Archives for 2013

A Friendly Challenge

September 8, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Paul’s letter to Philemon
preached on September 8, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It’s hard to be angry with a friend. Well, actually, let me a bit clearer: being angry with a friend is hard! It’s not that our friends and family—those we care about and who care about us, regardless of the relationship—don’t make us angry; it’s more that when we do get angry at them, it’s hard to figure out what to do with it.

I learned all this the hard way, as I suspect many of you have, too. Once or twice or maybe even three times—no more of course!—I made the mistake of actually expressing the anger I was feeling toward a friend, which made me feel better but just made my friend angry at me. It usually just became a vicious cycle that ended only when we took a long time to talk about it or one of us just gave up entirely on the relationship. So over time, I’ve learned that there are ways that I can express my anger and frustration with my friends in small and gentle ways, appealing to their better nature from my own better nature so that we can be honest with one another while also showing grace and generosity as we deal with our flaws together.

Paul’s letter to Philemon that we heard this morning is one of those strange places where we see this kind of honesty and gracious confrontation. Philemon is a very personal letter, unusual in the New Testament because it is not just written from one person to a community but written from one person to another person. While Paul certainly mentioned others, Apphia and Archippus and “the church in [Philemon’s] house,” they were just the carbon copies on this note. Paul was writing first and foremost to Philemon himself, sending a very personal and passionate appeal that we have the privilege to eavesdrop on nearly two thousand years later!

It couldn’t have been an easy letter for Paul to write. He clearly respected Philemon a great deal. Philemon was an important figure in the life of the early church in his community—he was the host of their gatherings, after all!—and he was wise and wealthy. But Paul was just as much an important figure in Philemon’s life. He had been the one to present the gospel to him, and Paul’s continuing leadership in the church was clearly important to Philemon even though Paul was now in prison. Beyond this relationship, though, their lives collided beyond the church when Onesimus arrived on the scene. Onesimus had been Philemon’s slave, and for whatever reason he had left him and become a friend and companion and servant to Paul.

In the Roman world, slavery was a pretty common institution, and Onesimus was certainly not the only early Christian who was a slave. While nowadays almost all Christians condemn slavery outright, the leaders of the early church refused to do so, and it took far too long for our forebears in the faith to step up and condemn this horrific institution in its many forms, so we still must seek God’s forgiveness of our continuing complicity in this great injustice. The slavery practiced in these Roman times was much like what is likely familiar to many of us from our own nation’s history. While the dehumanizing practices of chattel slavery in the Americas took millions of women, men, and children from Africa and forcibly transplanted them to North and South America without their consent, Roman slavery was not built on these ideas of racial superiority and importation of labor but rather on the power relationship between the master and the slave. The master had ultimate, final, and unquestioned control over the slave’s whole life. In a technical sense, slaves remained human beings, but they were ultimately property. While slaves might work in fields as varied as agriculture, household service, artisinal crafts, and even medicine, historian Paul Veyne notes, “personal ties were highly unequal, and it was this inequality that was common to all slaves… Whether powerful or wretched, all slaves were spoken to in the tone and terms used in speaking to children and inferior beings.” (A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, p. 58) Ultimately, the institution of slavery in Roman times and in all times since makes it clear that slaves are first and foremost property, and their relationships to their masters are rooted in the ultimate power of masters to buy and sell them.

So when Paul writes to Philemon here suggesting that he release his slave Onesimus, Paul is challenging his friend to take up a very different way. Paul doesn’t attack the institution of slavery here or elsewhere—it would take another 1800 years for most Christians to insist that it is not appropriate for one human being to claim to own another, and even now some who share our faith aren’t fully on board with the implications of this! Instead of attacking this institution, Paul confronts his friend directly and asks him to do what might have actually been harder: he asks Philemon to release Onesimus so that Onesimus can continue to assist Paul in his life and ministry. But Paul doesn’t just leave it there. He not only tells Philemon that he should release Onesimus but goes on to insist that Philemon should show Onesimus the same welcome that he would show Paul, that he should offer him the humanity, respect, and love that befit a brother in Christ, not an item of property.

