Please open your Bibles to Luke 10:38. If you have been here for a while, you know we have been going through this series called “Do not conform. Be transformed.” The series is based the passage out of Romans 12:2 that says “Do not be conformed to the pattern of the world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The idea behind the series is that we would look at the various patterns out in the world, especially the negative patterns, and we would look at the consequences of following those negative patterns and come up with a bridge to some sort of a biblical solution. We have looked at a lot of different patterns.
Today, we are going to look at a pattern of distraction. I suspect that most of you realize we live in a very distracted world in so many different ways. Before we examine the different evidence for distraction, let’s come up with a basic working definition of a distraction. A distraction is something that divides the attention or prevents concentration. That is a basic definition. Based on that definition, we all get caught up in distractions every single day. A lot of the distractions happen simply when we are driving around in the car. One of the biggest distractions right now is this thing called an iPhone, a smartphone, or whatever mobile phone you use. I know the biggest thing in the news lately is how dangerous it is to text when you drive or get on the phone while you drive. Now I know that no one texts or gets on the cell phone when they are driving. Or at least I don’t. That is a lie. Like many of you in this room I sometimes allow myself to be distracted by my cell phone even while driving.
But even before the cell phone came around, there were obviously a lot of distractions. You can’t blame all the distractions on the cell phone. I know a number of people were probably being distracted by the driver next to him or her. Many were being distracted by food. Driving down the road eating their lunch or dinner. I have seen some people brushing their hair in the car. I have seen some people even brushing their teeth. One of the biggest distractions seems to is music on the radio or whatever device it comes through. I am certainly dating myself, but when I was a teen one of the biggest distractions was my 8-track player, and it caused me to get into an accident one night. I was driving a ‘63 Plymouth Fury and I was about 17 years old. One night I was driving through our town trying to look cool. I pulled into the local McDonald’s which was a big hang out spot. I don’t know why, but as soon as I pulled into McDonald’s I decided to swap out my Temptations 8-track for my Three Dog Night 8-track. Sure enough, when I am swapping it out and going about 30 mph around the curb, I smacked right into a car with three or four people in it. So, yes even pastor Chuck was often distracted as a teen.
Some people are distracted at work, with things like personal texts, or the need to update your Facebook page. And occasionally you get a random email and you feel the need to open it. That was a mistake I did a few years ago. I was working for this high-tech firm back in Oregon and I received an email that appeared to be from a friend, so I decided to open it. About two seconds later all these people were running out of their offices saying we just got this virus that is shutting down the entire corporate system and it is coming from Chuck’s computer! So work distractions can be dangerous.
We know there are also distractions at home. As men, we know that we can be distracted sometimes. You men in the room know that sometimes your wife is trying to tell us something very important, and we are on the computer, maybe watching the sports channel on TV, or just zoning out from a long day at work, and all the while the wife is saying pay attention to me, pay attention to me. Of course, it only applies to you guys. It never applies to me because I give my undivided attention to Debbie all the time, right? Wrong she says. So distractions happen at home.
Some of you students can be distracted at school. It is so easy to be distracted at school because you have so many important things on your mind. Is Sally going to ask Billy to the dance? Who house are we going to after the game? Students get distracted by all sorts of things in school. Sometimes students are simply daydreaming, other times they are having a conversation with a classmate when they should be listening. I am reminded of the time that I was in first grade at a school assembly, and the principal, Mr. Findley was standing up giving in his mind this very important speech at the beginning of the school year. For some reason, I was distracted by the cute little redhead that was sitting next to me. So in my effort to impress her with my knowledge, I felt the need to engage in a discussion by pointing out those big ropes hanging from the ceiling and explaining the function they served in gym class.
About ten minutes into the assembly, Mr. Findley says “Mr. Gohn, if what you have to say is so important, why don’t you come up and share it to the whole school?” I said no thank you. All the kids laughed at me and I learned a lesson about being distracted in school.
Some of you get very distracted in church. Some of you use your iPhones in church, in some cases to read your Bibles, but in other cases just to read or send a text. Some people get distracted by the babies crying in the church. Some people get distracted when somebody walks down the aisle or gets up and leaves the church and all eyes follow the person. Some people become a distraction because they spend the whole time in the service talking to the person next to them. A comment or two is acceptable in the church, but some people just really want to talk the entire time. Sometimes I feel like I should be like Mr. Findley and stand up and say something like “If what you have to say is so important, why don’t you come up and share it to the whole congregation?”
