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July 10, 2016
1 Corinthians 12:4-11
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same
Spirit; 5 and there are varieties of services, but the same
Lord; 6 and there are
varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in
everyone. 7 To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit
for the common good. 8 To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of
wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit,
9 to another
faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 10 to another
the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of
spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of
tongues. 11 All these are activated by one and the same Spirit,
who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
Luke 10:38-42
38 Now as they went
on their way, Jesus entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha
welcomed him into her home. 39 She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and
listened to what he was saying. 40 But 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.” 41 But the Lord
answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; 42 there is need of
only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away
from her.”
Sermon: “Mary
and Martha”
Of course he meant it kindly. I know that.
I know Josh—as well as anyone can know
The Son of God. All the same, he slipped up
Over this one. After all, a Son is only a son
When you come to think about it. And this
Was between sisters. Marty and me,
We understand each other. For instance, when Lazzie died,
We didn’t need to spell it out between us,
Just knew how to fix the scenario
So Josh could do his bit—raising Lazzie, I mean,
From the dead. He has his own way of doing things,
Has to muddle people first, so then the miracle
Comes as a miracle. If he’d just walked in
When Lazzie was ill, and said OK, Lazzie,
You’re off the sick list now — that’d have lacked impact.
But all this weeping, and groaning, and moving of stones,
And praying in public, and Mart saying I believe, etcetera,
Then Lazarus, come forth! and out comes Lazzie
In his shroud. Well, even a halfwit could see
Something out of the ordinary was going on.
But this was
just ordinary. A lot of company,
A lot of hungry men, not many helpers,
And Mart had a go at me in front of Josh,
Saying I’m all on my own out there. Can’t you
Tell that sister of mine to take her finger out,
And lend a hand? Well, the thing about men is,
They don’t realise how temperamental good cooks are.
And Mart is very good. Believe you me.
She was just blowing her top. No harm in it.
I knew that. But then Josh gives her
This monumental dressing-down, and really,
It wasn’t fair. The trouble with theology is, it features
Too much miraculous catering. Those ravens feeding Elijah,
For instance. I ask you! They’d have been far more likely
To eat him. And all those heaven-sent fast-food take-aways—
Quail, and manna, and that. And Josh himself
The famous fish-butty picnic, and that miraculous
Draught of fishes. What poor old Mart could have done with
Was a miraculous draught of coffee and sandwiches
Instead of a ticking-off. And the men weren’t much help.
Not a thank you among them, and never a thought
Of help with the washing-up.
Don’t get me wrong. Of course I love Josh,
Wonder, admire, believe. He knows I do.
But to give Marty such a rocket
As if she was a Pharisee, or that sort of type,
The ones he has it in for. It wasn’t right.
Still, Josh himself, as I said—well, he is only
The Son of God, not the Daughter; so how could he know?
And when it comes to the truth, I’m Marty’s sister.
I was there; I heard what was said, and
I knew what was meant. The men will write it up later
From their angle, of course. But this is me, Mary,
Setting the record straight.
This poem entitled,
“Unauthorized Version” by English poet U.A. Fanthorpe, shows us that when we
think we know a Bible story – like that of Mary and Martha – we might not
actually know it at all. (A helpful
note: the Hebrew name for Jesus is Jeshua, so that’s why she cleverly kept
saying Josh.)
Martha always comes across in
this familiar story as the perfectionist, the over-achiever, the bad gal. (Which is perhaps why her name always comes
last…you never hear this story referred to as Martha and Mary, do you? Always Mary and then Martha.)
The prompt in our little
yellow box of summer sermon suggestions was simple: “Are you a Mary or a Martha?”
We all identify more with one
than the other: the doer or the dreamer, the server or the sitter, the laborer
or the listener. Jesus, it would seem,
prefers the latter. At least that’s how
it sounded. But our clever poem reminds us that things
aren’t always what they seem (especially hundreds of years and many
translations later).
I don’t think Jesus wanted
Martha to stop her hospitable ways – there’s a value in that. I think he wanted her to stop comparing
herself to her sister, and letting that worry and frustration overwhelm
her. And, whether we feel more like a
Mary or more like a Martha, we all know what that’s like.
When you can’t actually see
Jesus in front of you because you’re too busy trying to please people or earn
approval. Jesus doesn’t need any of our
posturing and perfection. He just needs our time, for us to sit
at his feet, and listen to his story again.
Because when we hear that story – one so saturated with grace – we see
everything differently. Like Mary
sticking up for her sister Marty in the poem, we extend grace to others. We don’t compete or compare. We celebrate the gifts each other bring, and
the gift of Jesus’ very presence with us, each time we show hospitality to a
wanderer.
Perhaps we understand this
story best when we remember it’s a story of two sisters, and like any family,
there was bound to be struggle and frustration.
Jesus happened to arrive on a particularly tense day. And perhaps he overreacted a little, because
all that demon-casting-out and parable-preaching left him low on patience. But once he left, back to that
healing-preaching-forgiving business, those two sisters were still sisters.
They dealt with their quarrel
as sisters do, that most classic of all sibling struggles, that their
personalities were so very different.
They loved each other. They
accepted each other’s gifts (eventually).
Early Christian writings suggest they may have been at the cross as
Jesus died and the empty tomb when he rose, together.
Some church traditions have
taken Mary’s gifts to be contemplation, and Martha’s gifts to be acts of
service. We need both. We need the storytellers and the servants,
the dreamers and the doers. And we all
need to be able to put the first thing first, that “one thing” Jesus spoke up. I
think that “one thing” is remembering that we’re family, we belong to each
other.
We need to remember our belonging
to one another now more than ever. If we
forget that “one thing” – our belonging to each other in this human family – we
miss the point of it all. We miss that
chance to sit at Jesus’ feet and hear his story: that he came to this earth as
a poor brown-skinned carpenter, to break down every single barrier between us
and God, and us and one another.
Family is complicated; Mary
and Martha knew that.
But that “one thing” of
belonging to each other is more important than all the other things we might do
or say or argue or defend. We show our
belonging in different ways, because like Mary and Martha, God has given us
different gifts.
1 Corinthians 12 says
it best:
Now there are
varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services,
but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same
God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the
common good.
What
is your gift, the thing that comes most naturally to you? Dreaming or doing, laboring or listening.
Whatever your gift from God, now is the time to use it, friends. Not just for your own good, or for the good
of your family, or for the good of our church, but for the good of all: the
common good. We need Mary and we need
Martha, and we need everyone else, to remember that one thing: that we all
belong to God and one another, and nothing can take that from us. Amen.
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