Scripture: Luke 10:38-42
I attended the Monday evening Bible study group this last week. There is also, as most of you know, a Tuesday morning Bible study group. I’ll start off this morning by giving a plug to both groups. I know they would both welcome new participants at any time without any commitment to come every week, or in the case of the Monday night group every other week. But it was the Monday night group that I attended last week, and the participants in that group are now going to think that I came just to get material for my sermon this week. I don’t usually come to Bible study, and here when I do, one of the scripture passages they discussed—they talked about all of chapter 10—but one of the passages turns up in connection with my sermon the next Sunday. It is true that my sermon today largely issues from the discussion in Bible study. It is not true that I went to Bible study just with that ulterior motive, hoping to find sermon material, though I don’t suppose the group would care too much if I did.
As of last Monday I wasn’t sure what I was going to talk about this morning or even what direction I wanted to go. I knew Adeline was going to be baptized of course, and whenever there is a baptism as part of our worship it causes me to reflect some on the meanings that surround the sacrament, but I hadn’t gotten a whole lot farther than that. And then the discussion on Martha and Mary came along. Somewhere in the middle of the discussion in which there were a number of issues being raised and points being made, I asked a question: What do you think that one needed thing was that Jesus referred to?
You remember that at the end of this story, after Martha is described as being distracted by many tasks and complaining to Jesus that her sister Mary was not lifting a finger to help and in fact asking Jesus to intervene in trying to get Mary to do her fair share of the work, Jesus replies: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things, there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part…” But, you notice, Jesus doesn’t actually say what that one needed thing is.
So I asked the question of the group. How would you express what you think Jesus meant when he talked about the one thing that was needed? There were some responses around the table, and then someone decided to turn the question back on me. What do you think Jesus meant? I wanted to cry “foul”—isn’t there a rule that if you’re the first one to ask a question, you don’t have to answer it? But of course it was a fair question; it’s just that the reason I asked was not to see if anyone else besides me had the right answer. It was because I didn’t have an answer. I said I wasn’t sure and that I would have to think about it. Which I did, and that eventually led to this sermon.
What is it that Mary was doing or what is it she represents in this story that is so all fired important that it justifies her in leaving her sister to do all the work and that justifies Jesus in his criticism of Martha and defense of Mary. For me, the answers that came most easily to my mind somehow didn’t seem quite right, so it kept me thinking about the question beyond Monday night and really beyond the immediate context of the story. Let me say that the fact that I spent some time thinking about the story does not mean that I think I now have the answer as to what Jesus meant in talking about the one needful thing, just a few more thoughts than I did Monday night.
In my ruminations on the story, a note I received from a colleague came into my mind. It was from a UCC minister who serves with me on the board of the Central Atlantic Conference, and a little bit of background is necessary here. The board we serve on meets four times a year in Catonsville, Maryland—Baltimore. People come from all over the conference to attend these meetings. The person who sent me the note serves a church in northern New Jersey, suburban New York City. Many of the church members work in Manhattan. I’m at the other end, with only a few churches being south of us, the farthest away being Glade in Blacksburg, the point being that there is significant travel involved to get us all into one place.
And when we get there, we have at most just a few hours on Friday night and up until about 3:00 Saturday to attend to a lot of business—budgetary issues that have recently involved difficult matters such as the need to lay off staff, personnel issues—sometimes very difficult and painful personnel issues, situations involving troubled and/or struggling churches, the desire to help start new churches such as Sojourners, supporting the social justice work that is done by the conference and that is going on in various ways throughout the conference, trying to do some planning and visioning in the midst of all the short-term business, and dealing with all sorts of unanticipated items that may come up, such as law suits, which happen more often than one might think or, certainly, wish for.
I tell you all this to emphasize the point that when this board meets, time is at a premium. Since we are all church people and we’re having a church meeting, we do begin with a brief worship time on Friday night, have a short devotional time to begin the day on Saturday, and a closing prayer at the end of the day, the key words here being “brief” and “short”. It has been the custom to tell the people who are leading these times to be sure and keep it short because we have a lot to do.
At our meeting last September, which was my first meeting as president of the board, I wanted us to spend some time setting goals and thinking about the big picture of what we thought we were about as a board, in a sort of retreat style, and I made sure to build in a little extra time for worship, not going overboard with the worship thing, but at least a little extra time. Several board members expressed appreciation that there had been a bit more attention paid to worship, including my colleague from New Jersey who wrote in an email: “Even in the land of hardened secularity where I serve, prayer is out of the closet. Or as I tell my confirmation students, ‘this is what Christians do; they pray, they think on something worthy, and they take the Eucharist together’,,,St. Paul really thought that this was the most important thing we could do. I’m not sure he is entirely right, but I am haunted that he just might be…”
Me too. I identify with what my colleague was saying, both sides of it. Like him, I have to say that I’m not sure that it’s entirely true that prayer, worship, and sacrament are the most important things we can do. In any case, I’m hesitant to say such things because they don’t sound quite right to me and because I think they can so easily be misinterpreted. And let me say a few words about that before going on.
For one thing, saying that prayer is the most important thing we can do has a kind of a pious flavor to it that doesn’t sit well with me. We’re Christians and good Christians ought to pray. To be cynical about it, one could say that it’s the obligatory “nod to God”. Or it puts an air of religiosity around you. If, to get back to the story of Martha and Mary, if we thought that Mary was claiming to be exempt from her share of the work because she sat at the feet of Jesus and looked earnest or soulful and therefore was doing something much more valuable than poor shallow Martha, I would be tempted to take Martha’s side. Many people are tempted to take Martha’s side in any case, but surely striking a religious posture, as Mary seemed to be doing in the story, even if, to be less cynical, one is striking a religious posture sincerely, striking a religious posture does not automatically put a person on some higher plane, doing by definition more important work in some wiser way.
