Examining Purpose

Martha was distracted by her many tasks.

I have to admit that I looked at today’s Gospel this week and didn’t really want to preach on it. It’s not that I think it’s bad, but it so often gets used to subtly shame people, especially women. There’s a pitting of activity versus listening. If Mary and Martha are used as archetypes, models of different ways of being in the Church, then Martha is the deacon, the person always seeking new ways to serve in the world, and Mary is the contemplative. Somehow a contemplative life wins out over the diaconate. There has always existed a bit of a friendly rivalry in the Church between those who are active in social justice, who are always doing something, always on their feet, and those who are more still, more calm, spending much more time in reflection than action. They are two different personality types that are both needed in the Church. They actually create a healthy tension between each other, the serving ones pulling the contemplative outside their comfort zone at important moments where action is required, and the contemplative always pulling those who serve into prayer. That tension holds and sustains a middle path between the two, action and contemplation, seeking to serve our neighbor as well as listening to what God would have us do. The vast majority of us live in that middle area. Action leads to further contemplation, contemplation leads to further action. The tension helps us deepen our faith. It’s not a competition, not a sporting event where one team beats another, it’s a healthy collaboration between personality types that compliment each other in the Body of Christ. If we make it about two competing archetypes, then all this story says is that one team will always win. That’s where the subtle shaming comes in. 

The subtle shaming is only amplified in women’s spaces, where patriarchy has created stricter scripts of service and obedience for women. Many mothers are expected to take care of the housework and do the majority of child care while working full time. This story is used too often to shame women for being busy. It’s almost as if clergy men (and it’s almost always clergy men who do this shaming) are telling women: if you don’t have a whole lot of time to stop and sit at Jesus’ feet while caring for children or trying to keep the bills paid, you’re not doing this part of your life right either. 

I don’t think that’s what this story is about. I don’t think the core of the issue is that Martha was active while Mary was listening. I think there’s something more enriching and life-giving going on here. 

I don’t think Martha caring for her guests was a problem in any way. As our story from Genesis today shows, hospitality is beautiful. God came to Abraham in the form of three men, walking in the heat of the day through the desert. Abraham immediately got up, ensured they had water for their aching feet, instructed Sarah to make bread, picked out the perfect calf for slaughter and had a servant prepare it. After all the food was prepared, Abraham came and sat down with them, and the men bestowed on him God’s blessing. Abraham saw their needs, ensured those were taken care of, and Abraham was blessed. The presence of these three men enriched Abraham’s life. Over and over in the Bible we see the enriching and life giving nature of hospitality. It’s a key commandment and tenant of faith. 

I don’t know when this interaction between Jesus and Martha happened during the course of Jesus’ visit, but I imagine it was either directly before a meal or directly after. I’m more inclined to think it was after. I don’t think Luke would call preparing food a distraction, but I can see where cleaning up afterwards could be called one. Mary and Martha had invited Jesus into their home, fed him a nice meal, and now Martha was trying to get everything cleaned up and ready for them to go to bed later. They most likely had a one room house where they would have to sleep that night, so clearing the space to give their guests and themselves room to sleep later had to be done. She was doing important work, but somewhere in the busy preparation she had lost track of the purpose of having Jesus over to their house: To listen to him teach. 

Teaching in their society was most often done in segregated ways. Men and women sat in separate spaces. I’m sure it was quite normal for women to go ahead and finish up the duties of hospitality before joining the men if they had a chance. Learning was more of a man’s task than a woman’s. That’s not that women weren’t educated in Israel, it’s that men’s learning took priority. But Mary sat down right at Jesus’ feet, and even before the house was prepared for bedtime, she was absorbing all of what Jesus had to say. Mary was taking the place of a disciple. She assumed Jesus’ teaching was as much for her as for the others who gathered at their house. Martha thought they were hosts first and foremost. She was mad that she was doing all the work. She was bitter. 

So Martha does a bold thing herself. She confronts the teacher while he’s teaching. I don’t know whether Jesus had stepped away from his seat for a moment and they spoke in private or if Martha came in during the middle of a lesson and pointed at Mary in rage. But Martha asks Jesus to correct Mary. Martha was assertive. That doesn’t mean the content of what she said or her approach were correct, but this tells us that she and Jesus had a relationship of relative equity. They knew each other well enough that she was confident she could address Jesus in this way, and she was right. Jesus didn’t try to cut her down or dismiss her. Jesus did something different. Jesus tried to help calm her down, and then invited her to join her sister. She was asked to sit and listen too. Jesus’ purpose in being at their house was not to be served. It was to teach all who are there, Martha included. 

