Year C

Luke 10: 38-42

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

Listening leads to Serving

The master brought his disciples into a darkened room with one instruction: “Find the truth.” One disciple came upon a table and declared that the truth is flat and square. Another touched the wall and said, “The truth is hard and wide.” A third disciple stumbled upon a ball and concluded that the truth was round and bounces. The fourth disciple simply stood in the middle of the room, not impressed with the other statements. He thought and thought, until concluding, “The truth is empty.” Finally, the master lit a candle, visually revealing the objects and space that gave rise to the various comments, and announced, “The truth is that you have all been in the dark.”

Today our texts each have something to say about perceiving the truth of their given situations. As we listen and study them, it is like a candle in a dark room, illuminating our reality for understanding in thought and action. In Genesis, the Lord approaches Abraham as he is seated at the door of his tent. And what he sees are three men, who to the physical eye are off-the-desert human beings that he invites to lunch. What he is later to learn is that the trio that dropped by his camp actually were two angels and God! And at that time neither Abraham nor Sarah recognized them, although both were believers in the one God. The visitors came to deliver a message and leave a blessing.

In centuries to come, Christians would see this truth as a manifestation of God in three Persons, the Trinity for Abraham addresses them as One. On Trinity Sunday, I shared with you a picture or icon based upon this passage of scripture in Genesis, titled The Trinity. In Luke’s story of Mary and Martha in the home they occupied with their bother Lazarus, Jesus approaches them both and each sees the truth and responds to his visit in a different way. Mary sits at Jesus’ feet totally taking in his nearness and “listening to his teaching.” Martha responds to Jesus by “doing for” him to help with the work. In doing this, she was being faithful to the tradition of hospitality begun long ago when Abraham welcomed three guests to his tent.

This well known story in Luke suffers from abuse from both popular and scholarly efforts at making it into some sort of paradigm regarding the role of women in the church.    Mary is praised and Martha is rebuked. But actually both women serve as an example of Christian discipleship. Both are necessary, as Luke will acknowledge in the book of Acts and takes for granted in this text today. We need to be both and the world needs both Martha and Mary. In preparing a meal, Martha fulfills her socially mandated role. Mary, in assuming the role of a student at the feet of a teacher, challenges culturally proscribed boundaries. In an age when it was commonplace for women not to be educated, we see Jesus teaching that woman’s education is important.

This entire section of Luke is dominated by a sense that the time that Jesus has left to teach and commission is rapidly coming to an end as he is making his journey to Jerusalem and Good Friday. So here we have Mary seizing the moment to learn from Jesus, while her sister is “distracted.” Distracted is the key word: this is an opportunity to learn from Jesus and Jesus by saying something to Martha is inviting her to stop fussing and instead come and join her sister and listen. For Luke, the sisters importance takes place in their evident devotion to Jesus, seen in Martha’s hospitality, Mary’s interest in his teaching, and Martha’s calling him “Lord.”

This same “Lord” calls us to focus on him, trust him and not be “worried and distracted by many things,” to be in touch with the part that will not be taken away as we serve our neighbors. For in Jesus we find our source of peace, forgiveness, and meaning for our lives. For he is the firstborn of all creation. All that we know-whether it is the church or the entire creation itself-comes through Christ who has shown us God. Christ is the very image or the truth of the invisible God Paul claims in his letter to the Colossians. These verses today pick up where we left off last week and are the heart of a quotation of a magnificent hymn in praise of Christ and Christ’s relationship to the church that predated Paul’s letter to the Colossians.

It is clear that the readers of this letter are people who have not yet understood the full meaning of their salvation, and Paul, who did not establish this community of faith, was concerned that they do understand. He understands and knows how easy it is for those new to the faith to embrace a part of it and assume that that is all there is to it. So being a highly skilled pastor and teacher, he encourages, explains, and nourishes their faith so that they may be blameless when they face God and continue in the faith with the knowledge that God has forgiven them and has given them new life through the death and resurrection of Jesus. He offers his own suffering as a sign for them to take him seriously, an authentic witness to the gospel of Jesus, into whom all disciples are to grow in knowledge and maturity.

As we sit at the feet of Jesus and grow in knowledge and maturity, we become new creations through the reconciliation accomplished in the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Christ, and by the power of the Holy Spirit we are drawn into the very life of God. In God’s power we live, and move and have our being. This is the hope that sustains us and is a relationship that is to come first. This relationship empowers us to welcome the stranger and feed the hungry. The challenge for the church today is to make sure that the good which we can achieve, represented by Martha, does not become a substitute for the good portion Christ offers us, represented by Mary. For the church exists to proclaim the truth that Christ the firstborn of all creation, is the head of the Church and the author of the world’s salvation. May the Christ who knew Mary and Martha show us the way of balance and be our light that illumines our reality for understanding in thought and action.