Mary Listens; Martha Works

By

Reverend Litton Logan

July 22, 2007

Scriptures:

³⁸Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. 

³⁹She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. 

⁴⁰But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” 

⁴¹But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things;

⁴²there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” Luke 10:38-42 NRSV

Sermon:

A few years ago, my wife and I went on a Celtic Spiritual Journey tour with a group to England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. One of the most memorable places for me was the island of Iona. This island lies off the western coast of Scotland and has been a holy site for one religion or another for approximately 3,000 years. Its Christian context lies in the establishment of a rather unique Celtic religious community by St. Columba of Ireland in 563 C.E.

The Celts were some of the earliest migrant Franco-Germanic settlers of the British Isle. They settled mainly in the Southern part of England, Wales, and Ireland where they came in to contact with an aboriginal people believed to have come from Southern Spain and North Africa.

With the occupation of England by the Romans in 40 C.E. Christianity moved into the islands. As the Celts were converted to Christianity, they incorporated pagan religious practices into their newfound faith. These incorporations can best be described as a more nature-based theology than a philosophical, propositional theology that Christianity had inherited from its Greco-Roman influences. We see this understanding of natural theology most clearly stated in the Celts understanding of the Little Book—the Bible, and the Big Book—Nature. Many of the Celtic practices and understandings of a person’s relationship to God, to Christ, to one another, and to the greater community of humankind later became the sources of controversy with the Roman church.

Each member of this religious community on Iona took a religious vow, but not the vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience common to the Roman monastic orders. In the Iona community, a vow of obedience alone was taken. In this community, the monks were allowed to marry and have families and to work for their own betterment and prosperity. However to reduce distractions and interferences with their duties and offices the women and children were actually situated on another island not far away—called the Isle of the Women The men traveled back and forth between the two islands to perform their various religious duties and studies and to be with their families.

I might also mention that in several Celtic Christian communities the religious superior or leader was a woman, frequently a married woman, with children. Another story.

The members of the Iona community devoted themselves to worship, prayer and praise, various occupations, service to others, and to the intellectual pursuits of the Gospel of Christ and the humanities.

From Iona, Christian missionaries and evangelist went out to the mainland of Scotland and into Western and Central Europe and there they established religious communities and monasteries. Had it not been for the Irish monks, especially those on Iona, much of the collective intellectual achievements of the sciences, humanities, and the Christian religion would have been lost during the dark ages. (And, you thought all the Irish did was drink and talk to leprechauns.) In fact, I recommend to you the book by Thomas Cahill, How The Irish Saved Civilization on this topic.

What I found most intriguing about the Celtic Christian communities was their concerted efforts to bring all of life—religion, work, family, government, and other relationships under the pale of the holy.

There were prayers for milking a cow as well as prayers and songs for high holy days and feast days. One’s whole life was a God-life. The members of the Iona community strove to balance their life between going and doing and listening and learning. Which brings me to today’s scriptures.

In the preceding verses of this chapter in Luke’s Gospel as Jesus taught his followers he has an encounter with a Jewish lawyer, a pious and learned person. This lawyer posed a question to Jesus regarding eternal life or citizenship in the kingdom of God. In response, Jesus tells the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In this parable, Jesus is instructing this man to “go and do” his faith and beliefs do not just sit, listen, study, and learn about his religion and faith. Jesus tells this lawyer to translate his religious knowledge into humanitarian actions that demonstrates God’s love for all people.

In today’s scriptures, however, we see a sharp contrast to the “go and do” injunction of Christ. Here Jesus says, “Sit, listen, and learn.”

To understand these scriptures properly let me place them in a different context. It is a context that many modern American women will find strange.

Let us go back a few years in our American culture. Remember when many of us were growing up if we had a family gathering, went to someone’s home for dinner, or a church pot-luck the women naturally headed for the kitchen and the men retired, out of the women’s way until called to eat? At most, the men may have had to set up or arrange the picnic tables, ice down the watermelons, crank the homemade ice cream freezers, etc. A woman may come and asks one of the men, usually their husbands, to do something like open a jar of home, canned pickles, preaches, tomatoes, or some other kind of “man” job but never join the men for conversation. However, when a woman entered the company of the men, talk changed, became more subdued, not that the men were saying anything they shouldn’t, it was just that men didn’t talk man talk in front of women, and vice-a-versa. The same would hold true if a man entered the kitchen to get one of the women to see to some child, because seeing to children was for the women. Remember this?

The idea that a woman would interject herself into a group of men or vice-a-versa and enter into the conversation was alien to everyone’s thinking in my culture. It would have garnered some raised eyebrows and snide comments from the other women if a woman had done this. It may also have earned a woman some words from grandmother. The women were supposed to be with the women doing women’s work, preparing the food, putting the meal on the table—taking care of the men folk and the children, and then they would eat afterwards as a group. Dessert time was generally the time when everyone ate together. Does any of this sound familiar?