Paul’s brutal and direct honesty and deep ethical appeal here could not have been easy to make. He, a poor prisoner of the Roman empire, was writing to someone who had great power and wealth, yet he had the gumption to suggest that Philemon swallow his pride and treat a disobedient runaway slave as a full-fledged relation in Christ, not just in some world yet to come but in the here and now. Paul insisted that the power his friend had over another of his friends was inappropriate and had no place in their lives as followers of Jesus Christ, and he challenged to Philemon to change things so that they would all have a deeper experience of God’s grace.

We don’t know how Philemon responded. There’s no record of whether he freed Onesimus or not. We don’t know if he threw a fit and never spoke to Paul again or if he welcomed his friend’s advice and found a new and deeper relationship with his former slave based on their common faith. Whatever the outcome of this initial appeal, Paul’s challenge extends across the ages into our own time. While we do not claim to own slaves who need to be freed, I suspect we do have a few relationships where the power dynamic needs some adjustment. There are most likely some places in our lives where we could stand to be more generous to those who are in need. There are certainly opportunities for us to give up the power and privilege that we have so that others can experience the fullness of God’s grace. And there are almost certainly times and places when we say that we are sisters and brothers in Christ and yet don’t take the deep and real consequences of those words seriously.

In these places and in others, we are called to say the difficult words and initiate the difficult conversations, to be honest with our friends when their words make us angry or their actions don’t embody the faith we know they have, to speak up when no one else is saying what everyone knows someone is thinking, to step up and insist that we all are responsible for caring for the least of these among us, even to demand that our nation and our world live out a new different way that doesn’t presume that more violence will bring us peace. Yet we can’t rush in like a bulldozer with these challenges—even Paul’s challenge to Philemon was rooted in their deep relationship and grounded in the faith that they shared. Like those places where we need to express our frustration with our friends, we are usually more likely to be heard if we approach these conversations with grace and generosity, not letting grace mean that others get a free pass but standing up with gentle yet firm insistence that justice for the least of these must prevail.

So when we become frustrated with our friends or our world, when we long for injustice to be righted and hope restored, when we look for a new way of life to take hold here and now, may we share words of justice and hope with our friends and our world, speaking out of our care and concern for one another, offering a friendly challenge to respond to injustice, and seeking a deeper peace in our lives and our world until Christ comes to make all things new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

The Unchanging Christ

September 1, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
preached on September 1, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

You’d think that such a powerful statement would be the beginning of an extensive theological discourse, or at least a long paragraph explaining exactly how this makes sense! But it is not. This provocative line from our reading in Hebrews this morning reads almost like an afterthought, tossed into a mix of other comments just for good measure. It follows a number of simple, wise, common-sense exhortations about how to live as we follow Jesus.

Live in mutual love. Show hospitality to all people. Pray for those in prison and who face torture. Honor the commitments of marriage. Avoid greed and jealousy. Follow the examples of faithful leaders.

All these things make sense, and they’re good advice for everyone to follow, but for me at least, they aren’t quite so directly connected to this grand statement of the timelessness of Jesus. Still this sentence jumps off the page in this reading and in this strange and interesting book of Hebrews, whose authorship and audience are unknown and yet have shaped the church for centuries.

These words are a great statement of truth, really—Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Yet in their simplicity they leave so much for us to figure out. Ultimately I think people hear these words in one of two ways. One interpretation of them gives them as much weight for our lives as for our understanding of Jesus. Since Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever, so we who follow him ought to live in the same way as he did in his time. According to this view, we should not yield to any of the world’s changing understandings of things. We must avoid being tainted by progress, since there is nothing greater than this one who is the same yesterday and today and forever. And in this view, the only change that is welcome is change that restores things to the way they used to be when Jesus himself set it up. This interpretation of these words from Hebrews is very faithful to the exact words of the text taken on their own, but there is something very limiting about this way of thinking. I know for myself that my experiences of God in my life have changed based on what else has been going on in my life, so even though Jesus doesn’t change, my experience of him certainly does. To me, this human attempt to insist that we experience God in the same way now as Christians in the late first century actually limits the power of God to be fully and truly present in our changing world.

