​17 July 2016
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
 
One Thing is Needful
 
“Mary has chosen the better part.” (Luke 10)
 
In the wake of three acts of violence the previous week, last Sunday’s sermon was a rather lengthy and demanding reflection on the dignity and integrity of the human individual. Violence is blasphemy, I said, because it attacks the very image and likeness of God in which we were created, and so we as people of faith must reassert in clear and unambiguous terms the inherent value of the individual.

After yet another bloody week, I can only reaffirm what I said then.

But perhaps today we need a quieter, and briefer sermon. We have before us the well-known gospel account of Mary and Martha—two sisters who together host Jesus in their home. You know the story: Martha busies herself in the kitchen, while Mary sits listening to their guest at his feet. And when Martha complains to Jesus that Mary is not helping her, he responds by saying that it is in fact Mary who has chosen the better part.

Now, the usual interpretations of this episode run along the lines of endorsing the spiritual inclinations of Mary over and against the materiality and anxiety of her sister Martha. And that seems like a fairly obvious reading, I suppose, but its very obviousness has always left me a bit dissatisfied with it. Mightn’t there be something deeper going on in what Jesus has to say to Martha?

One sign that that might be the case is Mary’s silence throughout. The story focuses on Martha, and her interaction with Jesus, more so than on Mary.

Interesting too is that Jesus’ response to Martha is given in such a gentle, even affectionate manner. Calling her by name twice, “Martha, Martha,” he sympathetically comments first on her level of anxiety and worry, and only then points toward Mary’s contrasting attentiveness and calm.

Perhaps what Jesus is trying to do, is to help Martha see that Mary’s choice is not just somehow better, but rather that Martha has failed to find in her own choice any joy or satisfaction. She seems only to feel obligated, and therefore resentful.

What Jesus perceives as lacking in Martha’s determined hospitality, is any sense that through it, she is giving something of who she is, and that therefore it is an activity that she can embrace freely and willingly, rather than grudgingly and unhappily.

What she lacks, if you will, is a sense of vocation. Mary’s choice is the better part, not because her contemplation is privileged over Martha’s activity, but because she has made a deliberate choice that responds in a deep way to her own individual nature. She has chosen to accept a calling to be who she uniquely is, and finds contentment in that. She has found her vocation, while Martha struggles with the social expectations of others.

In a meditation on the theme of vocation he once delivered to a group of new ordinands, Archbishop Rowan Williams pointed out that too often, our idea of vocation is shaped by a the unexamined notion that we are somehow cast into a sort of stage role by a divine playwright: God has a part in mind for us to play, and so it is up to us to fit into it.[*] That is Martha’s view: she has been cast as the dutiful hostess, and is obliged to fulfill the requirements of hospitality that such a role brings with it. For her, vocation becomes a kind of inevitable and inescapable fate.

Williams pushes back against that idea of vocation, however, suggesting instead that an authentic vocation is a discovery of our freedom to become who God has uniquely created us to as individuals: it is a process of interior creativity, rather than the acceptance of a predetermined role.

Speaking to that group of future priests, Williams encouraged them to be less focused upon whatever part they imagined that they would be expected to play, and to think instead about how what they brought to their vocation as individuals would shape it. So, for instance, how might someone who is a musician, live out that gift as a priest? Or a writer, or a mother, or a teacher? Our vocation in other words is not contrary to, but inclusive of everything that we are.

And so by extension, those kinds of questions are ones which each of us must answer as we create the vocation that is uniquely ours. Discovering our vocation becomes an act of freedom, a process of exploring who we are and what we aspire to do and to accomplish in light of the specific giftedness with which God has created us.
​
Williams thinks of it as our response to the creative Word of God, through which God is always speaking to us, calling us to be ourselves. Our life then becomes a mirroring of God, a playing back to God, of God’s own self-sharing, self-losing care and compassion. But to do that, we have to ask ourselves some pretty probing questions, that will help us to shed whatever blocks our true sense of self: “What am I denying, what am I refusing in myself that stands in the way of this interactive call and response with God? What am I trying to avoid?”

Like Martha, we too can fall into the trap of letting an external set of expectations drain the joy out of life, because they inhibit our true understanding of ourselves. The challenge is to learn to shed such unrealities for the way that they simply suffocate the soul, only to re-emerge in such angry forms as Martha’s irritable rebuke of her sister.

But Jesus encourages us, like Mary, to choose the better part: to be attentive to who we really are, and to live out our particular giftedness in ways that allow us to realize fully and perhaps for the first time who we really are. As Williams provocatively puts it, we are encouraged to find the vocation that is the residue when all the games of self-deception have ceased.

So discovering our vocation means more than just learning or accepting that there are a certain number of things we are to do: it means becoming a certain kind of person, as we become more fully ourselves. And that can be frustrating, because there is a certain reassurance in being able to simply tick off the boxes of what we imagine other people think we should do. Martha herself was busy ticking off the boxes of the social norms of accepted hospitality—cleaning, cooking, serving, hosting—and no doubt there was some reassurance for her in that of her value as a person.

Yet there is also something liberating about going deeper into the reality of who we authentically are. The second-century St. Irenaeus famously said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” That is, the wonder of God’s creative love is most fully shown in the way that each of us claims our full potential as it is has been given to us. Our calling therefore (our vocation) is paradoxically also our freedom: the freedom to be who we are. It is not a role into which we must reluctantly fit, but a creative and responsive life that we can joyfully inhabit.

Perhaps that freedom is what Mary had discovered for herself, and that freedom also that toward which Jesus encouraged Martha, as “the one thing that is needful.”
 
 
© Joseph Britton, 2016


[*] Rowan Williams, “Vocation (1)” and “Vocation (2)” in Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses (Darton, Longmand and Todd, 1994).

