Come, Sit with Jesus

Luke 10: 38-42

Sunday, July 22, 2007

The Reverend Shirley Smith Graham, St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Williamsburg

8 a.m. Sermon

Many people read this gospel lesson and can palpably feel the conflict between the two sisters, Mary and Martha.  Martha is trying diligently to exercise good hospitality toward Jesus and her other guests.  She is concentrating on serving all the dishes of the meal, of properly observing washing rituals, of making sure all is in order.  Meanwhile, Mary is sitting with the guest Jesus, letting him chat away.  While Martha needs help serving, Mary has her feet up with Jesus.  

Finally Martha approaches Jesus and says, “Don’t you care that she’s not helping?”  And in the short-hand of the gospel writers, Jesus appears to respond: “No, not particularly.  Mary is doing what she needs to be doing.”  On hearing this story, many people feel that Jesus has told off Martha and that Mary, the lazy sister, gets rewarded for her lack of labor.  Maybe you remember some Martha-Mary moments of your own, when you were working as hard as you could to do what you’d been asked, and you felt conflicted about someone who wasn’t doing his/her “fair share.”

So it is that we seem to be viewing a conflict between Martha, the do-er of the word, and Mary, the hearer of the word.

Further intensifying the tension is the fact that this lesson comes on the heels of last Sunday’s teaching, when we heard of the high value God places on us loving our neighbors as ourselves.  As important as loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength is loving our neighbor.  Inseparable from loving God is the duty of loving the neighbor – not just feeling the love but doing the love in acts of service.

So then, we are caught up a short to find ourselves today with this gospel lesson that sets us up to think that sitting at the feet of Jesus (what Mary is doing) is better than serving (what Martha is doing). 

But I would suggest that there is really no conflict between sitting and serving and, in fact, that each has its part in the Christian life.  We have a friend to help us in this conundrum, the theologian Hermann Beyer, of Greifswald, Germany.  Dr. Beyer thinks of service as the defining mark of a disciple of Jesus.  If you follow Jesus, you must be serving.  There is no following Jesus without serving.  So important to the practice of Episcopal life is service that we even have an order of ministry, the deaconate, named with the same word as the Greek word for service.

But if service is of primary importance, then how are we to think about other values that Jesus seems to be pointing to in today’s lesson and that are historically key ingredients of the Christian life?  If service is all, what’s the value of prayer, of sitting in the presence of God, of studying God’s word?  If service is the fundamental mark of discipleship, are these other action of lesser importance? 

Not at all. 

Although acts of service, such as Martha’s, are important, so are other acts – those of Mary, for example.  While waiting upon the Lord at table is what the action-oriented Martha is doing, waiting upon the Lord in another mode is what Mary is doing as she sits in his presence in a stance of openness and receptivity that are hallmarks of the life with God.  So if service and devotion are not in conflict, how do they relate to one another? 

Again, Dr. Beyer helps us out.  He says that God is not “a thou toward whom I may order my relationship as I please, but a thou under whom I have placed myself as diakoinon – as servant.”  In the classic language of speaking from the first person position of faith, from the “I” and relating to the “thou” who is God, Beyer asserts that God is not subject to manipulation, to the making of my own rules.  Rather, when I put myself in relation to God, when I place myself at God’s feet, at the table of faith, then I adopt the heart-values that are important to God, one of which is service.

But service is important not as a good deed but as an expression of something I do because I am in relationship to God, and because it is important to the Lord of life.  I don’t serve because it’s a good idea or because it makes the world a better place: I serve because that’s what one does when one places oneself in relation to God.  So then, we realize that service is important not because it’s a good by itself but because it is an expression of our relationship with God, the One who is good.  Acts of service without the posture of devotion toward God ring hollow.  Martha actions, as good as they look, are hollow without God, the object of Mary’s love, being at the center.

We 21^st Century Americans are such people of action that it’s sometimes hard to think of something as still as a “posture of devotion” to be worthwhile.  This posture works against our human DNA, our genetic code that is wired for survival and fight-or-flight.  So, let’s think about what it might be like to be, like Mary, in the posture of sitting at Jesus’ feet, this posture of awe, wonder and reverence, this posture in which we experience our condition of who we truly are: the “beloved of God”, waiting upon the Lord.