And so there is thankfully a second way of thinking about these great words from Hebrews. This second interpretation affirms that God in Christ is unchanging, yet it also recognizes that the way that we understand and experience God can and does and even should change. If Jesus Christ is just as alive and relevant today as he was when he walked the earth, then we must try to sort out what his life, ministry, death, and resurrection mean in our world, not just in the day and age that he lived. We can learn from the wisdom of our world, from science and technology, from medicine and psychology, from literature and historical reflection, and from countless other places of similar insight, for even though they are very much marked by our human wisdom, they remain a part of God’s good creation and so can give us insight into who God is and how God is at work in our midst. But even beyond this, we are different people than when we first began to follow Jesus, so we will hear Jesus differently and follow Jesus differently. When we live this way, we don’t so much try to recover a past way of life in faith or try to find out exactly who Jesus was in another day and age so we can exactly duplicate him, but instead we seek to understand how we are called to follow our unchanging Christ in our changing world.

So how do we do this? How do we sort out what it means for us today that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever”? How do we live this reality out each and every day in our world? I think there is great guidance in the words attributed to John Robinson, the pastor who spoke to the Pilgrims as they departed for the New World, insisting that “he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy word.” With each passing day, we can learn new things about what the unchanging Christ means to us, about this new truth and light breaking forth from God, about how Jesus impacts our lives in new and different ways, about how we will always know his presence, about what he calls us to be and to do, and about how we can be a part of his unchanging love, grace, and mercy each and every day.

As we follow this unchanging Christ, we will see new ways to live out the commands lifted up in Hebrews 13, not just living them out in the same way that the first hearers of them might but living them out appropriately and effectively in our own world. We can change how we live, not back to an old way but embodying a new way. We can look for new ways to show mutual love in Christ to our world without exception. We can show hospitality to all strangers, not just those who look like us or might fit in well in our community but to anyone and everyone who responds to our bold invitation of welcome. We can not only pray for those in prison or facing torture but also work for better treatment of them. We can deepen our understanding of the commitments of marriage and work so that all can benefit from this holy gift. We can step back from our culture of protection and hoarding to share our abundance with others and trust that God will provide for all our needs. We can honor the leaders of our communities by challenging them to keep the needs of those who may not always be visible at the forefront. We can look for broader and deeper ways to offer our praise to God in our changing world. And we can put our own gifts at the service of God each and every day, not just when we have time but in all our days, trusting that God will make even the smallest seed bear great fruit.

All along the way, we will even go farther than just these basic commands to see and hear and live in new ways. Our eyes will be opened to those who are different from us and who yet still need God’s loving care, even when we don’t understand them or struggle to be in relationship with them. Our hearts will be attuned to the love of God expressed for all peoples and nations, regardless of any human categories or characterizations. And our lips will speak words of peace not just for ourselves but for all people of the world, never responding to violence with more violence but always hoping and working and praying and trusting that God will guide our feet into the way of peace.

Ultimately, we can put these words about our unchanging Christ into their best setting here at this table. While the look of it may change from time to time, while we may partake of this bread and cup in different ways at different times in different places and with different people, while we may try to divide ourselves based on who is welcome here or how we understand what is happening here, it is actually at this table where the Christ who is the same yesterday and today and forever always waits to meet all of us and share this feast with everyone. And as we encounter him here, we are strengthened for this journey of living out our life with him in all these new ways.

So as we make our way to this table, may our unchanging Christ speak ever more clearly to our changing world and in our ever-changing lives, that our eyes, ears, and hearts might be opened to his new and deepening call yesterday and today and forever until he comes again to make all things new. Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

What’s Your Sabbath?

