The Mary And Martha Story

41 But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things;42 there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."

Can't you just hear Martha's thoughts?  "Well thats not fair!"

And yet, if Martha would have joined Mary at Jesus' feet.  How would dinner have gotten on the table?

This is a small, but brilliant, clip of real life!

The truth is, there are, at least, two kinds of personalities in this world.  

Those who live their lives attending to all the tiny details. 

And those who find themselves content to take life slow and easy day by day.  No extra planning or preparing.  Who want to just take a long walks alone to reflect on life! And forget the home-work.

So I want to talk about Jesus response to Martha's frustration.  Even though he didn't give-in to her complaining!  He also didn't scold her for not taking a seat along side of Mary.  

What Jesus does say is critical to understanding of all Mary and Martha's of the world.  

Jesus didn't say to Martha:  Well if you knew what was good for you, you would be doing the same as you sister.

No. He just, in my imagination, gently expressed his concern.  Martha Martha you are worried and distracted by many things.

I think the point, he was trying to make, is that there is more to hospitality than preparation and busyness.  

Dinner was not the only thing that he needed during his visit.  

He came to their house after a long long day of teaching.  He probably just wanted to relax and talk about the days happenings.  After all, he had just  sent out all of his disciples into an unfriendly world to bring the message that "God's kingdom has come near." Then he had to deal with an arrogant Lawyer who was trying to discredit him.  A good Jewish man who was unable to understand what a "neighbor" was; or how to love them. 

Who wouldn't like to come to a quite space of grace, after such a trying day, and find someone to talk to?  

Mary got it!  

Her attempt at proper hospitality was to sit and listen to all of Jesus' experiences.  And she did just that.

Martha wanted to show him how glad she was to have him in their home by busying herself with making a good meal and having clean sheets on his bed.

Both women were doing their best to honor Jesus' presence in thieir home.  

Both wanted to make him feel welcome and comfortable.

Most of us can identify with Martha.  We often find ourselves too busy. To busy for a moment to just sit with God.  We wish we could!  But life gets in the way!  

Right?

Martha probably would have loved to let the maid make the bed and prepare the dinner!  

Oh right, Mary and Martha didn't have a maid!

However, the question still remains!  How could Martha have done it differently? Or, did she need too?   

That is one question/issue that can get us into the offering of guilt to the Martha's of the world.

And by the way! That is often how this little story is used!  To guilt people into doing it Mary's way!

But I invite you to remember how Jesus cared for Martha. 

He didn't scold her!

He didn't try to make her feel quilty!

However, by him saying to her: "Mary has chosen the better part, will not be taken away from her."  I am quite sure that Martha must have felt at least a little guilt. 

Mary was claiming her "inalienable right" to sit and listen.  To chose Jesus' word; instead of following the traditional expectations -- preparing the evening meal for her guest.  

And no one can take that away from her.  

So, how can all the Martha's, of the world, learn to take time for the part of life that offers them the blessings of learning about God's activity in our world?  

As I am mulling over all of this, there is a frustration boiling up in me.  Its about the struggle we face in this busy life we have created for ourselves.  And I am thinking about how we need all the Martha's to keep things organized and working for all the Mary's.  

Yet, what I truly believe is that God is extremely important to the spiritual, and emotional, health of each individual in this messed-up-all-to-crazy-world.

The issue, as I see it, is that God's point get left out of this story.  

Gets left out, that is, in all the retelling!  

I wish Jesus would have simply said, something like: 'God wants you to take him with you as you prepare the meal and make my bed.' 

I wish he would have said, something like:  'Martha even though you find it hard to sit and listen; because there are so many things you need to do to make me feel comfortable in you home.  I Just want you to know that you can listen to God as you quietly go about your need to be busy.'

I wish he would have said something that would have made both women feel God's loving and gracious presence.  Both women loved by God!  No matter the situation! 

Sorry Jesus!  

