Representing Christianity

July 21, 2019

Luke 10:38-42

This Mary/Martha story has always put me on edge.  There’s Mary plopped down, idly ignoring her guests, comfortable as can be.  Meanwhile, Martha is cleaning and cooking and providing hospitality for Jesus and his followers.  She is busy doing the work that needs to be done in order for Jesus’ ministry to flourish. So why is Jesus condemning Martha and applauding Mary?

I think this story bothers me because it hits so close to home.  

Left unchecked, I naturally run much closer to Martha than Mary.  I am better at appreciating silence and stillness and sabbath rest in theory than in practice.  Life is full of work and responsibilities, and even in my free time I have something of a compulsion toward adventure rather than rest.  

To my family’s chagrin, this becomes especially evident on vacation.  We’re recently back from a two week trip to the Pacific Northwest. We started in Portland with my extended family and then drove up the coast and around Olympic National Park to join Holden’s family for a week in a house near Seattle.  Our days were full exploring the cities, catching up with family members, and hiking in national and state parks. I wanted to do and see everything we could -- who knows if or when we’d ever come back to these places? My family has learned they sometimes need send me out alone while they rest in the hotel room.

Surrounded by people and noise and with limited space, plus the added adventure-compulsion, I generally find it hard to keep up my prayer life on vacation.  So it was fortuitous that one event on my Seattle agenda was to go to a Sunday night service at the Church of the Apostles. I’d read about it in an article about emergent worship services so was excited to see it in person.  Church of the Apostles is a joint Episcopal/Lutheran venture that began as a coffee shop, before moving to their current space in an old abbey that is now a music and art venue in a somewhat grungy but hip part of town. It’s a cool space with neat lighting and a comfortable section in back for parents and young children with couches and quiet toys.  It is intentionally a community of people that might not otherwise be part of a traditional church, and it welcomes all to struggle through their questions of faith and explore new ways of being church in the changing world.

Creativity is a big piece of the Church’s spirituality, which speaks to me for sure.  They write their own music, bake their own communion bread (which is served deliciously warm!), and after the sermon they have an 8-10 minute time of reflection.  During this “Open Space,” as their website explains, people are “encouraged to meditate, create, interrogate, and react to what they have experienced in the service.”

Only Maya, my youngest, was up for joining this adventure, so she and I walked a little uncertainly into this new space, unsure of what to expect.  (Even for clergy, it is uncomfortable being a church newcomer!) We sat in the back, observing the people around us and following along with the screen in front.  And sure enough, after the sermon came that Open Space. Music played softly as we were invited to pray where we were or visit one of the prayer stations in the room.  Maya and I got up and walked to the area where you could light candles and sit on soft pillows to watch the light of your prayer flicker alongside others’.  In another part of the room, we wrote down our own particular prayers to be included aloud with the prayers of the people. We walked curiously to read the instructions by a clothesline where enlarged words from the readings that evening had been strung up.  Maya and I each took a word down to pray with (“grace” for me - “freedom” for Maya). We were supposed to fold, rip, or adorn our words in some way and then drop them into a basket for a future community-built creation. As the service progressed, I was taking notes in my head --  evaluating whether certain pieces were working for me, or thinking about how they might feel in a different context. There were still a few minutes of Open Space left, so Maya and I sat back down, with her head in my lap and my arms around her. I realized it was the first time I’d intentionally sat in silence to pray since the vacation began.  And it felt good and holy and restorative. I was overwhelmed by love for this little girl leaning on me who is growing up so fast. And I felt held myself -- almost tangibly -- by the love of God, who was inviting me to stop hurrying and striving and just rest. I felt grateful for the welcome respite from the fast pace of the world. It wasn’t long -- just a few minutes -- but it was enough.  It was a gift.

Maybe that’s how Mary felt, sitting at Jesus’ feet in our Gospel story.  And maybe Jesus knew that was exactly what Martha needed most in the world too.  Maybe Jesus in this story isn’t condemning Martha for her work at all, but inviting her -- begging her -- to stop for just a few minutes and rest at his side.  Not because what Martha was doing wasn’t worthwhile; her hospitality and support for Jesus were crucial and made his ministry possible. Maybe the reason Jesus encouraged Martha to rest was because he could see that Martha’s work was making her distracted and anxious and troubled.  And he knew that an experience of closeness to him was exactly what would sustain her and embolden her for her own ministry. If she was going to feed and take care of others, she needed to be fed and taken care of herself. She needed to pause in order to remember what her work was all about.

That’s what worship - like this - is intended to be: a chance to have a Mary experience.  To sit down next to Jesus and be fed and cared for. To surrender our distractions and anxieties and troubles to God.  To refocus and come away strengthened and ready to go out into the world and do our God-given Martha work, remembering what it is all about.

Now, when the church service was done and Maya and I met up with the family after the service, I didn’t say much about it.  And that’s largely because Holden’s family is proudly atheist. They are surprisingly well-versed and learned on the subject of the Bible and theology.  And they are supportive of me and curious about what I do. They just don’t buy it for themselves. So I tend to feel this self-imposed pressure around them, like I might be their only close encounter with Christianity and therefore need to represent it well.  Everything I do and say could affect the possibility of their one day being open to God. So I think carefully about anything I say that might be construed as relating to church or faith or theology, wanting it to be attractive and compelling to them. Which, more often than not, leaves me tongue-tied and stammering whenever the subject comes up.  My experience at Church of the Apostles felt like it would be too touchy-feely to broach with this intellectual crowd, so I kept it to myself.

But on the last day of our time together, my sister-in-law surprised me.  She asked me if I had any advice for how to answer her young son who was wondering about God and the afterlife. She said that he had some fears about what would come next, and she wondered if it was because of her and her husband’s atheism. She asked me how I imagined the afterlife.  I froze, overwhelmed by my internal pressure to get the answer right, to be compelling. But then my mind went to those few minutes at the Church of the Apostles - those moments of candlelight and music with Maya’s head on my lap and the intense feeling of loving and being loved, holding and being held.  The release from the striving to be or do, and the invitation to just rest with God. And then I took a deep breath, and thought of that experience as I tried to answer my sister-in-law.  

I started by admitting that I don’t have any more knowledge about what comes after this life than anyone else.  But that what I believe is that somehow it will be an experience of total welcome and absolute love. We will know ourselves to be cherished, just as we are.  And we will actually believe and accept that love and live into it. And not only that, but we will be able to share that same incredible magnitude of love with all of the unique individuals around us.  Not just for a few moments here or there, but for eternity; not selfishly, but without condition.

Even as I said it, even as I believed it, even so, I felt like my answer wasn’t enough. It was broad and fluffy, and it was vague, and it wasn’t supported by any facts or evidence.  I felt like I’d let her down, let the Church down, maybe even let God down. And then I looked at my sister-in-law and I saw that she had tears in her eyes. Somehow, however inartfully, I’d been able to express a fragment of my experience of the love of God.  Somehow I’d been able to get past my Martha self and share my Mary experience. Somehow God’s invitation to rest and be loved had gotten through.

Maybe that is the best and most important gift we representatives of Christianity can offer the world.  To witness to our own experiences of the love of God that enables us every once in a while to really believe ourselves to be worthy of love, and to extend that same love to the people around us.  And to invite others to join this journey with us; to be held and sustained and reminded of their reason for being. To invite others to Mary moments in this Martha world.

Amen.