When I was a young woman with few responsibilities, I used to
love today’s story about Martha and Mary. Of course Mary had chosen the better part, I agreed: Studying the word
of God, basking in spirituality and worship at Jesus’ feet--that is obviously better
than doing practical chores and rushing through boring day-to-day tasks. Serve
food at the homeless shelter? Set up for VBS? Come to parish clean-up day? Not
me! I was too busy studying theology. Even today, if the church would pay me to
set up shop in the seminary library, cradled on all sides by fascinating
religion books, stepping out of my comfy study-nest only to engage in
theological discussions, a nice meal with friends, and a few breaks for some
beautiful worship, then I would be as happy as a clam. Mary all the way! And
Jesus even praises Mary for her choice! Perfect!
Unfortunately
for all of us Mary’s out there, though, today’s lesson is not that simple.
First of all, isn’t Jesus always
telling us to “go and do?” The trouble with the priest and Levite in last
week’s Parable of the Good Samaritan could have been that they were too busy
praying to notice the dying man in the ditch; the Samaritan, on the other hand,
jumped in and got to work like Martha as he responded to his neighbor in action
and loving deeds. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus clearly says in the verses right
before today’s lesson. And what about Abraham and Sarah in our Old Testament
reading? When God comes to them at Mamre, they both jump into frantic action to
welcome their divine guests. “Hurry,” and “fetch” appear over and over in this
short passage, as I picture Abraham, Sarah, and their servants running from one
task to the next like characters in a time-lapse video, trying to turn their
tent into a spa-like respite and banquet hall worthy of the divine presence.
Here, God does not chide them for their frenzied efforts at hospitality—rather,
they are rewarded. As Tom Long puts it: “I cannot imagine Jesus saying to
Christians who are emptying bed pans in an AIDS clinic or baking corn bread for
the soup kitchen, ‘You people are preoccupied with busy work. Leave the
children, the needy, the ill, the lonely behind. Come sit and meditate for a
while. Be spiritual but not religious. This is the better part.’"[1]
Perhaps, then, the problem with
Martha isn’t that she is doing, but that she is just too stressed out about it?
She is clearly overwhelmed by all of the work involved in receiving Jesus into
her home. She is “anxious and troubled by many things.” According to the Greek,
we might say that she is caught up in her responsibilities to the extent that
she has put herself in an uproar. The Greek also tells us, though, that her
stress is objective: She has a reason to be overwhelmed. Her task is really too
much for one woman to accomplish easily.[2]
Aren’t our lives really too much for us to handle calmly most of the time? How
about trying to clean the house with a toddler messing things up as fast as you
clean them, while a baby screams in the crib? How about trying to do a job in 8
hours that everyone knows can’t be done in less than 10 and then rushing to
your second job? How about the pressure of landing an account with impossibly
stiff competition on all sides? How about getting your three children to games
and activities that all start at the same time on opposite sides of town? How about
caring both for sick parents in a faraway nursing home and needy teens at home,
while working in a demanding job? How about running a week-long Reading Camp?
Or selling rooms full of preschool furniture in a week? Or pulling together all
of the intricacies of Bluegrass and
Burgoo? How about deciding to answer one important email before you start
on the sermon, and then the phone rings, and then someone knocks on the door,
and with all three conversations still unfinished, you notice that you are late
to a meeting across town in the five o’clock traffic?
I might wish that I could be Mary, but I am also Martha, and I imagine that
you are, too. Rushing round with too much to do and too little time to do it ….
Resentful …. Frazzled … Forgetful and on overload…Jesus and love of neighbor the
furthest thing from our minds, even when we started out the project with the
most loving of intentions. It’s so easy to snap at our fellow workers (or at
least to pout quietly in our minds): “Look at me doing all this work, and look
at the others just sitting around! Lord, doesn’t it concern you that everyone
else has left me alone to serve? Tell them to get up and help me!”
