8 Pentecost
July 21,22 2007
The Rev. Barbara Schlachter       

Jesus answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one.  Mary has chosen the better part, which shall not be taken from her.”

Other things Jesus might have said,

Martha, go ahead and ask Mary for help directly.

Martha, you come sit here awhile and listen, too.  Or better yet:

Martha, if you want to sit and listen to me too, claim your desire.

Let’s all go out to the kitchen together and continue our conversation while we prepare dinner.  (After all, Jesus ate with sinners; why wouldn’t he cook with women?)

Well, unfortunately, we get the words that are a rebuke to Martha and an affirmation of Mary.  It’s the old choosing of one over the other.  And since they are siblings, we know how loaded those preferences can be, how they can hurt one and inflate the ego of the other.

Why is this story here, anyway?  What is the point?  I think that our reading from Amos gives us a clue.  Amos proclaims these words of God “The time is surely coming when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.  They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.”

Jesus is the one who ends this famine.  Here finally are words of God, and Mary is listening and Martha is not.  That’s the point.  Martha is not paying attention.

It is not that Martha’s providing for her guest is not important work.  But she has lost sight of what is most important because she has allowed herself to be distracted by her many tasks. 

Amos and the other prophets prophesied to people who would not listen, who were busy with tasks, in fact, were busy making themselves richer at the expense of the poor.  The rich kept getting richer and the poor, poorer and Amos said, this will not last.  You will go into exile and pay for this disharmony in the social order that God envisions for humanity.  And that is what happened. 

In our time we see a similar situation.  The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and if we are truly paying attention to what happens when societies get so far out of balance, we can also predict disastrous consequences ahead.  But it means we must be careful how we listen to God and how we use our energies.  We need the focus of Mary and the energy of Martha.

Over the centuries these stories have been used to pit the Mary and Marthas of the world against one another.  We can rejoice that Mary has the role of a disciple, which is to sit at Jesus’ feet.  Here is the precedent for women learning theology, of participating fully in the life of the church, of choosing a contemplative role as a nun or student.  Still others point out that Mary is being given a passive role that doesn’t allow the activist energy of a Martha to surface and to challenge the status quo.  That’s the down side of the Mary role.  We know that over the centuries women have been expected to be Marthas no matter what else we say and to do the work of the family and of the church—just not get much credit for it, for somehow sitting and listening and studying is still better, and not rocking the boat is best yet.  In the Middle Ages women had a brief renaissance and saw Martha as their role model for challenge and full participation in the world and the church and images of Martha show up in churches as a woman to emulate. 

So which one is right, or better?  And the answer is—both.  There are times to be Martha and there are times to be Mary.  Each of us needs our selves fully developed to be disciples in the world, to serve, to act, to challenge, and each of us needs an inner self that reflects, that studies the words of God, that develops a relationship with Christ. 

I am so thankful for the lesson of both/and that physicists have taught us about light.  Light is wave and light is particle.  And light is different when we observe it, because we are involved in it—there is no objective one thing called “light.” 

All the false dichotomies and dualisms about life are stood on their ear.  Faith and works are both important.  Being active and being contemplative are both important.  The inner life and the life in the world are both important.  Love is realized most fully when we take time to go inside ourselves, and justice is best not separated from love. 

Within ourselves we have a full chorus of different voices and ambiguity, and they all need to be heard and recognized and given a place within the essential unity of our personality.  Otherwise, we tend to project what we cannot accept about ourselves.  If we don’t listen to our own inner conflict, we’ll have conflict in our relationships.  The more we get to inner acceptance and peace, the better listeners we are and the more accepting of other positions we become.

Paul in the letter to the Colossians that we are reading on Sundays right now talks about mature faith.  It is his hope and goal that everyone will mature in Christ.  Part of that maturity is understanding that Christ is the source of all things, that the fullness of God dwelt in the earthly Jesus, and through him “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.”

All things are reconciled, all people are reconciled.  That is both inner and outer reconciliation.

Our word for this morning is responsible.  On the surface of the Gospel we can say that Martha is being responsible—she is preparing for the needs of a guest while Mary is being irresponsible, just sitting when clearly Martha needs her assistance.  But Jesus in his rebuke of Martha points out that Martha has taken on a task and is being overly responsible to it rather than to what is really happening in the moment. What is really needed is just a simple supper so that Martha can also sit and listen to Jesus.

 Martha has the typical outlook of the firstborn—being overly responsible, needing to do all things, and needing to do them right.  As a first born, I have identified strongly with Martha for many years.  But what a great gift it has been to claim my need and desire to nourish the Mary side of myself.  Responsibility means that both are needed if we are to mature in our faith.

H. Richard Niebuhr, brother of the perhaps better known Reinhold Niebuhr, another sibling pair, wrote a book called “The Responsible Self.”  He talks about responsibility from a different perspective than the one we ordinarily use.  He posits that responsibility is really “respondability.”  It means to respond to what is happening, and in particular, as Christians, to respond to what God is saying and what the world needs. That requires paying attention, sitting at Jesus feet and listening.

Us overly responsible ones often have an inner drivenness that comes from our own need to be perfect or to be recognized as a capable person.  We are responding often to our own neurotic need rather than a real need in the world.  In that sense, Jesus was right on in understanding that Martha was knocking herself out to do a fantastic dinner for him when a simple meal that would have given her time to sit and listen to him, too, would have been just fine.  Better, really, although we might never have been given this instructive story.

Martha provides us with a lesson in the KISS principle:  Keep it Simple Sweetheart—so you have time to listen for God.  Action without reflection is often futile and sometimes damaging, while reflection without action is to deny our call to be involved in the reconciling work of Christ in the world.  Both our Mary and our Martha nature are important if we are to be mature in Christ, as Paul hopes for those he worked with.

A recent study on spiritual maturity concluded that there are nine qualities that are to be found in spiritually mature people—which the authors define as “having the mind of Christ.”  Let me end with a brief listing of them.

1. They are much more likely to have a daily time of private prayer.
2. They feel a genuine sense of the presence of God in their lives.
3. They report that their religious experiences are a source of strength, personal growth, and the healing of inner conflicts.
4. They tend to have a greater sense of inner peace, to feel more joyful and happy, and are less likely to feel depressed.  (There is a difference between feeling depressed and suffering from depression that has nothing to do with spiritual maturity.)
5. 5. They are more humble, less likely to exhibit an inflated sense of self-importance.
6. They are far more often engaged in compassionate helping acts to others.
7. They are less racially prejudiced.
8. They are far more capable of forgiving people who wrong them and of being constructive members of society.
9. They are more favorable to church involvement in political activity in order to right wrongs in society.

(Gallup, Jr. and Jones, “The Saints Among Us,” quoted by Herb Miller in the Parish Paper.

So here is a definition of responsible, respondable spiritual maturity, of being a wise person.  It is available to us all, with a bit of Mary’s desire and Martha’s effort.  It’s a journey worth taking, and we are never finished with it for none of us arrives completely.  But hey—it’s what life is about.      Amen.