July 20, 2025
Pentecost 6 Lectionary 16
Luke 10:38-42
Epiphany, Winnipeg
How many times have we heard the expression, “Don’t just sit there. Do something?” Maybe you've heard it from a boss or a parent or a partner or any number of people, and then you feel bad for getting caught doing nothing, and the guilt stirs up your sense of duty so you get up and do something. Anything at all. Just look busy. “Don’t just sit there. Do something.”
But Jesus comes into Martha’s place, and she’s doing what any good host would do when company arrives. She’s busy with all those tasks of hospitality that are pulling her here and there and Jesus says, “Martha, Martha. Don’t just do something. Sit there.”
Last week and just before this story we heard today, Jesus told that story about a Samaritan who is acting as a neighbour – responding to someone who is hurt, taking care of what needs to be done, doing and doing and doing. If the story we call The Good Samaritan ended there, we might say, “The important thing is that we do something.” It’s a get-at-it-and-do-the-work kind of story.
But then the scene changes, and Jesus the storyteller is at Martha’s house. Martha is getting at it and doing the work of being a good neighbour to Jesus. But while she tidies up and attends to whatever’s on the stove, Jesus tells her she’s too distracted; her sister Mary has chosen the better part, and that is to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen.
So what do you want, Jesus? The good neighbour who’s busy doing what needs to be done? Or the follower who sits and soaks in all that you say?
Mary sits and listens. It’s a bit strange: Just a few minutes ago we heard the prophet Amos speaking, oh, twenty seven hundred years ago. Amos nwill not stay silent. He cries out in proper anger against a nation and its people, especially its leaders: “You trample on the needy, you ruin the poor, you wait for the religious holiday to end so you can get back to cheating your customers and cooking the books, and buying the poor to make them your slaves. Sounds familiar? And God will not forget what you have done.”
Then Mary sits at the feet of Jesus, listening to his words.
After we heard from Amos, we spoke, we heard and we spoke Psalm 52 together. We spoke like Amos, against the proud and the powerful who plan the destruction of the poor and who work so hard to deceive and lie and cheat. We cried out, and rightly so, that trusting in riches and taking refuge in wealth will only end in ruin.
There is so much crying out against social injustice, and can’t we just hear it ringing true all around us today? The needy are trampled, the poor are ruined, people are cheated and bought and sold? There is so much that needs to be said and done to change that.
Then Mary sits by Jesus, listening to Jesus speak.
Who knows what Jesus is saying just then? Maybe he’s telling that Samaritan story again and Mary’s hearing it for the first time. Or maybe he’s quoting an angry prophet named Amos, or pondering how that Psalm that spoke to us connects with the injustice that is everywhere in the world he shares with Mary and her sister Martha. Maybe he and Mary are having an animated conversation, or maybe even a debate, about the whole thing. Did you notice, the story never says that Mary didn’t talk; it just says that she was listening. So maybe she and Jesus were having a conversation, and everybody knows that the best conversations are the ones where everybody listens. Maybe Mary had just finished making a point, and Jesus said, “Good point, Mary.”
Who knows what Jesus was saying? Words that get Mary all fired up to get out and change something or to be a neighbour to all the ones left injured at the side of the road? Or words that somehow soothe an aching heart or that calm her fears? Maybe just words that call her to rest for a moment and to trust, because we need more in life than being busy.
Mary listens, and receives nourishment from Jesus that will go with her into the best and the worst of what any day might bring.
But what about Martha? She always comes off in this story being the busybody who’s too harried and distracted to pay attention to the more important matters that occupy Mary. Can’t you imagine Martha hearing what Jesus just said and thinking to herself, “All my life I’ve been told that this is what I’m supposed to do, but now Jesus is suggesting that I stop? I guess I can’t do anything right.”
But what about Martha? Maybe she also just heard Jesus telling that story about the Samaritan neighbour, and so she’s bustling around and being a neighbour to Jesus and anyone else in the room. Getting some food ready, maybe putting out a little olive oil where Jesus can dip his bread, maybe pouring a cup of wine or water. Or she heard about something else Jesus had said, something about how he’ll be arrested and killed in a few days. So she’s being a neighbour to someone who might be tired from travel, or she’s being a neighbour to Jesus who might just be afraid of what he thinks will happen next, and he needs some comfort of his own too.
At the Lutheran Campus Centre at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, students gather on Tuesday evenings for worship and for supper. That’s been going on for more than fifty years now:the chaplain cooks up a service, and the students cook up some soup. I had a chance to be a part of that for a few years as a student and then later as a chaplain, and I know that there were always a few students who needed that simple meal because it was the only proper meal they would get that week. Sometimes it was a bowl of hot soup and some good bread after an exam that didn’t go well, or sometimes it was a meal after great news about a scholarship for next year. It was soup and bread for students who wanted to change the world; it was soup and bread for students who struggled with new ideas. It was nourishment for students who were figuring out who they are now that they’re out from under mom and dad’s wing. It was a good meal the night before a final exam. Or it was just breaking bread with some friends and what could be better than that?
Martha is offering gifts that no words can give: A bowl of soup, a piece of bread, a small cup of tea.
Mary’s way and Martha’s way; it doesn’t have to be one way or the other. We don’t have to choose and call one better. Maybe Martha’s way and Mary’s way are just our way as the church. There’s a time of listening and a time of speaking out; a time to react and resist or a time to gather up a few gifts and some hospitality for a friend or a stranger. There is a time to be distracted by many things, and there is a time to stop with the many things because it’s not all up to me or to you.
In the presence of Jesus, Mary offers her gift of listening…and speaking too. In the presence of Jesus, Martha offers her own gift of an honest question to Jesus, and she gives her gifts of food and comfort for a few who are tired, or afraid, or just plain hungry. In the presence of Mary and Martha, Jesus offers his own gift of his presence and his words of life; just as he will soon offer the gift of his own life.
We will pray soon and there will be a gift of silence woven in with the words. We will name people and places silently or aloud. But maybe that silence is also a time to listen. The speaking and listening will feed us for a life in a world that needs our voices and our action and our care. Then we will come to kneel or stand at the table and something like the gracious hospitality of Martha, which is also the gracious hospitality of Christ, will come to us in bread and wine. And this hospitality will feed us for a life in a world that needs our voices and our action and our care. They will feed us for a life where we offer gifts of peace and kindness and justice and food and drink and love for a world that is so hungry for those things.
We will be nourished by the silence and the words here, by the food and the drink, by speaking and listening, by the presence of Christ who comes to us in this our home, and who comes to us in the homes where we spend our days, and in this world all around us that we call home. We will be nourished by Christ, who is with us when it is the time to cry out, when it is time to serve, when it is time to speak and when we listen for a word of life that is spoken for us.