July 25, 2010 Sermon

The Bold One    (Luke 10: 38-42)

Rev. Sally Harris

Holy One, come now to this place. Make your presence known.
Give us eyes to see your mystery. Ears to hear your Word.
And the courage to follow Your way of compassion. Amen

The story of Mary and Martha has borne an incredible weight in the history of Christianity. Often, Mary and Martha are presented as two different models of the Christian life—Martha exemplifies the active life, the life in the world, while Mary represents the contemplative, the one who withdraws from the world in order to focus on her relationship with Jesus. In 1983 I was struggling to discern a call to ministry. I had been raised to believe that women could not be ministers. This story gave me hope that in deed women could be ministers and that like Mary I could move beyond, and not be distracted by, the conventional roles of society that the religion of my childhood taught me. I could study and learn about Jesus. For me, Mary was the bold one – she was the one who risked by choosing to learn about Jesus. And Jesus defended her choice to move away from the normal behavior of women and encouraged her to sit with the men as they learned the mysteries of the divine. Mary had chosen the better part. It’s hard not to hear this story without thinking of women’s roles.

But since then I have learned that there is more to the story than this. Jesus has just been teaching his disciples and the crowd about discipleship. Today’s reading comes immediately after last week’s gospel, the story of the Good Samaritan and the demand to love God and self and neighbor. It also comes after Jesus has sent out seventy disciples to spread the word. Like those other texts, today’s gospel is also about discipleship. It is about what does it mean to love God with all our hearts and soul and to love ourselves and to love our neighbour.

And there is something else... The Greek text describes Martha's work with the word diakonia or service, a term that elsewhere embodies the mission of Jesus and describes a variety of leadership ministries in the early church. We are not talking housework here! Martha is not worried and distracted over household duties but ministerial ones. This is not about too much cooking and cleaning! It is about ministry. Within this text lies buried the memory that Martha, the 'deacon' was a bold leader in the early church. Confirmation for this idea comes from John's gospel, which depicts Martha as the spokesperson for the Christological faith of the community. She rather than Peter utters the community's pivotal confession that Jesus is "the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world" (John 11: 27) Both Martha and her sister Mary were originally close friends and disciples of Jesus and, in their different ways, ministers in the early Christian church. So the problem here is not who is about God’s work. Both are! The problem is not who is the bold one – both are bold in their own way. Mary bold in her risking to listen; Martha is bold in her conversation and in her confrontation. At the heart of this story is the dialogue between Jesus and Martha. But in that dialogue we see how off-centered Martha has become. Martha is distracted by all she has to do and ends up telling Jesus what to do. Both Martha and Mary are bold because they both know they are loved but Martha forgets not only to act out of that love but to BE in that love. The problem is how she is going about doing her ministry. And so Jesus invites Martha back to the center, back to the love that called her.

A story is told of a young minister who a few weeks into his pastorate calls his mentor. The mentor has been in ministry a long time, and the young minister asks, “Give me some advice. Give me some tips to help me succeed in my ministry.” The mentor says, “I have just one. Remove hurry from your life.” The young minister responds, “Good, that’s a good one. I’ll try to remember that. Now, what else have you got?” The mentor said, “No. That’s it. Remove all hurry from your life.” The young minister thought the advice was something to pay lip-service to, where you can brag about how busy you are by sighing and saying you’ve just got to slow down. The young minister thought that success was all about busyness. And, of course, this isn’t a story about ministry in particular. Most of us are susceptible to the mistake. And the problems it causes are manifold. In our busyness what do we miss? What do we miss in our families? In nature? In our friendships? In our spiritual lives? Someone said that life is what happens while you’re busy making plans. In our busyness we miss a great deal.

But why so busy? It turns out that busyness often serves a very basic purpose. Busyness serves to keep the things that bother us at bay. If we’re busy enough, we won’t have time to worry about the things that disturb us or challenge us the most. We can keep them under wraps. Our own mortality. Sorrow. Security. Fear. Failure. Loss. Change. It’s natural to want to avoid coming face to face with these. They’re daunting.

From Jesus’ perspective, though, our avoidance is a lost opportunity. Many who have read it carefully have thought that the good news that Jesus came preaching is more than a little sketchy. That is, the good news that Jesus came preaching doesn’t look like much relief. The news doesn’t look all that good. That’s because Jesus invites us on a journey that, for better or worse, takes us directly through the hell-fires of our fears. Jesus invites us not only where few have gone before, but where we have little desire to go.

But Jesus makes us a promise. On this journey we will be given and we will discover the resources to not only make it through the fires, but also to lose our fear of them. Ultimately we will move from coping to living. To do so requires that we begin by dropping our guard of busyness, to let go of the camouflage of routine and spend some time listening at Jesus’ feet. For, in reality, the more we enter into contemplation, the more we are then called out of that contemplation into action. By going deep, by being bold, by truly listening deeply, the One who is at the center of everything calls us into a fuller awareness of everything, and everyone, putting us more in touch with the need for healing, the need for hope, the need for compassion, the need for action that, in truth, surround us on every side.

Meanwhile, the more we enter into action, the more we know that we simply do not have, within ourselves, all that the church needs nor what the world needs; that no amount of will-power alone, no amount of determination, or personality, or negotiation, or leverage can finally bring about what we hope for, can finally bring about the realm of God. And, so, through action, we are called into contemplation, into prayer and study, we are called back into the depths seeking the Source of all we need, the One in whom we live, and move, and have our being. May it be so among us! Amen

       (Resource: Elizabeth A. Johnson Truly our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints)

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