Both Mary And Martha
Sermon by The Rev. Wallace Adams-Riley
Rector, St. Paul's Episcopal Church
July 18, 2010 - The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Listen to the Sermon
Sermon Text
Dear God, take my lips and speak through them;
Take our minds, and think through them;
Take our hearts, and set them on fire. Amen.
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In a matter of just a few weeks, I had managed to preach two homilies on busyness without realizing it.
(This was while we were in Pensacola, Florida.)
A parishioner pointed this out to me; and she did so not unkindly, but appreciating the irony; and she knew I would too. And I did.
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We are busy people, we Americans. And there is nothing more busy about American lives these days than communication, what has been called "the conundrum of connectedness."
Barbara Brown Taylor writes, in a column this week,
My concern is with those who have lost their freedom to decide when to use the media and when to turn it off. A woman I know says she learned to network in order to spread word of a new nonprofit, then found herself up all hours of the night on sites that had nothing to do with her ministry. Another says she shut down her Facebook page but is having trouble handling her anxiety since most of her family and friends are still heavy users. Those of us who limp along on e-mail know how many hours vanish in service of ever-growing mountains of mail.
Indeed, Taylor puts it well, "My concern is with those who have lost their freedom to decide when to use the media and when to turn it off."
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In this age of "digital maximalism," we may have the sense that this is a new problem; that our forbears had it easier, when there just weren't so many gadgets, so much technology, inviting us into distraction. However, author William Powers explores in his new book how the "conundrum of connectedness," as he calls it, is in reality nothing new.
In Hamlet's Blackberry, Powers goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, when the written alphabet caused Socrates and others to worry that the new technology the written alphabet would complicate, disrupt, and inhibit clear thinking.
From there, Powers goes to (among other places) the turn of the 17th century, where Shakespeare gives Hamlet the newest cutting-edge communication technology, an erasable notebook; and, in the 19th century, there's Thoreau's escape into the woods at Walden Pond, to get away from the telegraph and the railroad. And finally, back to the future, Powers arrives in our time, with text-messaging, Facebook, and Twitter.
Of course, that the "conundrum of connectedness" is nothing new is not, in and of itself, necessarily a comfort. What is a comfort, on the other hand, is the reminder that, in every age, faithful people have managed to live faithful lives, even with each age presenting its own array of technologies, distractions, and busyness, with which to contend.
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What we see in the story of Martha and Mary is some of our forbears in the faith working this out: working out what it means to engage in the world, while not being consumed by the world; what it means to live lives that are both active and centered.
Customarily, we see Martha and Mary as types: the person of action, the servant, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, the contemplative: Martha is "distracted by many things," while Mary "[sits] at the Lord's feet listening." That impression comes most of all from this scene in Luke; however it resonates with John's depiction of the sisters: it is Martha that runs to meet Jesus when their brother Lazarus has died, while Mary stays at home, waiting until she is called. Then, later in John's gospel, at a meal, Martha serves the meal, while Mary again sits at Jesus' feet; in that scene anointing Jesus' feet.
Martha: active, serving, high-energy. Mary: contemplative, listening, calm.
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And that's fine as far as it goes. Until we remember that Martha and Mary were real people, and, for that matter, that we are too. And that the real lives of real people resist such neat and clean packaging, such dichotomies; such either/or's.
For the truth is, it's a false choice, a false dichotomy; contemplation or service.
Of course some of us are more inclined toward one than the other. However, without both, the Christian life remains only incipient. Without both, maturity as Christians is simply out of reach.
We must have the quiet listening. And we must have the rattle and hum of activity.
Both contemplation and action. Not one or the other.
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Graham Hutchings, a Methodist pastor, cheekily put it this way, "occasionally [we need] to get the visionaries in[to] the kitchen and the kitchenaries in[to] the vision."
But, even there, we risk leaning into the reductionistic.
It's not that we need both the Martha's and the Mary's in our church. It's that we need both Martha and Mary in our person, in our own souls, in our own lived lives. And we must take care lest we excuse ourselves too casually, too easily, even unconsciously from either contemplation or action by over-identifying with one at the sacrifice of the other.
For, in reality, the more we enter into contemplation, the more we are then called out of that contemplation into action. By going deep, by truly listening deeply, the One who is at the center of everything calls us into a fuller awareness of everything, and everyone, putting us more in touch with the need for healing, the need for hope, the need for compassion, the need for action that, in truth, surround us on every side.
Meanwhile, the more we enter into action, the more we know that we simply do not have, within ourselves, all that the world needs; that no amount of will-power alone, no amount of determination, or personality, or negotiation, or leverage can finally bring about what we hope for, can finally bring about the Kingdom of God.
And, so, through action, we are called into contemplation, into prayer, we are called back into the depths seeking the Source of all we need, the One in whom we live, and move, and have our being.
Contemplation leads to action. And action leads to contemplation.
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So then, each of us, in our way, is called to be both the visionary, and the kitchenary. Both the contemplative and the servant. Both the one who prays, and the one who acts.
Not either/or, but both/and.
Both Mary and Martha.
Both me and you.