August 25, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 58:9b-14 and Luke 13:10-17
preached on August 25, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

“Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.”

It’s one of the Ten Commandments, so it ought to be pretty important. But I’ll ask you to be honest here—when was the last time you took a Sabbath? When was the last time you took a day to rest and reconnect with yourself, your friends and family, and God? When did you last take a day and turn off the TV and ignore the phone and email and do absolutely no work whatsoever? If your life is anything like mine, it has been quite a while! Even on days when I back away from all the things that incessantly pull me in twenty different directions, even when I can stay in bed until 9:00 because there is nothing on the calendar until noon, even when I can put off everything else that needs to be done, something inside nags at me, insisting that I need to catch up on something, get ahead on worship planning, or return that phone call that I’ve ignored all week long.

In this hyperconnected, hyperactive age, when we try to squeeze 25 hours of stuff into the 24 hours we have been given, the command to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy is an incredible gift given to us by God so that we can be a little more human than we otherwise would be, yet so often it seems that we would rather forget the Sabbath and fill it with so many other things. It hasn’t always been this way. Our reading this morning from the gospel according to Luke suggests that, in Jesus’ day and age, the Sabbath was almost over-observed. Based on what we see happening here, it sounds like the people of Jesus’ day and age weren’t allowed to do anything on the Sabbath! Certainly people were encouraged to go to a synagogue, but that’s about it. It is clear from just these few verses that by Jesus’ time the Jewish community had developed an extensive interpretation of exactly what “work” was prohibited on the Sabbath. If you talk to any practicing Jew today, you will quickly learn that those interpretations have extended to our own time, with wide variations among the different denominations of Jewish faith and practice even today.

All of these rules and regulations that give a more exact definition of the “work” prohibited on the Sabbath stand very much in the background of today’s story from Luke, where we see Jesus fulfilling his Sabbath day obligation and teaching in a synagogue, only to be interrupted by a woman who had been crippled for eighteen years. When Jesus saw her ailment, he didn’t tell her to come back to him tomorrow or even at sundown—he called her over to him right away, laid his hands on her, and healed her.

The leader of the synagogue was not happy about this. Jesus had healed this woman in his synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he would be held responsible! This leader wondered why Jesus couldn’t have just waited and done this at a time that wouldn’t be so controversial, that wouldn’t put the synagogue in the spotlight and raise so many questions about things that were already controversial enough.

But Jesus was equally frustrated. He reminded the leader of the synagogue and anyone else who would listen that some work does have to be done on the Sabbath. Even though the animals are specifically included in the commandment’s instructions about who should not work, they still have to be cared for and given water. Their basic needs do not have to wait until the end of the Sabbath. Jesus saw this moment of healing to be no different. This woman had been in bondage for eighteen years, and there was no need to make her wait even one more day to be freed and healed.

Ultimately, Jesus’ argument won the day. The woman had already been healed, and the crowd was very much on his side. He used the simple logic of personal experience to argue that even the most faithful observance of the Sabbath required that some things still be done. I think you could argue, though, that this was the beginning of a slippery slope that leads us to the dreadful place about Sabbath where many of us are today. For centuries, the church encouraged if not enforced relatively strict Sabbath observances—some perhaps even more strict than what Jesus encountered—but nowadays the practice of Sabbath has nearly disappeared among most Christians. Stores that were once closed every Sunday—or at least every Sunday morning—to give their employees time to rest and worship now open earlier and earlier to maximize their revenue. The Sunday morning hours that were once set apart so that everyone could attend worship are now open and available for other things, and the rest of the day seems to be set aside (at least six months of the year) for the true American religion, pro football.

