The Church of St.
Paul & Incarnation, Jersey City NJ
July 21, 2019
Year C, Proper 11:
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Amos 8:1-12
Psalm 52
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42
Many Ministries, One Jesus
A
couple of weeks ago I had a meeting in my office with someone who had never
been to our church.
Since
it was her first time here, I waited outside for her to arrive, both because I
like to stand outside, and because sometimes people have a hard time finding
their way around this place.
Anyway,
as she stepped out of her Uber, she looked up at the church and then looked at
me and said:
“After
looking at your website and seeing all the activities that go on here, I
expected the church to be…bigger.”
I
smiled and thought to myself, “I like you already!”
And,
you know, what she said about us is true.
Pretty
much every week, I begin the announcements by saying something like, “As usual,
we have a lot going on…”
Susan
uses the smallest legible font for the announcement insert, trying to squeeze
everything in, sometimes getting creative with abbreviations and punctuation to
somehow make it all work.
One
time my own mother said to me that it feels like the Friday morning email gets
longer and longer every week.
I
make no apologies for any of this.
We’ve
been given wonderful resources here – a great and beautiful (and air
conditioned!) space, along with lots of talented, interesting, and devoted
people.
And,
we’ve also been given a community around us that is hungry for good food in their
bellies – hungry for beautiful art and music to inspire their souls – and,
maybe most of all, hungry for human contact – hungry for the chance to have
real conversation, to break bread with neighbors, to know and to be known.
So,
I make no apologies for our full schedule and I don’t see us slowing down much,
at least while I’m rector.
But.
But,
all of this activity comes with some dangers.
There’s
the danger of becoming overwhelmed. I’ve heard from some of you who’ve felt
this way, that you just can’t keep with all that’s going on, that sometimes it
becomes too much and you just shut down or tune it out.
There’s
the danger that, when we get the word out into the community, when we open our
doors to absolutely everybody, when we do that, well, you never know who’s
going to walk in, right?
There
are likely to be people different than us, people who have new ideas, and even,
unfortunately, every now and then, people who might be unstable and disruptive.
But,
I think the greatest danger of all of this activity – of Sandwich Squad and
homeless lunch and Swift Fitness and yoga and art shows and concerts and the
dinner-dance Jersey City Together and feast days and craft guild and men’s
group and Family Promise and youth group and Stone Soup and Triangle Park, and,
and…
The
greatest danger of all this good activity is that we forget what all of this is
supposed to be about.
Right
now, our vestry has begun working on a mission statement for our unified
church. Because we do a lot, it’s harder than you might think to come up with a
couple of sentences that really capture who we are.
But,
maybe the most important thing to remember is:
There
are many ministries, but only one Jesus.
In
today’s Gospel lesson we pick up right where we left off last week.
If
you were here then, you may remember that we heard one of Jesus’ best-known and
most-loved stories, what’s usually called the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
In
that story, the Samaritan offers exceptional hospitality to an injured man on
the road, pouring oil and wine on his wounds, letting him ride on his own
animal, and then putting him up in an inn, where he could rest and recuperate
from his trauma.
And,
now, today, the theme of hospitality continues when Jesus and his disciples are
welcomed into the home of a woman named Martha.
For
some of us, probably especially many of the women, I’m sure that this story
both rings very true and is also pretty exasperating.
Martha
is busy with her many “tasks” – it’s no small thing to have Jesus of Nazareth
and his friends over to your house – but it’s not just that Martha is busy.
Martha
is “distracted by her many tasks.”
Meanwhile,
her sister Mary doesn’t seem to be lifting a finger to help. Instead, she’s
sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening to the Lord, in the posture of a disciple.
Apparently,
Martha can’t take it any more, and so she says to Jesus, “Lord, do you not care
that my sister has left me to do all of the work by myself? Tell her then to
help me.”
Now,
I assume that Martha expected that, of course, Jesus would agree with her and
say something to Mary, like:
“Mary,
Martha’s right. Why don’t you go help your sister and we can talk some more
later?”
Very
reasonable, right?
But,
no.
Instead,
Jesus gives a kind of cryptic, mysterious reply:
“Martha,
Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only
one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from
her.”
And
that’s where the story ends.
And,
I think we can all agree that it’s better that we don’t know how Martha
responded to this, but I can almost hear the banging of pots and the slamming
of doors…
So,
what to make of all this?
As
always, it’s important to remember that the gospels are written to operate on
several different levels.
Those
include history: the gospels gives us accounts of what Jesus said and did,
where we went, who he met, and so on.
Another
level is theology: the gospels tell us the meaning of Jesus’ life, death, and
resurrection, and what Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection mean for us today.
Another
level is one that’s harder for us to pick up on: at least to some extent, the
gospels address what was going on some of the early Christian communities in
the last few decades of the first century.
In
other words, while telling the story of Jesus, the Evangelist Luke and the
others were also telling the story of their own times and places.
And,
this is part of what may be going on in this story of Martha and Mary.
The
early Christians didn’t have beautiful churches like ours in which to worship.
Instead, they gathered in people’s homes, in what are called “house churches.”
And, yes, some of those house churches were led by women.
So, you see where
I’m going with this, right?
It’s possible that
the first hearers and readers of this story might have recognized Martha’s home
as a house church and they would have recognized Martha as the leader of that
church.
And, like church
people past and present, Martha is busy, busy, busy - distracted by her many
tasks – and in the Greek the word used for “tasks” can be actually also
translated as “ministries.”
So, like church
people past and present, Martha is busy - is distracted – so distracted that
she may have forgotten the most important thing:
There are many
ministries, but only one Jesus.
And, Martha, he’s
right there.
He’s right here.
Martha and Mary
also appear in the Gospel of John where we learn a little bit more about them –
they live in a town called Bethany and they have a brother, Lazarus, whom Jesus
raises from the dead.
But, aside from
that, we don’t know what happens to them after Jesus’s death and resurrection.
But, we can
imagine that life was often hard.
It was hard to be
part of the tiny “Jesus Movement,” when most everybody else rejected his
message and denied his identity.
It was hard to
live in a land occupied by a brutal empire, where life was cheap and any kind
of resistance was crushed without mercy.
Since Martha had
her own house, it seems like she was relatively well-to-do, but life was still
hard when you had to cook and clean and pay bills and probably take care of
others, maybe including her sister.
Life was hard with
much ministry to do and it was easy to get distracted from the most important
thing – it was easy to forget that the mission is to stick close to Jesus.
And, life is often
hard for us today.
It’s hard to be
part of a shrinking “Jesus Movement,” when most everybody else has turned away
and is probably not coming back.
It’s hard to live
on a planet that is getting dangerously hot.
It’s hard to live in
a land with shrinking resources and a government that often seems bent on
making the rich richer and hurting the poorest and most vulnerable.
Life is hard and
there is so much ministry to do and it’s so easy to get distracted from the
most important thing.
It’s easy to
forget our mission is to stick close to Jesus.
There are many
ministries, but only one Jesus.
Amen.
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