Preached at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Knoxville, IA
Because I teach these days, I’m not a regular Sunday-after-Sunday preacher. I always feel a bit rusty when I sit down to write a sermon. This week I looked at a couple commentaries and some preaching blogs to see what people are saying about our readings today. Here’s what I found out:
- Abraham and Sarah in the Old Testament reading are to be praised for their hospitality. They welcome in the visiting angels and cook ‘em up a dandy supper.
- Today’s psalm gives us line after line of the things you need to do in order to dwell in the Lord’s sanctuary.
- And then we get to the story of Mary and Martha in the gospel reading, Jesus seems to tell Martha that her distracted doing is a problem.
Doing work is a good gift from God. Martha sure was right on that count. There’s nothing wrong with good, hard work – producing something for the common good or to meet your neighbor’s need. That’s something God has made us for. When Luther explained the Lord’s Prayer in the Small Catechism, he told us what daily bread means. He said it includes everything we need in this life – including work and income.
Work is such a part of us that we hardly notice it until it’s gone. Unemployment numbers are important not just because people need to earn money to put food on the table and clothes on their backs. They’re important because they’re a sign of people who don’t have access to the good work God intends for us each day. When we don’t have work, we hurt. When there’s no work to do, it affects what Martin Luther called the conscience. He used that word to described our sense of ourselves. You conscience is your what you understand about your standing before God and before you neighbor. Lack of work wrenches your conscience, because your work helps tell you who you are and whose you are.
Later this week I’m driving out to western South Dakota for a big wingding at the old country school my dad attended. So I’ll meet lots of sheep and cattle ranchers whose last names I’m known for most of my 50 years. I’ll tell them my name and shake a handful of calluses. And you know what the first question they’ll ask me will be? They’ll say, “What do you do these days?” When I tell them I’m a Lutheran pastor and college religion and philosophy professor, they’ll know something about my place in the world.
So Martha’s puttering around the kitchen throwing a kosher casserole together is just a part of how God makes the world. Doing is a good thing. But when sin enters the picture, everything changes. When it comes to doing or not doing, we sinners are an odd bunch.
God’s given us a good batch of things to do and keep from doing: things like having no other gods, honoring your father and mother and remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy. And if that’s not enough God has given us neighbors galore to care for.
But from Adam and Eve in the Garden on down to us, we sinners have wanted it our way. We’re like two-year-olds in a high chair who refuse to let our parents feed us. We say, “My do it myself.” Doing? Yup. We like doing. As long as we get to decide what to do and when we do it.
We sinners treat the gift of doing, God’s gracious gift of work, just like we treat all of God’s gifts. Our sin-clouded eyes aren’t able to see God’s gifts as gifts. Because we don’t trust God to give us all we need for this life, we turn away from the divine giver and use the gifts for our own ends. At best we begin to think of God’s gifts as tools to achieve our own goals. I work so I can buy more consumer electronics. I work to keep my lawn green and mowed, so won’t be an object of scorn at our neighborhood block party. At worst we not only turn away from the divine giver, we also turn the gifts themselves into false gods. We look to the things of the creation, including work, as the be-all and end-all of our existence. We trust them to give us what we think we need. Instead of fearing, loving and trusting God above all things, we look to things to secure our future and stave off the terror of not knowing where we’re headed.
Now we’re at the corner Martha turned in her busyness. Her work had become the source of her security and future. The gift of work became an end in itself and just as quickly became a burden. She started to see all that needed to get done if the evening with their guest of honor was ever going to come together. And make no mistake, getting supper together in first-century Bethany was no easy task. There’s no nuking things in the microwave, no refrigeration, no Calphalon cookwear and no Cuisinart food processors. It’s just constant drudgery. And there sits Mary, hanging out with Jesus and the guys. She’s in the other room sitting at Jesus feet, gazing at him all star-struck like a 12-year-old at a Justin Bieber concert. Isn’t Jesus supposed to be all caring or something? Shouldn’t he notice her burden? Shouldn’t he whisper, “You know, Mary, I think Martha could use a little help out there”?
