Learning to Notice

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC September 20, 2026, the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. “Be Astonished” series.

Texts:  Psalm 19:1-4, Matthew 6:25-33                               

 

“The heavens are telling the glory of God.”

I love that phrase. It’s so poetic and so deeply true. The heavens are telling.

Day pours forth speech to day. Night declares knowledge to night. The whole creation, the Psalmist imagines, is engaged in this unceasikng testimony to the glory of God. And then comes this: “There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard.”

Creation is telling us something without saying a word. The sky is telling. The trees are telling. The oceans and rivers, birds and flowers, creatures we can see and creatures buried in the soil beneath our feet are telling.

The question is whether we notice.

Perhaps that is why, centuries later, Jesus says: Look at the birds. Consider the lilies. Pay attention. In fact, the words Jesus uses are stronger than our English translations sometimes make them sound. When Jesus says “look at the birds,” it’s an invitation to really look, to direct your attention toward them. And the word translated “consider” the lilies means something like observe carefully or learn thoroughly. This makes me feel better about becoming one of “those people” who have a collection of bird books and are constantly recording birdsong in the Merlin app to identify what birds are around.

Jesus says not just “look” or notice, but study the birds. There is something here for you to learn.

And notice who he says this to. Anxious people. People worried about what they will eat and what they will drink and what they will wear. People preoccupied with all the things that might go wrong.

Jesus doesn’t respond to anxiety with an argument or a philosophy. He instead gently redirects attention. Look at the birds. Consider the lilies. For Jesus, the birds and lilies aren’t simply beautiful distractions from anxiety. They are witnesses to a creation—including anxious humans!—held in the care of God. Pay attention, Jesus seems to say, and you may begin to notice not only the wonder of the world, but the faithfulness of the God who’s got the whole world in God’s hands.

Jesus teaches this way throughout the gospels. Pay attention to seeds and soil. Watch how yeast works its way through dough. Notice vineyards and fig trees and sheep and weather. Jesus moves through the world as though everything is shimmering with the possibility of revelation.

Which suggests that paying attention to creation isn’t a side hustle to the spiritual life. Paying attention to creation is part of how we learn to see. It’s a way we come to learn the wisdom, the love, and the care of God.

Annie Dillard, who died this past week, once described coming to a place where you say to the woods, the sea, the mountains: “Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive.”

What if awe begins there? Not with some extraordinary experience, but with stopping. With noticing. With allowing something other than our own thoughts, fears, schedules, screens, and preoccupations to claim our attention.

The psychologist Dacher Keltner identifies nature as one of the great sources of human awe. He calls it “wild awe.” And wild awe can certainly happen in spectacular places. Standing on the rim of a canyon. Looking across an ocean. Walking among trees that were ancient before any of us were born. Looking up on a clear night and suddenly comprehending—or failing to comprehend—how enormous the universe actually is.

But one of the things I appreciate about Keltner’s work is his insistence that awe doesn’t require a plane ticket. We can learn to notice astonishing things happening all around us. We live on a planet where bees use dance to give other bees directions to the next flower. Where crows remember human faces and teach their young which humans to avoid. Where ants beneath our feet build whole communities, carrying many times their own weight. Where birds somehow know when it is time to leave and where to go. Where tiny seeds split themselves open underground and reach toward light they have never seen. Where after a devastating fire, the earth grows flowers again.

“The heavens are telling the glory of God.”

They have been telling us all along. The question is whether we have stopped noticing.

And we have some good reasons for that. There is so much competing for our attention. So much designed to steal our attention. News alerts. Emails. Texts. Advertisements. The infinite scroll. Much of what draws our focus is what frightens or angers us. And I want us to be gentle with ourselves on this point—you know, it isn’t a moral failure to get hooked by upsetting things. Human beings are wired to notice threat. It has helped keep us alive. But if threat is all we notice, it begins to look like threat is all there is. If all I take in are the things that are falling apart, then eventually I begin to believe that falling apart is the truest thing about the world. If all I see is what frightens me, fear begins to determine the size and shape of my world.

And this, I think, is why the late Wendell Berry’s beloved poem “The Peace of Wild Things” resonates with so many people. He begins, “When despair for the world grows in me...” You know anything about that?

