a couple different ways.

Two that stand out to me are Bernard Stiegler’s idea that:

“to pay attention to is essentially to wait...What the attention waits on/for...is the infinite of the object” (15-16).

A Quaker might add to this, waiting requires attention, and attention waits for when the Light or Seed of God becomes apparent in a person, situation, or in creation itself.

Simone Weil, another French Philosopher, put it this way:

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”

As I think about it, ours is a movement of attention. There is no Quakerism if we lose the ability to pay attention.

Unfortunately, the dominant framework today is one that shapes our attention through constant streams of information served up through the “algorithms of empire.” These algorithms are not trying to serve the betterment of humanity; they’re trying to keep us hooked because it’s good for their bottomline. These things skew what and who we see as human, valuable, and worthy of our concern.

These algorithms aren't just distractions; they're designed to shape us into their values. Values that I think are rooted in wealth for the few, suspicion of others, and stoking fear.

Empire's algorithm wants us to see each other as enemies, as commodities, and as less than human.

The authors of Attensity! use a shocking visual for this when they name the attack on attention as human fracking. Describing it this way:

“The new industrial-scale practitioners of human fracking have to pump vast quantities of high-volume, high-pressure (as in toxic), and I’d add addictive, slurry int our faces, at the scale of the whole population, to drive a bit of biddable attention to the surface” (33).

Fortunately, we are not powerless against these forces.

When I became a Quaker, my attention shifted. If there are dominant forces that want to shape our attention, then there are traditions and communities that have methods of resisting those forces.

The Quaker tradition is one such attentional community/movement.

Becoming a Quaker in college was part of a longer process of change for me that began when I was 13 and attending Catholic Mass. From that time forward, I was searching for a community I fit within and, in a sense, a pair of spiritual glasses that would help me understand the world and know what to pay attention to (and how to do it).

My encounter with the Quaker faith was marked by both a deep sense of “these are things I already knew to be true but didn’t have language for it,” and “this is an new way of seeing myself and the world that is bigger and broader than what I currently have.”

In other words, it confirmed in me some parts and pushed me to grow in others.

This kind of faith spoke deeply to me and has, for the past 25 years, it’s what brought me to Camas in 2009, and what took us to Guilford College in 2015. It continues to shape how I interpret and see the world. I am here in front of you this morning because I believe that practicing faith in this tradition has the power to change ourselves and the world for the good. And nurturing, tending, and protecting our attention is on huge part of that.

Emily reminded me recently that the CFC pastor before me Caryl Menkhus used to say, “The best way to know god is to learn how to pay attention. I can’t teach you how to pray but I can teach you how to pay attention.” That continues to ring true for me as we continue to work on questions of attention in my role as faculty at Guilford College.

Attention and Suffering

Our text this morning reveals something about what and who we pay attention to. Jesus uses the story of the Good Samaritan to illustrate a contrast in attention.

First, you have the man victimized. Robbed. Beaten. Left for dead. While in the story this is an individual, we know that there are many communities in and outside America right now who are being terrorized, beaten, and left for dead by empire.

Then you have the Priest and the Levite. These are people of power and privilege. It does not say why they do not see the man who is hurt worthy of compassion, but we know from our own experiences all the excuses and reasons why this occurs.

The part that always gets me in the story is when it says “and when [each man saw] him, [they] passed by on the other side.”

I read it as:

They saw suffering, and they crossed the street.

You can see without acting, you can be aware without paying attention.

Maybe they saw but were distracted by biases or things they felt were more important.

Maybe there was a cruel calculation about how much time they had vs. what they had to do.

They took in information, but they did wait to encounter the infinite within the person.

It is easy to imagine these men walking by this man, looking at their phones or pretending not to see while listening to their podcasts about living a good life.

Whatever the case may be, they didn't see him as human, as worth their time, or worth caring about.

This makes me wonder: what is happening with a person’s moral algorithm that enables them to turn away from or turn toward suffering?

