Proper 11C

Proper 11C, Luke 10:38:42
Poor Martha! It’s hard to go down in history as the person who has been chastised by Jesus for complaining and not paying attention to the right thing. Or at least that’s how most people tell this story. The phrase “Martha, Martha” has been thrown at more than few people whom we think are busybodies.
When I read this Gospel passage last week, a story from my own life popped into my head right away, and I had a new found understanding of what Martha was going through.
During the ordination process, there are two life altering educational experiences the Church expects you to have. The first is seminary; the second is Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE. CPE is a summer long intensive course where students learn pastoral care in critical and crisis situations. Usually, a student is a chaplain in some sort of hospital facility. For my CPE assignment I was the chaplain at a retirement home that had a dedicated hospital floor. My job was to spend the morning going to classes about pastoral care, and spending the afternoon visiting with patients on the hospital floor and the rest of the time filling out paperwork on my visits. I was assigned a small section of the floor and asked to visit these people regularly.
There was a lot to do, and I was assured by my instructors that the classes, the paperwork and the visits were all equally important.
My first week there I met a man, Mr. Smith, in the common room of the hospital floor. He introduced himself as I was walking by, so I sat down next to him to have a brief chat. Well that brief chat turned into an hour long conversation, where we found out that we both loved to talk about theology and operas. When our conversation ended, I looked down at my watch, and realized what time it was. I had planned to fill out some paperwork that afternoon, but I had talked my way through that time.
I resolved that I would pay more attention to my watch and evenly distribute my time. Yet a few days later, I walked by Mr. Smith, and another hour long conversation ensued. Mr. Smith told me stories of serving his country, of being a school teacher, of being a father. I sat in a chair facing him, hanging on every word. Our conversation was easy, never awkward or forced.
I went home again that day annoyed at the disproportionate amount of time I had spent with talking to Mr. Smith. I knew I had to attend to my classwork and my paperwork, but I was realizing that I was spending more time visiting people than I was on the paperwork and classwork.
I still got my paperwork in on time, and I still read all the readings for class, but because of how much time I was spending visiting people like Mr. Smith I was not putting an equal effort into everything. The visiting was clearly becoming my priority. I felt like I was beginning to break the rules by not giving equal time to my classwork and paperwork, but I was sure I would be letting Mr. Smith down if I stopped visiting Him so much.
I believe Martha was in the same position that I was; someone with a set of duties and the challenge of balancing them all.
Mary and Martha are close friends of Jesus, some of the few mentioned in the Gospels outside of the disciples. On his way to towards Jerusalem, Jesus stops to visit his friends and followers. In first century Palestine, much like today, the rule is that when a guest comes to your house, you take care of that guest. You offer them a drink and food, you make them comfortable. Martha gets right too this. She heads right off into the kitchen and begins to get things ready. Now her sister Mary, she decides that she will attend to their guest by sitting down at the Lord’s feet to listen to him.
Many people hear this story and think “What was Martha doing? Why on earth, when God in the Flesh comes into your house, would you go off and start fussing in the kitchen? Why didn’t she go sit at the Lord’s feet like her sister?”
One the surface, It seems like Jesus agrees with this statement. He tells her “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things!” Yet, I am convinced this surface reading is not what Jesus meant. John Henry Newman, one of the foremost Anglicans of the 1800’s tells us “If Jesus’ words be taken literally, they might indeed, even mean that Martha’s heart was not right with Him,
which, it is plain from other parts of the history, they do not mean.” I think Newman was right in his reading of this. If Martha is wrong, wouldn’t have Jesus told her so? Jesus has no problem with telling people they are wrong…just ask any Pharisee or scribe that came within 50 feet of Him! Instead, He tells us that she is distracted. So what does Jesus mean?
Jesus is well aware that his time left is short. His earthly ministry will come to an end when he is put to death for our redemption. He speaks about this time and time again in the Gospels, but Jesus’ followers don’t seem to get this. They can’t seem to see the crucifixion looming on the horizon.
So on a practical level, Jesus wants his followers to listen to him. He wants to impart as much wisdom them to as His time on earth will allow Him. Yet we know in this desire, he wasn’t telling his disciples to break all the rules in order to listen to him. Jesus tell us “Let the dead bury their dead” (Matt 8:22) yet he also tells us “Think not that I have come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.” (Matt 5:17)
Hearing these two seemingly contrasting statements, it seems like you can’t win. “What am I to do? Do I follow the rules in the name of Jesus, or do I break them all in order to follow Jesus?”
This is the situation I felt myself in when I was talking to Mr. Smith. Does my love for Jesus, who tells me to love my neighbor, mean that I should blow off all my other work to show my love to Mr. Smith by listening to him all day?
After a few weeks of feeling guilty about this, I had a breakthrough. I was explaining this struggle I had over balancing my duties to a classmate of mine who was a chaplain on the same floor as me. She told me that she had seen Mr. Smith and I in one of those long conversations, and she said something special was happening there. In her opinion, I was doing the right thing by spending most of my time visiting people. I thought about this for a moment, and I realized that she was right. Something special was happening here…I was truly learning how to be a good pastor. I was being taught by a wise man how to listen well and to live into the moment…things that good pastors need to do.
That is the goal of Clinical Pastoral Education, to become a good pastor. I realized I had been learning more from Mr. Smith than I had been from any of the class work or reflection papers I was writing.
In this breakthrough I began to understand what Martha must have gone through and what Jesus really wants of us. Like Jesus’ limited time n Earth, Mr. Smith’s time was also drawing to a close. It was clear that his health was failing. What became clear to me was that the paperwork would always be there, the books would always be in a library for me to read. The time I had with Mr. Smith, that was limited. Every minute I spent with him was minute of education I could never get from anywhere else.
In the end, the tough decision I had made for myself never was a decision. If I truly wanted to learn to be a good pastor, yet fully pay attention to my paperwork, my classwork and my pastoral visits, I could never spend an equal amount of time on each of them. Class work and paperwork would never go away, but Mr. Smith would. In order to get the most out of all three of these learning assignments, I had to first give my time and energy to my pastoral work. It was only after spending all this time on the pastoral visits, and with Mr. Smith in particular, that the classwork and paperwork began to make sense.
This is what the Lord is telling Martha. Jesus is not saying to her, “Martha, why are you wasting your time on unimportant things like kitchenwork!” St. Luke tells us that Jesus told her “there is need of only one thing.” That doesn’t mean that in following Jesus that Martha is freed from all her earthly obligations. Jesus means that at this moment, what matters is that Martha is in the room with Jesus, listening to Him, learning from Him, loving Him. The kitchen will still be there when Jesus takes His leave and goes back on His journey. Martha wasn’t wrong to be attending to her obligations, she simply hadn’t realized that the obligation to be with Jesus came before her obligations in the kitchen.
Like Martha, we all live with various sets of duties, of things we need to get done. Quite often, these duties come up at the same time, and we are forced to ask the question: which one do I do first? This choice will always be up to you in the end, but I believe Jesus gives us a very good indication of what to focus on. Jesus instituted a church, a family, because He knows that we learn the most about God and serve Him the best when we work with others. When you have obligations that come up at the same time, and one of them has to with another person, spend your time with the other person. Kitchen work, paper work, class work will always be there, and always be important, but our time with friends, family and teachers is fleeting. Love your neighbor as yourself by spending your time with your fellow man. See Jesus in the other and then, when your friend has left to continue on their journey, attend to your other duties, knowing they matter just as much, yet they can never come first.