When despair for the world grows in me, Berry wrote, he goes out into the presence of the wild things. He lies down near still water. He looks up into the stars. And by the end he can say, “I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

The problems haven’t gone away. The world hasn’t suddenly gotten sorted.

Something has changed in him. His field of vision has widened. He has remembered that the thing causing him despair is real—but it is not everything that is real. This is such an important thread that we will pull through this entire series: paying attention to wonder, learning to notice—these aren’t ways of escaping the world’s pain. They are ways of refusing to let pain become the whole story.

Robin Wall Kimmerer says it beautifully in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

Awe helps us hold more than one thing at a time.

And Keltner’s research suggests that this does something important to us.

Experiences of awe can evoke what researchers sometimes call the “small self.” Honestly, I wasn’t a fan of this phrase when I first saw it. Because our faith certainly doesn’t teach that human beings are insignificant. You bear the image of God. You are beloved. Your life matters.

But I came to understand that the “small self” is connected to the spiritual practice of humility. There is a difference between knowing that my life matters and believing that I am the center of everything. Wild awe can remind us of the difference.

Stand under a sky filled with stars and you remember: I am small. And I belong here. Stand beside the ocean and remember: I do not control all of this. And I am part of it. Watch some tiny creature making its way through the world and remember: There are lives being lived all around me that have nothing to do with my agenda.

And researchers are discovering that this change in perspective has consequences. Awe is associated with greater feelings of connection. It can widen the boundaries of our moral concern—not only toward other people, but toward animals, plants, and the environment. It can make us more generous, more cooperative, more aware that we belong to something larger than ourselves.

We are earth creatures, given breath we did not create, dependent upon soil and water and sunlight and the labor and lives of innumerable creatures we rarely even notice. We are part of God’s vast, glorious, good creation.

And what a strange thing we human beings have done—to begin imagining that creation is simply the scenery behind the main stage, with us at the center and always in the spotlight.

Scripture tells the story differently. “The heavens are telling the glory of God.”

Creation isn’t scenery. Creation is revelation. Creation is our teacher, our neighbor. Creation is an astonishing gift. And when we begin to receive it that way, perhaps we also begin to live differently within it. Because reverence changes relationship. It is harder to treat as disposable something you’ve come to know as wonder-full. It is harder to think of the earth merely as a collection of resources when you have begun to perceive yourself as part of its beautiful, intricate community of life.

And perhaps it becomes harder to treat other human beings as disposable too. If awe teaches me that I am not the center, then that sets me in a different relationship with my neighbor. Perhaps I can hold my certainty a little more lightly. Perhaps I can become curious again. Perhaps I can recognize that my perspective is one perspective within a world vastly bigger than I can see. Perhaps wonder can loosen some of the fear and defensiveness that separate us from one another.

Allowing the experience of wild awe to soften the hard boundaries that grow up among and between people doesn’t mean we stop caring about truth or justice.

It does mean we remember our place in the vastness of creation and the human family. We are not insignificant nor are we all-important. We are not powerless nor are we all-powerful. We are beloved, responsible, and deeply interconnected with all beings and the whole creation.

Jesus says: Look at the birds. Consider the lilies. Maybe those aren’t just lovely illustrations for a sermon about worry. Maybe Jesus is giving us a spiritual practice: Learn to notice. Go outside and look at something long enough that it becomes more than background. Take a walk without filling your ears with something. Look up. Learn the name of a bird or the sound of its song. Watch clouds move. Notice the astonishing architecture of a leaf. Find water and sit beside it. Look at the moon long enough to remember that generations upon generations of human beings have looked at that same moon. Attend to something that does not need anything from you.

And perhaps, once in a while, allow yourself to be astonished. Not as an escape from this wounded world, but for the sake of your own well-being and for the sake of this beautiful, broken world.

Because we need people able to see beyond the crisis immediately in front of them and remember that God’s world is wider, older, stranger, more beautiful, and more resilient than any one terrible moment.

The heavens are still telling. Day to day still pours forth speech. Night to night still declares knowledge. The testimony has not stopped.

Maybe our practice this week is simply to learn to notice. Look at the birds. Consider the lilies. Slow down.

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

And discover what this beautiful and broken world has been trying to tell us all along.