The Better Part

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

July 21, 2013; 9 Pentecost, Proper 11, Year C

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Luke 10:38-42)  As Jesus and his disciples went on their way, Jesus entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." But the Lord answered her, "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."

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Let me start today by changing the lens through which you may imagine this story of Martha and Mary.  You probably are thinking of them as grown women, friends of Jesus and near his age.  Probably not.  The two were unmarried, living with their brother Lazarus, in a culture in which it was customary for women to marry as soon as they reached child-bearing age, around thirteen or fourteen.  So the best guess is that Martha and Mary were younger than that. 

And another detail.  The passage says that Mary “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying.”  That is a phrase that was used to describe one who is under instruction as a disciple of a teacher or rabbi.  When Paul offers his credentials in the Acts of the Apostles, he says he was brought up “at the feet of Gamaliel,” a famous rabbi of the time.[i]

So this situation with Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet would have been startling to Jesus’ contemporaries.  Rabbis of that era did not take women disciples, especially a little girl who was still a child.  That might account for some of Martha’s irritation. 

But Jesus accepts Mary’s discipleship – Mary’s desire to be close to him and to learn from him.  He calls it “the better part,” and says “it will not be taken away from her.”

Mary invites us to ask of ourselves, “What is ‘the better part’ that we might claim for ourselves as disciples of Jesus?”

In some of the Church’s tradition, this passage has been interpreted to mean that Jesus particularly endorses the contemplative or monastic life as better than the active or secular life.  I disagree.  I think it is significant that this story in Luke’s gospel comes immediately after the story of the Good Samaritan that we heard last week.  That is a story that commends the active work of serving or helping others – anyone in need.  The religious-spiritual types, the priest and the Levite, don’t come off so well in that story, do they?  Instead a heretic, a Samaritan chooses the better part in that story.

It seems to me that both of these are stories of the heart.  The Samaritan’s heart is right because he was alert and responsive to the need of the stranger; he had a soft heart, a compassionate heart.  And Mary’s heart is right because she is open and inquisitive with a deep affection for Jesus, wanting to be close to him and wanting to learn from him.

We pick up clues that Martha’s heart is a bit out of rhythm.  “Distracted by her many tasks” she tried to get Jesus to tell her sister to do what Martha wanted Mary to do.  Jesus would not be triangled into Martha’s anxiety. 

I have a hunch that the story could have gone a differently had Martha approached her tasks a bit differently, with a soft and open heart.  What if Martha had prepared her meal in a peaceful spirit, focusing simply on each task as a meaningful end in itself, seeing her work as an honorable and holy act of hospitality, and a generous gift of love for her beloved guest Jesus?  The circumstances are the same, but everything is different.

I find that I go back and forth between a Martha heart and a Mary heart.  For the most part, it’s entirely a matter of my own attitude. 

Sometimes I look around me and all I see is more tasks – more to do, more to fix, more than I can possibly do in the time that I think I have.  And I get anxious and distracted.  Then I hurry up and try to do too many things too quickly, and I usually make mistakes that cause me to lose even more time.  (We’ve been talking about these things in our 10:00 Adult Forum class:  Unrealistic and maddening expectations – Be Perfect, Hurry Up, Be Strong, Please Others, Try Hard.) 

There is another way I can live my life and do my work when I let myself be.  I can look around and see that all is gift.  Life is beautiful and good, and I am so fortunate.  I can focus on the present moment and decide what is the most significant thing I can do right now, and I can give myself in singular surrender to that task, bringing my whole self and concentration to the moment, alive and thankful, without anxiety.  I can simply accept what I do as good enough, and let it be, moving on to what is next when the present task is finished.  That’s a saner, better way of being.  And I can do that.  You can too.

There’s a group I meet with monthly where we talk about our work and our responsibilities, and we help each other with strategy and insights.  Several of us have recently returned from brief vacations.  Each person who had taken some time off said they came back refreshed, relaxed and more focused, able to do better work with a broader perspective.  The fact is that during that time off, they got very little done in the way of business – no tasks were accomplished, no goals met.  But they returned more empowered and more effective.

Sunday is supposed to be Sabbath, a form of vacation.   “Mary time.”  Time to sit at Jesus’ feet and delight in his presence.  Time to listen; to be fed; to relax and enjoy; to be challenged and learn.  That’s what church is supposed to be.  A time to stop from all of the worries and distractions and to remember the better part – I am God’s beloved child. 

The church intends to communicate an essential message of Jesus that you are a beloved child of God.  Your worth is in your being.  You are loved and accepted unconditionally.  So relax.  You don’t have to earn your breath and your place on the planet. 

God loves you and there is nothing you need do to earn that love.  God loves you and there is nothing you can do to lose that love. 

Sit at Jesus feet this morning, right now, and let his loving acceptance inspire you.  Open your heart; soften your heart to him.  He offers to you “the better part” which will not be taken away.  Hear his encouragement and wisdom, his encouragement and challenge.  Think about what it means to you to know you are loved and accepted.  Relax and breathe. 

Then leave this place empowered to live in the moment, to do what is yours to do, and to receive it all as a gift.  Let Jesus’ young disciple Mary ask you, “What is ‘the better part’ that you might claim for yourself as a disciple of Jesus?”

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[i] Again I am thankful to my friend Paul McCracken and his weekly Lectionary Notes from the Jerusalem Institute for Biblical Exploration, July 16, 2013.

Who is My Neighbor?

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

July 14, 2013; 8 Pentecost, Proper 10, Year C

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Luke 10:25-37)  Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live."

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, `Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.' Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

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You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 

Okay.  Then who is my neighbor?

It’s a good question.  To whom do I have responsibilities?  How should I regard other human beings, near and far?  Where are the boundaries?