The only time, I may have told you this story before, I ever saw men in the kitchen in the church I grew up in was the occasion of the Riverside Baptist’s first annual and only coon supper. Then the only reason men were allowed in the kitchen was the women of the church would not touch those foul smelling critters. It also just happened that this coon supper was the only time I ever saw a person of color in my church, except to do maintenance or repairs. The men had hired a rather dark complexioned, Italian woman—a Catholic--to come and cook the coons. She was the cook for one of the big hunting clubs in the area and had a reputation of being a fine cooker of coons.

Our church didn’t have a fellowship hall per se, so we used the extra wide isle that traversed our sanctuary to set up tables and chairs in a long banquet arrangement. I shall never forget standing in the hallway just outside the kitchen looking across our sanctuary down that row of tables at those serving platters with roasted coons, sweet potatoes, and all the trimmings. I can still remember the over powering smell of garlic and musky, roasted coon. Yuck!

It took us months to get the smell out of the sanctuary and the preacher, Brother Caraway, said that the odor was responsible for dissuading several visiting families from joining our church. Brother Caraway said our sanctuary gave a completely new meaning to the words “stinking Baptist”.

To my knowledge, that is the last time the women of the Riverside Baptist Church ever let a men into their domain of the kitchen—they had learned their lesson.

Growing up, there were just women things and men things. There were just these social customs related to the sexes, it was just the way it was. Think about such chauvinism—male and female--and then magnify them greatly in an ancient, male dominated culture, not unlike many places in the Middle East today, and we might begin to get an idea of the effrontery of Mary in these passages of scriptures we’ve heard read today.

Let us look at our scriptures again. Jesus enters the home of a woman, Martha. There is no mention of a “man of the house”. Whoa! Jesus and his disciples have either honored Martha beyond anything one could imagine or scandalized the whole lot of them. Luke does not give us any history or insight to Jesus’ and Martha’s relationship in the context of these passages of scriptures.

What we see is Martha busy preparing a meal for her guests as Jesus continues teachings most likely out on her patio area. However, Martha’s sister, Mary, apparently herself a guest, breaks with all traditions and interjects herself into a company of men. Not only this, she seats at Jesus’ feet—the posture of a disciple, a student—a woman student--sitting at a rabbi’s feet listening and learning man talk.

This whole scene defies all the conventions and customs relating to the sexes of Jesus’ day. This story would have been scandalous in its first telling.

We can only imagine Martha being in a dither, hurrying around trying to prepare a variety of foods in sufficient quantity for her guests. In her conscientiousness, she asks Jesus to dismiss Mary from listening to him so she may help with the preparation of the meal.

At this point, we have several understandings of what Jesus said. The one I like the most would go something like this: Jesus says to Martha, “Martha, Martha, you are doing too much. I really appreciate you going all out for us, but just something simple will do fine. Martha, Martha, in your conscientious observance of the time-honor traditions of hospitality you are missing out on the best food of all, a food that once eaten will fill you for life—eternal life. Mary, believe it or not, has chosen to do the best thing—sitting, listening, and learning what God requires of kingdom citizens.”

Sitting, listening, and learning--what a chore this is for many of us.

Which reminds me of the story of the man who sat in the counselor’s office lamenting the fact that his wife of thirty years had recently left him? He was devastated and didn’t know what he was going to do without his wife. The counselor asked him why he thought his wife had left him. The poor man replied,”She told me that I never listened to her. At least that’s what I think she said.”

Listening and internalizing—taking to heart--what one hears in their religious and spiritual pursuits is a very hard thing for many of us to do. Our tendency is to listen, learn, just enough to formulate an action plan and then charge off to serve and to do. We want the condensed version of things with definite instructions for doing. Rarely do we want to sit, listen, and learn in order to plumb the very depths of our spiritual lives or seek to discern the subtlety of God’s will and word for our lives or the life of the world. Too many of us go off, if you will, half-cocked with inadequate information only to be brought up short by what we didn’t listen to, pay attention to, and internalize—guilty as charged.

The going and doing of God’s will is admirable and necessary, but one must balance actions with acquiring the deeper insights of God’s will, before we engage the world.

The ancient Celtic Christians understood this—human life in its entirety is God-life. We are to balance “doing” with study, listening, praying, and worship. Without listening and studying, we frequently become so much unfocused motion with good intentions.

That is what I brought home from the Isle of Iona—the same thing Jesus is saying in these scriptures today—balance, balance, balance. First, we must listen and learn before our going and doing will be meaningful, helpful, and appropriate. The Lawyer was one of the most learned religious people of his day but he did not really “do” his faith. Mary listened and Martha did not. Had Mary not listen she would have been as unbalanced in her doing as Martha who did so much but did not listen. In this two stories—The Good Samaritan and Mary and Martha--we find the instruction to balance our spiritual lives between listening and learning and going and doing.

Did the Lawyer “go and do”? I don’t know. Did Mary “listen and learn” and “go and do”? I don’t know. Did Martha stop “doing” and “listen and learn?” I don’t know. The real question is do we sit, listen, learn and not go and do? On the other hand, do we go and do, but don’t listen and learn?

2 Timothy 2:15 (NRSV)
¹⁵Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly [understanding and] explaining the word of truth. [Paraphrase, added]

Oh, by the way, this fall we will be starting an introductory course to the Old Testament in the adult Sunday School Class, hope to see all of you there.