sermon preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Associate for Adult Formation
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| source: Wikimedia Commons (artist unknown, c.1000) |
Three visitors appear from out of the desert, and Abraham drops everything
and runs to meet them. Bear with me for a minute while I pose a few questions. Abraham’s
effusive welcome is a little surprising. I wonder if his knack for hospitality
is one reason God has chosen him? When have I welcomed strangers into my home
and fed them well?
Meanwhile, Sarah is in the kitchen dutifully cooking a lot of food for these
strangers. Does she question the necessity of this feast? Is it common practice
for the husband to stand while his guests sit and eat? As a guest, that would
make me nervous. Is it typical for the wife to wait in the tent until the
guests have eaten? Are the guests angels? Why are there three? In the original
Hebrew, there are all sorts of confusions about singular and plural here, and
our English translations sometimes fudge the distinction in order to preserve the
narrative. Could the three be God, the Holy Trinity, perceived in some way many
centuries early? Or am I reading too much Christianity back into Judaism?
How does Sarah feel to be addressed by name as she listens at the tent
flap? In a moment she will laugh at the thought that she could get pregnant at
her age. But she is also afraid. I would be too!
This stream of questions is the way I usually begin writing a sermon. I’m
not just reading the Bible. I’m letting the Bible read me, letting the story
draw questions out of me, putting myself into the story in some way. Do you
ever do the same? It doesn’t matter whether the questions have answers. When we
approach the Bible, we must engage our imaginations.
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| Erasmus Quellinus II & Adriaen van Utrecht, Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary (17th c.) source: Wikimedia Commons |
In today’s gospel, Mary is sitting, not standing, listening to her house guest
Jesus. My first thought is that the meal is over, and Martha is in the kitchen,
but she isn’t listening at the door. She’s up to her elbows in soap suds,
fuming that her lazy sister isn’t helping her do the dishes. Have you ever been
Martha?
Meanwhile, Mary is listening with rapt attention to Jesus, her teacher. But
I don’t imagine her to be silent. I think she’s listening, incorporating what
she hears into her own experience, and then asking questions and giving her own
perspective on things. The dirty dishes are the last thing on her mind. This is
far more important, and she’ll be happy to do some scrubbing later, even
tomorrow morning. No, of course the text doesn’t say this—it’s coming from my
imagination. Have you left the dishes until morning because you’d rather chat
with your friends? Of course you have. So have I.
You know what, though? This makes Mary too sympathetic a character. I think
Martha isn’t washing dishes—she’s preparing the meal. Nobody has eaten yet. A
living room full of people has shown up unannounced, and somebody has to feed
them. No wonder Martha is frustrated. And
then, when Martha triangulates Jesus into her frustration—“Don’t enable my
sister’s laziness! Tell her to help!”—Jesus takes Mary’s side.
Why does Jesus honor Mary’s behavior? Mary seems either oblivious or just
downright lazy. Or maybe—maybe! she’s a well-differentiated woman. Let all the
male disciples forage through the kitchen themselves. Jesus doesn’t require
women to do all the background work; he calls all of us to a life of attention
to God. Mary is training her focus. Martha will understand that when she has to,
and not one moment sooner.
Mary wants nothing more than to be close to God, and she sees that when she
is with Jesus, this happens naturally. What image do you have of the kind of
person who is close to God? Someone who is somehow not a sinner? What does this
even mean? Someone like the seemingly perfect person in Psalm 15, for instance?
Who leads a “blameless life” anyway? But maybe Mary, in her focused attention, has
figured out closeness to God. I just bet Martha is the older sister, brought up
to be responsible. Meanwhile the younger Mary listens and trusts—like a child. Perhaps
she’s practically still a child herself.
Jesus makes several references to children being especially receptive to
the Kingdom of God. They receive it naturally because they listen and trust.
They have to listen and trust, because they know they are not self-reliant.
It’s when we get older that we fool ourselves into thinking we are
self-made people. That’s when God begins to feel authoritative but distant, and
Jesus sounds well-intentioned but naïve (“Love your enemies?” What?!), and the
Holy Spirit becomes a nice idea, but it’s not like we’re going to become
radicals and let all this change our lives. After all, we’re adults, and we’ve
got stuff to do.
I mean, just this week I was busy co-leading the music station at Vacation
Bible School, and taking care of my daughter, and setting up a vet appointment,
and going to the gym, and getting an oil change, and planning adult formation
events for fall, and inviting conversation about racism on Facebook, and
collecting Pokéballs on the front steps of St. Paul’s. Write a sermon? Hah!
