I mostly like to cook. I like what can be creatively achieved in the kitchen and the care it involves. When I lived in the rectory I spent a lot of time in the kitchen. Yes, I made meals but I also read the mail there, leafed through magazines, prayed there and watched the news. While I cleaned up, I thought a lot as well.
I like to entertain. I do it well in point of fact. I depend on my ability to get things out of the kitchen in one given moment, hot and on the table. I don’t mind refilling bowls and platters. I remember to get the coffee on and the dessert out, if it has been planned. The plates are removed and the leftovers put in the fridge.
Often I overhear the leisure of those at table, the conversation, while I manage the details. I do not resent my role, except when I am tired. Then I realize I am missing the stories, the people at ease. Then sometimes there comes that resentment. Couldn’t one of you help a little? Talk kindly to me while I am in the kitchen managing the details. Why is it that I am here … being hospitable? What are you all thinking? It is not a good moment when this sets in.
So it is from this place that I understand Martha. She knows the ministry of hospitality. In her world there were no easy helps. She feels alone and burdened by what is expected of her and what she expects of herself.
You don’t have to be planning a supper party to get her. Anyone who ever takes on a task at church knows her feeling at some point, say a parish supper or coffee hour. You take it on, usually with willingness. You plan the meal, do the shopping, execute it, serve it…often with some help. You know the rhythm: we eat, we laugh, we tell stories, we do our business, say our prayer.
You get to the end and it is amazing the people who do not notice the clean up. Too often it is assumed that the usual people will clean up. Others pack up the leftovers, or don’t, and drift away home. If you are in that faithful crew who in good conscience cannot just walk out…well sometimes you resent it. You wish others would wake up, pick up a towel, bump you out of the way, and go to work. You hear Martha stir within, “Lord, do you not care that I am left to do all the work by myself?” Sometimes your Martha sticks her head out of the emotional kitchen and says, “Does anybody notice me?” “You are so engaged in meaningful stuff and I am feeling pretty alone, taken for granted! Will someone, you Mary, get off your behind, help!”
And it’s not just from the kitchen that we feel this, ask this. The call comes from the Sunday school floor, the stewardship group, the counters and bookkeepers, the rector trying to create education, those who care for the altars and the flowers and the hungry at your church door. So many times we feel Martha rising up within the areas of ministry that we assume for the whole church.
From this place we can understand how Martha felt as Jesus said, “Martha, Martha, you are distracted by many things…” Can you get a grip here?
It is important to catch the context of this encounter. We are in the portion of Luke’s Gospel about discipleship. Last week we heard from the lawyer who desires eternal life, and knows the law -- love God overall and neighbor as self. When he wants to limit who qualifies as neighbor, he is introduced to the nameless Samaritan. The Samaritan had every reason to walk away from a wounded Jew -- with their history of hate -- but he does not limit his sense of neighbor. He labors to restore the man’s wholeness. Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.”
If only George Zimmerman had noticed this lesson over against his notion of limiting. He and Treyvon would be nameless, neighborly Floridians perhaps. Or their encounter might have reconciled a neighborhood by example. We cannot undo this moment in history. But we can choose to grant the title, neighbor, when we might previously have chosen differently.
So last week Jesus named an outsider as our leader, a Samaritan.
This week, he names a woman who sets herself down in the place of a disciple to listen. She has chosen a non-doing role, a being role for just now. She sits at Jesus’ feet for now to grow her sense of wellbeing, her Christ center, her God core. She, in her silence, calls us to attention, to the place of listening. She, in her silence, claims women have as much right as men, and Jesus invites Martha to take note of this.
Martha, too often, gets a bad rap here, as if her busyness is so wrong. It is not. Rather she is being offered insight. Resting into Jesus' teaching, being, presence is not optional but essential.
Martha is the modern busy person. Trying to accomplish much, dutiful, balancing much, faithful to the ordinary in life, but also losing self and center.
When Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things.” He names her reality. We hear it as judgment but what if we hear it simply as reality pointed to. What if all that is meant here is; “Martha notice the toll you are paying? Notice you can sometimes choose a discipleship of listening, being.” Might you have more depth?
The key is here: "...there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."
What was it that Mary grasped and Martha missed? Not that daily duties are to be ignored. Rather Jesus wants her full attention at a strategic point. Has she noticed she too is offered a role as disciple, a close follower? Mary has. This is what will not be taken away.
Jesus comes to offer her…us...deeper life. He wants her to listen, us as well. Be attentive, find depth, accept a fuller life, live it. Perhaps this is the day she is to hang up her oven mitts, forget all who want to be fed, let go of hospitality's function…rest in Jesus. May be she did just this. Scripture falls silent as to her response.
And here, I guess, is the rub. We do need to function and be functional. Sometimes we do that best when we stop, pay attention to our need to rest in Jesus. Pray…study…listen…check our rhythm. We need to plan a pause, check our pace, breathe.
We are at our best both Martha and Mary, engaged in a balance of doing and being.
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