But even more than this, we let all our days become full to overflowing, and we leave no time for Sabbath of any sort on any day. Yet then we scratch our heads and wonder why we are so exhausted and have no time to rest and recover. More often than not, we don’t set any time aside to rest and reconnect with ourselves, our family and friends, and our God. If Jesus stepped into our world today, I suspect that he would immediately call us to set aside all our work on the Sabbath even though he insisted that healing this woman on the Sabbath was the right and proper thing to do! His actions here with the woman did not criticize the Sabbath but rather a legalistic interpretation of it. Jesus certainly knew that the Sabbath was an important and freeing thing, and he never hesitated to take time away from the hustle and bustle of his ministry to think and pray and rest.

Ultimately, for Jesus the Sabbath seemed to be a time of freedom—freedom to step back from the demands of the world and simply be the beloved human beings God has created us to be, freedom to reengage with God and one another in new and playful ways that set aside for just one day out of each week the demands of our busy world, and ultimately freedom from bondage like this woman faced, the bondage of illness but also busyness and anxiety that permeate our lives and our world. Proper observance of the Sabbath like this is not a chore to be dreaded but a gift for us, a time and space when we can step back and get a little bit of perspective about the things that seem to overwhelm us.

Like most of the Christian life, I am increasingly convinced that remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy is not about what we do not do but about what we do do. Keeping the Sabbath holy means setting aside one day per week to focus on the life-giving stuff with our families, our friends, our selves, and our God. Keeping the Sabbath holy means carving out at least one intentional moment every week when we gather with other people of faith and share in prayer, praise, and proclamation. And keeping the Sabbath holy means that we listen to the call of the prophet Isaiah as we heard this morning:

If you refrain from trampling the sabbath,
from pursuing your own interests on my holy day,
if you call the sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
serving your own interests,
or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the Lord,
and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy takes practice. Sometimes we’ll err on the side of the leader of the synagogue and be a little too focused on what we can’t do, and other times we’ll fit in very well with our world’s attitude that the Sabbath doesn’t matter at all. But God calls us to set this day set apart, to make time in our busy lives to reconnect with God, others, and ourselves, to step back from our world and try to see how even God rested one day out of the week of creation, and to see how remembering the Sabbath can set us free from everything that limits us and keeps us from being the full people God has called us to be.

So what is your Sabbath practice? How do you remember the Sabbath in your life? How do you keep this or another day holy every week? As the summer comes to an end and we prepare to enter another year in our life together, as the cycles of our world reset a bit and we start to settle into new patterns for the fall, as we as a congregation adjust to having a pastor in the office only three days per week, I hope and pray that you’ll keep the idea of Sabbath in your minds, that you’ll consider how setting aside one day out of each week for rest and renewal and worship can make us free for so many other things, and that you’ll welcome the challenge to make this practice more real in your lives in the months ahead.

So may God help us all to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy, not so much by sorting out the details of what is and isn’t allowed on this day but by recognizing that it brings us wholeness and freedom in our lives and in our world so that we might help make God’s justice, peace, and love a reality each and every day. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Bait and Switch?

August 18, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 12:49-56
preached on August 18, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

When you think of Jesus, what kind of person comes to mind? Do you picture him as a kind and gentle man, always offering a nice word to everyone he encounters, caring for children, and never raising his voice or showing a temper? Or do you imagine him like a fiery preacher, ranting and raving against all the bad things in the world, and always making people mad about something or other? Maybe I just saw too many pictures of a gentle and kind Jesus in Sunday School as a child, but I sure have something like that first image stuck in my head, and I suspect I am not alone. The song “Jesus Loves Me” that marks so many of our images of God suggests a kind and gentle man, not a fiery preacher. The gifted teacher and healer we hear about in the gospels surely only offered positive words that never condemned anyone, right? The quiet and gentle baby that we remember every Christmas was born to be the “Prince of Peace,” not one who stirs the pot constantly!

