Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Genesis 18:1-1-14; Psalm 15; Colossians 1:21-29; Luke 10:38-42

I’m not sure how it got this way, but a lot of the things that we think are “Christian” are exactly the opposite of what Jesus told us to do.  We look at wealth as God’s blessing, but Jesus said that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven.  We look at Christianity as a bunch of rules and regulations, yet Christ broke rules right and left, and the only thing He seemed to care about was where your heart was.  We think that people should get what they deserve, but Jesus said that because of Him we won’t get what we deserve, thank God.  And, finally, we look at hard work as a Christian virtue, but today’s gospel reading seems to say that there are better things than just getting the job done.

Let’s take a closer look at the reading from Luke, which is revolutionary from top to bottom.  It starts off with Jesus entering a village and being welcomed into the home of two sisters, Mary and Martha.  That’s pretty shocking in itself, since Jesus is putting himself at risk for becoming ritually unclean by being so close to these two women.  And it was unheard of for a rabbi – a respected teacher – to speak only to women.  Sure, women were allowed to listen if they were part of a crowd, but Jesus entered their home and spent time only with them, teaching them, giving them His undivided attention.

From the outset Martha seems like the more “Christian” of the two, at least the way we tend to think of “Christian.”  She’s the one who invites Jesus into their home, which is a bold step of faith.  And in that part of the world hospitality is a huge thing, and if you invite someone in, you have to feed them.  So Martha had lots of things to do – like preparing the food for people to eat and making sure they have enough to drink, and all that.  She’s dutiful and responsible, which seems pretty Christian.

Mary, on the other hand, doesn’t lift a hand to help her sister.  All she does is sit at Jesus’s feet and listen to him, while Martha scurries around doing all the work.  And that obviously ticks Martha off, because when she’s had all she can take, she doesn’t even talk to Mary.  She goes straight to Jesus and says, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?  Tell her to help me.” 

Reading between the lines a little bit, you can bet that this isn’t the first time this has happened.  If it was, Martha would just give Mary a nudge and remind her of her proper duties.  But since Martha goes straight to Jesus, you can almost hear her saying, “Jesus, she always does this to me.  I do all the work, and she just sits there.”

So if Jesus were your average Christian, He probably would have said to Martha, “You are so right!  Mary’s not doing her part, and here you are doing all the work.  Mary, get up off the floor and start doing your fair share!”

But Jesus isn’t your average Christian, so instead He says, “Martha, Martha, you’re 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.”

Whenever I read this passage, I always think back to the time that Pam and I spent as missionaries in Uganda.  The culture over there is very much like the culture Jesus lived in: men get all the perks, and women do all the work.  And that’s inculcated in the people from an early age, as the little boys spend all day playing ball while the little girls are gathering firewood and doing laundry and helping their mothers cook the food. 

Just to give you an example, one time the hospital chaplain there invited us over to his house for lunch.  We gladly accepted, as I’d never met his wife and none kids. As it turned out, we never did meet them.  We were at his house for about three hours and had a wonderful meal with many courses, but we never saw his children.  And we assumed that the nice woman who was bringing out all the food was his wife, but he never introduced us to her, and finally when I asked, he said she was actually a student he’d hired to serve the food.  Evidently his wife was so busy cooking that she didn’t have time to even meet us, let alone sit and eat together.  As we returned home that day, we certainly understood the old Ugandan saying, “A woman can never be a guest.”

We tried to do a few things to level the playing field.  When the boys in the neighborhood came to our door every afternoon wanting to play, we would only give them one thing to play with: either crayons, balloons, or the instant camera.  But when the girls finally came by – after we went out and invited them several times – they could have any toy they wanted.  Eventually the boys began to wonder why the girls got special treatment just because of their gender, which is exactly what we were hoping they’d wonder.