This isn’t about pitting two sisters against each other or trying to elevate one way of living against another. This is Jesus seeing Martha’s exhaustion, recognizing how much she has taken on, and inviting her to be fully included in what is happening in the here and now.  Martha wasn’t entirely sure the purpose of Jesus’ visit was really for her, she was the host, not the guest. But Jesus told her that the purpose of teaching there at Martha’s house was to have Martha learn too. She is a part of Jesus’ reason for being there. She didn’t have to be the host at that moment, she didn’t have to make sure everything was put together, she could sit and listen too. Martha is as much of a disciple as Mary or any of the men there. That’s Jesus’ ultimate message to her. 

So the question for us today is not which life is better, the life of action or the life of contemplation. The question for us today is:  What is the purpose of following Jesus and how can we feel included as full disciples of Jesus too? Where are we distracting ourselves from that purpose? 

Part of what I internalized as a child of the Church, growing up in mainline Protestantism, was that the Church was dying. Membership numbers were decreasing. Congregations were shuttering. Our ways of worship were about to become toast. I remember watching videos at conferences about numerics, about how my generation wasn’t just going to walk through the church doors, that our congregations were aging and would eventually leave empty buildings. All this made me just want to yell, “Could you wait for us to finish college before you decide our fate?” Being told all this since I was ten made me a bit bitter towards the Church. I felt ignored entirely, but I also felt like I had something to prove, that I somehow had to save the expression of Christianity that I love, to keep it from this bitter end. I did leave the denomination that pushed that story of doom down my throat, but the story has been told in all mainline Protestant churches, The Episcopal Church included, in one form or another. 

The solution I was told was programmatic, there were books and studies for congregations to do that would help them do more in the community, help them put their name out there, help bring butts to pews, help them increase their stewardship, help them save their congregation from this doomed fate. It was the great Protestant work ethic being applied to the problem. We could fix it if we did X or if that didn’t work, there’s a great new program Y that tells you to do the exact opposite. Somewhere in all of that doing we were promised a resurgence of the Church. We would be saved by our work. 

One of the good things to happen for the Church in the past few years is that when we couldn’t meet in person, a lot of programs were abandoned and for a while there were no experts. Everyone was kind of afloat. I would go to clergy meetings on Zoom and we would all shrug, express our laments, and then try to listen to God together for best next steps. We all had to ask the big questions and wonder together what things could or would look like. We were all left at Jesus’ feet where Mary was, waiting for us. My friend Stephen describes it as a great clean out. We took all the stuff out of our closets and left them bare. The question now is what is going back in. Here at St. John’s, we never stopped giving to the wider community around us. The most important things that we put back in as soon as we could are fun, food, and fellowship. This speaks to who this congregation is at our deepest level, a community that wants to ensure that everyone around us has enough and share life together. What we add to that is our choice. But if we draw from our core, if we listen closely to Jesus, we won’t be led astray. 

Packaged programs aren’t bad. They can be helpful resources and guides. They can help inspire congregations to hear what their call is as a unique group of disciples. But the Church is not our programs. It’s not what we do. The church is a group driven by our purpose. The purpose of the Church universal is to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbors as ourselves. We build up voluntary societies, called denominations and congregations, because love requires community. It requires support. It requires the reminders from Jesus that we are loved too. Love binds us together and invites us to learn from Jesus. If we don’t have communities built around that love and support, around helping each of us live out God’s call in our lives, the Church is not living out God’s dream. It’s not about numbers, not about buildings, it’s about loving God and our neighbors. If we are grounded in God’s love, if we know ourselves to be disciples, we are able to move forward into what God is asking us to do, learning and growing in our faith together, deepening our relationships with God and neighbor. 

What I admire about St. John’s is that this community knew all that way before I got here. We are disciples just as we are. We don’t have to push each other or pull each other out of our learning moments to do work that could wait. We are fully included in Jesus’ dreams. There exists a healthy tension between activity and learning. There is a healthy tension between maintaining what we have and living into where God is leading us. We are able to try new things and put ourselves out there without feeling like we’ve failed if things don’t go as we planned. We are allowed to experiment, and know that we are always invited to sit at Jesus’ feet, to learn and grow and dream with God. 

So much of being a healthy and vibrant community of faith is always remembering that Jesus loves everyone, including us. Jesus accepts us fully and completely as we are and wants to work with us as the unique disciples we are. We’re allowed to have our full range of emotions, including anger. Jesus allows for up times and down times, the stressful times and the moments that make it all worth it. Martha wasn’t gas lit or kicked out for calling out Mary in front of Jesus. Jesus invited Marth to learn, to grow, to be built up as the disciple she was, just like her sister was learning and growing in her discipleship. 

The Gospel today leaves us with these questions, ones that invite deep listening: What do we need as disciples? What is distracting us? Where is God calling us to support each other as we move forward together?  I invite you this week to take these questions and listen at Jesus’ feet with Mary and Martha.