A guest arrives, and the whole operation in put into motion. Y’all know how this works – there is a meal to be planned and prepared, there are beds to make, drinks to keep topped off, and after the meal, there are dishes to be done. And can you imagine if the guest was someone really important – maybe your boss just popped by for dinner, an influential neighbor stopped in for a cup of coffee, or the governor arrived for lunch - you’d go above and beyond to make sure that everything was done well, done perfectly, to make a positive impression and make your guest feel at home.
So you can imagine how Martha must have felt when Jesus accepted her invitation to her home. This miracle working rabbi – a great prophet, some said – was in her living room, and Martha’s reputation as a host was at stake. She was probably pretty nervous about having him there, anxious that she might burn the bread or that he wouldn’t like the vegetables that she was cooking, or that he wouldn’t find the cushion he was sitting on comfortable enough. Sure, she had heard how gracious and kind he was, but you never know how these rabbi types act when they are relaxing after hours. Martha was getting pretty anxious about getting all of the jobs and tasks completed, and doing them well, and Mary wasn’t helping any. She literally wasn’t helping at all, she was just sitting there on the floor at Jesus’ feet, listening to him talk about something or other – and Martha was getting more and more anxious, more and more frantic, and more and more frustrated that Mary wasn’t helping her make their very important guest feel at home.
Finally, Martha couldn’t stand it anymore and her anger and her frustration boil over and she interrupts the conversation that Jesus and Mary and the disciples were having in the living room. She points a finger not only at Mary, but at Jesus, too and says: “Lord! Do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work myself? Tell her to help me!” There was a lot of work to do to serve Jesus, to make him feel welcome and at home, and Martha was feeling overwhelmed, and Mary wasn’t helping. And Jesus wasn’t helping, because he was allowing Mary to sit there just listening, instead of demanding that she get back into the kitchen to help her sister.
But instead of joining into her tornado of anxiety, Jesus oh so gently calls Martha back to earth, back to the room, back to where she was and what she was really trying to do. “Martha, Martha,” he says, “you are worried and distracted by many things. But there is only one thing that you need. Mary has chosen the better part, the best part of life, and I’m not going to take it away from her.” Martha wanted Jesus to lend her a hand by ordering Mary to come help her, but Jesus responds by offering words that would really help her, if she took them to heart. You see, Martha had become so focused on the little jobs, so fixed on the tasks of cooking and cleaning and preparing and serving that she had lost focus on who it was that she was serving to begin with, Jesus the Christ, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords. Mary, sitting at his feet, sitting in the posture of a disciple before a master, had remained focused on Jesus alone since he walked in the door, and Jesus knew it. Jesus knew that Mary was choosing the best part of life, choosing to be connected to the Source of Life, choosing to focus on Jesus and what he was doing.
For years, preachers have preached sermons pitting the two sisters against each other, Mary versus Martha, Martha versus Mary, as though they each represented two extremes of human life. The line of argument usually looks something like this: Martha represents a life of action and work, and Mary represents a life of contemplation and study. If we are like Martha, we spend our whole lives working away and miss out on the best part of life, on study and contemplation at the feet of Jesus. If we are like Mary, we choose the best part, the part of an interior life, and leave behind the working part to someone else to do. This line of thinking has fueled a kind of split in the world, a divide between those who work and those who think, between those who do and those who are content to just be, between works and faith. But splitting life up in this way doesn’t really make much sense, and it is definitely not what Jesus is getting at in this living room lesson.
The truth of the matter is that to make a life work, including a life of faith, including a life of a community, of a church – in order to make it really function, you’ve got to have both sides: the Martha side of work, of completing tasks both complex and simple; and the Mary side of prayer and focused attention on Christ. If life was all about being just like Mary, always engaged in an interior life, withdrawing from the world to pray and study scripture without being dirtied by the world, then how would anything get done? How would we eat? Who would grow our food or cook meals? If the lights went out, who would fix them? How would we ever touch a broken world to heal it? You see, if we lift up Mary as one who follows an interior path, there is a danger of falling into a place where faith is only a matter of navel-gazing, of staring at our bellybuttons looking for the meaning of life. Too often the church has fallen into this trap, walling itself off from the real world, spending all of its time on fancy prayers and mulling over the historical meaning of Biblical texts without ever putting them into action.
