Worship > Sermon Archive

The Reverend Beth Fain
July 22, 2007
Pentecost 11c
We are listening, God: Mary and Martha (Luke 10. 38-42)
Join me for the Scripture of the summer. The VBS folk know it as Luke 10. 27.
It was in our gospel last Sunday:
You shall love the Lord with all your heart and soul and strength and mind; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Last week's very familiar gospel, about the injured traveler, the neglectful priest and Levite, and the merciful Samaritan, was Jesus' response to what loving our neighbor as our self looks like.
This week, we have another familiar gospel, the story of the two sisters, Mary and Martha.
The placement of Jesus' visit to Bethany, the village 1 ½ miles east of Jerusalem, immediately following the story of the injured traveler and the merciful Samaritan is an interesting one.
According to Luke, Jesus won't even enter Judea, where Jerusalem and Bethany are located, for another eight chapters.
The story of Mary and Martha is geographically out of place (unless Mary and Martha had a second home in another village north of Judea).
I think that Mary and Martha's story is placed where it is in Luke for an intentional editorial reason.
I think that Luke follows the passage about the public encounter between Jesus and a lawyer, with a story illustration of men on a road, with the story of two women at home as a further reflection on how one lives one's life loving God and loving our neighbor.
It's such a familiar story, the story of Mary and Martha.
In the same way the Good Samaritan has become a cultural metaphor for those who help out others, the names Martha and Mary have become metaphors for ministries of busily doing and the contemplative life as if they were an either/or proposition.
Can we put that familiar metaphor aside and look at the story of these two women at home in a fresh way? A word about Martha. Martha starts out offering hospitality-she greets Jesus at the door of her home and welcomes him in.
Women displayed hospitality, a holy act, by keeping a welcoming home and providing for the physical needs of family and guests.
Women's acts of service within the home were considered acts of prayer.
Martha's initial, holy act of welcome is consistent with Martha's behavior the other two places she and Mary show up, again, in the gospel of John.
In John (11), Martha runs out to meet Jesus when her brother, Lazarus, is dying, and she has sent for Jesus to come heal him.
We are also told that Jesus loved Martha and her sister, but her sister, Mary, is not named here-only Martha. Jesus' love of Martha is especially noted.
As the story proceeds in John, Martha is among the very first to identify Jesus as the Christ when she says to Jesus, "I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world." (John 11.27) After raising Martha and Mary's brother, Lazarus, from the dead, Jesus returned to their home several days later, and we are told that Martha served. (12.2)
The word serve being English for the Greek word diakoneo, from where our word deacon comes. Like our deacon, Russ.
Diakoneo is used over and over to talk about the ministry of serving; its usage here reminds us that Martha, through serving a meal and offering hospitality is doing the ministry of service, that is, the ministry of a deacon.
What about Mary? Who is Mary, Martha's sister?
We are told in today's gospel that Mary sits at Jesus' feet.
To sit at a person's feet, in the Hebrew tradition, is code for studying under someone.
Mary is a student.
Everything about Mary's sitting at Jesus' feet is outrageous and maybe even scandalous.
Certainly, women could be students. But girls were educated by women not men.
Certainly there would have been women and girls present when Jesus taught on the hillsides and by the sea. Women had a separate place in the synagogue and the temple where they could listen to what the men were experiencing.
But women were not taught by men in an intimate setting, a classroom if you will. This is what Mary is portrayed as doing.
In John, Mary is present two more times, in the passages I've already mentioned about Martha.
When Martha ran to meet Jesus on the road when he was on his way to heal their now dead brother Lazarus, Mary is sitting, waiting in the house (John 11. 20)
Only at Martha's invitation, after Martha's encounter with Jesus and her statement of faith, does Mary leave the house to greet Jesus.
When Mary sees Jesus, she places herself at his feet once again and says her own statement of faith, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." (John 11. 32)
It is in response to Mary's tears, and then the tears of the others that Jesus himself is so deeply moved that he himself weeps.
In the return visit to Mary, Martha, and Lazarus' home several days later, which is six days before the Passover and Jesus' arrest and death, when Martha is serving, doing deacon work, Mary is at Jesus' feet once again; this time she anoints Jesus' feet with a pound of costly ointment and then wipes his feet with her hair (John 12.3).
Although Judas criticizes Mary for being so wasteful, Jesus commends her (with his own thoughts towards
Jerusalem and his death) for doing an act that he sees as preparing his body for the day of his burial, an act of loving Jesus while he is still present with them.
One more word about Mary and Martha.
It is about the phrase in our gospel from Luke today, there is need of only one thing.
That phrase can mean:
Martha-the one thing you need to do is the behavior chosen by Mary.
OR Martha-don't be so busy cooking a big feast. We only need one thing to Whichever the case, the better way that Mary chooses is the same and is available to Martha, too, even in the midst of her preparing a meal. The better way that Mary chooses is to listen.
Connecting today's gospel with the passage that came before which we heard last week, this is how we are to
love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind and our neighbor: To listen.
Jesus is saying that whatever we are doing, to love God is to listen to God.
For Jesus there was not any act Jesus did that was more holy than another act.
Yes, Jesus went off by himself to pray and to listen to God.
Jesus also traveled and taught and healed and fed and raised people from the dead and mentored the disciples.
What was unique to Jesus was that in all these acts, Jesus was listening to God.
How do we love God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind?
It begins with listening.
The word listen is used in the New Testament over 400 times; listen is used over 60 times in Luke alone.
In fact one chapter back in Luke, when Jesus is transfigured on the mountain, what does God say to the
disciples? "This is my son, my beloved, listen to him."
In our gospel this morning, Jesus connects the unexpected holy and prayerful act of a woman listening to a
rabbi to the unexpected holy and prayerful act in the passage which comes before it of a social outcast seeing
a person in need and extravagantly caring for him.
Both are ways to love God and to love our neighbor.
Our gospel today is not a conflict between doing and being, between quietly listening and doing work.
Both are ways we can listen to God.
Both can be ways to love God and to love our neighbor.
Both can be ways used not to love God or our neighbor.
The balance between the active and the contemplative will be unique for each of us, but it is only by
listening to God that we will discern the balance which is correct for us.
The passages I mentioned from John, happening near the end of Jesus' life and crucifixion, indicate to me that
Mary and Martha got the lesson Jesus was teaching that day at their home in Bethany.
They had learned that all that Jesus really wanted was that through whatever they were doing, they were to be
fully who they were and to listen to him through whatever that action was.
An ending word: Last Sunday, when Bishop Wimberly was with us at the 10:30 service, he quietly asked me if I
had forgotten to say the offertory sentence.
The offertory sentence being the one that is said at the end of the announcements and before the preparation
of the table like, "Ascribe to the Lord the honor due his Name; bring offerings and come into his courts."
I told Bishop Wimberly that instead of an offertory sentence, we at St. Mary's do an offertory prayer instead,
the prayer of discernment.
Which ends with what words? We are listening God.

AMEN

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