Community Church Sermons
July 22, 2007
Pentecost
8
Psalm 15
Luke 10:38-42
Rev. Martin C. Singley, III
Listen to this Sermon!
The story of Mary and Martha. It’s one of the most famous stories in the Bible, and a favorite of many people. Jesus goes to the home of his friends Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus. They live in Bethany, which is a little village, just the other side of the hill from Jerusalem.
Lazarus is the man Jesus raised from the dead, although he doesn’t show up in this story. Instead, the sisters are the main attraction here, and the focal point is an argument going on between the two.
Martha has invited Jesus into their home. Martha is planning lunch for Jesus and the disciples. Martha is cleaning up the dining room. Martha is putting out clean towels in the bathroom. Martha is setting the table. Martha is starting the stove. Martha is cooking the soup. Martha is baking the bread…do you see where the tension is in this story?
While Martha is doing all this hard work, that no good sister of hers is nowhere to be found! No, Mary is in the other room, sitting at the feet of Jesus. She is listening to him teach – laughing at his jokes, asking him questions, talking about the upcoming UT football season…
More than the soup starts boiling in the kitchen. A very upset Martha rushes into the living room, gets right up into the face of Jesus, and explodes, “Don’t you CARE that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her to get off her duff and help!” That last part – about getting off her duff - is only found in a very rare translation of the Gospel of Luke that I happen to own.
Now, if I was Jesus, I know what I would’ve done. I would’ve gotten out of the way of that woman! Can you picture her standing in front of Jesus with a rolling pin in her hand, TELLING the Master to TELL her sister to GET UP and help? I wouldn’t want any part of that!
But then again, I’m NOT Jesus. I would never have the guts to do what he did. Instead of running for his life, or even just telling Mary she should go and help her sister, Jesus looks straight into Martha’s anger-filled eyes and says, “Martha, Martha, Martha! You’re worried and upset about many things. But only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken from her.”
Hmmm.
How do you suppose Martha responded to that? What do you suppose she said to Jesus?
Well, Luke doesn’t tell us. He leaves it to our imagination. And that allows us to focus in on the words that Jesus spoke.
“You are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed.”
“Mary has chosen the better
part, and it will not be taken from her.”
What do you suppose Jesus means by that?
I read this week that when Murray Sperber was diagnosed with a heart ailment, he retired from Indiana University where he had taught for 33 years. He thought he would miss teaching because it was his passion in life. But something interesting happened in retirement to Professor Sperber.
One day, he came across a French language textbook he had used as a graduate student. The French he had learned back then was long gone from his brain, so he decided to relearn it. And he found that he learned French better now than he had as a graduate student. That gave him a great sense of satisfaction and joyful accomplishment.
“It turns out,” Professor Sperber said, “that what I love most about academe is not teaching, but learning.” [1]
Did you hear that? He loved not so much the teaching, as the learning.
Maybe WE can learn something about Mary and Martha – and about ourselves – from these words.
Life is full of responsibility. At the dawn of every day, there are a multitude of tasks that stretch out before us, the things we need to do. Make breakfast. Take a shower. Get dressed. Go to work or to school – or for a walk – or to the golf course. Clean the house. Mow the lawn. Pay some bills. If you live in these parts, you’ll probably need to go to the heart doctor…and then the knee doctor…and then this doctor and that doctor before you go to the pharmacy to pick up your prescriptions. There’s the daily visit to Wal-Mart, and the phone calls with the kids, and the good work you do at the Good Samaritan Center or one of the other organizations you volunteer at. Hour-by-hour the things that need to get done get checked off the list. You invite friends in for dinner, cook a great meal, spend ten-minutes trying to figure out how to open up a box of wine, check your email, get cleaned up, put on your jammies, and hop into bed before Tellico midnight which is 9 PM. You get the picture, don’t you?
