You Go Where You Look, So….”

Rev. Joe Mortensen, guest preacher

Once in a while truth trips you up in odd places. Would you expect to hear basic Bible truth spoken by motorcycle riders? Would you expect race car drivers to teach essential Christian theology? Probably not. Yet in both cases I found that it’s true.

Skip Barber runs a high performance driving school in Connecticut, the Skip Barber Racing School. He teaches people how to drive normal cars, hot cars, and race cars. Among other offerings, he gives a one-day course “which features a classroom session on vehicle dynamics, manual transmission instruction, and identifying why cars behave the way they do.”

“In the ONE DAY DRIVING SCHOOL students learn and practice slides and recoveries on a skid pad, threshold braking, lane-toss exercises and accident avoidance techniques in … sportscars, … roadsters, and … sedans. Of course, everyone gets out of the cars smiling!” Well, parents, sign up your teenager today. It’s only $1,000 for a one day lesson. It might be worth it.

Skip Barber stresses one thing above all else in his instructions to drivers. Whether they are beginners or wannabe NASCAR drivers, they get the same message: “You go where you look so you better look where you want to go.”

Those who teach people to ride motorcycles say exactly the same thing. On a website called Motorcycle Rider Basics I found this heading: “Look Where You Go & Go Where You Look.” It says, “Understanding this concept is another critical piece of the riding puzzle. Go where you look means that, when riding, you (and your motorcycle) will go to wherever you are looking. The formal term for this is Target Fixation.”

The article cites three examples of “target fixation” and its probable outcomes:

1. When you see a pothole coming up and you stare at it while you are approaching it, odds are that you will hit it.
2. Making a tight U-turn on a residential street and halfway through the turn, you look at the opposing curb; odds are that you will hit the curb. [turning bike around on a narrow cul-de-sac]
3. During a gradual turn on a two lane road, you look at the oncoming traffic; odds are that you will ride right into oncoming traffic.

If you have ever driven a car or ridden a motorcycle or even a bicycle, you know by experience what these experts are saying. If you look away from the road ahead to adjust the radio or look at the touchscreen, glance at your cell phone, tweet something, look at the pretty girl or handsome guy walking on the sidewalk, grab a quick look at a map, or reach for your Big Gulp, you know what happens. Your body will take you where your eyes are looking. Your brain directs your arms to follow your eyes and steer to where they are looking.

If you wake up to your situation, you jerk the steering wheel or slam on the brakes to keep from hitting the kid on the bike on your right or the oncoming car on your left. Or worse things happen. An accident I had in Western Nebraska almost 60 years ago comes to mind.

You go where you look so you better look where you want to go. (Repeat)

And one of the next things these instructors of drivers and bikers would say is, keep your eyes looking far down the road. Drivers who don’t look far enough ahead have to make constant adjustments, swerving, etc. So you should avoid looking at distractions, either in the car or outside.

You go where you look so you better look where you want to go. Keep your eyes looking far down the road.

Every driver needs to to glance frequently at the rear-view mirrors, but not to fix your gaze on the mirror or enjoy where you’ve been. The mirrors are only useful to see what dangers lurk behind you, somebody driving carelessly, too fast, an enormous truck about to run over you. Looking mostly or only at what’s behind you leads to trouble.

You go where you look so you better look where you want to go. Keep your eyes looking far down the road.

All of what I’ve said so far shines light on what the Bible teaches all the way through. It especially shines light on what Jesus taught. It’s all about our eyes. It’s all about where we are looking. It’s spiritual “target fixation.” When our eyes are sound and keep focussed on the main thing, we nurture our spiritual well-being and bless others. When distractions and difficulties draw our eyes away from the target, there lies trouble. When eyes stay fixed on the mercies of God and the path laid out for God’s people, the church flourishes and the world is blessed.

What did Jesus say? Matthew 6:33 “But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

The main thing, the first thing, the most important thing according to Jesus, is to seek the kingdom, strive for God’s kingdom, that is, a world put right again, a vision of something not yet but with the coming of Jesus already being realized. That’s what we are called to seek or strive for.

Jesus’ own deeds and words show us what this means. All in all it’s a wonderful prospect. But I must admit it’s also a very tall order, something that seems impossible, out of reach, a nice thing to hope for, but really..… It will take some doing to get you and me there, given who we are, some kind of transforming event. What does it take?

Our own eyesight may be impaired and need healing, which not only keeps us from looking where we go but also keeps us from seeing clearly enough to know where we are going and where we want to go. Can our vision be made whole?
Bruce Bridgeman lived with a flat view of the world, until a trip to the movies unexpectedly rewired his brain to see the world in 3 dimensions.* How did this happen? Good movies may change people’s view of the world, but how many can say a movie has fundamentally altered their vision forever? One person who can is Bruce Bridgeman. For the way he sees the world, there is life before Hugo, and life after Hugo.

