Where'd You Get Your Biscuit?

Sermon for Sunday, August 23

Luke 10:38-42

It starts with a question: the legal scholar asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus leads him to the answer, by asking another question: “What’s in the Bible?” The scholar: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Jesus: “Do this and you will live.” Scholar: “But who is my neighbor?” Last week, we learned about loving our neighbor through the story of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan in Jesus’s story was exemplary because he didn’t try to wriggle his way out of helping the man in need, but rather let the man’s need make him a neighbor. Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.”

That story has shaped a lot of our ideas about what it means to live our faith, and a lot of us know the story that comes next: Mary and Martha. But I couldn’t have told you until I started preparing these two sermons that the story of Mary and Martha came next. Usually when we read this story, we portray it as a simple, black and white story. We pity Martha and exalt Mary. We judge Martha and we hold up Mary as an example. And then we all leave church on Sunday morning and go home to the meals our own Marthas have prepared for us. We eat and we discuss the sermon, or more likely the baseball game or the NASCAR race that is about to start. Our Martha gathers the lunch dishes and begins to wash them, to put away whatever food is left, placing a little in Cool Whip containers to send home with the guests or the grandchildren. Let me just take a minute to say, thank God for the Marthas in my life, and the Marthas in this church. We would be impoverished without you.

If we look at the story in the context of the lawyer’s questions and Jesus’s answers, we can see that Martha is doing a good job of following the second command. Like the Samaritan, Martha cares for the needs of others. In fact, the English translation of our story hides the commendable nature of the things she is occupied with. The Greek word is diakonia which is work done on behalf of someone else. It is the word for “ministry” from which we get the word “deacon.” So we could say in verse 40, Martha is distracted by her many ministries; she is distracted by her abundance of deaconing, if you will. You see: her ministries, her service, her many tasks are taking her eyes off of what’s really important.

What is she distracted from? First, she loses sight of her love of her sister Mary. Martha falls into the trap that I think all of us know so well; she is so distracted by the good work that she has to do on behalf of the world and her special guest Jesus that she forgets about the needs of the person with whom she spends her life. Scholars think that in addition to being Martha’s sibling, Mary is Martha’s partner in ministry. In chapters 9 and 10 of Luke’s gospel, we see that Jesus always sent the disciples out in pairs, whether they were representatives of the Twelve or of the Seventy. Throughout the gospels and in Acts, along with the letters of Paul, we see this pattern: in chapter 19 Jesus sends two of the disciples to find the donkey he will ride into Jerusalem, in chapter 22, he sends Peter and John to make the dinner reservations for the Last Supper. On and on it goes: Paul and Silas, Paul and Timothy, Paul and Barnabas, Priscilla and Aquila. And having two people work together is important, because where two or more are gathered, there is the church. So Martha’s story warns us that we can get so caught up in our ministries that we lose sight of our love for the church. 

Now, when I say “the church” I think we run the risk of making it all very abstract. Too often, we say “the church” but what we mean is “the church as it could be” or “the church as it exists in my head.” We all have this perfect image of what we wish the church was. For some of you, maybe you wish we were a little more polished. Maybe you wish we were a little less formal. Maybe you wish we had different flooring, or a different style. Maybe you wish we did this ministry or that ministry a little harder or a little more. And of course, you can work to bring about change by working on those things. But you must never lose sight of your commitment— which every member of this church made, though maybe we didn’t realize it— to love this church, as it is. Just like you can’t love your wife or your husband, or your friend “as you want them to be,” you can’t love the church in the abstract without losing sight of the real thing.

I don’t hold it against Martha that she lost sight of her love for her sister. Indeed, she doesn’t sound like she is holding her sister to a higher standard than she holds herself. Katie and I just finished watching a series on Netflix about Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls teams, who absolutely dominated the NBA during the 1990s. They had the most talented player in the history of the game— everybody wanted to be like Mike. And when he went to practice, he wanted everyone to be like Mike too. His teammates talked about him berating them, trash talking them, cussing them, getting into physical altercations with them when his temper got up because they weren’t performing as well as he thought they could. And he made them into the best team in Basketball, with the help of Head Coach Phil Jackson. But you don’t get the sense that his teammates loved Michael Jordan, or that they felt loved by him. Trading love for effectiveness might work in the National Basketball Association, but it has no place in the Body of Christ.

Martha knows there is a problem in her little church, and she thinks she knows what it is: Mary isn’t working hard enough. She doesn’t quite have it right, but who does, anyway? We won’t fault her for that either. It’s at this point that she does something commendable, when you think about it. You might miss it; I always have, and most scholars have as well I think, but someone pointed this out in an article I read about this passage. We miss it because we live in a culture that says, “If you have a problem with me, come and talk to me about it.” But Martha doesn’t do that, she takes it to Jesus! Now a lot of pastors won’t like that because they think that that’s me telling people to take their problems with other church members to the pastor. That’s how we pastors read it, because sometimes we forget that we aren’t Jesus. But I want to remind you that in the gospels whenever someone talks to Jesus— whenever they ask him for something— that’s a model for prayer.

Now Martha doesn’t ask Jesus for anything; she tells him what to do! She accuses him of apathy and then she unloads on him with a command: “Tell her to help me!“ It doesn’t matter that she prays for the wrong thing; at least she’s praying! At least she doesn’t run over and tear down her sister, who is sitting at Jesus’s feet and listening to what he was saying. In fact, that seems to be what Martha was doing too, before she got up to attend to her ministries. How often do you sit down with your Bible, or sit down in church, sit down at the feet of Jesus, and then your mind starts to race? Did I leave the stove on? What’s for lunch? I should really call this person or that person? If you’re like me, you have ministries that distract from ministries and if you let them you will find yourself doing a lot of things, but none of them particularly well. To be able to love well, and serve well, we need to do what Martha does (perhaps by accident): we need to come back to the Word of the Lord.

The word that Jesus has for Martha is the word I believe he has for some of us here today: stop. Stop comparing others to yourself, trying to pull them to your level of activity. Stop letting your ministries distract from your love of Christ and His church. Stop running yourself so ragged and listen to the Word. Commit this week to spend some amount of time every day being quiet with Jesus. Read Scripture or think about Scripture. Or just pray and be silent. Maybe you need 20 minutes a day, 30, 45. Maybe you can only hold your attention on Jesus for five minutes at a time— that’s ok! He will meet you where you are. Whatever you’ve been doing to be quiet with Jesus, just do a little more this week. Return to the Word and see if that changes how you look at the church.

I imagine another encounter after the story, that Luke doesn’t tell us. Mary comes to Jesus: “Can you believe my sister? She gets so worked up about stuff that isn’t important. She’s so ridiculous” And gently, gently, Jesus asks Mary, “Where did you get that biscuit you’re eating? When did you get the fresh ice in your glass? I must have missed you getting up.” And gently, gently Mary realizes, she feels so satisfied from her time with Jesus, and her sister has gone to great lengths to make the visit pleasant. Maybe it’s time Mary got to work.