In our small parish, we objectively
do not have enough people to do all of the great work that we want to do for
Jesus. I know that it is a struggle for any of us to find time or energy to teach
Godly Play or to shepherd a new family. It’s not that we are lazy. It’s not
that we are inefficient. It’s not that we don’t care. It’s not that we don’t
love God or St. Thomas. We are simply overwhelmed. Martha should be our patron
saint.
So what’s the answer? Jesus seems to
chide the complaining, bustling Martha, telling her that “there is need for
only one thing.” What is that one thing?
Is it time for prayer and meditation? Should we sign up for yoga and do
Centering Prayer when we feel the stress keeping us awake at night?
Or is the One Thing to spend more
time reading the Bible so that Jesus’ words and teachings can keep us focused
on him, rather than on ourselves and our own meager efforts?
Or is the One Thing to keep focused
on the in-breaking Kingdom of God, where God’s will is done on earth like it is
in heaven, and the poor in spirit are the happy ones, and the things that
stress us about our everyday lives have lost all of their power over us?
There are many strategies that we
could use to keep us focused on Jesus (prayer, meditation, reading God’s Word,
living for God’s reign—or even cooking meals and hosting parties and working in
the garden, for that matter!) But I think that Elizabeth Myer Boulton hits the
nail on the head when she writes that it is Mary’s delight in Jesus that is the
“One Thing” that can bring peace to our harried lives. Says Boulton: “Mary has
chosen … single-minded savoring and delight, and it will not be taken away from
her. The story is not a celebration of study or inaction or even of sitting
still. It's a celebration of savoring, of delighting in God, of creating the
possibility of sabbath even on the busiest of days.”[3]
I was talking with a friend about a
way to help the men among us enter into this very woman-centered story in our
Gospel. I thought that if I could tie the cooking and cleaning into a story
about sports, perhaps, I might get some extra sermon-points! But my friend told
me a story, instead, about his sister’s husband, a story that invites us all to
think about how we find joy. While his sister is like Martha, quick and busy,
competent at multitasking, able to direct all of the family activities and
carry on an animated conversation at the same time, her husband is like Mary,
slow and deliberate in his movements, a quiet contemplative who communes with
God as he unhurriedly goes about his tasks. Her husband even got quite a
reputation in the neighborhood for the hours that he spent trimming the hedge
in front of his house, one slow snip at a time. Neighbors would rush by on
their way to soccer practice, or zoom around pushing lawn-mowers in a race
against time, while this man dreamily shaped his hedge, tuft by tuft. People would tease him about his slow deliberation. But then
tragedy struck. This thoughtful father of three was diagnosed with stage four
cancer, and the terrible treatments began. In the hospital, this man's quiet
contemplation paid off: he was able to endure the pain, one slow moment at a time. He was
able to enjoy tiny pleasures, one slow moment at a time. And his busy, hurried,
competent wife, she was forced to abandon her busyness and to let go of her
competence, to learn to live each moment of joy more fully, to savor her
husband’s presence, to lean on God, second by difficult second. In the all-absorbing
fight against cancer, we suddenly learn to see the One Thing that matters, as everything
else falls away.
Many of you have recently lived
through difficult illnesses, either your own or those of your loved ones. You
know that tragedy has a way of forcing us to savor life, to live into the
depths of each moment, to focus on One Thing, rather than the many things. I
think that what Jesus is telling us in this story is that we don’t need to wait
until tragedy strikes. In Jesus’ presence, we can live more fully into joy, as
well. We can savor God’s presence, laughing like Sarah at the promise of
unexpected delight, whether Jesus joins us as part of a community working in
the Fellowship Hall kitchen or whether Jesus makes our heart leap in a
beautiful note from the organ or whether Jesus touches us with a hug from a
grateful child at Reading Camp, or whether Jesus speaks to us as we pray alone
in our room. However you want to do it, reach down in gratitude into each moment,
as if that moment is the only thing that matters, and delight in God, lest
God’s presence pass us by.
[1]
Sermon by Thomas Long, found at: http://day1.org/1052-mary_and_martha
[2]
Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (Sacra Pagina), 173-74.
[3]
Elizabeth Myer Boulton, “Martha’s Problem,” found at http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2011-02/martha-s-problem.