All kidding aside, if we are not careful, all these distractions can flow over into our spiritual life. They become a distraction in our spiritual life and hinder us from doing the one thing that is most important and that is sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to what he has to say about us. That is what we see in today’s story in the story of Martha and Mary. A little bit of background on this particular story. It is a story that easily missed because it is sandwiched between the story of the Good Samaritan and the Lord’s teaching on the Lord’s Prayer. It is a very short little snippet. We know if we are familiar with other stories in the gospel, especially in the book of John, we see that Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus were very good friends with Jesus. In fact, in John 11 is where Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. Jesus says of Martha and Mary and Lazarus it says that “Jesus loved Martha, Mary, and Lazarus.” In this particular story we see Jesus coming to the home of Martha. Martha invites Jesus into the home and all the disciples with him. What happens is Martha is running around like crazy trying to get things ready and where is Mary? Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus. Basically, Martha goes off on not only Mary but on Jesus. We are going to read through that section really quickly and then I will go back and highlight a few of these key verses. Reading from Luke 10:38. (Scripture read here.)
If you are familiar with this passage, you likely know that Martha gets a bad rap in this situation. She is seen as the distracted sister. The workaholic or whatever you want to call it. Really, Martha was just doing what she thought she had to do. Martha was a gracious host. She was the one at the door that welcomed the disciples into her home. During that time, she was doing what was expected of her. Because she was a woman, she was expected to wait hand and foot on the men that would show up at her door there. That was an expectation. On the other hand, Mary who was sitting at the feet of Jesus, she was bucking the culture. She was basically doing what she wasn’t supposed to be doing. At that time, it was improper for a woman to sit at the feet of a teacher to be considered a disciple but that is what she was doing. She was probably offending a lot of people. But we know she was really offending Martha. Once again, Martha is running around like crazy trying to get things done and so much so she ends up snapping. She ends up snapping a bit at Jesus. She came to him and said “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!’”
The word I want you to key in on first is the word that says she was distracted. That is important here. It doesn’t say she was busy. It says she was distracted. This is the only place I think in the New Testament, possibly the whole Bible, where this particular word is used. It has the idea of being pulled and yanked around. Kind of out of control. What was she distracted by? She was distracted by preparations. If we were to look at the underlying Greek word here for preparations, again the New Testament was written in Greek, we would see the word diakonia, which is basically the same word that we translate deacon, servant. As a side note, we have six or seven deacons that operate in this church. They are basically the chief servants of the church, which means that when you are all home or wherever you go during the week, a lot of times these deacons are here at night sitting in long meetings going through the budgets, going through the finances, going through challenging issues within the church. Doing the things that a lot of people don’t want to do. That is why they are called deacons. That is why they are called servants. In many ways, Martha was being like a deacon. She was serving. She was doing the things she thought she needed to do. She was serving Jesus and the disciples. She was making sure that they would have a welcoming environment, that they would have a nice meal to eat, that they would have plenty of water to wash their feet, wash their hands, sheets on the bed. Whatever it is, she was making sure that it was a very pleasant environment for them. The picture again is that you have Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus basically doing nothing in Martha’s mind and Martha is running around like a chicken with her head cut off in this big tizzy. Verse 40 says: “But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made” so much so that she snaps and she says: “Lord don’t you care?” When she says “Don’t you care?” I guarantee that that got the ears of everybody in that room, especially the disciples.
Another side note, there is only one other place in the gospels where somebody asks Jesus “Don’t you care?” That is in the story found in Mark. The story of the storm. You may recall that Jesus was finishing a long day of teaching and he suggested that the disciples all get in a boat and go to the other side of the lake, which they do. What happens is they get in a boat and get in the middle of the lake and this huge storm called a squall comes up and the waves are crashing into the boat, beating up against the side of the boat. The boat is beginning to sink. The disciples are in a panic. They really don’t know what to do. They look for Jesus. Where was Jesus? It says Jesus was in the stern sleeping on a cushion. “The disciples woke him and said to him ‘Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?’” Again, the words: “don’t you care?” Instead of responding in the way they think he should, what he does is uses it as an opportunity to expose their hearts. Specifically to expose the fear in their heart. He says something like why are you so afraid? Where is your faith? So we have a situation here that is really not much different. With the disciples, it was in the middle of a storm. With Martha, it is kind of the middle of a storm that is going on in her head. She has a lot of stuff whirling around in her head. What does Jesus do? Jesus goes on and says to her “‘Martha, Martha’ the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things but only one thing is needed. May has chosen what is better and it will not be taken away from her.’”