Or let me put this another way. Praying for peace is not a substitute for working for peace. In my understanding of the story, Martha does not represent a trivial mentality. It’s not that the household chores she’s engaged in are inconsequential in the big scheme of things and therefore she should know enough to give them up in favor of something more worthwhile. It’s not that Jesus would have had a different attitude if she had been running off flyers for a peace rally or, say, writing a sermon. It is not that what she was doing was trivial; in fact it was not because what she was doing was not just household chores (and even if it were just that, it would not be trivial) but she was also preparing her house to welcome a guest, not at all a trivial thing, especially in that culture.
So in my eyes what Martha represents is not a trivial mentality but an activist mentality. And if prayer takes the place of action, or in some subtle way exempts a Christian from taking action or wrestling with questions about what policies actually are likely to lead to peace, for instance, as opposed to praying for peace in some generic and generally meaningless way, or if saying that prayer is the most important thing Christians can do implies that actually working for peace is really not all that important, is not so much a Christian thing to do, whereas prayer is obviously a Christian thing to do, well then the authenticity of prayer itself is thrown into question. In this sense, I am hesitant to say that prayer is the most important thing we can do.
Then too, prayer can be thought of as a kind of utilitarian activity. This can be true in the crass sense that the pray-er is trying to enlist the intervention of God in whatever he or she is praying for. Prayer is good for getting God on your side or getting God to help. Or prayer may be good for encouraging deeper thought, or larger perspective, or patient listening, or more humble decision-making, or more openness to creative possibilities (some might say the spirit of God). I actually do think prayer can do all of those things, but of course there is no guarantee that prayer accomplishes all or any of those things. But whether it does or doesn’t, I am suspicious when prayer is thought of as one of the tools we have at our disposal to make us better or more effective in doing what we have set out to do, when it is seen as a means of making our activist selves more effective activist selves. For this reason too I am hesitant to say prayer is the most important thing we Christians can do.
But here’s the other half of it, as best I can say it for now. Here’s why, with my New Jersey colleague, I am haunted by the idea that prayer may be the most important thing we can do as Christians. Sacrament and worship in general go along with it. Back to the story for a moment…it seems to me the most important part of how we interpret the story is not what Martha is doing that is so misguided or what Mary is doing that is so great, or what Martha stands for or what Mary stands for. The crucial part is how we look on what Jesus represents in this story. I tried out some things. God? No, this is not a story about how we should be godly like Mary rather than ungodly like Martha. Rabbi or teacher? No, I don’t relate to this story as though Mary’s virtue was that she was so devoted to studying the scriptures and Martha seemed not to care so much about the scriptures. I tried some other things; I won’t bother to go through them with you. But one way of thinking about Jesus in this context did help. I imagined him as holy presence in the household of Mary and Martha. Words matter, as any good Sojourner knows. And when I thought of Jesus as a holy presence, the story started to resonate with me a little more.
What we need, we human beings, I believe, is a sense of the holy, not in the sense that we need occasional moments when something of God breaks through and makes itself felt in the otherwise drab routines of our lives, not in the sense that we need mystical experiences to convince us that there is such a thing as the holy, but more in the sense that we know somewhere deep down, in our souls, that there is a holiness that pervades every part of our living, the Mary parts of it and the Martha parts of it, the doing and the being parts of us, the seemingly important and the seemingly trivial parts of us, the noble causes and the daily chores parts of us—a sense that there is a holiness about all of it.
We need to have a sense of the presence of that holiness. Without it, no matter how noble the cause, we are just going through the motions. And therefore prayer, if it is not something we use to get our way or accomplish some purpose, prayer, if we engage in it for no useful reason, is perhaps the most important thing we can do, if it brings us into the presence of holiness as we hope, worry, grieve, and rejoice over the human things of our lives, if it not only brings us into the presence of holiness but speaks to us of the holiness present within our hoping, worrying, grieving, and rejoicing. Whether we use these words that I am struggling to come up with or not, I do believe it is what we need most of all, not to succeed or fail at this or that, not to either be or do, not to fret or not fret over the small things, to think big thoughts or small ones, but to know the holiness of all of it. Not the rightness of it, not the importance of it, but the holiness of it.
This brings me to back to baptism, which I mentioned at the outset was on my mind, because that too is a needful thing in this sense. We may talk about the love and the blessing of God carried in the waters of baptism, but it is not only that there is a blessing bestowed on the child or on the family from the outside. It is that the sacrament is saying, and we are saying in our participation in the sacrament, that there is something holy about this life, the life of this child who has come among us, and therefore something holy about your life and mine. It is not for the good that the person has done or will do. Nor is the holiness that is within any of us because of the good we have done or will do.
This is why worship, sacrament, prayer, precisely because they are unnecessary in the ordinary, utilitarian sense of the word are the most necessary acts of all. The most needed thing we can do, the most necessary thing is to remind ourselves, and we do need reminding, that our lives are not worthwhile because we are so important or so necessary but only because this gift of life that we have been given is a holy gift and the process of our living is a holy one. What is really needed is not to accomplish something but to have a sense of the holy, to have a sense that all these things we do, big and small, amount to something not because they are so all-fired important but because there is something holy about the whole of it, something sacred about the journey, Adeline’s that she is just beginning, yours, and mine. May God be with us as we travel. Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 22, 2009