Life is full of responsibility and things that need to get done. But one of the questions Jesus seems to be confronting us with today is this: “Are the things you do just things you need to do, or are they things from which you LEARN?” Professor Sperber said that he found that the real joy in teaching was not the teaching, but the learning! Not the doing, but the living!
This being Scholarship Sunday at our church, I find myself wanting to ask our scholarship students, “Why are you going to school? Why are you studying what you’re studying?”
When I do ask college students that kind of question, the answer is almost always very similar to the way I answered it when I was in college. “Well, I have dual majors in Sociology and Anthropology because I think they’ll help prepare me for the ministry,” I used to say. In a similar fashion, today’s students might answer, “I’m studying to become an electrical engineer” or “I want to be an accountant” or “I’m studying nursing because I want to work in an ICU.”
You see, its easy to think that the reason we do anything is to get a job, or to perform a task, but what Jesus is getting at today is that the point of life is not to get a career or even to do a job. The point of life is to EXPERIENCE IT. And out of life’s experiences, we LEARN.
Sure, there was food to be cooked and tables to be set at the home of Mary and Martha. But there was something in their home that day that was more important than soup and sandwiches. Jesus was there – the most beautiful man who ever lived – the one many said was a prophet and others said was the Messiah.
Martha went and worked. Mary sat and learned.
There is this rumor going around the world these days that millions of people have decided to believe. The rumor is that life consists of our work – our career – the things we need to do in order to live. We must work to sustain our lives, we think! How many marriages have broken apart because one partner made their job the center of their life? How many peoples’ health has been ruined because they were so busy DOING that they forgot about LIVING? “But I was only doing it to support you and the kids!” some of us have been known to say.
But I can tell you first hand, that life can be sustained merely by hooking people up to life-support equipment in the Critical Care Unit at Park West Hospital. Everything a person needs to keep on breathing can be provided. Nourishment can be received. Everything needed to keep a heart beating can be done. But sooner or later, families of people hooked up to life-support equipment that SUSTAIN life this way have to ask themselves a question: “Is sustaining life really LIFE? Is there any QUALITY of life remaining?”
Sometimes – long before we get to the CCU – we lose our quality of life to the things we need to do, or to our job, or to reach a goal.
Poor Martha! She is so busy DOING! But she has stopped LIVING.
And she has stopped living I would want to point out, because she has stopped LEARNING.
I’m so glad we could share this morning in the baptism of Mike and Lonnie Crosby’s grandson Torin. Whenever I look into a little face like that, I find myself thinking, “I wonder what his job is?” What is the job of a four-month old child? Is it simply to eat – and sleep – and cry – and grow? Or is there something more in the job description of a human being?
My guess is that a child’s main job is to LEARN – to sit at God’s feet, if you will, and discover the beauty of life, the mysteries of creation, the marvels of the world, and the intricacies of relationship. Little children learn so much, so fast – how to scream and get Mom to come, how to smile and wrap Dad around their little finger, how to talk, how to walk, how to read and write and swim and ride a bike and make snow angels and how to sing and dance and make friends.
And then – one day – all us little kids go off to get a JOB. Maybe its what needs to be done at home. Maybe it’s a career we desire. Maybe it’s a trade that will make us a decent living. Maybe its raising children, or keeping a home. But somewhere along the line, the joy of learning gives way to the necessity of doing.
“Jesus, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work myself? Tell her to get up and help!”
Like many of us, Martha had substituted FUNCTION for LIFE!
My simple message for our college students today would be to focus your education on the experience of LEARNING rather than on the job or career path you want to reach. In fact, when LEARNING is your first priority, you often begin to discover what your true career path should be and sometimes its not the one you started out on.
And my message for the rest of us is to treat each day as though you were sitting at the feet of Jesus, learning all about the intricate mysteries of the world God created. Don’t spend your life DOING things just to get things done. Spend your days, LIVING life in all that you do!
You will discover that, even in the things you need to do, there is much to be learned, and life to be lived.