Another little side note, there are only two other places where Jesus repeats a person’s name twice together. One of the other places is in Luke and I think it is Luke 22:31. The situation is the night of Jesus’ arrest and Peter is about to disown Jesus and he doesn’t know it. What does Jesus say? He says “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you like wheat.” In other words, Satan is going to mess you up. The other instance where he repeated a name is found in the book of Acts. You might remember Paul, who at that time was known as Saul, was not a Christian. He was a Jewish guy who was intent on persecuting Christians. He is on the road to Damascus getting ready to persecute other Christians and what happens? Jesus gets ahold of him, knocks him off his horse and says “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” When we hear this repetition of a name, we get the sense that there is a little bit of relationship there, but there is also a little bit of discouragement or a little bit of a rebuke or correction for what they have done or what they are about to do.
We read this passage and we see “‘Martha, Martha’, the Lord answered, ‘You are worried and upset about many things but only one thing is needed. Mary chose what is better and it will not be taken away from her.’” I need to stop here again and clarify that Jesus was not criticizing Martha for being a servant. If you think that, you are missing the point here. He was not criticizing her. In fact, he might not even have brought this issue up had not Martha said something. Because Martha made that comment “Don’t you care?” Again, Jesus saw an opportunity to reveal Martha’s heart. To open up and see all the stuff that was churning inside of her. What he was doing was trying to make the point that maybe you need to be here with Mary. Maybe you need to sit where Mary is sitting. Maybe you need to get your priorities right. At this time, I suspect that there are people here today, the Martha people, the doers, saying well if she did that then who is going to take care of the place? Who is going to feed the disciples? Who is going to get the water? Who is going to make the beds? Who is going to clean up after them? My response is it really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It is not about the meal. It is the fact that at that time, it was more important for Martha to sit at the feet of Jesus than it was to wait on these 13 guys. How bad would it have been if when these guys showed up at the door and instead of Martha running around like crazy, she would have said welcome. Glad you are here. There are cheerios in the pantry. There is milk in the fridge. There is luncheon meat. Help yourself. Just make sure you clean up after yourself. By the way, I will be sitting over here with my sister Mary, and we will be sitting there with Jesus. If you need something, just come and see me. I should hear some Amen from the women there. Really, how bad would it have been? The disciples would have been fine. It wasn’t Jesus. Jesus was not asking her to do that stuff. What we have is Martha who was running around like crazy as a servant. Martha was someone who welcomed Jesus and the disciples into her home, but the difference is Mary welcomed Jesus into her heart. Martha welcomed Jesus into her home, but Mary welcomed Jesus into her heart. That is why it says “Only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better and it is not going to be taken away from her.” What he is saying is Martha you have made a choice. No one is telling you to run around like crazy. You have chosen to do that. Mary on the other hand has chosen what is better. Chosen to sit at my feet. That is what is better at that particular point because most likely it is what both Martha and Mary needed at the time. It is the one thing they needed.
As a side note, this is not the first place where someone like Mary has figured out the most important thing. The one necessary thing. If you have a Bible that has cross references on it and you ever follow your cross references, you will see there is a cross reference back to Psalm 27:4 I believe it is. Another side note, if you don’t know what to study in your Bible, just start on a passage and read all the cross references. You could spend the rest of your life following cross references and you will get a very unified picture of the Bible. If you would pay attention and look at this, you would see that this particular statement of the one thing some suspect that Jesus is actually referring back to a comment made by King David back in Psalms. This is The Message version because I like the way it reads. He says “I am asking God for one thing, only one thing. To live with him in his house my whole life long. I will contemplate his beauty. I will study at his feet.” That was what David wanted to do. One thing. Sit at his feet. Be in the presence of God. Gaze on his beauty. Think about who he is. Learn from him every lesson that God is trying to teach him at that time. We know that David was a busy guy. He was a king. He was a warrior. He was a politician. He was a businessman. He was a husband. He was a father. He was very busy so we know that he was very distracted by many things. He had wars to fight. He had speeches to give. He had administrative details to do. He could get caught up in many things and be distracted from what is so important. In his frustration, I think that is what he says. He says I know the value in being in your presence. This is my desire. I am asking for one thing. To dwell in your house my whole life because I know that is where I get my strength. That is where I get the strength to go on living.
