Other Scriptural passages:
Genesis 18:1-10a(10b-14)
Colossians 1:21-29
Psalm 15
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. (Psalm 19:14)
Two years ago, on June 28 (2005), four Navy SEAL commandos were on a mission in Afghanistan, searching for a notorious al-Qaeda terrorist leader hiding in a Taliban stronghold.
As the battle ensued, three of the SEALs were killed, and the fourth, Marcus Luttrell was blasted unconscious by a rocket grenade and blown over a cliff. Severely injured, he spent the next four days fighting off six al Qaeda assassins who were sent to finish him, and then crawled for seven miles through the mountains before he was taken in by a Pashtun tribe, who risked everything to protect him from the encircling Taliban killers.
They took Luttrell back to their village, where the law of hospitality, considered “strictly non-negotiable,” took hold. “They were committed to defend me against the Taliban,” Luttrell wrote, “until there was no one left alive.” (Lone Survivor – by Marcus Luttrell)
The Law of Hospitality is very strong in Middle Eastern culture, and has been that way for many millennia. It prompted Abraham in our reading from Genesis today to offer food and drink to his three visitors, the Lord and two angels.
It is what prompted Lot in the next chapter to protect the two angels in his home in Sodom from the men who wanted to rape them. While Lot’s idea of how to protect them is appalling to us — he offers his daughters to the crowd instead — the point is that the Law of Hospitality is so strong that it even supersedes the obligation to protect one’s own family.
So it’s against this backdrop of strong hospitality to visitors that our Gospel passage unfolds.
Jesus and his entourage of at least 12 disciples arrive at Martha and Mary’s doorstep, without phoning ahead or sending an email or even a text message to give Martha a heads up.
When they arrive unannounced, Martha decides that someone as important and holy as Jesus deserves the absolute best she can offer. She searches briefly for a frozen lasagna from Costco’s to put in her microwave oven, and then remembers that none of those things have been invented yet.
So she takes out a jar of freshly ground flour and a jar of oil, and starts preparing some food. She fetches some extra water from the well. And then she decides that a simple meal won’t do, and starts preparing a major feast that isolates her from her guests and causes her to resent the labor she is doing for Jesus.
She decides that the problem is not that she overburdened herself, but rather that her sister is actually sitting in the other room with the Rabbi who came to see them.
Here was a Rabbi who allowed women to sit at his feet! Usually people would sit on chairs or recline on couches, but disciples would sit at their teachers’ feet. They were preparing to become teachers themselves, which was a role not permitted for women at that time. Most Jewish men would have been shocked to see Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening to his teaching.
This was an opportunity to learn from Jesus as his disciple, but instead of joining Mary at Jesus’ feet, and simply bringing some food and drink to sustain them all, she chose to complain that Mary had seized the opportunity to learn.
Can’t you picture Martha, knowing that Jesus would of course agree with her, telling him to show Mary the error of her ways, embarrassing her in front of the other guests? I think she expected Jesus to say something like, “Mary! I didn’t realize you were sitting there! Only my disciples are allowed to sit there! What were you thinking? Get back in the kitchen and help you sister!”
Can you picture Martha’s face when Jesus said that Mary made the correct choice? Now Martha was the one embarrassed. But I also believe she realized what she was doing wrong, changed her meal plans and joined them.
I believe that because in John’s Gospel (12:1–2) Martha prepared a feast for Jesus and his 12 disciples, and her brother and sister, without any complaint. She had discovered that sitting at Jesus’ feet brings not just knowledge, but also God’s peace.
Warren Weirsbe points out that we see Mary of Bethany is three times in the Gospels. Each time, she is in the same place: at the feet of Jesus.
• She sat at his feet and listened to his Word in Luke 10:39;
• She fell at his feet and shared her woe in John 11:32;
• She came to his feet and poured out her worship in John 12:3.
He also notes that each time there is some kind of fragrance:
• In Luke 10, it is food;
• In John 11, it is death (John 11:39);
• In John 12, it is perfume.
We often get the impression from the particular Gospel passage that we must choose between being Martha or Mary. But that’s not what we’re supposed to get from the story. Both Martha and Mary were devoted servants of the Lord, and both have positive traits we should learn from. We’re not supposed to be either a worker like Martha or a worshipper like Mary. Both aspects are integral parts of our Journey with Jesus.
In one of Charles Wesley’s hymns (#325), he states it perfectly:
Faithful to my Lord’s commands,
I still would choose the better part;
Serve with careful Martha’s hands,
And loving Mary’s heart.
There’s a book called Having a Mary Heart in Martha World, written by Joanna Weaver. In it Weaver writes,
"Instead of applauding Martha, Jesus gently rebukes her, telling her … ’Mary has chosen the better part’ (NRSV).
’The better part?’ Martha must have echoed incredulously.
’The better part!’ I say to God in the midst of my own whirl of activity. ’You mean there’s more? I have to do more?’
No, no, comes the answer to my tired heart. Jesus’ words in Luke 10 are incredibly freeing to those of us on the performance treadmill of life.
It isn’t ’more’ he requires of us.
In fact, it may be less."
We are led to believe that more is always better. “Bigger, better, faster, more” could be our credo. Many of us shop at Costco or Sam’s Club, where most items are sold in gargantuan quantities.
Think about it. Do any of us really need a half-gallon of mayonnaise in our refrigerator? Or 48 corndogs? Or a three-gallon bucket of ice cream?
