Mary and Martha

Amos 8:1-12

Luke 10:38-42

            As I reflected on the story of Mary and Martha, a short vignette came to my mind.  There was a man who visited a farm one day slightly before thanksgiving.  He was watching the farmer, whose job it was to dispatch a turkey for thanksgiving.  Sure enough he chopped off the turkey’s head.  And as we’ve heard sometimes happens with chickens, the head-less turkey took off running around the yard.  “You see,” said the farmer, “activity is not a sure sign of life.”

Activity is not a sure sign of life.

            But we tend to think that it is, don’t we?  I was walking with a good friend the other day and we exchanged the usual conversation that we almost always have when we meet, every couple months or so.  “How are you?” she asks.

“Busy,” I answered.  And then I returned the question, “How are you?”

“Also busy,” she answered.  And then she paused.  “Why is it that if we answer any other way, we somehow feel we have failed?  Why is it that we have to prove our worthiness and our work ethic and even our label as ‘good person’ by being so busy we don’t have time to walk with a friend except once every few months?” 

There’s truth in this. Far too much truth for comfort.  My own life is work and kids, work and kids.  I now have a walk scheduled in for every other Thursday morning.  But I do it in such a way that it is part of my job: the “hiking group” that we have here: a time to connect with parishioners makes it acceptable for me to walk. 

While I tend to think this work-mania is worse now that it was in the time of Mary and Martha (though honestly, whose to say?), I think another big part of the issue here is that Martha feels she is taking the higher road.  She is doing what is expected of her. She is, no doubt, getting food ready to feed their guest, she is taking care of the work of the house, being a good hostess.  And yet Mary is the one reaping the benefits.  Martha is doing what must be done.  And yet Mary is getting to sit and listen and learn and just BE with her friend, her teacher, her Jesus.  Martha is outraged by it.  Why should Mary, who is not following the rules as we know them, not allowing herself to be defined by how active and busy and productive she is, not doing what is needed by the household and by the rules of propriety, why should she actually be gaining, be benefitting, be thriving in her scandalous behavior? 

And Jesus?  Well, he does not give Martha what she is hoping for.  He does NOT lift her up and praise her for the work she is doing.  He does not correct Mary for her choice to sit and listen rather than work.  He does not support what everyone knows to be the rules of good manners and good behavior then and now.  Instead he says, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”  Outrageous!  Frustrating!  UNFAIR.

I understand this.  I think about people I know personally who have what I call enchanted lives.  One in particular is very comfortable, has no need to work, and takes full advantage of that to do whatever he wants to do.  He has a lovely house, a cute zippy little car.  While fairly young, he does not have to work because he was born into privilege.  He does take the time to sit and listen, to walk, to be with people he cares about.  And there are times when I find myself very envious of his situation.  There are moments when, like Martha, I want to shout, “It’s not fair!  Make him do his part!  Tell him to help!”  I am truly grateful for the work I have and the privilege of raising my beautiful children, and the depth of the relationships that I have with them.  In my better moments, I know I would not trade my life of busy and crazy with anyone else's.  But there are moments when I also recognize that he too has been given a gift: the gift of time, and space; he has time to listen and reflect, to choose what he does, to step forward into a new life, a life without responsibility, a life of freedom.  And there are moments of recognition on my part that the gift in that is something I, too, should embrace, and in fact could embrace, with more frequency and more intention. 

Mary, we are told, has chosen the better part.  She has put aside the requirements and responsibilities of daily living in order to be in the moment with Jesus.  She has put aside the busyness of expectations and demands on her time, and has instead chosen to sit and learn and listen.  She has chosen to be alive in the moment, rather than running around, headless, without meaning or true life. 

How often do we pause, do we take the time to just take time?  How often do we say, “No, I’m not going to do whatever the world believes I need to be doing in this moment.  Instead I’m going to just BE, rather than DO?”

In talking with my eldest daughter about this, she has shared with me that, as she is a quieter person, that the business and activity of her fellow students makes her feel that she is somehow failing.  She has already learned to measure her worth by busyness.  Which is unfair, both to her, and to the other students who have forgotten how to find the time to simply BE.  She has much to teach them by her quieter stance.  But what she has to give is harder to learn.

I used to think that retired people were better at this, but as I’ve watched many of the schedules of my retired friends, I no longer believe this to be the case.  We all struggle with this.  Maybe in part because we feel that we aren’t doing anything by just Being.

But science actually tells us something different.  It’s not intuitive, it’s hard to understand.  But science tells us that observing, watching, just BEING changes everything around us.  As an article in Science Daily (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/02/980227055013.htm) said it, “Strange as it may sound, interference can only occur when no one is watching. Once an observer begins to watch the particles going through the openings, the picture changes dramatically: if a particle can be seen going through one opening, then it's clear it didn't go through another. In other words, when under observation, electrons are being "forced" to behave like particles and not like waves. Thus the mere act of observation affects the experimental findings.”  If this is the case at the quantum level, think how much more true this is at a grand scale level.  When we take the time to look, to see, to observe, to notice, to hear one another, to listen, to learn, to reflect, the world around us is affected.  It is changed.  It is often when we do the least, that we do the most.