38 Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home39 She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying.40 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."41 But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things;42 there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her." (Luke 10)

What Is The True Treasure?

44 "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. 45 "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; 46 on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.(Matt.13:44-46)

We have here the human search!  

The search to find something that will solve all our problems, and being to our lives what we have been looking for happiness -- peace, joy, calm -- and financial security.  

                          More than enough.  

                                                        And more.  

That one thing that will take away all worry and challenges in life.

That has been  the quest, of the human-soul, since Adam and Eve bit into the fruit of that forbidden tree.   

The pursuit of happiness. 

      The quest for knowledge. 

           The search for meaning.

The interesting thing here is that in the discovery of a treasure, and finding the pearl, or getting the father's ring, rendered nothing else.  Just an object, something to hold on to.  

It says:  he went and sold all that he had and bought it. a he went and sold all that he had.  Everything he had to get this one precious object.  

Interesting!  

The point of these parables, about the kingdom of God, is that it is worth more. More than all we can ever possess. 

                                                

That is the treasure  

    It alone is worth everything.  

                                     

Try selling that idea to a culture that thrives on greed and power.  A humanity hungry for getting a head, being on the top of the ladder and having all the best toys!  

Jesus will never ever make the most likely to succeed list.  

Who wants to follow a guy who talks against the worldview? 

Who tells us to share what we have; and to be sure to look out for the other     

guy?  

        Who tells us:

To forgive others who hurt you!

                                

   Take time to smell the roses!  

                

       That the simplest of needs are enough!

                                           

           To stop working so hard for what doesn’t matter!  

                             

                                  

You know, the interesting thing is, the least likely choice for living on this earth, is the most precious.  

Our ultimate security, peace and calm is found in the God Jesus came to teach us about.  

There is no power, no source, no hope more real than the God who created it all.

We have it all! 

And yet we keep on searching! 

Interesting!

What is: Grace Upon Grace?

ELCA Lutherans are thought of as those whose faith is wishy washy.  “The Most liberal of the liberal denominations!”  That is, they live with a faith that hangs on, what others refer to as, “cheap grace.”  “They say that they are simply 'saved by grace through faith'.”  Historically this was, at first, a Roman Catholic verses Lutheran argument.  But the Pentecostals soon joined the conversation. 

So, I would like to do a bit of thinking, through my fingers, about what I have learned about grace.  Because it was grace that prompted me to become a Lutheran Pastor. I was not raised Lutheran.  I was an ecumenical child; raised in the town that only had one church when I was in grade school. It was simply called “The Community Church.” As a young adult, grace was the one thing that made sense!  I think it was the answer to all of the theologies that wanted to claim authority over anything graceful.  Who wanted to put judgments on human behavior as “sin.”  They say things like: “if you don’t believe as I do; you will not be saved.”  “You will go to hell when you die.”  

I call that scare theology!  

As a small child I remember going to Los Angeles to visit my grandma.  There were people in LA who would stand on boxes and yell about how people were doomed to hell;  because they didn’t believe a certain way.  They scared me!  I would walk really close to my mom's side as we walked on those city streets.   That kind of theology does not even know about God’s grace.  The God I was learning about in Sunday School was a loving and kind God.  Those men, on boxes on those city corners,  made God out to be mean and awful and scary.  

A terrible message to give about God!  At least the God I grew up with!  

So! If God is a God of love and mercy!  And, if Jesus came to teach us about that kind of God!  And if, as John writes in his Gospel: 16 From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17 The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.(John 1)

Then, it seems to me that we might want to think about — take seriously — this “grace upon grace.” Jesus brought to light.

One of my favorite writer, during seminary, was Gerhart Frost.  I believe it was in his writing that I read the definition of grace: “Grace!  What is it but God’s activity in our lives.”   

I lived with that definition for years!  

I still agree with it. 

I do believe that God’s activity in our lives brings grace.  But grace has become so much more!  It has become, to me,  the ingredient that creates a level plain in all the divisive crap people assume about God.  