When we, like Mary, sit at the feet of Jesus, we experience the awe of being in God’s presence, a power so much greater than ourselves that we may be left in wordless astonishment.  The American, Pulitzer-winning poet Mary Oliver describes the posture of awe in this way:  Her work as a poet finds her “mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.” 

In our Christian context, we would add to the awe the comfort of resting in God’s presence.  In this posture of awe, astonishment and devotion, we put aside our worry about ourselves and the world.  We practice the spiritual discipline of resting in the arms of Jesus.  What is that old hymn?

Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms;

Leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.

We can learn a lot from Mary of Bethany, the Mary of this story from the Gospel of Luke.  Here, we see Jesus affirming that, for her, she has chosen the better part: she needs now to be sitting with Jesus, learning, soaking up the goodness and grace of his presence, getting her spiritual fuel tank filled up.  Later, this Mary of Bethany appears again, this time in the Gospel of John as the one who anoints Jesus’ feet with perfume and dries his feet with her hair – just about the most flagrant act of service one could think of.  So, on a different day (in a different telling), Mary will do her acts of service that rise out of her relationship with God.  But on this day, the expression of her discipleship with Jesus is to wait upon the Lord in that different way – to sit at the feet of Jesus, soaking up his goodness and keeping Divine company.

Looking at things this way helps me understand why I said what I did to a member of my former church when I was first overseeing education there.  I was recruiting Sunday School teachers and, upon meeting Margie, I asked if she would teach.  Margie was adamant.  Absolutely not.  She said, “Don’t ask me to teach Sunday School.  I taught for 20 years when my kids were growing up, and I’m done with that!

I was o.k. Margie’s answer.  I didn’t believe her teaching abilities were all dried up.  I knew from forums that she had a lifelong love of learning.  I knew from her volunteer work that she still enjoyed teaching.  But I felt at peace with her insistence that she would not, in this season of life, teach Sunday School.  So much of her life service had focused on God’s creatures that she was starved of opportunities to sit with Jesus.  For this retired Sunday School teacher, the best service she could render to God was to serve not in Sunday School but to wait upon the Lord more directly, more Mary-like.  May we, like Margie, discern in the day we’re in, our better part – always to wait on the Jesus, because that’s who we’re in relationship with.  Some we will act like Mary; sometimes we will act like Martha; but always we will be waiting on the Lord.

10 a.m. adult supplement

We heard in the gospel reading today that Martha is worried about many things.  Jesus recognizes her worries.  She is anxious about exercising good hospitality, probably worried about getting all the dishes of the meal out before people, making sure that the correct washing rituals are observed.  And the “short-hand” in which the gospel readers write doesn’t give us the whole story.  The whole story is something we get if we read one passage of Scripture against another, piling one story on top of another, so that we get more of a multi-dimensional view of a story, instead of the kind of two-dimensional view we get if we consider one story in isolation.

If we read this story of Mary and Martha in isolation, we might think Jesus was ridiculing Martha for being caring about the household chores (fed up but tolerant): “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.”

But we get a different interpretation when we hold up this story against others.  Jesus knows that we live in this world: we may not belong to this world, but we do live in this world. So, we need to eat; we need to stay clean; we need to find food; we need to survive.  We do have a lot of things to be concerned about, but that worry is not supposed to control us.  So, Jesus will point, from time to time, to one thing to concentrate on – one thing to do, as a focusing point.  As if to say, first do this, then the rest will sort itself out.  Now, with that interpretation in mind, let’s hear this verse again:

“Martha [draws close],

 Martha [deep caring],

 you are worried and distracted by many things;

there is need of only one thing.”

This is a message of hope for Martha (and Mary).  That, although there are justifiably many things to be concerned about,  they have the grace and peace of Jesus authorizing them to focus just on one thing – in this particular case, sitting in his presence and knowing they are beloved.

In this case of the Amos prophecy the children and I looked at, the one thing is using a fair standard to make sure that everyone has food – regardless of their status – status of family, legal status, economic status.

Let’s take this lesson into our next week living “in the world.”  You have God’s permission to focus on “one thing.”  What is that one important thing that is for you, the better part?

Amen.