So David knew the one thing. Mary knew the one thing. I bet Martha, even after this little situation, knew the one thing. All the disciples knew the one thing. My hope is that everyone here would understand the one thing. The importance of being with Jesus. But we are not. Most of us don’t get it. Most of us are distracted. We are distracted by all of the things I have already mentioned. It goes on to so many other things. We are distracted by all sorts of things out there. It does not mean being busy. I was actually going to name this sermon the Pattern of Busyness, but to me it just didn’t feel right. I don’t think the issue was busyness. The issue here again was distraction. I didn’t want to say busy because if I said a pattern of busyness a lot of people would check out and say I am not busy. I just go throughout my day. I watch TV. I sit around. I take naps. Those are all distractions. I don’t want you to be excluding yourself from the sermon. Once again, it is a distraction. You are distracted from the one place you are supposed to be and that is sitting at the feet of Jesus. It could be doing good things. As we saw with Martha, Martha was doing good things. She was not doing bad things. Likewise, we can get caught up in doing good things for Jesus. All sorts of things. In the church. In the community. In our home. We can do all these good things for Jesus, but the problem is we can sometimes substitute the good things for Jesus over the importance of being with Jesus. In other words, we prioritize going out and doing things for Jesus at the expense of sitting at Jesus’ feet and being with him. That was really the difference between Martha and Mary. Martha was a doer. Mary was a be-er. Martha wanted to go out and do things for Jesus. Mary just wanted to be with Jesus.
I need to stop there again and say this does not mean we should not do things for Jesus. There is a time and a place to serve meals to others. There is a time and a place to go down to the soup kitchen and serve a meal to the homeless. There is a time and a place to change a light bulb or whatever in a church. There is a time and a place to take care of the children, to change the diapers, whatever it is. There is a time and a place for service. Service is a necessary part of the Christian life. What I am saying is, and this is what you need to hear, doing for Jesus should never be a priority of being with Jesus. Being with Jesus is more important than doing things for Jesus. If you get anything out of this sermon that is what you need to get. This is important. You say why is it important? Because this has to do with the relationship. All you have to do is think of it in terms of your own spouse or your significant other. We can run around and do all sorts of great things for our spouse, but really what our spouse sometimes wants is just that we sit down and listen to the challenges, listen to the frustrations, learn about areas of places in our heart that we need to grow. That is the place that not only develops the relationship. What happens then when we are with Jesus is the transformation that we are trying to seek. We talk about transformation, but few people can point to it and say that person is transformed. Only the people that have spent devoted time with Jesus can really be transformed. If that is the most important thing, then why do we not get it? I think the simple answer is it is easy to do things for Jesus rather than be with Jesus. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. Especially if you are serving in your area of giftedness. We have a bunch of talented musicians. If Debbie said this week we need to have a two or three-hour practice. Can you all be there? I suspect, with few exceptions, they would all be there because they enjoy what they do. If we said we need some construction people to come up and help do something construction-related, remodel the bathroom, whatever it is, but you need to give about two or three hours. I bet we would get those construction types that say yeah, I love doing that. Or if we said we need somebody willing to help downstairs and sort the curriculum for the fall for the preschoolers. The people that love kids would say I will be there. I love doing that stuff. Or if you said there is a great outreach in the community. We are going to give hot dogs away. The people that are wired for outreach would say I would love to be there. You just tell me when. I will be there. I will give you two or three hours.
If I said to those same people, give me a promise before you do those acts of service, before you do something for Jesus, would you make sure that you match that time with the same amount of time with Jesus. In other words, if you gave three hours to serving in the community, three hours to serving in the church, would you sit down for three hours straight one day of one week and just hang out with Jesus. Would you just sit there with a Bible and a pen and a journal. That is all. Would you do that? I expect, if we are honest with ourselves, most people would say I am not going to do that. Three hours just sitting with Jesus. The people that are the Marthas would have the biggest trouble. There is stuff to do. There are things we have to do around the house. There are things we have to do at the church. They would get upset. What we have to realize is that Jesus once again is not concerned about what we do for Jesus. Sometimes what he is trying to do is do something inside of our heart. If we don’t settle down, he can never do that thing in our heart. We never experience any form of transformation.
