EDITOR'S NOTE: In October 2017 I began a new venture as a synodically authorized minister at Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. The ride over the past 2.5 years has been an amazing journey of learning, growing and the deepening of my theological mind. This sermon originally took place on July 21, 2019.
Today’s gospel is a familiar story to many of us, and maybe you know someone like this?
The moment we have a guest in our house, my wife Shelley busies herself with the chores of being a host. … First, the guest is brought into the living room. … And then drinks are offered. ... Maybe even a snack.
If there is an overnight stay involved, Shelley will busy herself making sure that the guest’s room is fit for royalty, even though in reality she already assured these preparations were completed multiple times before.
If there are kids involved in the visit, she busily goes about making sure that they are all entertained, and that they too have been plied with drink and eats, and that their every need is met.
Most of the time during a visit by guests -- even if a meal isn’t involved -- Shelley never sits still.
And, God as my witness, this behavior bothered me to no end during our first few years of marriage.
Every time we had a guest, she was as busy as a bee and she rarely ever stopped to join in the conversation.
I didn’t understand it. It was foreign to me at best, and at worst, it seemed rude. … Because in my family, when guests were present, it was time to stop. … Time to put work aside. … Our custom was that it was rude to make yourself busy and ignore your visitors. … And that was the frame of reference with which I viewed Shelley’s behavior.
Until one day, several years into our marriage, after some guests had left, I finally leveled with her and shared my feelings. … She couldn’t have looked more stunned.
She stammered back at me that that was exactly the expectations of the women in her house when she was growing up. … She was doing exactly what she was taught to do, and what was modeled for her.
When guests were present, women were to show their appreciation through extreme hospitality, even to the point of erasing themselves from participating in the visit. … It was rude not to dote on your guests, and there was never a thought given to whether the woman of the house might want to actually participate in the visit.
And it was that conversation that lifted the veil from my eyes. … All this time, Shelley wasn’t being rude when we had guests. She wasn’t ignoring them. … Quite the contrary: She thought she was excelling at exactly the kind of hospitality that was expected of women in the home in which she grew up. … And she thought she was making me proud.
Needless to say, we had differing ideas about what hospitality meant, and what it meant to practice our Christian hospitality.
I see a similar misunderstanding over expectations in today’s gospel.
Martha, the head of this particular household, extends an invitation to Jesus for him to visit her house. He accepts, and when he comes, Martha busies herself with taking care of his needs. … The gospel text doesn’t tell us this, but given the societal expectations of hospitality in the Middle East so many thousands of years ago, we can surmise that Martha made herself busy with preparing a meal for Jesus.
But, what does her sister, Mary, who lives with her, do? … She immediately sits down to listen at the feet of Jesus. And Martha is incensed. … I imagine that at some point, after she is fed up, she bops out of the kitchen and says, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”
And what does Jesus tell her back? … “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”
Now, we’ve all heard this gospel preached in some fashion many times. … And the typical fashionable interpretation has always been: That silly ol’ Martha just doesn’t get it: Here, sits Jesus, the Savior, right there in her home, and Martha is so distracted by the chores of hosting that she isn’t receiving the teachings of Christ. … She isn’t even enjoying the fact that Jesus is sitting in her living room!
But, Mary … now there is a disciple. … Attentive. … Undistracted. … All ears for her God. … A model picture of what a follower in Christ should be.
Does all of that sound familiar?
But what I’m encouraging us to ask today is … is that a fair characterization of what’s taking place here in this story? … AND … is that really the point that Jesus is trying to make?
And in both cases I would say, “No. I don’t believe so.”
I think it’s easy to make Martha out to be the bad disciple here, just as it is easy to misinterpret Jesus’s admonition of Martha.
But the fact is: To follow in the footsteps of Christ we need to both take care of others -- to practice the Christian act of hospitality, such as Martha is doing -- but we also need to dwell in the other’s humanness as well -- or to sit at the feet of the others in our lives and give them an ear just as Mary is doing. … Afterall, in Jesus’s response to Martha, he tells her that Mary is getting the better part because she is dwelling in him.
But, oh, if it was only that easy, am I right? … If only these human lives of ours didn’t require constant work. … And if only it didn’t take action to live out our Christian lives, we could always sit at the feet of the other and dwell in them, just as Jesus would have us do.
But that is not reality. … The reality is that some of us find ourselves called to a discipleship of Christian hospitality. … Or in other words, to serve is to be divine.
And still others of us find ourselves called to be attentive to others. … To be the one with the ears, a safe harbor for those in need of sharing of themselves. … And neither is a greater discipleship than the other.
This is the lesson I learned when Shelley and I finally came to terms with our different approaches to hospitality. … I realized, after her revelation to me, that Shelley’s playing the Martha role wasn’t just about ignoring her guests. But rather it was the type of hospitality that she was taught to practice. … She was raised to believe that women opened their homes to their guests and then served at their beck and call. … Whether the women hosts were fulfilled during the visit was immaterial.
On the other hand, I was raised that there was no greater hospitality than to give a guest your undivided attention. … Or to practice my discipleship by being a Mary. … And the truth was that neither of our forms of hospitality was independent of the other. To do either without the other is missing the point.
But what I think Jesus was trying to tell Martha in today’s gospel in his sympathetic response to her complaint is that, yes, in this world, we always will have a ton of work to do. … Afterall, if we are to play host to guests, if the bills are going to get paid, if the kids are going to be taken care of, if the farming is to get done, there is a certain amount of toil that is necessary.
But, hopefully, in the act of completing that work we don’t become so distracted for work’s sake, that we forget why it is that we are working.
In other words, Jesus says, the problem is not in Martha’s form of service, because after all, someone has to do the cooking, the serving, the work. … The problem with Martha’s actions comes in her distractions and worriedness. The problem comes in the fact that Martha is pulled in so many directions that she has lost focus on what the meaning of her work is. Her meaning has become to do the work for work’s sake, and not as a means to serve Christ.
The problem is that Martha’s distraction and worriedness leave no room for the most important aspect of hospitality -- her attention of the guest.
It is not the work itself that keeps Martha from being present in the moment with Jesus, and also drives a wedge of discontent between her sister and herself. … Instead, it is actually the distractedness that is the problem.
Now, it would be easy to wag a judgemental finger at Martha. … Afterall, we all like to believe that if Jesus were present in our home, we’d drop everything and gather around his chair like eager children.
But most of us are no different than Martha, and we allow our work -- be it the everyday work of this world or the work of discipleship -- to get in the way of our relationship with Jesus and our relationships with each other … which is essentially the same thing.
But Jesus knows this and he offers us compassion in his response to Martha, saying, “Martha, Martha … or as I hear it, “Dear naive child,” the words of a loving parent coming out like ... “you are a hard worker and a good disciple, but your work is all for naught if you forget who you’re working for, or why you’re doing it. … Yes, the toil is a necessity in this world, but don’t let it overwhelm you and block out the true way of discipleship in me.”
And in the process he offers us absolution for our innate human inability to tell the difference between the the two. Jesus knows that we get to busy, and that we can’t tell the difference between work and sacred work, and yet he is still kind to us. … Martha, Martha, he says. … Or Devlyn, Devlyn. … Shelley, Shelley. … Do not get distracted, even though I know you will.
And that is the Good News on this Sunday. … Amen.
コメント