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Dr. Anna Carter Florence
November 1, 2009
“One Thing For All the Saints”
Luke 10:38-42
“Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself! Tell her then to help me.” Why are the best fights always between brothers and sisters? I guess we just know each other too well. Only a sibling knows that when you come home at the end of the day, you are so ravenous that you will do anything, even trade your birthright for a mess of pottage. Only a sibling knows that as soon as you get your share of the inheritance, you are going to spend every cent of it in six months flat, because money runs through you like water down a drain. Only a sibling knows that when there are guests for dinner, especially interesting ones, you drop everything to be with the company while the rest of us have to pick up the slack. “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself. Tell her then to help me.” Why are the worst fights, even in the bible, between siblings? I guess we just know which buttons to push. We have lots of practice, and we know too much about each other, things we even keep from our parents. Like it or not, you are your brother’s secret keeper, at least up to a point.
Maybe that’s why it is so infuriating to find yourself enacting the same old script in the same stock roles. You and your sibling, and your 186th performance of Luke 10, verses 38 through 42. You know she won’t finish setting the table or slicing the carrots or making the gravy like she promised. She never does. She just disappears into the living room to chat as if those potatoes were going to cook themselves just like when you were kids. She did the same thing, and your parents never called her on it - not once! And here you are, all these years later, and no one seems to notice that if they get to eat dinner at all, it isn’t thanks to her. It is in spite of her, because you are the only one in this house who takes any responsibility for what happens at the table. It would be nice if for once, someone acknowledged that.
There is nothing so cleansing and so clarifying as the same old fight with your same old family over the same old things. That includes your church family - this room full of beautiful saints, sisters and brothers, at First United Methodist Church where I surmise maybe there has been at least one performance of Mary and Martha in the last year. “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”
What an amazing sentence! Do you notice the absolute lack of direct communication? It is a gorgeous triangulation - really top notch. Nothing makes you revert to childhood behaviors (I mean kids in the back seat behaviors) like being mad at your sister or your brother. Close your eyes. You can almost hear little Mary and little Martha, ages four and six, after three hours in the car, “Mom, she’s looking at me. Make her stop looking at me.” Or in my world where I live and move, you can hear preacher Mary and preacher Martha snipping sideways at one another at the lectionary group. One of them is saying, “You know, if we just polished off our Greek, I bet we could come up with something more to say about Romans 8 than ‘Saved by faith through grace alone’ week after week.” “Well, if I could delegate the hospital visits like you, I would have thirty extra hours in the week for my own translation of the text which I’m sure is what made your sermon so riveting for the listeners who stayed awake!” We really know how to regress with family, don’t we?
I don’t even think we do it deliberately. It just happens. Then, the next reflexive move is to try and get Jesus on your side, because you always want that endorsement. “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Well, tell her then to help me.”
If Martha had directed this statement to God instead of to Jesus, we would call it a prayer. The psalmist could write it up in lament form - a prayer for deliverance from personal enemies. We might learn it for use at family gatherings. “Save me, O God. The dinner dishes have come up to my neck. Deliver me from these pots and pans. Make haste to send me help. You know how I alone have labored. How long, O Lord, must I suffer to keep this family fed?”
Spoken to God, that is a prayer that is direct communication, but Martha doesn’t speak to God, not the way Luke tells it. She speaks to Jesus, the flesh and blood God with us. That takes her words out of the realm of a private kitchen prayer and into the messy living room of human relationships. Word becomes flesh right in front of us because where two or three are gathered, there He is in the midst of them. If you talk to Jesus, you had better be ready. He is going to answer. He has this habit of showing us exactly what we have just said. He will take our words, bless them, break them, give them to us, our eyes will be opened and we will recognize him in what we’ve said. There isn’t anything you can say to that except, “Lord have mercy, and thanks be to God!”
So here is Martha in her triangular conversation with Jesus and Mary, because nothing makes you lose direction like a sibling. Just ask Cain. He’ll tell you, except this is not going where Martha had planned. She is trying to be responsible. She is trying to be a good servant of the Lord, but it is hard to serve Jesus and fight with your sibling at the same time. It is hard to keep focused on what he’s done when you are so mad about what she hasn’t done. You tend to say outrageous things like, “Lord, if you love me, then tell Mary to listen to me, not you. Tell her to help me serve this meal my way, or I’m sorry, nobody is coming to the table tonight.”