But if Mary isn’t the one to follow, is Martha really that much better? Martha, the worker, the one who is busy in the kitchen, can seemingly offer us a model that gets our attention out of our belly buttons, out of our minds and heads and into our hands and feet. And this can feel like an antidote to the inertia of the interior life. At last, if we follow the path of Martha, we can get our hands dirty, and get off our duffs and do something! But this path also presents a danger, a trap that is more akin to a never ending hamster wheel. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in all of the tasks, all of the jobs to do in the church that our life of faith can end up being a never ending cycle. And while it may seem that we are working hard on the outside, we are just spinning around in circles, never moving forward. Too often the church has fallen into this trap, spending all of our energy on potluck dishes or flowers for the altar or meetings that don’t seem to have much purpose or point.
Either path, the Mary or the Martha path, can lead to a stuck place of faith. Either stuck in an interior belly-button gazing place or stuck spinning round and round never going anywhere. But into this argument, into these extremes of life, Jesus interrupts. “You are distracted by many things,” he says, “you have need of one thing only.” You are distracted both by interior things and exterior things, and it’s true, we are. We are so easily distracted by a life of study and learning, never going beyond our classes and books; and we are so easily distracted by our little jobs, our work to keep things up and running, never going beyond the things that we’ve always done to what might lie beyond. The cure for being distracted by one extreme is not to throw off everything and run to the other extreme – that only has us swinging like a pendulum, or running from one side of the deck of a sinking ship to the other. No – the cure for distraction is focus. A clear, laser beam focus on one thing is all that you need to find your way out of the traps, out of the stuck places, out of the distractions. And the thing, the person to focus on is Jesus Christ. You see, Mary doesn’t represent a life of contemplation and study, she is just a devoted disciple, never leaving the feet of her Master, always focused on his face, listening intently to his words. And Martha could have still done all the work she was doing and kept her eyes upon Jesus, kept her heart focused on why she was cutting the carrots and mopping the floor, and that would have served the same purpose as sitting on the floor with Mary. It is not the actions that you are taking in your life of faith, it is your focus that matters – a focus on the Source of Life himself.
There is a pastor named Mike Slaughter, that some of you may have heard of, who was sent in the late 1970s to serve a congregation in Ohio called Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church. They had about 70 members on the books at the time, and about 30 people or less came to worship on a given Sunday. Like a good pastor, Mike listened at meetings and in conversations to get a sense of who the people of the church were and the issues that the congregation were facing. It seemed as though the church had stagnated, stuck in an endless round of covered dish suppers and dull and boring committee meetings. Meanwhile, several folks let him know about the air conditioning system – it badly was in need of replacing, but they just couldn’t get the money together to replace it. They had tried and they had tried, but they just couldn’t do it. Mike quickly recognized that the congregation had become distracted by many things, stuck in a rut of the tasks of being a church. So he did two things: first, he began a bible study in the church, and began to preach sermons pointing always to Jesus, helping the congregation to refocus on their Lord and Savior. And second, he said: we are going to do this one thing. We are going to work as a team, all of us, to reach one common goal of purchasing a new air conditioner. That is going to be the focus of what we do as a church until we can get it done. So with their renewed spiritual energy and a newly found focus on a goal, they quickly raised the funds within a few months. But they didn’t stop there. They came together and picked another “one thing” to work on next – this time to build a playground at the church. They quickly reached their goal and had a new playground for their church and community. Through focusing on Jesus Christ and on one project that was attainable, but still a challenge, the church came together as a community of faith. They recognized that they needed the gifts of all of the Marthas out there to work and to get the jobs done to reach the goal, and they needed the gifts of the Marys in their church to keep them focused on Jesus even as they worked. And here is the thing – the church hasn’t stopped yet. They have kept setting goals and meeting them for the last thirty years, and they invited other people to join them along the way, and are now one of the largest churches in our denomination, with over 12,000 members. One of their most recent “one things” was this: they declared that within a 15 block radius of their church, no man, woman, or child, would go without food, medical care, or school supplies, and they would work to find them jobs if they were in need. They have made a commitment to their community, to love and to serve in a radical way because they have kept their eyes upon Jesus, and their ears upon his words, and their hearts upon his love. And with that kind of focus, look at what the Body of Christ in this world can do.