Eight years ago, Bridgeman went to the movies with his wife to see Martin Scorsese’s 3D family adventure “Hugo.” Like everyone else, he paid extra for a special pair of glasses, even though he thought they would be a complete waste of money. Bridgeman, a 67-year-old neuroscientist at the University of California in Santa Cruz, grew up nearly stereoblind, that is, without true depth perception. “When we’d go out and people would look up and start discussing some bird in the tree, I would still be looking for the bird when they were finished,” he says. “For everybody else, the bird jumped out. But to me, it was just part of the background.”

He had a condition called alternating exotropic strabismus, often called “lazy eye” or crossed eyes in which each eye independently tends to drift outward. He could aim each eye individually at a scene, and sway back and forth between them, but he could never get both eyes to fix on a single point, and couldn’t look through both eyes at once. So throughout his life he had seen the world as a collection of flat panels.

All that changed when the lights went down and the previews finished. Almost as soon as he began to watch the film, the characters jumped out  from the screen in a way he had never experienced. “It was just literally like a whole new dimension of sight,” says Bridgeman.

But this wasn’t just movie magic; it didn’t end when the movie ended. When it was over, he took off the 3D glasses and stepped out of the theatre. The world looked different. For the first time, Bridgeman saw a lamppost standing out from the background. Trees, cars and people looked more alive and more vivid than ever. And, remarkably, he’s seen the world in 3 dimensions ever since that day. “Riding to work on my bike, I look into a forest beside the road and see a riot of depth, every tree standing out from all the others,” he says. Something had happened. Some part of his brain had come to life.

Conventional wisdom says that what happened to Bridgeman is impossible. Like many of the 5-10% of the population living with stereoblindness, he was resigned to seeing a world without depth. Yet – something happened. Now he saw, everything in 3 dimensions  – without the 3D glasses.

Scripture, as we read this morning from Hebrews 12, bids us look to Jesus as the way forward. As it says there, “let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” Run with perseverance. Look to Jesus. Can there be Jesus-glasses you and I can put on to correct our vision so we can see with depth and insight? Can we envision a hopeful path ahead? Something for us to focus on to continue our journey?

Wendell Potter was a successful health care executive at the giant insurance company Cigna. As vice-president of communications, he was used to viewing the world – especially the world of health care – from 35,000 feet, very comfy in the company jet, eating gourmet meals served in style on gold-edged china.

It happened that he heard about a group called Remote Area Medical which was holding a free outdoor clinic in West Virginia. His curiosity aroused, he drove to the Wise County Fairgrounds in West Virginia.

When he arrived Potter saw thousands of people lined up in an open field. Many of them had camped out the night before. He says he froze at the sight. “It felt like touching an electrical fence. I remember tearing up and thinking, how could this be real?….It looked like a refugee camp. It just hit me like a bolt of lightning. What I was doing for a living was making it necessary for people to resort to getting care in animal stalls.”

He later would write, “Until that day, I had been able to think, talk, and write about the U.S. health care and the uninsured in the abstract, as if real-life human beings were not involved.”

He came to realize that “Most of us are just a layoff from losing [our health insurance].”

Now he had seen, he had looked, but Potter was not ready to go there. He stayed with his job at Cigna with its six-figure salary and other perks. Potter is like a lot of people; his job was his identity. It defined him. But what he saw that day in West Virginia kept gnawing away at him.

You go where you look…and Potter could not stop seeing those thousands of people lined up to get help. Somehow new eyes, Jesus-eyes, overcame Potter’s resistance and steered him in a new direction. He began to strive for God’s kingdom. He looked to Jesus to guide him. He found a new source of personal identity as he awakened to the long-dormant Baptist faith of his youth. He read the Bible again. Paul’s words in Philippians spoke to him: “Cast all your anxiety on God.”

He did just that. He took the risk. He left Cigna with its security, big salary, prestige, perks and power to become a very visible and vocal advocate of health care reform. He has written at least three books advocating reform of the way we provide and pay for health care. Some of his former co-workers regard him as a “Judas” but others have followed his lead.

So where are you and I looking? At the bumps in the road, distractions inside and outside the car, heavy traffic heading toward us in the other lane? These all distract us and deter us from action. Worries about tomorrow may overwhelm us.

We have a choice. We go where we look. We ca we put on the special glasses of God’s good news and see things in a new light, discern the right direction, maybe in ways we’ve never imagined. Let us trust God to guide and empower us individually and as a body of believers to go forward in grace and mercy in our city and in our world.