sermon of July 18, 2010

The first congregation I served as a fulltime pastor was in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains in a town called Altavista, Virginia. True to its name, you could see the mountains from Altavista, but it would not be fair to call it a mountain community.

It was a fairly small place, population 4,000 -- progressive by local standards, but not quite cosmopolitan. Shortly after Andra and I arrived, a major event took place in the life of the community. A Hardees Restaurant opened up. A couple of years later, McDonald’s arrived. It was the talk of the town for months.

The Presbyterian Church of Altavista was not exactly a hotbed of liberalism, but we did have female elders and deacons, unlike several other churches in the presbytery. In one respect, however, the Altavista Presbyterian Church remained stolidly traditional: the Women of the Church ruled the kitchen. It’s not that men were forbidden to enter. They just didn’t spend much time in there.

I learned very quickly that no matter what the session decided regarding a church program, if it involved the kitchen, you’d better clear it with the Women of the Church.

Shortly after I came to Tallahassee, I was in some meeting or other when a meal or reception was proposed – something that would involve the preparation and serving of food. “Perhaps the Women of the Church would do the meal,” I suggested.

Now, I wasn’t physically attacked. I wasn’t actually tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, but I did emerge from that meeting having learned that I wasn’t in Altavista anymore.

It’s easy to read this story as the first blast of the trumpet in the war of the sexes – an early example of women’s liberation. Martha is enslaved in the traditional role of women in that time and place while Mary steps out of the traditional role and assumes the posture of a male disciple – sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening to his words.

Martha appears in the doorway, apron in hand, and tries to get Jesus to make Mary put it on, but Jesus (rather harshly, it seems to me) rebukes Martha and praises Mary. “She has chosen the better part,” the NRSV translates.

If the story is read this way, Martha comes off as a woman stuck in subservience to men and Mary as a liberated woman, the equal of any male. I’ll have to admit, there was a time when I tended to read this story along these lines.

I now think something else is going on here – a little less political and a good deal more interesting. It’s true that Jesus accepts Mary as a full-fledged disciple. He does not send her back to the kitchen or scold her for giving priority to his words. On the other hand, his words to Martha might not be so harsh as they appear.

If you think about it, Jesus speaks rather harshly to all of his disciples. He calls Peter “Satan” at Caesarea Philippi. He dresses down James and John for asking for places of honor. Jesus was not the kind of teacher who worried over much about wounding his student’s self-esteem. In this regard he was more like my 12^th grade English teacher than Mr. Rogers.

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things,” the NRSV translates. “There is need of only one thing.” This word translated “many things” can refer to almost anything. Perhaps Jesus is talking about the many “tasks” Martha is trying to accomplish in the kitchen. The word translated “tasks” means, more or less “table stuff.” It could even mean “dishes.” Maybe Jesus is saying, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by trying to prepare too many dishes. One dish is enough.”

Whatever the case, it’s not busy Martha or hospitable Martha that Jesus is talking to. It’s worried and distracted Martha. He’s not putting her down for energetic service, but for what you and I might call “anxious multi-tasking.”

A recent study of multi-tasking has revealed, first that people are not nearly so good at doing it as they think they are, and second, that the better you think you are at doing several things at once, the less likely you are to do any of them well.

When Jesus called his first set of disciples, they left their fishing nets in the boat to follow him. I strongly suspect that if Jesus were recruiting his disciples today, he would have them leave behind their cell phones, their i-Pods, and their Blackberries. If Martha seemed distracted to Jesus back then, imagine how we would appear to Jesus today.

A few years ago, Tom Friedman wrote in the New York Times about a trip in a taxi from Charles de Gaulle Airport into Paris. The trip took about an hour, and in the course of the trip, the taxi driver and he did six things. The cab driver drove the cab, talked on his cell phone, and watched a video (that must have been disconcerting), while Friedman rode in the cab, worked on his column with his laptop and listened to his i-Pod.

“There is only one thing we never did:” wrote Friedman, “talk to each other . . . It’s a pity. He was a young, French-speaking African, who probably had a lot to tell me.”

Linda Stone, a technologist, labels the disease that plagues the Internet age “continuous partial attention.” We’re so busy being accessible to our personal technologies that even when we’re standing cheek to jowl, we’re not accessible to one another.

Friedman concludes his op-ed piece with a story about trying to get hold of a friend in Jerusalem. He kept calling his cell phone and getting no answer. Eventually he reached his friend at home.

“It was stolen a few months ago,” he answered, adding that he decided not to replace it because its ringing was constantly breaking his concentration. “Since then, the first thing I do every morning is thank the thief and wish him a long life.”[1]

On the first Sunday we held worship here in the Westminster Room, several of you walked in the door, looked at that screen on the wall, and asked where the praise band would be setting up. “O no!” said one of you (who shall remain nameless) “Don’t tell me we’re going to become one of those churches.”

By that I think she meant not that using a screen is a bad idea, but that there is value in worship that is not a constant bombardment of stimuli. Glenn Laird, God bless him, keeps telling the folks who are installing the new air conditioning system in the sanctuary that it has to be as quiet as possible. Last week I heard him say it again.

“No,” said Glenn. “You don’t understand. It has to be quiet enough for people who really listen.”

Not only do we want to be able to hear the organ and to hear each other sing. We want to be able to hear the silence, for it is out of silence that God sometimes speaks most clearly.

Worried and distracted and assailed by all manner of things, including our well-intentioned efforts to please Jesus, we can end up missing what Jesus calls “the better part,” which is Jesus himself. To sit at his feet. To soak in his words. To eat at his table. That is the better part. That is what cannot be taken away when the cell phone gets stolen and the i-Pod runs out of juice and flat-screen TV gets hit my lightning.

When I stand by a grave to commit a saint’s body to the ground, I usually end with this prayer:

“The fever of life” is a pretty good description of the way Martha was living her life, even back in the first century. It’s an even better description of our life as we are “worried and distracted by many things.”

[1] Thomas Friedman, “The Taxi Driver,” New York Times, Nov. 1, 2006, http://select.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/opinion/01friedman.html?_r=1