As I preach, I am not just preaching to you guys, I am preaching to Pastor Chuck here too because I struggle. I am a doer. Some of you know before I became a pastor I was a business person. I was a vice-president for a corporation back in Oregon. I was an entrepreneur for ten years. I am a doer. I know how to do. In fact, I think that is one of the reasons I was hired here. They wanted somebody to initiate some new initiatives. To do some things in the church. Not to pat myself on the back, but we did a lot of things. But the last six months, I will be honest with you, Jesus sat me down or I decided I was going to spend some time with Jesus and Jesus said stop doing. You don’t need to do stuff. What you need to do is be with me and then you need to replicate that with others. The best thing I can do or a pastor or preacher can do is give you what God is teaching me. I guarantee he is teaching me it is not about what you do Chuck. It is where you spend your time. You have to spend your time with Jesus. In other words, what I am saying is in-reach has to proceed outreach. You have to be willing to sit at the feet of Jesus and let him go in and stir up those dark crevices of your heart and allow him to deal with those things so when you go out to do, you are doing good things with the right motives. I think the church collectively makes a big mistake. It makes a big mistake because when we are out there trying to get people to be saved or whatever, what do we do? Immediately we put them to work. You can serve in the first impressions team, you can serve as an usher, you can serve in the nursery, you can serve on the construction team. You can do all these great things. What we should do is give them a Bible, a pen, and a journal and say you don’t have to do anything for three months. All you have to do is sit down for three hours during a week and sit and talk with Jesus. Everything he says to you, write it down. It will start slow and you won’t think he is going to say a thing. Pretty soon, you are reading the scripture and all of a sudden it is not you speaking anymore because you don’t have the wisdom to say some of the things you are hearing. You start writing and writing and pretty soon the three hours isn’t enough because you are getting so much wisdom just by sitting there. He is revealing all sorts of stuff so when you go out and do something you do it from a position of strength. You do it from a position of wholeness. Those yucky parts in your heart have been dealt with. The bad attitudes. The fears. The prejudices. The Martha attributes. I am doing all this stuff. Why isn’t somebody helping me? He will take that stuff away you sit at his feet long enough. Help me if you want. I know what I need to do. I am not going to worry about what anybody else is doing. It starts by sitting at the feet of Jesus. There is no other way you can get it. There is really no other way.
I was trying to think of an illustration to close this all off. I was trying to think of a cultural icon that most of you would recognize that summarizes a distracted life and the problem of living a distracted life and I was trying to think of a Martha. The Martha that came up was of course Martha Stewart. Does everybody know who Martha Stewart is? She is a millionaire. She is worth $368 million. She has her own media empire, publishing company, magazine, Martha Stewart Living, her own television network. She has all these products out there. She is a very, very successful. She is a doer. She has done a lot in her life. In about 2004, she did something that she wasn’t supposed to do. Actually it was about 2001 when she did it. She got involved in what is called insider trading in the stock market. That is not a good thing because what it means is you are getting information that the public is not getting and you are acting on it. She saw that a stock was going to take a dive. Her broker gave her inside information from the company president and she acted on it so she would save $50,000. Then what made matters worse. She not only violated securities law, she lied about it. That was her getting her picture when she was getting hauled off to the federal penitentiary. Again, a distracted life. I really don’t know Martha Stewart’s religious background. I really looked to see what I could find out about it. All I saw was a comment or two that said she was like a recovering Catholic or something like that. I was thinking that is kind of sad. I can’t guarantee it, but I suspect if she was more of a Mary than a Martha and she got up once a week and locked herself in some room with her pen, notebook, and Bible, when she was getting close to making this decision it would have bubbled up. It would have become part of her journal. I am thinking about committing a securities crime or something like that. And at some point I suspect the spirit of God would have gotten ahold of her and said uh-uh-uh. Don’t do it. It’s not worth it. But because she didn’t have that relationship with Jesus Christ, she did it. Instead of now having a stellar resume with all these things, right in the middle of the resume she has five months in the state pen. Before her mother died at 93 years old, her mother saw that. Success in so many ways but that one little blotch just ruined her, all again because she didn’t have that relationship because she chose to conform to the patterns of the world rather than trying to be conformed with Christ. This is what the series is about. “Do not conform. Be transformed.” Do not conform to all the things out there that are trying to pull you in. The distractions. The greed. Whatever. The things that are trying to pull you in. Instead, try to conform to the image of Christ. That requires you sitting at the feet of Jesus Christ. When you sit at the feet of Jesus Christ and you open your heart up to what he is trying to do in you at that particular time, what happens is you begin to change. You become transformed into the image of Christ. You look like Jesus. But it starts with having the attitude of Mary and having the attitude of David where he said “I am asking God for one thing, only one thing. To live with him in his house my whole life long. I will contemplate his beauty. I will study at his feet.” Let us pray.