Grace allows us to be human!  
                                           Not God-like!  
                                                               Not perfectly perfect!  

And still be acceptable and loved by God.  Grace gives us wiggle room to make mistakes and still be in God’s graces.  

My youngest daughter, who was often a challenging child, came home from school one afternoon and announced:  “Mommy, it is okay to make mistakes!"  My response was: “Really!  Who told you that?”   “Mrs. Koff told me, she said that mistakes help us to learn a better way of doing it.”

Miss Koff must have known God really well!

I have more to say about grace.  But before I do, I invite you to enter the conversation.  I invite you to write what you think grace is all about.  Why it might have been so important to Martin Luther that he broke away from the Roman Catholic theology.

James One More Time

This comment came after yesterdays blog: 

"Here are my “serious" thoughts on James:

The clear Christian message was far from clear or consistent 2,000 years ago. After honing and perfecting many sources, Jesus’s message feels obviously clear to Christians today. It might be helpful to remember that for hundreds years after Jesus’s death, a variety of groups received and interpreted the new ideas to work for them.  

The Bible did not exist.  Jesus’s message of grace was a new idea in the time of James.  Clearly delivering new ideas was a challenge for those who had deep cultural beliefs to set aside. Grasping a controversial message for other than political reasons was likely even harder for those who heard the new idea.  For example, as we read James, confusing his words to his audience about ‘the law’ and “The Law” requires care.  

I hope to allow James the grace he deserves in reading his ideas, by keeping them within the context of his life. I also am grateful for those who have insisted on including James’ ideas despite serious complaints to remove his work from the Bible.”

My first thought, as I read your explanation, was:  ‘Yes, of course, I know all of that.  I learned all of what you explained, and more, in seminary.’  

Then I thought:  ‘But what I have learned, in the time between then and now, is that what you and I understand is not what the general reader of the Bible knows nor understands.'  

That is to say.  That the conservative theological mind takes each word, and sentence, of the Bible at face value — as truth without error. 

In my experience they think they don’t need to take into account language, culture, context or any other of the many factors involved in the writing of these ancient words.

And there in lies the problem!

What I have observed, learned, experienced and actually lived through.  Is that the Bible is used as a tool to exclude. And also to determine who is “in” and who is “out” of the “kingdom.”

What you are not taking into account, in your argument, is the very apparent danger of ignorance, and/or mis-information.  

What you are also neglecting to take into account is the powerful damage that this kind of conservative stance has done.  Done not only to God, or Jesus or the Christian message as a whole; but to those who are searching for a loving God.  

What they find is judgment.  And a refusal to have their questions answered. What they get Instead are platitudes, and words of warning, about even questioning “what it say in the Bible.”

So yes, I take Jame’s finger pointing as offensive.   Just as Luther did.  Just as many biblical scholars today who believe that Jesus came to give us a model of God’s true nature.

I am truly sorry if that offend you.  

One More Thought On James

I received one comment on my Jame’s blogs.

“I need to read your recent blogs again more carefully, but I it seems like you are pretty hard on James’s ideas - impatient with them as limited rather than looking for the nugget within.”  

My first response to this email is to ask:  What are the nuggets you find in the book of James.

I think the one outstanding nugget for me is the first part of chapter three when he writes about the tongue.

I am wiling to admit that I could very well be guilty of what is called “proof texting.”  

Using “A scriptural passage adduced as proof for a theological doctrine belief, or principle.”  (Websters)

That was not at all my intention.  

What I was trying to do is point out the parts of Jame’s dissertation that lead to a need to follow the rules — the law — in order to be a faithful part of God’s people.

It has been my observation, in the last thirty some years of ministry, that the Bible has been misused and abused.  It has been used to cloud the love of God in the name of right and wrong, good and bad, sinful and/or clean, faithful or unfaithful, worthy or unworthy.

A very black and white way of reading the Bible.