Martha’s gotten all turned around with work. Stoke the fire. Wipe the brow. Knead the bread. And forget about just who it is the supper’s being cooked for. Martha’s worried about getting the meal together, but even the Devil knows that if he wanted to Jesus could grab a couple rocks and turn them into nice loaves of focaccia. Martha’s forgotten about who she’s dealing with.
So Jesus brings her back to the place of the lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin. Doing what needs to get done is great. He just wants her to keep her doing in its proper place, so she can see what’s really going on in the house she and Mary and Lazarus share. The Lord himself is with them, the Holy One of God. He didn’t choose to go to dinner with the Chief Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem, he came here to Bethany.
There’s great danger in letting work be the one thing that defines you in any moment. Because you see yourself able to exert your efforts to accomplish something, you begin to think that you might even be in charge. You yourself become the ultimate cause of your days and deeds. You become the game master. It all depends on you. But when you live under that illusion, what happens when you come to a place where no effort of your own, no work, no exertion of effort can change anything?
I suspect there are quite a few people in Pella these past few days are feeling the shifting tides of paralysis and powerlessness. Two boys drowned at an FCA camp pool party and there’s not a thing you can do to change the fact. The history will always be there. And nothing any of us does can create a different future. Life is full of those places and situations. We run along busy as can be and trip on the cold, unexpected truth that we are not in charge of our future. The word “cancer.” The loss of a job. The prospect of an empty next. The cruel names tossed in a middle school hallway. The slow, inexorable pull of gravity on our body’s various flesh bulbs. The inevitable last day and last breath that creep steadily toward us. All these things pull our ability to work out of our hands and remind us that we are not our own gods.
Each of these places in our lives offers a hidden Word from God, speaking to us the same way Jesus spoke to Martha. “You’re right,” he says, “You have come to the end of your rope. What exactly do you think happens when you discover you can’t fix things? Do you think the final catastrophe is at hand? Did you think you were in charge?” So Jesus brings a clear no to Martha and to us. There is a limit to what doing can accomplish, especially when it comes to ultimate matters like your death, your salvation, your verdict come Judgment Day.
But then Jesus turns Martha’s attention to her dear sister. “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” You see, there are lots of things you can do and may want to do. But there’s one thing that rises above everything else, and it’s not even a thing. It’s a person. Jesus. He has given himself to awestruck Mary, to busy Martha, to Lazarus soon to be dead and stinking in a tomb, to Peter, to Paul, to St. Monica and St. Clothild, to Martin Luther, and to you, sinners all. And here he promises that he can never be taken away. As Paul says in Romans, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
It’s just like Jesus to pull this on Martha. He has a habit of zeroing in our disasters and frustration. He has a way of finding our weak spots, of taking a magnifying glass to our sins and peccadilloes. He doesn’t mind pushing us to the limit and over it, because when we fall he gets to do what he does best: catching fallen sinners. He wants them to know that, work or no work, powerful or powerless, we remain subject to his own mighty affection. Meal schmeal, who cares what you’re cooking up for yourself. He has something better in store for you, the ultimate feast of mercy and forgiveness, the sacrament that bestows a future.
To paraphrase Psalm 15: You shall dwell in his sanctuary and live on his holy hill. No longer will you seek to be blameless in your work and production. Your purity comes from the one who died for you and rose again. He is the one who keeps his oath, even when it hurts. His promise on the cross is for you. Risen from the dead, he will never be shaken. He’s done all the work and now gives you the wages of faith: your salvation, forgiveness and deliverance from sin, death and the devil. For that we might just be willing to let the fires die out and the pots turn cold on the stove. And that’s just why we’re here today, to sit her at Jesus feet and hear him promise to stick with us always.
Calendars and to-do lists get put in the proper place when Jesus is around. Work becomes a gift again. And the invitation stays in place for the rest of our days: “Settle in now,” Jesus says, “And hear what I’m doing for you, always for you.” Amen.
