"The Other Great Commandment"
July 22, 2007: 8th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.UnitedChurchontheGreen.org

Scripture:

Luke 10:38-42 (New Revised Standard Version)

Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." But the Lord answered her, "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."

Sermon:

Just when you think you've got Jesus figured out, he goes and pulls something like this.

Reading from Luke's Gospel last week, we heard Jesus expound on his vision of the heart of Torah, his answer to what makes for a life that participates most fully in the eternal life of God. He quoted the scriptures, from Deuteronomy and Leviticus: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." When pressed, he then went on to illustrate his point with a parable, The Parable of the Good Samaritan, noting that our obligation to our "neighbors" is not defined by simple proximity, but rather is lived out in the call and response of need and compassion. The neighbors we are to love are whoever needs loving, and loving them this is apparently the best way to love God.

Or maybe not. Because in the very next verses, in our reading for this morning, Luke's Jesus seems to pull a 180. In a new scene, busy, busy Martha asks Jesus to tell her sister Mary to get up off her duff and help with the work of "welcoming the stranger" into their home, but instead it's Martha Jesus tells off. "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part." But, but...? Martha was busy being hospitable, wasn't she, heeding the Great Commandment to attend to the needs of her new neighbor, Jesus? While Mary was just sitting there at Jesus' feet, doing... nothing. And yet Jesus affirms Mary's as the better choice? What gives?

It's clear the two scenes are related. That's the advantage to reading through the Gospel sequentially, as we've been doing this summer: it's easier to see the interplay between the various bits and pieces we read week by week. And the connections between these two seemingly contradictory stories are undeniable. The Parable opens on "a certain man... going down from Jerusalem," along a rough road where his needs will be tended by a stranger, while in today's reading Jesus, on his rough road to Jerusalem, stops at a "certain village" where a "certain woman" named Martha welcomes him and tends to his needs. Also, both are, in their own way, pronouncement stories, opportunities for Luke to showcase particular teachings of Jesus, as in "The neighbor is the one who shows mercy" or "You are worried and distracted by many things, but there is need of only one."

And then there's their placement in the gospel narrative. Both scenes follow close in the wake of what the church has come to call The Great Commandment—capital G, capital C—to love God and love our neighbor—which, as I mentioned before, we thought we'd understood Jesus to mean, really boils down to loving our neighbors in God's name, no matter who they are, no matter where they are on life's journey, just like the Good Samaritan did. That is the "go and do likewise" take home of that whole passage, isn't it?

Yet here's Mary, sitting quietly, prayerfully at Jesus' feet with all the other disciples, eagerly listening to his teaching, straining forward so as not to miss a single word that falls from the rabbi's lips, while her sister, Martha rushes all over the house, busting her hump to love her neighbor—her neighbors, since Jesus rarely traveled without the twelve disciples. She's washed their feet, tended to their scrapes and bruises, fed them, and, I dunno, darned their socks. Like the best kind of host, she's looked after their every need, but when Martha asks Jesus to remind her dear sister of her duty to "love her neighbor" alongside her, he refuses to disturb Mary's studies since "she has chosen the better part." So now, it seems, Jesus has reversed himself and prefers the spiritual life, the love of God demonstrated in Mary's rapt contemplation, to Martha's hands-on love of neighbor.

So which is it, Jesus? Do you want we should love God or love our neighbor? Or are you being abstruse on purpose? You can't just go around saying one thing one day and something else completely different the next! That's so confusing! That's so frustrating! That's so...

...human. And, yes, friends, lest we forget, Jesus was human. And so here's Jesus the human being trying to explain the heart of the Torah, the whole purpose of our human existence—Can we really blame him if the answer to life, the universe, and everything doesn't fit into a neat and tidy one-liner? Of course he says one thing and then another, twisting and turning and contradicting himself. No one single snapshot can capture the whole picture. It takes an entire life lived mindfully and prayerfully, a life centered in the life of God, a life like Jesus' own, to begin to do justice to that theme. It takes everything we've got: words and action and reflection, song and story, narrative and parable, politics and poetry. If that weren't the case, then God wouldn't have bothered coming to us in Jesus, taking on our flesh, living among us as one of us, in all our muddled messiness, to get the point across. She would have sent a memo for us to tack up on the fridge and been done with it.

Ok, so, true... but, still...which is it, Jesus? We still live in the tension between the two. It's there in our churches, our households, our bones. Mary or Martha—which one should be our role model in faith? Where should we focus our attention, on loving God or loving our neighbors?

