Mary Gordon’s Homily for July 17, 2016
Delivered by Shiela Reaves
Martha and Mary Sermon
I am so sorry not to be with you today, as I had very much looked forward to being the homilist as my dear friend Paul Knitter presided. For those of you who don’t know, my husband, Arthur Cash, had a serious fall resulting in brain injury from which he is not expected to recover. He is now in a wonderful hospice facility and we await the end, which may come sooner or later, no one of course, knows. I ask your prayers for us in this difficult time.
Nevertheless, it pleases me to be able to be with you in this way, or at least to have my words with you. So, this is how it would have gone had sadness not struck us.
If I ever have doubts about the active presence of the Holy Spirit in my life, the fact that these particular Scriptural readings were the ones I am meant to speak on today erases all my doubts. The readings from the Hebrew Bible and from Luke are both centered on the question of hospitality, and they both touch on the ordinary lives of women—who all too often bear a disproportionate burden in the actualization of the dream of hospitality.
I’m going to begin with the passage from Luke, because it has been central in my life. For a long time, I used it as a defense against housework: wasn’t I named Mary and wasn’t sitting and listening—because what else are learning but a kind of sitting and listening—indeed the better part. Didn’t it provide the authority for me to live a life of the mind and spirit, leaving the domestic life to others…defined by me as my inferiors? And then, lo, it came to pass, I was a married woman with children, and when I read or heard this passage, I realized that I was identifying with Martha rather than Mary. It was kind of like watching Sesame Street with your kids and knowing that while you had thought you were Ernie, you had somehow become Bert. I particularly identified with Martha’s resentment, and moved by Jesus taking the time to understand what she was going through before he pointed out the limits of her point of view. But I wanted to say, right Jesus, great, but without Martha you’d be looking over your shoulder wondering when dinner was going to happen. Did you think it was going to magically appear, Mary wasn’t going to do anything and where was Lazarus? Out playing ball or reading Torah? Of course Martha was annoyed. She was worn out. In my memory, Jesus said, Martha, Martha, you are weary and troubled by many things. It was important to me that Jesus acknowledged the weariness that accompanies domestic responsibility, because in those years I was so often fatigued by the responsibilities of career and motherhood.
And so I was surprised in reading the text of our lectionary to see that the word weariness was not present but that the word “distracted” occurred twice. I decided to investigate different translations. I began with the one in my family Bible, the Douay, Rheims version, which was provided for Catholics during the Counter Reformation as an alternative to the King James. In this version, Martha is “busy about much serving,” and “careful and troubled about many things.” I of course took into account the fact that in the 17th century, careful meant full of care rather than attentive…nevertheless the resonance of careful seemed less derisory than “distracted.” The King James, with its usual mastery renders the words “cumbered about much serving, thou art careful and troubled about many things. “The word cumbered was particularly pleasing to me, with its suggestion of being weighed down, and the words careful and troubled appear in this version. The language of the more modern translations was disturbing to me because it seemed dismissive. The revised English Bible has Jesus accusing Martha of “fussing and fretting” and the Jerusalem Bible uses the word “fret” as well. Fretting to me suggests an activity which is entirely groundless, worthless, and superficial, charges that are too easily leveled against women and their domestic work. I then looked at the interlinear Greek text. It is from this source that the word “distracted” comes. This translation renders the words as “: distracted about much service” and has Jesus telling Martha that he understands she is “Anxious and troubled about many things.” I consulted the Interpreter’s Bible, which offered a tantalizing suggestion: that Martha’s problem stemmed from a misunderstanding of hospitality. That she was preparing too elaborate a feast, whereas “one thing only” was required, and in her zeal to be a good host she was actually a bad one. I pondered the word “distraction,” which really means not being present. And I felt myself guilty of that fault. I took pride in creating elaborate holiday meals, with a perfectly set table and food that would astonish. At one point, my children told me that they hated Christmas dinners because I was so stressed and it was like I wasn’t there, or only there to be irritable, and would I please dial it down a few notches so that everyone could enjoy it. I had to acknowledge that I was guilty of narcissism or hospitality. I had convinced myself that I was doing everything for my guests, but I was actually doing it for myself, so that I could bask in their praise, and live up to some standard dictated from on high by who knows who. I had forgotten that Martha Stewart was not the Fifth Evangelist.
And so it would be possible to leave you with an interpretation of this passage that soothed and comforted, with a nice life lesson under our belts about proportionality and balance. But the text demands more than this. It insists that to be a follower of Jesus demands a necessary imbalance, a tilt toward the supernatural. It requires more than being a good person who makes others comfortable. It would be perfectly possible to be such a person and never to have read the Gospels. Jesus demands that whatever the practical business of our lives—and I think it’s important to remember that this passage follows the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is all about practical charity—as followers of Jesus our lives have an added dimension which must always be before our eyes, which has primacy of place and trumps everything. We are followers of Jesus because he is our particular doorway into the infinite Kingdom of God.
The reading from the Hebrew Bible is also about hospitality and the limits of ordinary wisdom. I was glad to see that although Abraham gave a lot of orders, he was involved in food prep. And you have to love Sarah when she laughs at the news that her hundred year old husband is going to give her a child. I was particularly pleased that her laughter was not only about the impossibility of procreation, but the joke that this old dude could make her happy in the sack. “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” How nice to encounter a reference to female pleasure in a sacred text. As is the case with Martha’s complaint, we have to sympathize with Sarah’s laughter, even her fearful denial when she finds out that one of the guests is Yahweh himself. But Sarah’s perspective is a closed one: it forecloses the possibility of miracle, of surprise. Abraham had no idea who the strangers were, but he was open to the possibility that they might be wonderful. And this, I think, is the secret of real hospitality: the possibility of openness, the possibility of delightful surprise. The long shot bet of hope. I was reminded of these lines of poetry from Randall Jarrell:
“Woe’s me, in folly’s mailbox
There sits the postcard hope.
Your brother in Australia has died and you are pope.
For many a man has entertained an angel unawares.
And as you cry “Impossible,” the step is on the stairs.