Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture Readings:
Hebrew Scriptures – Amos 8: 1-71
1This is what the Lord GOD showed me—a basket of summer fruit. 2He said, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the LORD said to me,
“The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by. 3The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day,” says the Lord GOD; “the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place. Be silent!”
4Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, 5saying,
“When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, 6buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” 7The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.
Gospel – Luke 10: 38-422
38Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. 39She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. 40But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” 41But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; 42there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”
“There Is Need of Only One Thing.”
“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.” With these words Martha and her sister have come to represent and, all too often, to caricaturize the polarities of human experience and response: action vs. contemplation, manual labor vs. quiet adoration, doing vs. being, workaholicism vs. peaceful presence. Mary and Martha have been used as icons in the debate over faith vs. works. In the refracted light of these artificial divisions, people have been summarily divided into “Marthas” and “Marys,” depending on the ways in which they tend to interact with others and with their surroundings.
I’d say that our gospel author, Luke, even encourages us to see the polar opposites in these two women – if for no other reason than he places the story right after the story of the Good Samaritan. Just so we won’t come to the conclusion that caring for the needs of one’s neighbor represents the entirety of Jesus’ message, Luke pictures Mary sitting at his feet – a stereotypical image of faith and prayer in counterpoint to the act of charity demonstrated by the Samaritan.
Whenever this story is cited, it seems, pastors and preachers have used this text to support “Mary-like” behavior. She always represents the peaceful presence, the quiet adoration, the contemplative being – Mary, we read, “has chosen the better part.” Even if our good judgment tells us that Martha and Mary represent two equal, and not opposite, ways of being in the world – two equal but distinct temperaments – the traditional interpretation of this passage has always been that we’re not dealing with equals, but between two choices: one “better” and the other “worse.”
Because tradition has so commended Mary’s choice, we often become defensive about our own struggles to balance contemplating the life and teachings of Jesus over against an active life of living out those teachings ourselves. For all of us, finding the right balance between these two ways of being is a lifelong project – a project whose focus shifts as we find ourselves attracted to one or the other end of the spectrum and is often dictated by commitments that we have to our family and friends.
There’s another twist in this little story and it’s represented by the patterns of Jesus’ relationships with women. We come across it earlier in Luke when he mentions the women who Luke says followed Jesus and the twelve and “provided for them out of their [own] resources.”3 We think nothing of it that Mary is seen here sitting in front of Jesus – the disciple at the feet of the master. But at that time, and in that culture, it would be unheard of that a rabbi would even accept a woman as a disciple – let alone let her have lunch with him and the boys! Luke seems intent on making the point that Jesus’ message was for everybody – women as well as men, children as well as adults, the poor as well as the rich. Hearing this story in our culture some simply assume that it’s Jesus’ summons for women to get out of the kitchen. But, again, this presents us with an unfortunate stereotype. The message has nothing at all to do with gender. We men are called upon to focus our attention and energies on the one thing that really counts, too, and not become so preoccupied with “making a living” that we miss meeting the One who really can make a difference in the quality of the lives that we are living.
Susan Norman, in the Complete Book of Everyday Christianity, says:
The best homemakers manage to create a place where people matter more than material things. This often marks the difference between a housekeeper and a homemaker, as shown in the story of Martha and Mary. Martha was “worried and upset about things” (Luke 10: 41). Her concentration was primarily on the pots and pans and food; she seemed to see them as an end in themselves. Mary chose to sit near Jesus and listen to him. In so doing she demonstrated her priority: her friendship with Jesus. Mary may have seen the things that Martha did as one way to express love and hospitality. But the way Mary chose, the homemaking rather than the housekeeping way, was clearly acceptable to Jesus.4
A mentor and hero of mine, Robert McAfee Brown, delivered a sermon about this story and in it he noted three stumbling blocks to understanding Jesus’ intentions in his interactions with these two women. Brown says that we ought to junk all three of them: first, any interpretation that pits Mary and Martha against each other – where one wins and the other loses; the second one is our temptation to stereotype people (but particularly women) based on this story – “There’s that ‘Martha’ side in you coming out again”; and finally, interpreting the story in a way that affirms all over again the social customs of first-century Palestine – like “Men don’t belong in the kitchen,” or worse, “Women should be taught, not the ones who teach.” Let’s move on now to something that we can reclaim about the story, says Brown:
As far as Mary is concerned…we can affirm a radical breakthrough on Jesus’ part in relation to Mary, for when he admitted her to what we would call a theological discussion, such an action, in that era, was virtually unthinkable…. But Jesus overturns such accepted customs: Mary is welcome. And that tells us that we, too, in our time, are to challenge encrusted religious traditions that are taken for granted, by refusing to abide by them. Not a bad rationale for congregations struggling toward the acknowledgment in our denomination of full equality for gays and lesbians.5
So in spite of all of the sermons that you’ve heard about this story (and not because I live with a woman named Martha – we do have a daughter named Mary by the way!), this has nothing to do with choosing between two different ways of being or between two kinds of responses to Jesus. It has everything to do with choosing, though, choosing to be who we are, faithfully living the gift and the grace of the present moment instead of filling our days with “if onlys” – “If only my sister would help me.” “If only I had more time to be a true contemplative.” “If only things were different.” Well, get over it, they aren’t! Just be careful with what you are choosing to do with your time and why.
