The Battle for Our Attention: Lessons from Peter on the Water
Summary from Fr. Matthew Brown Homily Aug 10th, 2025 St. Mary Magdalen Orthodox Church (OCA)
The Power of Attention
The story of Peter stepping out of the boat toward Jesus teaches us about the power of attention and what attention really is. A helpful way to think about worship is this: it is whatever holds the highest priority of your attention. By definition, the thing you worship is the thing to which you give the most sustained focus.
Attention is a limited resource. We live in an age, especially online, where countless things compete for it, pulling us in every direction. Even in prayer, we experience this battle. One of the greatest challenges of prayer is learning to control our attention, and in doing so we discover how little control we often have over ourselves.
Worship as Training Attention
The good news of the Gospel is that Jesus offers us a way to regain agency over our lives so that we are no longer enslaved to whims, desires, or distractions. In many ways, His ministry of freeing people from demons shows us this truth. A demon—whether understood spiritually or psychologically—is an enslaved attention, an obsessive fixation on something destructive that leads to death rather than life. Whatever receives our attention will shape us and, in a way, possess us.
The direction of our attention determines the direction of our life—spiritually, psychologically, and even physically. Just as a child learning to hit a baseball must “keep your eye on the ball” in order to connect, so too in life we become what we focus on.
When we gather for worship, we are in a kind of spiritual gymnasium, training our attention. The goal is not only to gain control over our focus here in the liturgy, but to carry that skill into our daily lives. The liturgy shows us what properly ordered attention looks like—transforming bread and wine into the very Body and Blood of Christ. This is the power of focused, consecrated attention.
Peter’s Lesson on the Water
In Matthew’s account, Peter walks on water toward Jesus, sustained by his fixed attention on the Lord. But when his gaze shifts to the storm, fear overtakes him, and he begins to sink. The same attention that enabled him to walk on water now works against him when it turns toward fear.
When Jesus lifts Peter into the boat, He says, “You of little faith.” Sustaining attention on Christ is an act of faith, and faith is best understood as trust. We often imagine faith as signing off on a checklist of doctrines, but biblically it is relational—a willingness to give our attention to someone, to risk trusting them with ourselves.
The Battle for Our Attention
Relationships falter when they are starved of attention. Giving our focus requires risk and vulnerability; it is something we pray for and also train for. Every time we give God our full attention in worship, we are strengthening the capacity to do so in the storms of life.
Like Peter, we can learn to keep our eyes on Christ rather than on the fear and distraction around us. The struggle for attention is, in the end, the struggle for our own souls, for the very direction our life will take.
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