We all know extreme "Mary churches," folks who focus on the "loving God" side of the equation. Found all over the denominational map, right belief, right worship, and right spiritual practice are the watch words for these communities. Given a choice, they prefer not to engage the world head on, but instead retreat within their sanctuary walls to study, pray, and praise God, because their ultimate goal is the prize of heavenly salvation they believe God holds out for the faithful few who make it through the world untainted. Out on this extreme end of the spectrum, where the eternal takes precedence over the things of this world, loving one's neighbor tends to be defined more as trying to "save their souls" than meeting their immediate physical needs.

Clearly, that's not us at United Church.

No, in this congregation we definitely tend to be a bunch of Marthas. I mean, have you ever stopped to consider the number of helping professionals among our number—teachers, social workers, civil servants, organizers, therapists, non-profit workers? Well, of course you haven't, because you're too busy to stop and consider. You all too busy doing good work, even in your "spare time." From the moment you wake up and turn on NPR in the morning until you turn out the compact fluorescent on the bedside table at night, you're busy loving your neighbor in a staggering variety of ways. Poverty, housing, hunger, the war, the death penalty, the environment, marriage equality, education, immigrant rights—these are just a few of the issues that command our atttention. We're a bunch of professional neighbors, that's what we are. We have causes like most people have houseplants.

So it's not surprising that when we come together, ours is a "Martha church." As a church, we focus on the "loving our neighbor" side of the equation, meaning we tend to express our faith less in strictly orthodox observance or pious practice than in tangible acts of peace, justice, and compassion. We prefer to make our home not in some stained glass tower or walled-off suburban church campus, but in the heart of the world, as we do here in this meeting house on the corner of Temple and Elm. We seek to engage the world, not retreat from it, to transform it, and we have few qualms about working with secular partners to accomplish this goal. So perhaps it's not surprising that we tend to favor the soup kitchen to the sanctuary, social action to scripture, or even, as some of our sharper critics might say, politics to prayer.

And, truth be told, if the extreme Mary churches sometimes forget they even have neighbors, we Marthas sometimes forget we have a God. Just ask our grown kids, too many of whom lead lives of devoted service to society, but only darken the door of a church Christmas and Easter.

This is not good. Jesus tells these two stories together to show us that it's not a matter of either/or but both/and. It's "love God" and "love your neighbor," not one or the other. We are called to work hard, like Martha, and sit still like Mary. As followers of Christ, we need to seek both the mind of God and the welfare of the wider world. In Jesus' outline of the good life, as Luke presents it, action and reflection work together, as two complementary muscles in the body of Christ, to carry us along the Way to the kingdom of God. And they need to be exercised together, trained together, or the body will grow uneven, and unhealthy, and we will veer off course. Which, of course, being human, we're bound to do. God help us, but we do tend to favor one leg over the other.

Truth is, though, some of us busy, busy Marthas are barely limping along. We know we're supposed to love our neighbors, we get that. We understand we're called to make a difference in the world, but we are tired. We are tired of trying to fix everything, of cleaning up everyone else's messes, of the seemingly endless work on one urgent cause after another. Tired and frustrated! Because our vision is so limited. How do we even know we're working on the right things? It's all so overwhelming, and so fragmented. More often than we care to admit, it feels like trying to put together a massive jigsaw puzzle when all we can see is the one tiny piece in our hand—one down and only 999 to go. Aarrgghh!

At which point Jesus says to us: Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by so many things. For God's sake, don't just do something—sit there! Stop running around, running in circles. Stop spinning your wheels, spending your energy in every direction at once. Come and sit by me like your sister Mary and be still—no, not forever, don't be silly!—but for a while.

We come here to worship God not to get away from the world, but to seek its center. We come here to refresh ourselves in prayer, in music, in companionship, in laughter and silence so that we may be energized for the work ahead. We come to open our hearts and minds to God's wider perspective so we can rise above the fragmentation of issues and answers to understand that there are not a thousand different crises, but only the one cross, raised on a thousand different hills, there are not a thousand different causes, but only God's cause of peace, justice and compassion, expressed in a thousand ways, As followers in the Way of Christ, we come here to listen for his voice and look to his leading in the voice of Scripture, the beloved community, and the Holy Spirit. And we come here to receive grace, God's good reminder that we cannot, and will not, do it all alone, that God's own self is already at work in us and in a thousand thousand others to change the world.

So, friends, before the hour is over and you all head back out into the hurly burly of the world, to pour yourself out in service once more, come worship God and be filled. Come and learn to love God more, and let God love you, so you can carry that love with you out there to all our many neighbors, near and far, who need it every bit as much as we do, if not more. This is what Jesus meant, when he said all we really need is one thing, this is the better part, God's part, given to you, to all of us, freely, powerfully, lovingly, the part which no one can take away. It is our gift from God, ours to choose.