There’s a new show on NPR that I’ve recently gotten into called Invisibilia. The program looks at the intangible things that shape human behavior, things like our ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and emotions. The show is on Sunday nights at 8 pm, but I prefer to listen to it as podcasts while cooking, providing a nice, non-visual distraction to the boring task of chopping vegetables. Which is how I found myself one evening, with this week’s texts floating around in my mind, listening to an episode titled, “How to Become Batman.”
The focus the episode was expectations, how our expectations affect the actions, and even the abilities, of people around us. The program began with the hosts sneaking a lab rat into NPR studios and asking their colleagues this question, do you believe your thoughts could affect the behavior of this lab rat. The answer, universally, was no. No, it’s a rat, obviously it’s going to do whatever it’s going to do, and my opinion of it has nothing to do with those behaviors. But a research psychologist named Bob Rosenthal discovered something surprisingly different.
So here’s what Rosenthal did. One night he snuck into his lab and hung signs on a whole bunch of the rat cages, labeling some rats as incredibly smart rats, and others as incredibly dumb. This was completely random, the rats weren’t smarter or dumber than each other, they were all just rats, just the same lab rats you would get from a place that supplies rats for any sort of scientific testing. Then Rosenthal brought a bunch of other research scientists into this lab filled with randomly labeled rats and said, for the next week, your job is to take these smart and dumb rats and run them through mazes, and record how they do.
The results were not even close. The smart rats did almost twice as well as the dumb rats. Except, remember, the smart rats were not smarter and the dumb rats were not dumber, they were all just rats. What Rosenthal eventually discovered is that the expectations the scientists had for the rats affected the way the scientists handled the rats, and this in turn affected the rats behavior. Thinking they were handling incredibly brilliant rats caused the scientists to behave more warmly toward the rats, to handle them more gently. And the rats, in their own rat way, responded to that better treatment and in fact lived up to the expectations the scientists had for them. While the dumb rats, which, remember, weren’t dumb, dumbed down to the low expectations the scientists had for them.
This has been seen in human subjects as well. A teacher’s expectations can affect a student’s IQ scores; a military trainer’s expectations can literally make a soldier run faster or slower. But there’s a limit to this, of course, the host of the show challenged the psychologist. My belief that if a person jumps off a building they will be able to fly is not going to end well, no matter how firmly I believe it. So what is the line, what is the tipping point where my expectation stops being able to influence behavior. It is a continuum, the psychologist agreed, but there isn’t a line. Or, at least, that line is moving, as we continue to understand how our beliefs affect an outcome or how one person affects another person, that line can move.
It’s a brilliant episode, and I’d definitely recommend catching the end of it. Or stay tuned, because the second half of the show featured a story about a man without eyes who uses echolocation to see that is begging to be a sermon illustration at some point itself. But as I thought about our Gospel reading for today, I kept thinking about the rats.
Our Gospel text for this morning is the call of the first disciples. Things happen very fast in Mark’s Gospel, if you read through the Gospel, you’ll notice Mark uses the word immediately the way most of us would use the word “um.” Jesus saw Simon and Andrew, he said, “Follow me, and I’ll make you fish for people,” and immediately they left their nets and followed. Then Jesus saw James and John and called to them, and immediately they left their boat and followed. It was a crazy, gutsy move on the part of Simon and Andrew, James and John. John the Baptist has just been arrested, within a few chapters he will be beheaded, but even so when Jesus came calling, calling them away from everything they’d ever known, they dropped their nets and followed. And so we hold the disciples up as models of faith, models of commitment, models of devotion. And we ask ourselves, if God called me away from everything I’d ever known, would I follow?
But remember the rats? The rats weren’t smart or dumb, they just responded to the commands they received, and as a result, some did better than others. Similarly, to hold the disciples up as models of faith or commitment I think is to give them too much credit. The disciples didn’t weigh pros or cons or make any giant, bold leaps of faith. It just happened too fast. Jesus said, follow me, so, they followed. Jesus treated them as disciples and so they became disciples. They weren’t always awesome at being disciples, read the rest of the Gospel of Mark, they were really rather bad at it, but that’s to be expected too. The smart rats didn’t start quoting Shakespeare; they were still just rats. The disciples went from being fishermen to followers because Jesus believed in them, because Jesus knew that they would.
And like the moving line psychologists found of how expectations affected abilities, that belief that Jesus had in the disciples was a continuum. The more they followed, the more they experienced this belief that Jesus had in them, the more they were capable of and the more they believed in it too. Taking a lot of time thinking about why the disciples followed Jesus or what we would do in their place is to over think the epiphany. Jesus called, the disciples followed, and things were never the same after that.
There are few things I can say for absolute certainty, but I can say this, you will never find yourself in the first century standing on the shore of the Sea of Galilee holding a fishing net. You may travel to the Sea of Galilee, you may even get to hold a fishing net, but the time travel bit, the family history of growing up in a career of subsistence fishermen, a thousand large and small details render wondering how we would respond in the disciples place irrelevant. What matters is that like the disciples, God has expectations for us, expectations that are better, more than we think we are capable of, and those expectations change who we are, change how we interact with the world. God says to us, you are my child, the Beloved, and we are, because God says it is true. God says, follow me, and I will make you fish for people, and we do, because God says we can. Some of these actions are life-shattering, like the disciples dropping their nets and following. Others are smaller, simpler, but no less important or profound, forgiving someone we did not think we could forgive, inviting someone to church we were afraid to ask, praying for someone who needs our prayers, working at the food pantry, writing a letter to a Congressman, or simply getting up and beginning another day knowing that we are beloved in God’s eyes are all profoundly important actions that we do everyday because God believes in us, expects it from us. And as we journey along this continuum of faith, these beliefs that God has in us changes us more and more, so we begin to know more and more the depth of God’s love, and the power of that love to work in our lives and in the world.
“Follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fish for people.” That sentence is not a command, it is not a request; it is simply a statement. An expression of fact by the one who is Truth. And so we follow, and we fish, because God knows we can. Amen.
The episode of Inivisibilia can be found here: http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-become-batman. The whole episode is excellent, but the rat story specifically is in the first six or so minutes.
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