I give Jesus a lot of credit for not laughing here. He must have known, this is ludicrous, and she is serious. So, it is not the moment to laugh, and it is not the moment to scold either. Jesus never shames us. He calls us by name, and then he shows us the truth of where we are so we can stop, turn around, and try again. “Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part tonight. It will not be taken away from her.”
“Worried and distracted.” Did you hear those words? You try to serve Jesus. You try to be a good host, good hostess, good Methodist, good citizen, good saint of the church, and member of the congregation. That’s not what others see when they look at you. Then see “worried and distracted by many things.”
“Well, yes. You try serving Jesus while your sister sits and thinks deep thoughts in her ivory tower. You try serving Jesus while your brother acts out all over the church and squanders the inheritance your parents built. You try serving Jesus while one sibling is a trickster and another one dreams dreams and another one gets chosen even though he is the youngest and it is not his turn yet. Isn’t it my turn Lord? All these years, I’ve been working like a slave for you, and never once have I disobeyed your command, and yet you have never so much as slaughtered a young goat to celebrate the fact that I am still here. Don’t you care Lord that my sisters and brothers are leaving the church in droves so that I am doing all the work by myself?”
“Martha, Martha. You are worried and distracted by many things. There is need of only one thing.”
I wish I could remember what that one thing is. God knows, I need it. Maybe you do too. I want to serve Jesus, and there is so much stuff that gets in the way.....inside worries, outside distractions, not to mention other people, other preachers in my world who make a big deal about sitting at His feet instead of doing the work that I am doing who are definitely in the way of that one thing. It is so hard to serve Jesus and fight with your brothers and sisters at the same time.
Here is what I think Jesus does. He shows Martha that somehow she has lost herself. She has lost her “I,” her subjectivity. She can’t speak directly. She can’t serve directly. She can’t remember the one thing she needs, so he gives it back to her. He gives her back her subjectivity, so she can chose for herself. That’s what Mary did. Did you notice? She chose for herself. Maybe it is the fact that Mary chose rather than let someone choose for her what is the better part. “Mary has chosen the better part,” he said. “That will not be taken away from her.” When you choose Jesus for yourself, no one can take that away from you. No one.
What would it be like to know the one thing that you need to serve Jesus? What would it be like to choose it for yourself? We could do that. I’ll bet we could serve Jesus in ways that we have not even imagined yet. I’ll bet the way that I chose and each of us chose would be different because every one of us is different. Maybe the challenge is to discern what the one thing we need is at any given moment in ministry and discipleship, and then to let your brother and sister discern theirs for themselves without trying to take it away from them.
It is odd, but a lot of Christians feel hijacked by this passage in Luke 10, especially women. Just ask sometime. The story of Mary and Martha could get a level orange upgrade to a text of terror, because it has been used in some pretty awful ways to sort us into groups:
“Are you a Mary or a Martha?”
“Do you like bible study or do you like soup kitchens?”
“Would you rather read or cook?”
“Do you think first or act first?”
“Do you try to simplify or do you complicate everything?”
“Are you a quiet scholar or a bossy busy body?”
There is not much room in those dichotomies is there? You are either one or the other, always at odds, which is such an unhelpful way to divvy up the church. This is especially true if we preach the virtues of Mary then still expect her to help Martha clean up after the potluck which is what sends a lot of church women over the edge. The truth is that we are not just one of these saints, one of these sisters. We are both on any given day serving Jesus in all kinds of ways with all kinds of discipleship, and there is no point in asking us to fit into a mold and decide once forever if we like head sermons or heart sermons, the spiritual or the activist, the organ music or electric guitars, post-modern or traditional, emergent or dead in the water? In the end, these are false alternatives. Why do we have to choose between Mary or Martha when we might just choose Jesus? Choose Jesus and let him show us the better part that is waiting for us so that we can get on with dinner together.
I read a book recently by the British scholar, Susan Durber. She had a great idea about Mary and Martha. “What if the next night at dinner, Mary was getting tired of sitting at the Lord’s feet. What if she started to feel the burden of being the only one listening to this lecture and taking notes? Maybe Martha should be in on this too. And now that you mention it, how come she gets to skip class and flip pancakes while I’m the one responsible for all this information? How come she gets to serve while I have to read? That’s not very fair. Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Well, tell her then to put down her spatula, get out of the kitchen, and help me learn this stuff.”
What do you think he would say? “Mary, you are worried and distracted by many things. There is need of only one thing. Martha has chosen the better part today, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Lord, have mercy on us and all the saints, and thanks be to God.
Amen.
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