And on our last Sunday in Uganda, the bishop asked both Pam and me to preach. I preached the main sermon in the Cathedral, and she preached afterward in the dining hall to a group largely made up of women.  And the text she chose – which should come as no surprise to anyone who knows Pam – was the story of Mary and Martha.  She challenged the people there to see that Jesus was encouraging usall to sit at His feet and listen, and it wasn’t fair that the men did that all day and the women never did that for a second.  And she got very specific, asking the men whether, if Jesus came to their house, they would let their wives come out of the kitchen and talk to Him.  I’ll give the men credit for one thing: they didn’t make a big secret about how they felt.  Because after Pam challenged them to do that, most of them just shook their heads as they looked around for another man to commiserate with.

When it comes to equality between men and women, we’re a bit ahead of Ugandan society, although we still have a long way to go.  But Jesus isn’t just talking about men and women – He’s talking to all of us about how we order our lives.  The reason He chooses two women to make the point to is that there probably weren’t any men who worked as hard as Martha, since they just sat around waiting for women to serve them. 

Jesus is trying to tell us that all the work we do doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if our hearts aren’t right with God. That’s hard for us to understand, because many of us Christians view hard work as our God-given responsibility. And in America, we define ourselves based on what we do. The first thing we ask somebody when we first meet them is, “So, what do you do?”  But I wonder how we’d respond if they responded, “I sit at the feet of Jesus and listen.”

I think about this stuff a fair amount, because I have three jobs and am pretty busy.  It’s easy to get caught up in all the work that needs to be done, especially because there’s an immediate penalty if you don’t get it done.  If you have a presentation you’re supposed to give and you show up with nothing prepared, you pay a price for it.  And if I stay at work late and don’t get home until after Catie’s gone to sleep, there’s no immediate penalty, and I might resolve to do better next time.

But Jesus is telling us that nothing is more important than spending time with the people we love.  He’s telling us that we can do without fancy food and can survive with an empty glass as long as we’re surrounded by the people we love.  He’s reminding us of the old saying that no one, on their deathbed, ever regretted not working enough.  They regret not appreciating life, not spending enough time smelling the roses and talking to their friends and praying and giving their child a bath. 

Over the years I’ve heard this idea expressed in a lot of cute ways.  One of my friends is fond of saying that we’re human beings, not human doings.  I once heard someone turn around the old saying, “Don’t just stand there, do something!”  Instead of that, my friend thought Jesus was telling us: “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

But the first time I really saw what Jesus was talking about was back in college, when a nun came to speak to our class. She was an old-style nun, too: dressed in the full habit and living in a very strict convent.  She talked about all the needs in the world: how so many people are starving, either for food or for meaning or for God. 

One of my classmates didn’t take too kindly to her preaching, especially since she never seemed to leave the convent, except to tell other people what to do.  He asked her, “So what do you do all day?”

And she said, “I pray.”

He said, “Shouldn’t you be out there solving all the problems you’re talking about?”

To which she responded, “But don’t you believe in the power of prayer?”

That day I saw that Christians spend most of their time acting like Martha and thinking that’s what Jesus wants.  But Jesus doesn’t want that.  He wants us to listen to Him, even when there’s work to be done.  He wants us to spend time with the people we love, even when there’s a price to pay, because the price of missing out on the lives of our spouse and siblings and children and friends is infinitely higher.  He wants us to see that the world’s priorities are upside down: we weren’t put here on earth to work, praying only in our spare time.  We were put here to pray, and listen, and learn, and love – and our work should flow from that. 

And there’s always time to change.  It’d be nice to think that Martha understood what Jesus was talking about, and that she sat down at Jesus’s feet and listened to Him. We can’t know for sure if she did, but we can make sure that we do.  Because I’m sure that there are a lot of things that we should do this afternoon: like mow the lawn, or balance the checkbook.  But Jesus is telling us to stop, and sit, and listen to the people we love.  Spend time with them.  Care for them. 

The lawns and the checkbooks will still be there tomorrow.  They’ll always be there.  The people we love may not be.

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