 
In the gospel story today Jesus sends 70 of his followers on a mission.
It sounds like Mission Impossible.
 
            Go as lambs among wolves – the radical message of Jesus is not always welcome
            Carry no purse, bag or sandals
            Remain in one house, eat what is set before you, and cure the sick
 
Who would take such a mission?
Take nothing with you – are you crazy?
You want us to heal the sick?
Yet these 70 go as they are told,
            and return to Jesus “full of joy” at what they have done in Jesus’ name.
 
It sounds crazy.
But I think there are things we can learn from this story, as followers of Jesus today.
 
When Jesus sends out the 70, he requires that they be completely dependent on others -  
            especially their one partner, and on the strangers to whom they go.
Not an easy thing for us to imagine.
In our culture, independence and self-reliance are paramount virtues.
We have convinced ourselves that our wealth can buy us security.
All our earning and planning and buying and saving, preparing ourselves for the future –
            it works for a while –
            until suddenly it doesn’t.
Wealth evaporates in a stock market crash just when one plans to retire.
A medical emergency eats up one’s accumulated savings.
Or, the day comes when we realize all our wealth and security means little
            in the face of loss or addiction
 or loneliness.
 
The gospel story lays out the possibility that what is important on the journey
             is not what we have, but who.
That the most valuable thing is to be part of God’s family.
Seminary President David Lose goes so far as to say that the greatest gift Jesus gives the 70
            is not the power to work miracles,
            but the gift of vulnerability and interdependence.
 
The truth is, we are vulnerable.
To face life as it really is –
            to admit that we are not in control –
            takes courage.
 And admitting our dependence on others is not weakness,
            but a true expression of our life in Christ –
            we are all in this together.
 
This is a challenge for us.
I have seen first hand how ready you all are to help, serve, and give to others.
And how difficult it is for most of you – of us – to receive help or be served.
 
Most of us here are much more comfortable cooking a meal for someone who needs help,
            or sharing food at the food pantry,
than we are getting a meal to help us out after surgery,
            or taking a box of groceries to tide us over in a difficult month.
How many times have I heard,
            “I can handle it. Someone else needs that more than me.”
 
But the invitation to live in community is an invitation to receive help when you need it –
            to give someone else the gift of helping you.
To admit we need one another.
 
I was recently at an event where my Lutheran bishop, Jim Gonia, spoke.
He began with these words:
            “Those of you who know me know I have a saying. We are church . . .”
Here he paused – and those of us who do know him finished the phrase “better together.”
We are church – better together.
When we work together as the followers of Jesus,
            and rely of the presence of the Spirit among us,
            we can accomplish so much more than any of us can do alone.
 
The second challenge in this story is similar, but has to do with our work as a church.
We spend a lot of time talking about hospitality – about how to make this place welcoming for people to come here, to join us, to eat at our table and share our fellowship.
And that’s a vital, valuable conversation, which we need to always keep in front of us.
 
But this story asks for something different.
Jesus doesn’t tell his followers to stay here and prepare a feast for all the people he will send to eat with them.
He tells them to go out, to receive the hospitality of others –
            even to make themselves dependent on that hospitality –
            and in that way to share the good new that the Kingdom of God has come near.
 
 
I am reminded of a summer I spent studying in Africa – with a program from Luther Seminary in Zimbabwe, and with the Maryknoll Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, which trains people for missionary work in Africa.
Both programs, while centered in cities where we took classes from local university professors, also included the chance to go out to visit rural villages.
In Zimbabwe, we visited LWF development sites.
We heard the stories of people in the villages, saw their pride in the dams and other projects they were building with relief funds to make their lives better, and ate cola and roasted goat meat in their homes.
In Kenya, we each had an assistant who helped us navigate Nairobi, and we each spent one weekend visiting that person’s family in a rural village. So I went with Lucy to stay with her parents, worship in their church, eat avocados from the trees around their home and drink the punch they made with local water that I wasn’t sure I should drink but knew I could not refuse.
In both places, I received a gift from the people which changed the way I think about Africa and the people who live there.
It was a lesson about being in relationship with people who will receive our help –
            seeing, first, their gifts and strengths, rather than only their needs and struggles.
 
There is a movement in contemporary theology and church circles called Missional Church.
We often talk about the church’s mission –
            the mission we share to spread the gospel;
            the mission statements each church writes to guide our ministry.
The Missional Church movement turns that around a bit, saying that God has a mission in the world, and Gods’ mission has a church.
A basic tenant of the movement is to get out of the church –
            out of our buildings, our outreach programs, our comfort zones – to receive hospitality from people we might call other, and see what God is already up to there.
 
I have some ideas of how this might work – ministries I’ve been part of or heard about.
Such as marching in the Pride Parade.
Sharing “Ashes to go” on Ash Wednesday at the corner of 4th and Montano.
 
Susan Allison Hatch has told me about a program in downtown Albuquerque where anyone who comes – wealthy or poor, housed or homeless – sit down side by side to create art together.
I have read about two churches in Washington DC which do Church in the Park.
One morning a week, they prepare sandwiches and take them to a park in DC where many homeless people gather.
They share a Eucharist service, and then lunch, with the people who are there.
 
Ideas such as these are just the beginning.
Missional churches are still exploring what it means to move outside what we know,
            to meet people who know nothing of Jesus and the church,
            or who know only the Christianity presented as a set of rules and boundaries
                        from which they are excluded.
We are still learning what it means to receive hospitality, as well as offer it,
            and in that way create community and perhaps learn what God is up to outside our            church walls.
 
We have taken first steps –
            and I hope St Michael’s might take on this mission more and more.
It’s hard, and more than a little scary.
But we know, as did those first 70 who went out with no purses or sandals,
            that Jesus is with us.
And that is all we need.
 
Thanks be to God.
Amen.