We could go a lifetime with these simple and peaceful images of Jesus, and many of us do—but then Luke confronts us with the Jesus from our reading this morning. The Jesus who speaks here sure seems like a very different person than the one we sang about a month or so ago when Cristian so wonderfully led us in singing “Jesus Loves Me.” This Jesus doesn’t offer a gentle or kind word—he speaks of fire and division! It feels a bit like a classic bait and switch move, as if Jesus has lured us in with the promise of simple love and grace and then tells us that that is all out of stock—with only fire, brimstone, and family conflict available instead!

His words here are intense and direct. He starts out with a simple promise tied to a lament:

I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!

Now it is certainly reasonable for Jesus to suggest a fire to purify the problematic areas around us, but I for one am not really interested in him bringing great destruction to the entire earth. Either way, his words here are not easy to hear.

Then he turns to the things that are ahead for him. As Luke tells the story, we’re right in the middle of an intense time for Jesus. He has been doing his basic ministry of teaching and healing for quite some time, and after an encounter with Moses and Elijah on the mount of Transfiguration, he has set his face toward Jerusalem, knowing that great challenges await him on the journey. So after he promises to bring fire to the earth, Jesus declares that he has “a baptism with which to be baptized,” and that he faces incredible stress until it is completed. He clearly knows that that road ahead for him leads to the cross, and because of that he has little patience for anyone who doesn’t share his commitment to the new things that God is doing in the world.

After this, he clarifies his intentions once and for all:

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two and against three; they will be divided:

father against son and son against father,
mother against daughter and daughter against mother,
mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.

This is the ultimate bait and switch of this text, I think— the one who has repeatedly been declared the “Prince of Peace,” the one who has said that he comes to inaugurate a new and different way of life in the midst of the deep uncertainty of his time, the one whose mother sang of his mercy and strength even before his birth, for this one to suddenly declare that he comes not to bring peace but rather division is a dramatic reversal!

It seems that we have been deceived into thinking that Jesus is up to one thing when in fact he is doing something entirely different. We have been deceived that Jesus will make all our relationships stronger and better right away. We have been deceived into thinking that Jesus wants us to put our families first and ask questions about it all later. We have been deceived that following Jesus will lead us simply and easily into eternal life.

You see, when you get down to it, the content of Jesus’ message is so radical that it can’t help but bring a divisive response from some people. If we take just the words of his mother’s song, the Magnificat, that help to open Luke’s gospel, there are a whole bunch of potentially angry people: the proud who have been scattered in the thoughts of their hearts, the powerful who have been brought down from their thrones because the lowly have been lifted up, and the rich who have been sent away empty as the hungry have been filled with good things.

All this is only the beginning of what Jesus is up to. As commentator Richard Carlson puts it,

The divinely wrought peace that Jesus inaugurates and bestows involves the establishment of proper relationships of mercy, compassion, and justice between God and humanity. Not everyone, however, wants or welcomes this divine peace plan. Hence the initiation of Jesus’ peace agenda also triggers contentious disunity and fissures among all facets of society, right down to the societal core of the household. (“Exegetical Perspective on Luke 12:49-56,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 3, p. 361, 363)

So will we be deceived? Will we be deceived into thinking that that we can only focus on Jesus’ message of love without talking about the things that that message condemns? Will we be deceived into thinking that the “Prince of Peace” who comes to bring people together will not stand up to those who continue to beat the drums of war? Will we be deceived into putting temporal relationships with family and friends above the call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God? It is easy to fall into these traps and set aside the more challenging parts of the gospel message, but when we listen to Jesus and take these words seriously, something can and will change for us and our world.

When we listen to him closely here, we will recognize that a full embodiment of Jesus’ way of life will make some people angry, maybe even some people we deeply love. But we will also remember that this is to be expected, and we can’t let others’ responses to our actions turn us back from following him. I find strength for doing exactly this in the example of the thousands upon thousands of women and men who practice nonviolent resistance, where quiet and gentle people simply seeking to exercise their rights to assemble, protest injustice, and live with the full dignity of their humanity insist with words and actions that they will not be moved, that they will not be silent until all people are recognized as children of God, that no one of us can be truly free until all of us are free. In the protests of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the Moral Mondays celebrated each week this summer in North Carolina, and so many other such things, these women and men do not set out to bring conflict but show that the divine intentions of justice, peace, and mercy stand in direct conflict with so many of the practices of our world and so deserve our condemnation. In drawing attention to the injustices of our world, these people who live out the message of Jesus in this way remind us that those who claim a place of power and privilege for only a few do not speak for all.

