The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost – Rev. Lauren Byrd

 Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. – Luke 10: 41-42

This morning our gospel reading offers what some might call “a sister fight” if not for the fact that this particular fight is all one-sided. Martha is certain her sister Mary has it all wrong, certain Mary’s witness should be more active, more like her own.  Mary, though, is completely wordless in the story: her silence marking either her complete indifference to her sister or, more likely, her complete immersion in the life of Jesus.

St. Luke held on to this story of two sisters because he knew his community needed it. Like us, the people Luke was writing for never actually sat at the feet of Jesus. They were a generation down the road from his death and resurrection, and deeply troubled by the fact that he had yet to come again the way he said he would.

Very likely, they envied the earliest believers, and felt things were easier for them. Those first followers had known what it was to sit at the actual feet of Jesus. And very likely, St. Luke wanted his community to know that even absent those actual feet, one could still draw nourishment from the abiding presence of Christ.

So, to my mind, this is a story very much about God nourishing our souls before sending us out into the world to do the work God has given us to do, sending us not alone but in communion with each other.

Martha, though, has come to feel she’s all on her own, trying once again to throw together the usual fare for her guests. She may feel overwhelmed by the effort at the outset, but when she sees, out of the corner eye, the contentment of her sister Mary, it galls her so completely she’s had enough.

She resents Mary’s simple contentment. You can hear it in her words: “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work of serving by myself? Tell her then to help me.”

I think church work — or any work, for that matter —  often lands there. We imagine we can serve others by doing it all on our own. But then one day we’ve had enough and need help but have forgotten both how to ask for help and how to receive it, too.

Service can, understandably, become a source of deep resentment.

I once came across wise words from the late Nelson Mandela. He said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”

Martha is full of resentment and is hoping it will put an end to Mary’s contentment.

I love what Jesus does, though, in the face of Martha’s resentment.

He doesn’t begin with telling her how Mary “has chosen the better part” and how nothing can separate her from it. It’s what he says, but it’s not how he begins, is it?

He begins instead with tenderness, saying, “Martha, Martha.” That lovely repetition of her name is an intimate relational address, like saying “There, there, I’m right here with you. Not going anywhere.”

From early childhood, I remember there came a day in the life of my favorite teddy bear, good old Winnie the Pooh, when he said to his friend Piglet, “I don’t feel very much like Pooh today.” And for an answer, Piglet said, "There, there, I’ll bring you tea and honey until you do.”

My good friend Fr. Kevin Kelly recently suggested "the whole world would be better off right now if we all took a break from whatever [we’re doing] and just read some Winnie the Pooh.”

Sometimes, like Martha, we all need to recover some of what children so easily delight in, like the hope of tea and honey setting things right again. All Martha need do is join her sister in the better part of resting at the feet of Jesus, not alone but in communion with them.

So often, though, we adults get hardened off and mapped into the ready divisions and oppositions that define us. Those divisions mostly matter. And sometimes anger is how we get to the place of talking.

Polarized, though, is the word that’s come to characterize how we live with our differences. It’s a hard and frozen kind of word, sharp and to the point, very useful in a fight, less so in conversation, and worth nothing at all in relation to others.

And while Martha and Mary may appear to be “polar opposites” – and while it’s all too easy to imagine them that way – the reality is this: they are sisters: human beings who have the same need for rest and nourishment and help, and Jesus is not only among them but right there with them, in their midst.

Like Mary, we may come to church confessing the many ways we’ve had enough. But in the work of Holy Communion, God reaches through our loneliness and alienation, to say, “I’ll bring you love and strength (and bread and wine) until you feel like yourself again, until you remember who you are and why you’re here. Until you feel again the true life I gave you to live on the day you were born.”

Holy Communion doesn’t aim to mute our differences or take away our goals and priorities. Holy Communion aims instead to nourish us with and in Christ’s body, so completely that for a moment we are at peace with ourselves and with the world as it is:  lost, like Mary, in what Charles Wesley called “wonder, love, and praise.”

It’s the good part Mary held onto and the good part Martha had need of: it is Christ Jesus, the source of our being, the font of our love, the river of our life. We need the nourishment of his body, not to avoid or deny the challenges and tensions of our days but rather to strengthen who we are in Christ, understood to be the children of God who care about, and delight in, the world God made. 

In a moment, we’ll gather to baptize two children. We’ll say their names out loud altogether: Bennett and George. And we’ll pray for them, to let them know we are right there with them, already in those deep waters of baptism, there to welcome them into the river-struck life and love of God.

In a sense, by way of Baptism, we’ll be asking their parents and godparents to renounce anything that might separate them from the love of God. And when we welcome Bennett and George into the household of God, we’ll be proclaiming, in a sense, that nothing can, nor ever will, separate them from the depths of that love.

We’ll be saying, “There, there, we are right here with you. And we will always be with you in Christ Jesus. Amen, amen.”