Here’s a sermon which I preached this morning at St. George’s Episcopal Church in West Asheville.
In the movie City Slickers, two men are riding through the desert. Curly, a resident so long that he may as well be native, is speaking to Mitch, a dude from New York City. As they talk about life, love, and the choices we make, the cowboy laughs at the city slicker saying, “you city folk, you worry about a lot of stuff.” Despite the protests of the young man, the weathered cowpoke continues “You spend fifty weeks a year getting your rope tied in knots and you think two weeks up here will get them untied.”
It’s a notion that we want to hang onto, though, this idea that every once in awhile we can go away from the world, spend some time in contemplation, and get our heads set on straight before going back out into the fray. When I consider everything that needs to be done in the course of a day or a week, the cloister looks better and better all the time. I bet we could quadruple the turnout for Moral Mondays in Raleigh if the Capitol police would promise to put protesters in jail for a week with nothing but the top 5 selections from their Amazon wish lists.
Or maybe not, because more than an iPhone 5, a diamond necklace, or a Mercedes Benz, the ultimate status symbol for our age is to be busy. On the social media site Twitter, it’s not unusual to see a user celebrate a “productive” day or bemoan all of the things he or she has been forced to pack into a few hours. The latter is a combination of complaining and false humility that’s come to be known as a “humblebrag” since a gripe about being overworked is really a boast about how important one has to be in order to be so busy.
In today’s gospel, Martha makes a bit of a humblebrag when she asks Jesus why her sister Mary is not helping out in the kitchen. It’s one I can identify with because, like Martha, I am conscious that biscuits do not bake themselves and plates don’t just jump up on the table. I can hear oven doors slamming and silverware rattling as Martha tries to get the attention of her malingering sister. After all, the rules of hospitality that she is trying to carry out, on her own, with no help from the shiftless Mary, are ones that go all the way back to Abraham who set the standard with his example more than 2,000 years before.
Abraham, having just gone through the delicate surgery necessary to become the first Hebrew, is sitting on his front porch in the heat of the day. Down the road come three men, who are described in Genesis as “the Lord.” I’ll leave the trinitarian implications of that wording for another time and focus instead on Abraham’s immediate response. He doesn’t hesitate to jump up and begin preparations for a great feast. Perhaps he knows that these men are of God or maybe he thinks they’re crazy Englishmen out in the midday sun, but what matters is that, whoever these men are, Abraham has extended a welcome and offered them all the hospitality he can afford.
They have come to rest at the oak of Mamre, a crossroads in the West Bank where traders have gathered for market days from prehistoric times until well into the current era. In modern day Mamre there is an oak estimated to be more than 5,000 years old. For centuries, Jewish and Christian pilgrims would gather at this tree and worship, behavior which the emperor Constantine found too close to idolatry for his comfort. To counter this practice, he built a basilica where both Jews and Christians could worship God, separated from each other by only a thin screen. Constantine dedicated this basilica to St. George, who is venerated by Muslims as well as Christians and is a symbol of hospitality to all.
I wonder what the potlucks were like at that St. George’s. If the meal we read about in Genesis is a pot-luck, then what did the three men bring? Given that one staple potluck food is not mentioned anywhere in the list of foods Abraham provided, I can only conclude what I have suspected for a long time. Deviled eggs do come from God. Deviled eggs and good news. The good news for Abraham being that he and Sarah will have a child. This word is delivered to Abraham not because he has properly arranged the platters before his visitors, but because he has stayed to listen, to hear what his guests have to say.
Between the rattling cookware and her audible sighs, Martha probably cannot hear a thing Jesus has to say to her and her sister Mary. Jesus likely sees Martha’s complaint coming long before she lets it fly. The question is, why is she launching it at Jesus? Isn’t it a little bit tacky for Martha to berate this guest in her home? She obviously expects a specific answer, which is once again something I’m plenty familiar with. Far too often my prayers sound something like “God, here’s my problem and here’s what I want you to do about it. Amen.”
Jesus, of course, is having none of that. By putting him on the spot, Martha has put Jesus in the position of host rather than guest. Taking her up on this opportunity, Jesus invites Martha to make a choice, the choice that Mary has already made. It’s the same choice that Curly in offers to the city slicker in the desert:
“Do you know what the secret to life is?” Curly asks. “This.”
“Your finger?”
“One thing. You stick to that and everything else doesn’t matter.”
“So, what’s the one thing?”
“That’s what you have to figure out.”
Martha is distracted by many things. Mary has figured out her one thing. Contemplation is not inherently better than labor, but choosing the one thing that brings us into right relation with Christ is better than being distracted by the many things we think we need.
Like an empty email inbox or a completed to-do list. I want these status symbols more than I want a Cadillac. I want to brag on Facebook that I have been productive. I want Twitter to know that I have my stuff together. And yet, in the blink of an eye, my inbox is full again. I forget a lunchbox and spill coffee on my clean white shirt. At some point, it becomes painfully obvious to me that, having gotten it together, I can’t hold it together.
The good news, my brothers and sisters, is that I can stop trying. Christ Jesus has gotten that part taken care of because in Him all things hold together. Thrones, dominions, rulers, powers, Gmail, text messages, smart phones, and video chat, all these things have been created through Him and for Him. All of these things which we use to distract ourselves, God will happily transform as instruments of peace and has in fact already done so through Jesus’s sacrifice. He redeems our overdue tasks and our unreturned calls, and we have to seek but one thing: relationship to him.
Am I really willing to trust Jesus with my to-do list? I’m not sure what he would do with it if I gave it to him. He might put some more things on, or even worse, take something off! Then, like Martha, I would be robbed of the thing which proves how important I am. At some level, Martha must have sought this re-ordering in her life. She did, after all, invite Jesus into her home. Do I have the same courage to ask Jesus to come in, even if it means I would not be in control anymore? Was I ever really in control to begin with?