These are the kinds of questions that people ask Rabbis, teachers.   A lawyer, like the one in our gospel, was probably not a lawyer as we think of them today, but was probably one who spent his time studying Torah, the law of scripture.  He engages Rabbi Jesus in a typical conversation about the law.  Starting with a question in the traditional manner, “Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 

Jesus turns the question back with a question.  Good Rabbinical technique.  “You tell me.  You are the scholar of the law.  What does the law say?”

The law says, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."

Good answer.  Do this and live.

“But,” says the lawyer.  “Who is my neighbor?”

There was a conventional answer in Jesus’ day.  According to my friends, archeologists and scholars Charles Page and Paul McCracken, the correct first century Rabbinical answer to the question “Who is my neighbor?” is:  “Your neighbor is a member of your family.”[i]  The Biblical obligation to “love your neighbor as yourself” was a family obligation. 

The lawyer would have known that.  He would have known entire context in Leviticus 19 where we read the commandment “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Listen to it now.  But try to hear with Jewish ears, hear the tradition of parallelism, where the writing says the same thing twice, using different words.  “You shall not hate in your heart any one of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.  You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself:  I am the LORD.” (Lev. 19:17-18) 

The passage where the love-your-neighbor commandment occurs parallels the word “neighbor” with “kin” and with “your people.”  Your neighbor is your kin, your family.  That’s the traditional answer a Rabbi would have been expected to give.

That’s still a pretty broad obligation.  In that day, families lived together in multi-generational homes, and within a village like Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth, the interrelationships might have been so thorough that a liberal interpretation could extend the notion of “family” to the whole village. 

So this lawyer, the Jewish Biblical scholar, expected Jesus to answer him with some nuance of one’s responsibility to love and care for one’s family or one’s extended family or village. 

Surprise.  Jesus tells a story about a hated Samaritan.  Samaritans had been bitter enemies of Jews for more than five centuries.  Samaritans were heretics and unclean.  Think Sunni-Shia in its worst forms.  Jesus tells the lawyer that the Samaritan is the example of being a neighbor.

Jesus tells a story of a naked body on a dangerous highway.  A priest and a Levite were forbidden by Law to approach nakedness.  Ritual contamination from a corpse would render them unclean for their official duties.  From a conventional point of view, they did the right thing by passing on the other side of the street.  They had no obligation to a stranger.  Besides, it could be a trap.

Jesus blows all of the conventional notions away.  In fact, his story is calculated to offend Jewish sensibilities of moral propriety.  Jesus did a lot of that. 

Over and over, Jesus broke down the barriers and boundaries that his careful, moral, ethical, and religious culture had erected, and he widened all of the connections. 

Jesus made direct, intimate connections, first between people and God – passing out forgiveness freely without the need of Temple sacrifice; speaking to God as Abba, a childlike address of intimacy and affection. 

And he made direct, intimate connections among people, especially people who were regarded as “other” – unclean, unreligious, foreign, outsiders, even enemies. 

In some sense, Jesus’ whole teaching had to do with dismantling the various ways we have of making distinctions and creating hierarchies of identity – neighbor and stranger, clean and unclean, good and bad, us and them.  He replaced that whole system of “either/or” thinking with a new way of being. 

We are all one.  We all belong.  All human beings.  Including Samaritans and lepers and demoniacs and enemies.  We are all one. 

And we are all one with God.  Connected in one organic being like the vine and the branches. 

Imagine his eyes looking at you as he looked at the people – diverse crowds, Jews and Gentiles, believers and skeptics – looking upon them with loving compassion and saying to them, (saying to us):  We are all one.  “I am in you, and you are in me,” he said.  And then he connected that human unity with the divine.  “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” and “I am in you and you are in me.”  We are one with God and with each other.  His message is clear.  We are all one, living within the very life of God.

So, when we hear Jesus say, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” the context is radically changed.  He’s not just talking about your responsibility to your family.  He’s not even saying “Love your neighbor as much as yourself.”  He’s saying, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Love your neighbor as an extension of yourself, as a continuation of your very own being.[ii]  And he’s speaking universally.

We are all children of God, created by God, from God, in the image and likeness of God.  Every human being is made of the same divine stuff.  We are all expressions of infinite life. 

So when I see a stranger lying naked, half-dead in a ditch, I see not only my neighbor, my fellow human being, I see myself – an extension or continuation of myself lying there in the ditch.  To care for that other, then, is to care for myself.  To love my neighbor as myself.

It’s a completely different way of being in the world.  That’s the radical shift that Jesus announced when he proclaimed the Kingdom of God.

When we look at Jesus we see one who befriended all:  Samaritan, Canaanite, tax collector, Roman soldier, Pharisee, Sadducee, Zealot, widow, leper, slave, sinner, and demonic Gentile living in the tombs.  His empathy and love extended toward every human being.

What if we adopted that world view?  What if we adopted that identity?  Every other human being is one with me, and I am one with them.  I am one with God, and so is every other human being.  We are all extensions of the divine life, expressions of God’s very own being.  How different might we be if we looked at the world that way?

We talked about these things the other night at “Theology on Tap.”  Cynthia Bourgeault’s book The Wisdom Jesus explores these topics.  During our discussion, parishioner Pam Burton shared this quote she heard from author and retreat leader Jim Finley:

   Although I am not God,

      I am not other than God.

   Although I am not you,

      I am not other than you.

   Although I am not the earth,

      I am not other than the earth.

In Christ, there are no others.  We are all one; we are all manifestations of God’s light and life.

So the lawyer asks, who is my neighbor?  How will you answer?

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[i] Paul McCracken, Jerusalem Institute for Biblical Exploration, July 9, 2013, from his weekly email lectionary notes. 

[ii] see Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, Shambhala:  Boston, 2008, p. 31

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