Then there is the Samaritan. Clearly the example within the story. The Samaritan pays attention and acts. Another definition of attention, this one not from a French Philosopher is: “Attention is what catalyzes awareness into action.” (The Attention Economy - Davenport and Beck - 15)

The Samaritan is the one whose spiritual lenses enable a very different kind of action. That’s the real subversion within this text.

The Samaritan is a stand-in for the unlikely hero, the unexpected person, and quite frankly, the one who, if you were the victim, you might not want their help.

As Friends might say, “that name did not occur to me.”

To put a finer point on the subversion of the place the Good Samaritan occupies in society, Clarence Jordan, a farmer and theologian growing up in the segregated South known for his work around racial equity and his founding of the Koinonia Farm (which was committed to racial integration, simplicity, and nonviolence), retells this parable as though it took place in Atlanta during segregation.

In this remix of the story: The man beaten was white. Two white Christian men (a pastor and a worship leader) are the ones who pass him by. It is an African American man who, when he sees the white man beaten lying at the side of the road, and is “moved to tears.”

He, whose own reality within society is radically marginalized, is the one who tends to the man whose reality is very likely just a momentary victimization.

What we pay attention to tells us something about what we want to see. What we’re looking for. What we’re ready to act upon. It tells us something about the shape of our spiritual lenses, and for Jesus and his parable, it is a way of seeing that allows us to be moved to action.

That could be because of a sense of shared responsibility, compassion, practices that shape us over time to pay attention to suffering, or it could be because of one’s own suffering or marginalization that keeps them awake to others.

Our Shared Responsibility

This past summer, I organized a handful of community service work days at Guilford College. The idea stemmed from something a Friend said during a business meeting a few months prior. They really stressed the point that Quakers - at least in NC - feel a deep sense of responsibility and care for Guilford which was going through financial hardship. And so if it needs help, they wanted us at Guilford to make space for folks to help.

And so we put out a call. A number of people donated funds and worked to spruce up the welcome center for interested students and their families in the hopes that it will help with recruitment. What was even more amazing was it had to be one of the hottest weeks of the year. I remember thinking I’d never been so hot in all my life while waiting a railing black one of those afternoons.

We had Quakers from the three surrounding meetings, and college staff/faculty, show up to put in some hard and hot work.

When a faculty colleague was asked why on earth he was doing something like this during his summer off from college, he responded, “Guilford belongs to me.”

Guilford belongs to me. Not in ownership, but in love.

I hear echoes of the Samaritan seeing that beaten man and recognizing: this person belongs to me. In solidarity and in love.

If the algorithms of empire teach us to pass by on the other side, “that’s not my concern,” “that’s not my problem,” too become increasingly detached, then the Quaker algorithm stands in contrast: “we belong one to another and are responsible for the places we are rooted and called.”

We are the ones responsible for a better world.
We are the ones responsible for healing the broken.
We are the ones responsible for feeding the hungry.
We are the ones responsible for giving compassion to friend and enemy alike.

And this reminded me of funny and poignant saying from one of the old pillars of Camas Friends Church where I used to pastor.

Ron M. shared this with me years ago that Jean Hansen made a cross-stitched for the meetinghouse that said:

“If you’re looking for a helping hand, you have no further to look than the end of your own arm.” (Jean)

I was curious about the origins of this, so so I looked the quote up to see if I could find the original. It’s from Sam Levenson so the time period matches. It went like this:

“Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, it's at the end of your arm, as you get older, remember you have another hand: The first is to help yourself, the second is to help others.” ― Sam Levenson

I hear this as a certain way of seeing the world, a sense of co-laboring, co-responsibility for what we are creating, a solidarity with those who are struggling, in this we have come close to the Quaker algorithm of love. It is a commitment to trust that the work we are called to can be accomplished if we pull together and do the work.

Love of God and Love of Neighbor is about a continual process of broadening compassion and solidarity. Our attention, not poisoned but protected, and aimed at the infinite things, the eternal, and of love can get us there.

God is with those who find ways to expand and deepen love in the world with those who turn toward suffering. If only we’re willing and able to pay attention.

May it be so among us.

Queries:

What and who do you see?
What do you pay attention to? What do you notice?
How might we keep love and compassion always in front of us, moving us forward?