I think about the trees that surround us.  They are not “active” and yet, they produce the very air that we breathe.  And their ability to stand, quiet, still, silent, can have a profound effect on all of us when we actually take the time to be in the forest, with the trees. 

There is a wonderful book called Touching Spirit Bear, by Ben Mikaelsen (New York: Harper Collins Pub., 2001) about a young juvenile delinquent who is dealt with using restorative justice practices rather than retributive justice.  What this means is that instead of incarcerating and hardening the boy to become a life-long criminal, the community came together, including those hurt by his crimes and decided together that instead of incarceration, he would first make amends, and then spend a period of time alone on a secluded island, with occasional help from wise officers, working through his past in order to make new decisions about his future.  I won’t ruin the story for you by telling you all of his experiences.  But I would like to share with you a segment of his story.  He has had a bear encounter that ended very badly, but now he is searching out that bear, trying to restore and reconcile what has happened to him since his time there.  He calls the bear “spirit bear”.  The story continues with Cole, the boy reflecting…

“… what happened to people in their frantic worlds of noise and hectic rushing?  How much of the world did people miss because they were not calm enough, empty enough, to experience it?...When dawn finally arrived, he hiked to the opening of the bay… As he walked he focused on the patterns around him.  The lapping waves came as regularly as deep breaths, the light drizzle roughed the water’s surface, clouds hung low as fog, and thousands of smooth worn rocks lined the timeless shoreline like a ghost highway that disappeared into the mist.  Cole felt a part of the pattern as he meandered alng the shore.  When he reached the point, he picked a natural saddle between two rocks and sat down.  He focused his gaze on a small whit erock near the water’s edge and breathed in deeply.  To see the [] Bear, he needed to clear his mind and become invisible, not to the world but to himself.  He left his hood down to let his head and senses remain exposed to the air.  The cool drizzle soaked his hair, and soon droplets of water dripped off his forehead onto his cheeks.  When he closed his eyes, the droplets felt warm on his face.  At first they felt like his own tears of anger and fear.  Then he breathed more deeply, feeling the rhythm of the world around him, an endless rhythm where time disappeared.  As the past, present, and future became one, the droplets on Cole’s cheeks dripped to the ground, melting into the landscape to which they belonged.  When he opened his eyes once again, it was as if he were waking from a deep sleep.  Far down the shoreline, where the rocks disappeared into the folding mist, a white object had appeared.  At the place where things visible faded into not-being, there stood the [] Bear, as clear as if it were standing only feet away.  The bear gazed patiently.  As Cole stared back with the same patience, all time, even the present, ceased to exist.  He no longer thought of himself as Cole Matthews, a juvenile delinquent from Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Instead he was part of the landscape, without a beginning or end. …(p189-191).

             I think about my own moments of being so completely in the present that the amazing happens.  Or maybe it’s not the amazing that is happening, but the ordinary that I’m finally seeing.  As you may or may not know, one of the things that gives me the most sense of life is walking, is being outside with nature and with the beauty that God has made.  A few weeks ago I was sitting by myself outside for a few minutes, just breathing in the depth of the air around me and listening to the world.  Just for a moment I was still.  Suddenly a dragon fly came out of nowhere and landed on my knee.  It was facing me, looking up into my face.  I have never before been so close to a dragonfly.  But I looked into its face as it looked into mine.  It squatted down: that’s the only way to describe it.  It had been up on its legs and it kind of bent down, tipped it’s head and looked at me again.  I didn’t want to breathe.  But I did breathe.  And together we sat looking at one another in wonder.  It must have been a full minute.  But suddenly the world around me was back in my mind.  And I went from being present in that moment to wanting to take the dragonfly’s picture, to share the moment with my family and friends.  I went from being present with the moment, to being in the future and into what I should “do” with that moment that was given to me.  The moment my thinking shifted from being there with the dragonfly to thinking about sharing it in the future, the dragonfly spread his wings and left.  Before I had even moved, but the moment my attention became divided, the dragonfly left. And I was the one who was no longer blessed by that special time. 

            Yes, we have much to do in this life. We have responsibilities that need to be done, people who need our care and our attention.  We need to do the things of daily living and not shirk our responsibilities to ourselves, our families, our communities and the world.  But we are also called to sit at the feet of Jesus and to listen; to be present to this glorious, beautiful, amazing world that we have been privileged to experience.  We are called to take it in, to be fed and nurtured by it, so that we CAN do the work of the church in the world, loving, giving, working towards justice.  We are called to eat and drink of the bread of life, to allow the gifts of God to build us up so that we can enter the world with strength, with wholeness, with grace. 

            There will be times of being Martha.  But let us not be so consumed by them that we also miss the times of being Mary.  For they are the “better part”.  And they are an invitation to us to live with fullness.  Amen.