| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|||||
| |
|
|
|
|||
|
Gospel:
Luke 10:38-42 We are most familiar with the Gospel reading this morning, the story of Mary and Martha. In kind of contemporary words we describe Martha as the Type A personality--busy, scurrying about the house, probably wiping the floor and dusting the furniture and fluffing the pillows and getting the place ready for visitors. Martha is probably the one who makes sure that those embroidered hand towels that we all have are in proper display in the bathroom. (We've had ours for about twenty years. No one ever uses them. You walk out kind of wiping your hands because you're afraid to use the embroidered towels.) The writer of Luke says Martha was distracted by her many tasks. Then, like typical siblings, or at least the two we had in our house, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? I cut the grass last week. It's his turn. I took out the garbage yesterday. What about fairness? He never does anything around here." Well, siblings and husbands and wives and roommates have been playing some variation on that game--"I always do more than the other"--at least since the first century. My guess is that Adam and Eve even did a bit of it. Mary, we
know, is the attentive one to Jesus. Mary is the one who sat at the Lord's
feet and listened to what he was saying. She was the contemplative one,
the one who quietly paid attention to this sacred and holy man. Jesus
gets a little bit grumpy with Martha and says, "She is the one who
really understands." She, Mary, is the one who has it right, whatever
right is, because this Gospel doesn't tell us.
I've been thinking about these words for several weeks now. Most of the time I've focused on the way Jesus characterized the distractions of Martha, in his saying that Mary had chosen the better part; what Mary was doing I needed to do, for I want to choose the better part. The thrust of that sermon had begun to take shape--how we are all distracted by the things of life, the emails and the fax machines and the telephone and the voice mails, classes to prepare, people to see, hospitals to visit, programs to plan -- and I even had the awareness that works of ministry, acts of kindness, tasks with noble and honorable purpose could indeed, themselves, be distractions. A couple of weeks ago, Don Johnson was ordained as our third Bishop here in the Diocese of West Tennessee. The day prior the clergy had met with the Presiding Bishop. He talked about the danger of becoming Technicians of the Holy-allowing the sacred work, the ministry that we have to do, to become kind of a distraction of what is ultimately important. What is that ultimate importance? What is the other thing, the thing that lasts? Then something else began to immerge in my preparation of this homily. Maybe this story has a deeper and more powerful meaning. I realize that it was Martha who had provided the hospitality for Jesus, but that she had allowed the things of life, the stuff of life, the activities of her life to distract her and draw her away from Jesus. I remember a few weeks ago kind of scurrying around the house one night and putting some clothes in the washer and putting some things out for tomorrow. Marsha, my wife, finally said to me, "Stop it. You're driving me nuts." I then realized that I was distracted by some things that concerned me deeply. Marsha and I, at that particular time, were not in relationship. We were strangers in that time, in that place. I wondered if that is exactly what Jesus is talking about -- that something that is important, that Holy Other. As I began to think about that and to think about Martha and Mary, I realized that I am both Martha and Mary. Both parts of me are very real. The distracted part, the part that is unfocused, the part that is busy, the part that avoids the real thing is real. But I am also that person who tries to pay attention to the real thing, to be present, and to live into the wonder and joy of the relationships that God has given me--to be about the sacred thing of being related. The second discovery, in addition to the possibility that what Jesus was talking about is relationship, is the awareness that what Jesus may have been saying to Martha is that Mary was not afraid of the sacred and the mystery of the sacred. What God, I believe, yearns most deeply for each one of us, above all else, is to be in relationship with Him. In fact, I believe God built us for relationship. We may find ways to accommodate how to live alone. We may find ways to live independent of one another, but ultimately, I think, part of the human fabric of things is to be in relationship with one another. There is nothing more painful in all of life than when a relationship begins to break and tear at the seams. As someone said to me recently, "What do you do when the red comes off the candy?" I am reminded
of a wonderful novel some of you may have read, Corelli's Mandolin
by Louis de Bernières. The story is set in the Greek Isles just
as World War II is about to come on the scene of history. It's a story
of pathos and love, of death and consequences, of choices that we make
in life. In a particularly moving passage, Palagia, the woman who is trying
to figure out the big questions of life and love, is addressed by her
father. He says to her:
Mary, I want to suggest, was in love. She showered her attention on Jesus, but my guess is that it was from a much deeper place than the first glance of a relationship. It is what happens when love happens to fall away. Martha is that part of us that now struggles to be in relationship when the romance ceases -- when the red is gone from the candy and somehow we must go deeper. I was reminded
of some words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a wonderful book titled The
Cost of Discipleship. He asks the very same question with these words:
What Bonhoeffer tells us and what I think Jesus points to in this simple story is that it is a love that is on the other side of the cross. It is a love that deals with the hard things in life. It is love that moves into that place that makes us so terribly uncomfortable that we seek easy solutions and quick answers. I am also reminded of another book, A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Nasberry. Some of you may be familiar with it. The mother, as I recall, is talking to her daughter about her son (the mother's son) that has just put the entire family in total embarrassment. This time he's gotten himself into so much trouble that the mother can't take care of it, and he has been arrested. Life is crumbling down around them. The daughter says to the mother, "We need to simply forget about him." The mother replies, "No, this is exactly when we begin to love your brother. This is exactly when we begin to stand with him." This is, I would add, love on the other side of the cross. "Love
itself is what is left over when being 'in love' is burned away."
That is something that Mary knew and that Martha was to learn, and that
we are to learn and hold dear in our hearts. Love itself, real love, love
that counts, love that sustains, love that will abide the worst that we
can imagine, love that has its roots entwined in the deepest part of our
lives is love that is on the post side of the cross. It is there that
we find the Easter, the new life, the beginning that God promises us --
the other thing that Mary has learned and for which we give thanks.
Copyright 2001 Calvary Episcopal Church Gospel:
Luke 10:38-42
|
||
 |
|||||
|
|||||