And in my opinion the Bible is not black and white.  There is a lot of gray.

I actually had my first taste of this Biblical distraction as a child.  I was outside playing, when a plane flew over our yard and dropped yellow pieces of paper down on our small dessert town.

The yellow paper said something about “the end of the world” and “being saved.”  It scared me. I took one of the papers to my mom and asked her what that all meant.  She just wrapped me in her arms and said something like:  “Oh sweetheart nobody knows this kind of information.”  She assured me that the world was not going to end that next week.  

I went back outside to play.  

However that kind of scary theology has not stopped over all these years.  Still today there are those who want us to believe that God is some ridged, wrathful and mean god sitting up in the sky just waiting to prove us sinful and unclean.

So yes, you could be right:

“It seems like you are pretty hard on James’s ideas - impatient with them as limited rather than looking for the nugget within.”

I am indeed impatient with anyone who tries to limit the love of God.

I am impatient with people who think they know it all. And are willing to make others feel less because they will not agree with their assessment of something —and/or  God. 

I am impatient with anyone who is not willing to sit and discuss possibilities.  But rather push their needs to convince.  

Having said that.  I am thinking that it may sound like I do just that with my belief that God cannot be limited.  

I am perfectly willing to say that I am convinced that we are made right with God only because of God’s graciousness, and unconditional acceptance, of our human nature. 

That we are “saved” only by God’s grace; because we have faith.  

Yes, faith as tiny, and possibly imperfect, as a seed.

Does that mean we can sit around on our butts and do nothing but have faith?  

Not at all!  It is because we have faith in such a loving and forgiving God that we gratefully love our sisters and brothers — our neighbor — no matter how close or how far away they may be.

¹⁷The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. (John 1)

I choose to write more about this treasure of grace tomorrow.

My Last Comment On The Book of James

James 4 continues:

11 Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another, speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. ¹²There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbor?

Here we read about everything we learn in nursery school, kindergarten, grade school and beyond.

Simple little rules about how we like others to treat us.  And yes, how we are to treat them.

Nothing really new here, love you neighbor as you would have them love you.

However I take issue with one thing James infers here.  We are not to be doers of the law.  At least not the law James is referring to.

¹⁷The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. (John 1)

31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. ³²It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. ³³But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.(Jere. 31)

James should have been very aware of the new covenant that God was to bring through Jesus’ grace and truth.

Then, what he writes next is kind of interesting.  At least it is interesting because of were it fits in the rest of Jame’s preceding conversation.

13 Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.’ ¹⁴Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’  

There is something to be said for paying attention to this moment — today.  

At least when you get as chronologically  advantage as this Gramma.

We can never be sure, from one minute to another, what life will bring — or take for that matter.  

¹⁴Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life?

We humans have this innately natural ability to think that we have forever to live.  We move through the life, we are given, without really thinking about it.  

We say, and do, things that often catch us up short.  And instead of immediately correcting our errors; we leave them to be settled for another, more convenient, time.

I think I have told this story before.  But it is a good example of our mode of living.  Marie was 90 years old.  She still lived in her own apartment on her own.  I asked her one day:  “Marie, when you wake up in the morning  do you ever think you are going to die?”  Her answer came quickly, and with great confidence:  “No, why would I?”

Often these days I find myself assessing my “life.” 

I talk to myself about what is important and essential. Over against what is just trivia.

I talk about how I want to live the days I have left.  

I think a lot about my desire to be real.  Like the Velveteen Rabbit.  Not fake or superficial.  

I am quiet focus on being comfortable in my clothes and with myself.

God has put us here on this earth to be our best self possible.  

That is what I have wanted to be, free to be, for years. 

However, I often found myself living up to  the expectation other thought I should be.  Always following the law; rather than enjoying the grace offered.

¹⁴Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life?

A great question to ponder.

Now, that is all the attention I will be giving to the Book of James.  

If any of you who want to talk about chapter 5.  

Give me a comment.