And so Jesus’ strong words here can give us the courage to speak up with so many others around us about the places that need the purifying fire of the Holy Spirit, about the people who face a challenging road of uncertainty as they follow the path that Jesus set out for us, about the injustice that remains so pervasive in our city, state, nation, and world, and about the depth of peace that still evades us even when we seek and pursue it each and every day. Jesus calls us, even us, to be a part of God’s new thing in our world, to speak up against everything that gets in its way, and to step into the world proclaiming this way of justice, peace, mercy, and love every day.

So may we trust even the Jesus who seems to bait and switch us and not be deceived along the way, for the path is not easy, but he walked it before us and walks it with us as we join in his work of making all things new until that day when he comes again. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

It’s Easy to Be Martha

July 28, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 10:38-42
preached on July 28, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I know lots of people like Mary and Martha. You know, those people who get along great in normal times but whose personalities simply clash when things get crazy. Stress rarely brings out the best in us, and even those who thrive under pressure end up having to deal with people who aren’t quite so composed when things get complicated.

Now we don’t know much about Mary and Martha’s relationship beyond what we hear in these five verses, but for me at least it’s incredibly easy to fill in all the gaps about both of them with the details that we are given. Martha is clearly the consummate hostess, always with fresh bread to share with guests, a clean house ready to welcome anyone who might stop by, and an industrious spirit that is focused on making sure all the work gets done. Her sister Mary is the more laid-back one, the one always reading a book or sharing a story with a friend, ready to talk to her sister’s guests and hang on their every word.

Even when we know just these few things, our reading from Luke this morning sets up Mary and Martha for trouble one day when Jesus stopped by. Martha had invited him into her home, surely intrigued by his new message about God’s love and justice, though I suspect she also was glad to have the honor of showing off her hospitality to a local celebrity. Like any guest, hosting Jesus would have required a great deal of preparation and care, for offering hospitality was a very important gesture in the Roman world and a big part of what this teacher was talking about as he journeyed through the countryside. Plus, this teacher had quite an entourage: even if his twelve core disciples provided for themselves—highly unlikely—the hostess would still need to offer them a welcome to her home, and there were surely others who were looking to spend more time with him, too, and might try to force their way in for dinner.

The way Luke tells the story, Martha was clearly counting on her sister Mary to help her out with all the hospitality and arrangements, but they each had a different idea of how they should be interacting with the guests, and based on this story, I bet they didn’t host parties together very often. Martha spent her time in the kitchen, preparing the food, offering all the guests something to drink, and making sure that everything was in order and all the guests were comfortable. Now while Martha was working in the kitchen, Mary spent her time mingling with the guests, finally stopping to listen to Jesus for a while and to hear for herself his teachings that were causing such an uproar in the countryside. The scene seems easy to imagine even in our own time: Martha, darting in and out of the kitchen, worried about how to make her guests feel comfortable and welcome; and Mary, sitting over in the corner at Jesus’ feet, schmoozing with the guest of honor and hanging on his every word.

Martha was understandably frustrated. Mary, her most important helper and sister, disappeared from her side at the moment she needed her the most, leaving her with all the work to be done while Mary just sat and listened. Martha could not just abandon all the things to be done—Jesus had come to visit, and his miraculous powers weren’t terribly effective with matters of cleaning the house and serving dinner! However, the text says something more about Martha. She wasn’t just busy, focused on offering hospitality to Jesus and her other guests. Luke tells us that she “was distracted by her many tasks.” While Mary sat and listened to what Jesus had to say, Martha was worried: about how the flowers looked, how the food tasted, and how the whole evening was going. She ended up ignoring the guest of honor even as she sought to provide for him. She let her tasks get in the way of the purpose of the visit.

