2025-08-05
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
The short story of Mary and Martha was actually the lectionary text for two weeks ago, when I preached on the camel and the eye of the needle as part of the “ask the pastor” series. And it turned out that the gospel reading scheduled for today was also on money and wealth, which I was disinclined to belabor again so soon, so I decided just to pull a switcheroo and go back and grab the Mary and Martha text for today. You see, I love the story. And I didn’t want you to miss it in the three year lectionary cycle either, lest you go a total of six years before hearing it again.
I love it, in part, because it is so universal and ordinary. Who, after all, does not have “that relative” who somehow manages to go missing when it’s time for the work to start at the big, family dinner? It’s a common story, indeed, not just because of the two sisters and the fact that one resents the other, but it’s also universal because here we see Martha not going to Mary directly with her complaint, but creating an interpersonal triangle by trying to leverage Jesus into the mix, by asking him to break the tie. It’s easier for the passive-aggressive to do it this way, isn’t it? It’s easier not to go directly to the party with whom one has the issue, but to leverage a third party to take our side. The problem, of course, is that to do so complicates things, and sets up a situation where gossip can take hold and everybody is soon involved in a toxic dynamic where addressing the actual problem becomes impossible. So there’s my first point for this sermon, and although it’s certainly not the main point of this story, I do think it’s worth noticing that Jesus does not allow himself to become triangled. He keeps the conflict contained and talks only to Martha. He doesn’t turn to Lazarus, their brother, or even to Mary, to pull her in. He just keeps it directly between himself and Martha. And then he gets to the main point quickly, as Jesus has a way of doing. “Martha, Martha” he says. “you are worried and distracted by many things, 42 but few things are needed—indeed only one.“
And we can pretty much guess what that one thing is by looking at his far and again number one, most preached about topic, namely the Kingdom of God. It’s perhaps the most dominant theme of scripture and has to do with that reality where love and wholeness and joy and justice rule the day. It was in the garden of Eden, before the fall. It’s envisioned as restored at the end of Revelation when the new Jerusalem, heaven, descends to earth, and sorrow and sighing are no more and every tear is wiped away. And it’s what Jesus was here to teach and embody. In short, it’s the gospel! And here’s the real kicker. In Luke 17, he says, “the kingdom of God is within you!” In other words, its seeds are in your hearts and minds. And here’s another kicker: you embody it, you create glimpses of it, whenever you operate out of love. Shorthand for the Kingdom of God is simply… love. And Martha was not bringing love to her work. She was worried and distracted and was, no doubt, sharing her huffing and puffing misery with everybody else! I think Jesus’ main point was not to teach that sitting at his feet was more important than work. Many preachers go that route when they preach on this text. They say that prayer or contemplation is more important than service or activism, but I don’t think that’s it. Rather, I think he is saying, in whatever you do, work or prayer or anything else, do it out of a loving spirit!
Psalm 84, which we heard this morning in the Call to Worship, paints a beautiful picture of it in talking about what it’s like to live from a center of God’s love in everything. I paraphrase a bit to sharpen the point for today:
“How lovely it is to dwell in your love, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, indeed it faints, for this!4 Happy are those who live in your presence, and, whose strength is in your love,6 As they go through the valley, they make it a place of springs;7 They go from strength to strength;. For one day lived in conscious presence of your love is better
than a thousand elsewhere. and I would rather be a doorkeeper in the conscious presence of God than to dwell in the tents of anything else.”
So Jesus, in this passage, is not decrying service or activism. In fact, the passage that immediately precedes this is the story of the good Samaritan where the one who offers charitable service and activism is praised to the hilt! Indeed, Jesus is not questioning Martha’s work, he is going deeper than that and putting the spotlight not on her action, but on the spirit in which she performed it, namely on her worry and distraction! Martha, it would seem, is working from the wrong center and in doing so is making herself and everyone else miserable! Jesus is saying that only one thing is needful: operating, in whatever you do, out of love as center. Martha could be doing her work from a healthy spirit: from calm and contentment, from love for those she is serving. She could even, in a loving spirit, ask Mary for help. But instead she is operating out of obligation and fussiness and resentment. She’s in a great big tizzy and it is, frankly, contaminating everything she is doing.
Maybe you’ve heard one of my favorite sayings, “love what you do and you’ll never work again.” Now this is another saying that is easy to misinterpret, because I don’t think it means, “if you’re lucky enough to find something you love to do for your work, it won’t feel like work,” I think it means, “choose to bring love to whatever your work, to be rooted in love when you do it, and then it won’t seem like work. It will be transformed into something joyful and contented, a place of springs, and you will go from strength to strength” You see, we can choose to bring love, to bring the kingdom of God, to anything we are doing and when we do, the love transforms the process and makes it a glimpse of the realm of God. Again, Jesus is not criticizing Martha’s work, he’s criticizing the fact that she has lost her proper center and is not living from love, but from distractions and worry.
The writer, Brenda Ueland, speaks to this matter of not living from a proper center. She says this:
“There is a little, spiritual fountain in us all. It is the Spirit or God or love or whatever you want to call it. If you are very tired, strained, have no solitude, run too many errands, talk to too many people, drink too many cocktails, this little fountain is muddied over and covered with a lot of debris. The result is you stop living from the center, the Spiritual fountain, and you live from the periphery, from externals. That is, you go along on mere will-power, without Spirit or Joy.”
She is warning us of the danger of getting caught up in distractions as center. And you know what? It’s actually not just external things that muddy the fountain and get us off center, it can be our thoughts also! When our brain gets moving too fast it can be this kind of distraction as well. It can pull us away from love as center and complicate our lives as much as too much work or too many obligations or anything else.
Another writer, Ann Morrow Lindburgh, writes about it as well, only she calls the center grace:
She says, “I want first of all…to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life…I want, in fact- to borrow from the language of the saints- to live “in grace” as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in the strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony…I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God. Vague as this definition may be, I believe most people are aware of periods in their lives when they seem to be “in grace” and other periods when feel “out of grace”, even though they may use different words to describe these states. In the first happy condition, one seems to carry all one’s tasks before one lightly, as if borne along on a great tide; and in the opposite state, one can hardly tie a shoe string.”
So the question for you today is not are you a contemplative or an activist or anything else? The question is, are you doing whatever you are doing in any given moment, out of love and grace? From that little spiritual fountain as center? Or are you doing it out of obligation or resentment, going along on mere will power? Paul makes the point more clear than anybody, “If I speak with the tongues of humans and of angels but have not love, I am nothing.” He goes on and on, saying that even if he accomplishes great things, if he does it without love, it will somehow not amount to much! I think we can safely assume that Mary sat at Jesus feet out of rapt adoration, out of adoring love… And it was this that he had in mind when he said, “Mary has chosen the better portion.”