9th Sunday After
Pentecost: Luke 38-42
Our world is
hurting. Life can be so painful. And we want to respond.
We even feel we need to respond. And sometimes I don’t know
how. This week in a small town in India, 23 children died from eating
pesticide lased food in their school lunches. I also read about how the
US finally acknowledged their role in the death of a 16-year-old American
citizen by a US drone attack in Yemen. Much anger, confusion, and even
violence has ensued from many on issues over race, power, and justice, after
the verdict of the Trayvon Martin Case. And yesterday, someone was
murdered in a quiet apartment neighborhood just north of here in Cordova.
We know that
what we often experience in the world is not what God desires. Love of
neighbor and love of God are not the ultimate commandments that rule the lives
of all. We wish that all children would be protected from such a horrific
tragedy especially while under the care and supervision of others. We
wish that our country and other countries wouldn't have to be engaged in acts of violence that can costs
the lives of noncombatant civilians, or that hate in the hearts of people would
not drive our nations to engage in war. And as the Bishop of Southeast
Florida said this week, we long for a world where George Zimmerman would have
offered Trayvon Martin a ride home instead of following him.
It is easy to
feel hopelessly overwhelmed, seeking complex answers to life’s equally complex
questions. Many of us have not figured out how to respond.
And I think that plays a part in our gathering here today. In our
spiritual journeys, we seek and we gather. The more confusing the world,
the more driving our spiritual journeys can become trying to provide us with
answers.
A New Testament
scholar at Emory, Luke Timothy Johnson, suggests that we should read the story
of Mary and Martha as an extension of the Good Samaritan story we heard last
week. The story of Mary and Martha immediately follows the passage on the
Good Samaritan. If you recall, a certain lawyer asks about eternal
life. His response is to love God with all your heart, and soul, and strength,
and to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus says, do this and you shall
live. While we hear about his commandment from Jesus in both Matthew and
Mark, Luke is the only one who writes about the Good Samaritan and Mary and
Martha as a way of understanding the great commandment, and therefore we can
take the story in its whole as an exposition on hospitality.
Immediately
following the question on eternal life begins a parable about hospitality and
compassion from the enemy, established to teach the lawyer, and by extension
us, just who is our neighbor. Luke’s placement of Jesus’ encounter of
Mary and Martha, then bookends the exposition of neighbor with what love of God
looks like. Where hospitality laws pertaining to how to love one’s
neighbor command care for the stranger, these laws also command Martha to
invite Jesus in to her home. And by this, we are shown what love of God
can look like. Love of God is about intentional presence (I hope you saw the YouTube video this week) and
it is intimately connected with love of neighbor. I believe Luke’s Gospel
is suggesting that the two are even inseparable. And when we attempt to
figure this love out, we receive an invitation to sit down and listen to one
another.
This past week,
I met with my mentor from the Diocese of West Tennessee. His job is to
journey with me as I begin my ministry with you, to provide me with not only
resources, but a perspective. He has years of practical experience.
So as I sat in his office talking about beginning at Annunciation and all of my
hopes and ideas, he sat there and listened and smiled.
“You know John”,
he said. “A lot of young clergy come right out of seminary and they have
all these wonderful ideas about Christian formation, plans for outreach, plans
for the church, envisioning all that the church can be and its role in
radically transforming the community.” I sat there, smiled, yet a little
nervous where this was going. “And those clergy are so excited with all
their new tools, and well it doesn't take
the church long to feel that maybe they’re getting more church then they
originally intended. The relationship ends, both maybe not as grateful
for each other as they both should be, sometimes the clergy kicking the
congregation on the way out, frustrated from the inability to move where one
assumed they all should have moved.”
Even our
spiritual journeys can be incredibly taxing and from time to time we need
rest. Have you ever felt like taking one or two Sundays off, or maybe one
or two years? It happens from time to time. Our journeys are long
and there is a need for rest.
We should find
great comfort in Jesus’ words to Martha. “Martha, Martha, you are anxious
and troubled by many things. But there is need for only one. Mary
chose the good part. It won’t be taken away from her.” All we have
to do is show up. How often we can turn to Martha, doing all the
tasks that we think are necessary for the church. We give and we give and
we give. And from time to time, we find ourselves frustrated at our
family. We want to say, “You know, if everyone else would just
pitch in a little bit more, imagine what this place could be.”
But Jesus
reminds us, all we have to do is show up. Love of God and love of
neighbor are inseparable. Come. And be. Listen to one
another. Rest. This is how we can love one another.
Today we are not to worry about the tasks ahead, the busy chores of being
church. If all we can do is show up and listen, and be present to each other,
we have chosen rightly.
Arguably, Martha
noticed Jesus as a stranger and welcomed Him into her home. There
is little doubt that finally as dinner was served, both Mary and Martha
understood that Jesus was not just a stranger. Martha’s own desire for
Jesus to solve a family dispute leads to this. But as they gathered
to listen to one another, over a meal, over the breaking of bread, they began
to understand just who this stranger was, Jesus Christ, God among them.
All we have to
do is show up. And here we are today. We have a world that is
deeply hurting. And we want to respond. We feel the pain of
Cordova, of the United States, of India, and of the world. And one
faithful response is to have a meal together. We have a hunger for
something deeper, for as Jesus said, ‘we cannot live on bread alone, but the
bread of life,’ the meal that we will take in just a few minutes. It is a
start. It is a response to the world around us. And it will call us
to a deeper relationship with God that will feed us until and when we know how
to respond otherwise.
I hope you know
that I am not saying that we stay in here in the place and not worry about
changing the world. But it is in this meal that we have together, that we
can see the world being transformed. It is in this meal that we can learn
about love of God and love of neighbor. If it is all we can muster up, we
have chosen rightly. Come. Sit. And be. Listen to one
another. Rest. And join together in Holy Food for Holy People.
Sermon Preached at
Church of the Annunciation
July 21, 2013
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