So Martha was swamped, and Mary wasn’t helping her any. I suspect that we all have moment when we need some help and look to our closest friends only to find them outside playing, at home watching TV, or out and about doing things for themselves rather than being there for us when we need them to help out or just to be with us. As I think about moments like these in my life, I see three options for Martha. First, she could do all the work herself, grumbling a bit along the way in hopes that Mary would get the hint. Or she could directly ask Mary for help. She could even ask Jesus to help. None of these are perfect solutions, but they all seem perfectly reasonable.

However, Martha finds a fourth option: ask Jesus—her guest!—to reprimand her sister for not helping. What a strange request! I doubt that anyone would respond well to this sort of request to intervene in a family dispute. Listen again to what she asked Jesus to do:

Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.

Maybe Martha had asked Mary over and over again for help, but still, why would she ask Jesus to intervene in this way?

Jesus knew better than to respond as Martha requested. Instead, he turned to Martha and offered a different sort of advice:

Martha, Martha, calm down!

He never attacked the work that Martha was doing. He never said that her work didn’t need to be done. He simply said that Mary’s work of listening was equally important. Martha was doing important things, but her attitude toward them was distracting her from the bigger picture, keeping her from truly appreciating her guest for who he was and what he could offer his hosts. Through his actions here, Jesus calls Martha—and us too—to look at our work in a different way, not to leave it behind, approach it with little real concern, or grumble about it along the way. Instead Jesus calls us to approach our work an attitude that recognizes the bigger purposes behind it all and gives us the time and space to stop and appreciate the moment as we journey through it.

You see, it’s easy to be Martha. It’s easy to become so engrossed in the things that we do that we forget why we started doing them in the first place. It’s easy to go through the motions of the day, approaching all the small tasks in front of us with a frustrated spirit and being constantly distracted by the demands put us by others or ourselves. It’s easy to go and help people in the world during the week while forgetting what we do on Sunday that drives us to do that work. In our life here, I know that it seems to be so much easier to talk about and do the practical things—to maintain the building, figure out the budget, and sort out the administrative details—than to get a grasp on the spiritual side of things. I think we have trouble in our world approaching life as Mary did, staying focused on the center, constantly connected to the source of all, the Holy One, even as we move and work and live in our daily lives. While Martha’s work is clearly important—if we didn’t have people like her in our world and our church, we’d be in a lot of trouble!—Jesus makes it clear in this story that we have to spiritually center ourselves for all these practical tasks so that we can be more faithful about all the work that we do.

Exactly a year ago today, I arrived on the Island of Iona, along the western coast of Scotland. This beautiful and remote island has been a center of Christian community for over a millennium, and my experiences there showed me something new about the balance between the experience of Mary and Martha. The guests at both of the centers operated on Iona by the Iona Community are expected to fully participate in both the practical and spiritual work of the community. When we arrived, we were put into groups with specific responsibilities to assist with serving meals and helping with the daily tasks that keep the Abbey running, like peeling vegetables, cleaning the bathrooms, or sweeping the hallways. We had about an hour assigned every morning for these tasks—but it was made clear from the beginning that in no way were our chores to be done during the service of morning prayer. Just as everyone was expected to help keep the Abbey running, everyone was also expected to attend morning prayer, where the community made it clear that our day was grounded both in our practical tasks and in our prayer and worship.

This is ultimately the challenge for all of us in the story of Mary and Martha, to find the quiet center that grounds us and helps us to hear the voice of Jesus so that everything we do—even the most practical things!—is built upon the spiritual life that we find in and through Jesus Christ. So may we not be like Martha, distracted by the many tasks of our lives, but instead find the center of hope and new life in Jesus for all that way say and do as we follow him in our daily tasks until he comes again. Lord, come quickly! Amen.