Weekly Sermon
SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
PROPER 11C2
FR. JERRY THOMPSON
ST. JAMES’ CHURCH, FREMONT, NE
This story of Martha and Mary is used in a variety ways, some more helpful than others.
On occasion I hear someone comment, “I’m more of a Martha.” This statement is usually said to indicate that the person tends to focus more on working actively for God and the church than on praying. On the other hand, sometimes someone will comment that they are “more of a Mary,” indicating that they tend to focus on the work of prayer rather than other kinds of ministries.
I don’t think it’s worth spending too much time analyzing those statements – they’re usually said by faithful people as a characterization of themselves as they see themselves.
However, it is worth noting that either of them can be used as excuses. The person who says, “I’m more of a Martha, that’s just who I am,” might very well be adding the unspoken words, “so I don’t need to pray.” Or, conversely, the person who says, “I’m more of a Mary, that’s just who I am,” sometimes is leaving unspoken the words, “so I’ll leave the other kind of work that needs to be done to someone else.” That’s the sort of attitude that Martha is accusing Mary of in our gospel reading.
The reality is that each of the two – the work of prayer and the work of active ministry –
each is important if we’re going to live as deeply as possible into the Christian life of following Jesus.
Whether or not you’re aware of it, that’s a very Benedictine statement – that we need both - and of course my life personally has been deeply affected by the Benedictine tradition – so that’s what you get!
It’s important to have both prayer and active ministry as part of our lives; that’s the way we come to know the love of Jesus most profoundly. Some of us are called more deeply to a life of prayer and some of us are called more deeply to a life of active ministry. But we need both to follow Jesus, who himself is the incarnation of prayer and active ministry.
We see Jesus actively working a lot of the time – teaching, healing, being born, dying.
And we also see him constantly going off by himself to commune deeply with our Father – so that he can do all those other good works faithfully and in accordance with our Father’s will, indeed so that he knows what that will is.
Without the communion of prayer, none of us can follow God’s will; we can’t touch the lives of people as we are called to touch them.
That human reality means we must sometimes make some tough choices. I myself chose to leave the monastery for two primary reasons. One of those reasons was that the burden of active ministry had become so heavy that I was no longer able to pray as I am being called to pray.
Now that I am in a different situation, without the structure of prayer as it existed at the monastery, I find myself facing different challenges, challenges with which I am familiar from all those years before entering the monastery and challenges akin to what each of you face every day.
I must deliberately structure my day in such a way that I carve out the time to pray. And I must discipline myself to do things like follow the structure I have created, as well as other disciplines like not turning on the television or some other screen available to me,
so that the time God has given me is spent communing with our Father, with our Lord Jesus, and with the Holy Spirit who broods over us waiting to sweep into our hearts when we open them.
These are deliberate choices I must make; but they are also deliberate choices you must make – in order for all of us to follow Jesus faithfully, so that we know within our souls what the Lord would have us do with our lives.
That’s true individually, of course, but the same is true for us as a church community.
All those individual prayers inform the way we shape and follow Jesus as a community when we gather. And the more we pray together as a community, seeking together the will of God for our community, the stronger our understanding of Jesus’ guidance will be within our corporate heart as our corporate spirit informs our actions.
After forty years of working with congregations, I state without hesitation that one of the serious issues in the church today is that people don’t pray enough to be informed by the Holy Spirit, both individually and corporately. The result is that we are inadequately shaped by God’s Spirit for the vital work we have to do.
What then happens is that we end up making decisions not based on the guidance of Jesus but based on our own broken human reason alone. Our broken human reason alone is too often treated as the primary authority in both our individual and corporate lives – our broken human reason rather than the living God. Whereas the Holy Spirit of God will move us to do things that will surprise even ourselves, our broken human reason will rarely do so. Our reason is primarily interested in seeing after ourselves.
All that can change, of course, at any moment. It can change at this moment – if we choose to make it so.
And this moment is all we truly have. A series of “this moments,” one after another,
in which we choose to seek Jesus or not to seek him. And then to follow him or not to follow him.
And the choice, of course, makes all the difference, in our lives, in our church’s life,
and in the life of everyone we touch, in the life of the world.
After Martha complains to Jesus in our gospel reading, our Lord says to her, “Martha, you are distracted by many things.” In the Benedictine tradition, much is made of distractions that draw us away from the primary relationship in our lives, our relationship with Jesus, from listening for his direction so that we may follow him more perfectly.
The primary relationship in our lives is with Jesus. Not with ourselves. Not with our spouse. That’s important to recognize. For the follower of Jesus, our relationship with self and spouse grows out of our relationship with Jesus and is an expression of our relationship with Jesus. To reverse that order is to make an idol of ourselves or our spouse. And I don’t care how wonderful our spouse is, they don’t deserve that!
Of course the same is true for our work. No matter how holy our work is, and sometimes it’s very sacred, our work always grows out of our relationship with Jesus. What he calls us to do and the way we do it. That’s why Jesus goes on to say to Martha, “Mary has chosen the better part; “I’m not going to take that away from her.”
In order for Martha to know what work is truly important - in order for any of us to know what work is truly important - what’s truly sacred, what’s truly holy, in order for us to follow that Spirit of God and not some other spirit, we need to know the source of all holiness, our Lord Jesus Christ; without being fed by him, with him, we’re just making up life by ourselves. And that can be dangerous not only to our own souls but to the lives of those whom we touch. It is always way too easy to confuse our own desires and passions with the desires and passions of God.
It happens with the apostles, and they know Jesus quite well.
That should be a caution to us all.
And so we enter into all those fleeting moments before us, all those moments in which we have the amazing and audacious choice: will we actively seek Jesus, will we actively seek to know him, seek to love him and his way, will we seek to follow him?
May we choose well. May we choose consciously and deliberately. May we pray and may we serve. May we choose for the well-being of our souls, and to the glory of God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen.