All Work and No Pray
All Work and No Pray by Rev. L. John Gable
July 21, 2019
Someone once said, “We know that the Bible is true because we find ourselves in it”, or a Coleridge said, “It finds me!” By faith we claim that the Bible is the Word of God and the record of God’s involvement in human history; it is God’s story. But by experience we also know that it tells our story because as we hear and read this narrative we find ourselves in it. This certainly is true of the story we read this morning in Luke 10.
Recall, the Gospels are not simply written as a diary of events, but with the expressed purpose of instructing, persuading, convincing us of the truth of Jesus Christ and of the benefit of life lived according to His standards and values. To this end, Luke places the story of Jesus’ visit to the home of Martha and Mary very strategically between two other very familiar passages. Immediately preceding is the story of the Good Samaritan in which the question is asked, “Who is neighbor to the man who fell victim?” Clearly, it is the one who helped him, so the teaching ends, “Go and do likewise.” That story is a call to action. “Don’t just stand there, DO something!” Immediately following our text though is Luke’s recollection of the time the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray from which we get what we call the Lord’s Prayer, conversely a message about the importance of the cessation of activity and the priority of intimacy in the presence of the Lord, which we could translate, “Don’t just do something, STAND THERE!” So we see the two legs of the Christian faith, good works and personal devotion, held in tension in this portion of Luke’s Gospel, each given a place of prominence and importance in Jesus’ teaching. And nestled neatly between them is the story of Jesus’ visit to the home of Martha and Mary.
Jesus, traveling with His disciples, comes to the community of Bethany and goes to the home of these two sisters, presumably good friends of His for we will meet them again later; they are the sisters of Lazarus, the young man Jesus raised from the dead. Already in this story we see something about Jesus that at times we tend to forget. He had friends. Yes, He was a great religious leader and respected teacher, but He didn’t always need to be center stage and in the spotlight. He, as we, also enjoyed the downtimes, the quiet times with good friends. So, I picture Jesus sitting, visiting with Mary (which in and of itself would have been seen as being radical and provocative; a rabbi in the home of two women, one of which was sitting at His feet, the position only a disciple would take) while Martha is in the kitchen busily preparing the evening meal, and this is where the story gets interesting.
Periodically I can picture Martha calling out, “What was that you said, Jesus? Can you talk a little louder? I missed it in here preparing this meal ALL BY MYSELF!” My guess is she was trying to drop as many hints as she could, without being too conspicuous, for her sister Mary to get up off her duff and get in there and help her. But Mary missed every clue and sat spellbound at Jesus’ feet, hanging on His every word. We all know people like that, don’t we? They love to sit and visit while we do all the work.
Luke tells us that Martha was “distracted by her many tasks” which is a nice way of saying she was fit to be tied by her sister’s apparent laziness. She finally got so upset that she went to Jesus (isn’t it interesting that she went to Jesus and not directly to Mary – “Excuse me, Mary dear, but may I have a word with you in the kitchen?”) and said, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” And Jesus’ response is as profound as it was unexpected, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; but there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part which will not be taken from her.”
Scholars debate the exact translation of this text. Jesus’ words are unclear, but His meaning is not. In the vernacular, Jesus is saying “Come on, Martha, lighten up. Get a life. You are worried and upset about the wrong things. Just as there will always be the poor among you, so there will always be meals to prepare, laundry to wash, bathrooms to clean and carpools to drive. Those things are important, but they aren’t the most important. Mary has chosen just to sit and be with Me, and that is good. So why don’t you just leave the kitchen for a while and come and do the same.”
Poor Martha, through the ages she has gotten such a bum rap. All she was trying to do was that which was expected of her: being a good hostess and providing a decent meal for an honored guest. So, for those of us, both women and men, who see ourselves as Marthas in this story we need to understand what Jesus is saying. He is not belittling our acts of service and heightened senses of responsibility. What He is saying is that we have to make sure we have our priorities right. While those tasks of service may be important, and they surely are, they should not be done to the neglect of other things that are more important still. Jesus never criticized Martha for setting a beautiful table and preparing a wonderful meal; but He did address her getting all flustered and distracted and resentful, which is to say, in our desire to serve Jesus we must be careful not to neglect or miss the opportunity just to be with Him.
You and I, today, have many things which call for our attention, some very important and essential, others that only appear to be so. The constant struggle for us is in discerning which is which, so we must continually fight the battle against “the tyranny of the urgent”, by asking ourselves “of all the things I have to do today which are the most important?”
This is what the Psalmist is getting at in Psalm 90. He understands the relatively brief span of our lives against the backdrop of eternity, so he prays, “Lord, teach us to number our days (to count or to take an accounting of our days) that we may gain a wise heart.” He suggests that each day we should ask ourselves, “What did I do today, or what do I need to do today, to give my life meaning and purpose and to make myself useful in the work of the Lord?” It is remarkable how that simple prayer can refocus our attention and priorities.
Jesus’ conversation with Martha and Mary seems to turn on the phrase, “You are worried and distracted by many things, but there is need of only one thing.” What is that one thing to which Jesus is referring? He said Mary, the sister sitting at His feet, “has chosen the better part.” What does that mean and what is the better part for us as we try to apply this teaching to ourselves today?
First, Jesus reminds us to “keep God first in our lives”, to give God a place of priority before all else. How often we say, “I don’t have time to pray or read the Bible, I’m too busy!” Sometimes we can even find ourselves saying that because we are so busy doing “religious” things! Jesus here calls us to check our priorities. As with any relationship, if we desire to grow in our relationship with God, to “deepen our faith” it only makes sense that we spend time with Him each day in prayer and meditation and study of His Word. History has it that the great Reformer Martin Luther spent 3-4 hours a day in prayer. When asked “Why”? he said “I’m too busy not to pray.” Clearly our first priority is to give God our first priority.
Second, Jesus’ response to Martha reminds us of the basic truth that people are more important than things. There is no question that both Martha and Mary dearly loved the Lord; they just showed it in different ways, Mary by sitting at His feet and Martha by preparing Him a good meal. Both are valid ways of expressing love, but Jesus says Mary has chosen the better way because people are more important than things. In this case, friendship is more important than food, relationships are more important than relish trays.
If we read this story purely from the perspective of either of the two sisters we could argue that sitting all day won’t get a meal on the table and working all day leaves no time for friendships or prayer. But surely there is a middle way. What if our work becomes our prayer and our prayer becomes the avenue for our service? Brother Lawrence was a monk in the 17th century in France. He entered the monastery late in life and was frustrated by his inability to live by the rigorous disciplines of the monastic order. One day, while washing dishes, he discovered that he could talk with “the God of the pots and pans” just as well as he could kneel in prayer at the altar, or, as he phrased it, he could “practice the presence of God” in whatever he was doing. He writes, “I turn my little ommelet in the pan for the love of God.” Brother Lawrence fell head over heels in love with God and he let that love permeate and transform everything else he did, and we can do the same. This is an important lesson for each of us, particularly as we find ourselves running faster and faster and still getting further and further behind.
I’ll close with yet a third insight we can glean from this teaching. This past week I was in Denver attending a national convocation with the Credo program and I was reminded of a story one of my faculty team members tells about a sermon she previously heard at a similar convocation several years ago. Credo is a ministry jointly shared by the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church, which meant that at that particular closing worship service there were far more preachers on the dias than any service ought to have, all dressed in their high church finery. When it came time for the sermon, after an already too long service, the preacher of the day rose to speak. He was an older gentleman, well past the age of retirement, who looked rather disheveled in a professorial kind of way and who seemed to lose his place in his manuscript at various points as he preached. The sermon meandered and my friend wondered where he was going particularly when he started rambling on about a time when he was 9 or 10 years and he went to his grandparent’s farm for Thanksgiving. He told how he watched as his grandfather went out in the barnyard and grabbed a big Tom turkey by the neck before cutting its head off. He told how the turkey took off running, like its head had been cut off, then falling and getting up and running again. All pretty fascinating stuff to a young boy, but my friend was wondering what the story had to do with the point of the sermon, until the preacher finally paused, looked up from his notes and said, “The moral of the story is, activity is not a sure sign of life.” “Activity is not a sure sign of life.” This was Jesus’ message to Martha, and to all of the Marthas among us, and a good indication of why Mary had “chosen the better part.”
There is no question but that we are busy, so the real question is, are we busy about the right things?
In our desire to grow in our relationship with God, sometimes we are called to “go and do”; and other times just to “sit and be”, both are expressions of worship and devotion as we seek to “practice the presence of God”. “O Lord, teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”