But we buy it anyway.
A guy I work with bought a new pickup truck. The suspension is so high that the floorboard of the cab is even with my chest. It comes with a drop-down ladder to climb inside. I don’t know how he gets the groceries in and out of the truck bed. Maybe he pulls alongside his house and pulls the bags in through his attic window.
He drives it back and forth to work and to the store on weekends. He doesn’t go to monster truck rallies in it, or pull redwood stumps out of the ground. It’s much more truck than is needed for its purpose.
But none of us do things like that do we? We do everything in moderation, right? We balance our work, play, and family time with our devotion and worship time so our families and our Lord receive the attention they deserve from us, don’t we?
If anyone has mastered this, please raise your hand, because I really want to meet you. I’ve never met anyone who’s mastered this delicate balancing act, but it’s what we’re all called to try to do.
We buy all sorts of gadgets and gizmos to give us more free time, but some how we end up with less free time than before those things existed. Think about the family dinners each night and family vacations that were the norm a few decades ago, but can’t fit into our busy schedules today.
We have washing machines and clothes dryers that figure out when your clothes are dry, so you don’t have to.
Microwave ovens that can cook a meal that used to take two hours in under 12 minutes, and we still get impatient waiting for dinner.
Remote controls for nearly every electrical item in our homes because leaning over to the edge of the couch to turn on a lamp was too much effort.
Cellphones, Blackberries, and e-mail keep us in constant connection with our jobs, pulling us from our families. It really wasn’t that long ago that when we left the office we were gone until we came in the next morning. Calling someone at home had no guarantee they would be there. And somehow we survived.
We have become Marthafied in so many ways we have forced ourselves away from our own lives.
We seem to be using the time we save to continue doing more of what we were reducing the time for.
We want bigger houses, better cars, nicer clothes, more stuff, and we spend more time away from our families and God trying to get it all.
There’s a popular email that’s gone around most businesses concerning time off. It says:
So you want a day off. Let’s take a look at what you are asking for.
There are 365 days per year available for work.
There are 52 weeks per year in which you already have 2 days off per week, leaving 261 days available for work.
Since you spend 16 hours each day away from work, you have used up 170 days, leaving only 91 days available.
You spend 30 minutes each day on coffee break which counts for 23 days each year, leaving only 68 days available.
With a 1 hour lunch each day, you used up another 46 days, leaving only 22 days available for work.
You normally spend 2 days per year on sick leave.
This leaves you only 20 days per year available for work.
We are off 5 holidays per year, so your available working time is down to 15 days.
We generously give 14 days vacation per year which leaves only 1 day available for work.
There’s no way I’ll let you take that day off!
It doesn’t seem like we have that much free time, does it? And then we think that God wants us to do even more.
The truth is, though, that God often wants us to do less — but to with him more as we do it. If we’re getting annoyed or irritable by doing something for God, we need to take another look at how we’re doing it. Our time with the Lord should be pure joy, not drudgery.
Mother Teresa served the Lord in Calcutta, India, in the most deplorable conditions you could possibly imagine. In her work with the poorest of the poor, she discovered that unlike many of the rich, the poor are happy together with their families in the love of God, that the real poor know what joy is.
She said, “The material is not the only thing that gives joy. Something greater than that, the deep sense of peace in the heart. They are content. That is the great difference between rich and poor.”
That doesn’t mean God wants us to all be poor. He expects us to help others if we have the means to do so. And he wants us to live our lives in him.
The rich tend to focus so much on accumulating more material possessions; they sacrifice the parts of their lives that are more important.
They miss the children’s concert recitals or ball games, so they can spend more time at work.
They may even have someone else like a nanny or day care center raise their children for them so they can work.
And there just isn’t enough time for God.
In an interview with TIME magazine, Bill Gates is quoted as saying:
“Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”
Bill Gates has a net worth of 56 billion dollars. To put that in perspective, there are 181 countries listed in the International Monetary Fund. If we called Bill Gates a country and labeled his 56 billion dollars as his Gross Domestic Product (GDP), he would rank 58th, with more revenue than Bahrain, Jordan, and Iceland combined. At what point is enough finally enough?
But Bill is the pinnacle of wealth. Most of us are nowhere near that. In fact, many of us are just getting by. At least by our standards. You see, when I was retiring from the Navy a few months ago, we learned an interesting statistic that has stayed with me. We learned that 50 percent of the people in the world do not have a toilet.
This basic item of subsistence that we take for granted, is a luxury that half the people in the world can’t afford. So you are doing better financially, than at least 3 billion other people. By their standards, we are incredibly wealthy.
But we look at it based on our own standard of materialism, and we decide, like Bill Gates, that we don’t yet have enough.
John Ortberg pinpoints this in his article, Taking Care of Busyness.
He says, “For most of us, the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.”
Jesus is calling us to put down the things that distract us from him. To serve him, but in a way that brings us closer to him, not in a way that keeps us from getting to know him.
Having the right priorities is very important. If we put Jesus first, then others, and then ourselves, we will be able to spend time at his feet, learning his Word in our lives. We need to spend quiet time with Jesus each time, personally and privately. Otherwise, we become like Martha in today’s Gospel passage: busy, but not blessed.
This world is only temporary, a place for us to develop who we will be for the rest us eternity. If we, like Mary, choose the better part and sit at the feet of our Lord, we will gain much more than if we continue to rush through our lives, reaching the end without ever having really lived.
Amen. God bless you.