Martha, out there in the kitchen, is miserable, not because she isn’t a good cook or because she has too much to do by herself, but because she keeps looking over her shoulder, wishing she were just a bit more like Mary. She compares herself with her sister, calculating her own gifts and her own service – her way of life – and she’s upset that Jesus doesn’t seem to be paying attention to her at all. In all of this Martha never chooses simply to be who she is, with her own particular gifts for hospitality and graciousness.
Mary, on the other hand, is content to be who she is in that moment – no comparisons, no “if onlys,” no longing for some indefinite future in which her “if onlys” can be realized. Mary chooses to be herself, and that’s the better part.
Here in the opening decade of the 21st century there’s a lot of pressure put upon us all to live the economic and social “high life,” so much so that “down time” – what I would call “Sabbath time” – is hard to find. I’m reminded of a wise Spiritual Director who told me once, though, “You know, Doug, the busier you get the more Sabbath time you need.” It is a bit of a paradox, and it is hard to do, but we simply have to, if we want to bring our physical, our emotional and our spiritual well-being back into balance. When we are able to embrace Sabbath time, we will discover that our being and our doing come together. We enter into every activity of our day mindful of its, as well as our, connection to the sacred.6 Eventually we may come to discover that we just naturally begin to choose the good, the true and the beautiful in every area of our lives. That’s the one and only thing that’s needed. Coming to such a level of satisfaction about ourselves, we’ll find that we simply cannot wage war or perpetrate violence against anybody anymore – economically, physically or emotionally – nor can we impose our values on the values of others. I can’t think of a better legacy to leave our children and those generations yet to be born.
* * *
1 That prophet of passion for justice himself, Amos, describes a vision that he’s had – it’s of a basket of summer fruit. And yet instead of receiving it with delight, as we all usually do at this time of year, in Amos’ vision God explains that, unless the people repent, this is a sign of the end for Israel. The play on words here is lost in English, but in Hebrew the sound of the word for ripe summer fruit is something like qayitz, and is set next to the word for “the end,” which is qetz – so where they might long for ripeness, instead they face the very end of society as they’ve come to know it. If they keep going the way that they’ve been, where once was life and beauty, there will be death and grief instead.
2 This is the story of Mary and Martha; and while my own wife, Martha, always rolls her eyes at this one every time that it comes up in the lectionary, it really doesn’t have anything at all to do with women named “Martha” – it’s about the “Mary” and the “Martha” in us all. There’s a time get up and do what’s got to be done, and there’s a time to listen and simply reflect on things. Knowing which to do and when to do it is a matter of spiritual discernment. With last week’s story in mind, then, I think that if we were to ask Jesus which example applies to us – the Good Samaritan or Mary – his answer would clearly be both.
3 Luke 8: 3c.
4 Susan Norman, “Homemaking,” in Complete Book of Everyday Christianity, can be seen online at the URL: http://www.ivmdl.org/cbec.cfm?study=127.
5 Robert McAfee Brown, Reclaiming the Bible: Words for the Nineties (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), pp. 68-69.
6 An excellent text and teacher of being awake and fully aware is a book entitled The Miracle of Mindfulness A Manual on Meditation by the Buddhist author and mystic, Thich Nhat Hanh.