That means listening before talking. And I don’t have time to listen. I only
have time to talk.
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| Singing together |
Meanwhile, all week, God was assailing me with opportunities to listen,
most of them coming from the children at Vacation Bible School. We weren’t
planning to teach the five-year-olds the Zulu lyrics to “Walking in the Light
of God,” but there was little Lydia singing with perfect pitch and rhythm:
“Siyahamb’e ku khan yeni kwen kos!” Then there was Allie, holding a drumstick
like a baton to conduct a group of young percussionists and inspiring others to
follow her. There was Declan’s declaration about VBS—“I don’t like it; I love
it!” —which we promptly turned into a song. All week long, children were sitting
at our feet, and we tried to show Jesus to them through stories and songs and
crafts and science experiments and games and food and opportunities for
service.
On Thursday I said to one group of grade-school musicians, “Today’s theme
is ‘God calms.’ I think God calms us through music. And I have a story to tell
you about that.”
A boy jumped in: “I’ve heard this story before!”
I smiled and said, “Oh, I really doubt that!” And I went on: “One winter’s
evening I was driving home, and a huge ice storm hit. My car was sliding all
over the road …”
The boy piped up again, “And you sang this song over and over again to help
you get home. And now you want to teach us that song.”
“Oh!” I said. “Yes, that’s exactly the story. Did I tell the story last
year when I taught this same song?”
Several kids smiled and nodded. Well! Would you look at that. They were
listening. They remembered my story from a whole year ago, which is a
significant percentage of their lives. And several kids from the next group
remembered the story as well!
At noon the same day, there was a girl whose parent was a little late
picking her up, something that inevitably happened to a few kids every day this
week. Most of the other kids had left, not all, but this girl was sitting by
herself, so I sat next to her. She told me she was feeling very anxious about
not having been picked up yet. She thanked me for the song, which she had been
singing to herself over and over until I came and sat with her. I told her that
I was certain one of her parents was on the way. I also asked, “Do you see how
many adults there are here who care about you?” “Quite a few,” she admitted.
And right about then, her mom showed up—only about seven minutes late. But now
this girl knows that God calms us with music, and she is reminded that she’s
part of a big family here at St. Paul’s.
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| Storytelling in the nave |
Say what you like about children never listening. They are the best
listeners we have. We can’t always tell because they multi-task so well. And
they won’t always do what we wish they would do, but doing and listening are very
different things. They do, indeed, listen and incorporate what they hear into
their life experience. When they’re in Godly Play, they listen and incorporate.
And when they’re in the pews, even on days when they seem like a vibrating
bundle of energy disturbing your personal quiet space in a room of 300 people …
they are listening and incorporating even then. Are you?
During Vacation Bible School, this room was the storytelling place. That’s
what we do here: we tell stories. We don’t read stories to ourselves. We hear
them out loud, the way they were meant to be received. So don’t read the story.
Let the story read you.
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| More storytelling in the nave |
Make connections. Sarah and Martha both prepared feasts, maybe 2000 years
apart from each other. We’re about to do something similar 2000 years after
that. It’s not a lot of food, but it’s enough to help us conceive of this much larger
family of ours. It’s a feast of bread and wine and blessing. The blessing comes
through us all being gathered together and listening attentively to God.
There’s a longstanding tradition of the priest giving a blessing at the end of
the service, but it’s not necessary, because we have already been blessed
through Holy Communion. When we gather here, we are preparing to receive a feast.
We are making time to listen and receive.
Martha didn’t understand that listening is its own kind of hard work. When
we’re really listening, we’re not just passively receiving, but struggling to
incorporate new ideas and experiences, including experiences that are not our
own and never can be. Stories come to us not only through the Bible, but
through other people in our lives, and through the news, and everything we hear,
from every source, is filtered through somebody else’s narrative. It’s up to us
to decide how to fit it into our own narrative. What do we hear? How will we
allow it to change us? Christ is at work in the hard work of our listening.
Prayer means listening before speaking, and this will change us.
There’s an old joke about a priest who is nothing like me, but whom I
admire greatly. She is asked by a parishioner, “How often do you pray?” The
priest replies, “One solid hour every morning.”
Shocked, the parishioner continues, “But what about those days when you
have way too much to do to spend a whole hour in prayer?”
“Ah,” replies the priest. “On those mornings, I pray for two hours.”
Let the story read you. Listen and pray. Amen.
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