Fourth Presbyterian Church: A Light in the City

Sunday, July 17, 2022 | 10:00 a.m.

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 15
Luke 10:38–42

Jesus was no stranger to accusation. He was accused of all kinds of things throughout his life.

He was accused of breaking the law by those who watched him work on the Sabbath. He was accused of perversity when people saw him welcoming sinners and degenerates into his company. He was accused by the religious authorities of blaspheming God and conspiring against the empire.

Luke’s Gospel has perhaps the most concise distillation of the kinds of accusations people made against Jesus, where the assembly that tried him in the chief priest’s house brings him before Pontius Pilate in the morning and states, “We found this man perverting our nation, forbidding us to pay taxes to the emperor, and saying that he himself is the messiah, a king.”

Much of that accusation is, of course, false; Jesus is forever identified with the falsely accused.

The accusations against Jesus began the day he was born, since the claim that a child had been born “King of the Jews” could not but ring in the ear of the actual king as an accusation of treason, and they continued to the hour of his death on a cross, as onlookers mocked him, “He saved others; he cannot save himself?”

Jesus was a lightning rod for accusation.

Yet there’s one accusation I imagine must have stung Jesus with a particularly harsh venom. He heard it twice. The first time it came from his disciples, in a boat, as they were struggling to prevent the vessel from capsizing and drowning them all in a storm. Jesus was actually asleep in the stern of the boat, so the disciples shook him awake and demanded, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

Do you not care?

It happened again in the story we just heard when Martha puts the same four words to Jesus: “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?”

Don’t you care?

Technically, it’s a question, but it’s really an accusation. It’s like when I ask Laura, my daughter, “Are you going to leave your cereal bowl in the living room?” A question, for sure, but also something more pointed and less curious than it is trying to appear, an accusation in question’s clothing.

Don’t you care?

Have you ever been accused of not caring? It comes in a variety of forms:

Do you even care?

You don’t care, do you?

You just don’t care.

If you’ve heard any of these directed at you, take comfort—you’re in good company. Jesus himself received the “Do-you-even-care?” treatment not once, but twice.

But how could anyone accuse Jesus of not caring? Caring is Jesus’ whole thing. He teaches his disciples to care for the hungry, the thirsty, strangers, the naked, prisoners, and the sick. Perhaps his best-known parable is about a Good Samaritan who goes to unreasonable lengths to care for a victim he doesn’t even know.

Jesus cares for lepers and paralytics. He cares for the possessed and the unclean. He cares for children and widows, poor people and rich people, women and men, Jews and Gentiles, prisoners and soldiers.

Jesus doesn’t care? This Jesus? How could you say that?

You know where my heart sometimes accuses God of not caring? In traffic.

You know the on-ramp to the northbound lanes of the Kennedy expressway at Fullerton, where the left lane merges onto the expressway but the right lane continues up over a little hill to Western Avenue? You know how those two lines are marked off by a clear white line and how the left lane is always backed up because of the traffic signal at the end of the ramp, but the right lane is typically clear?

And you know how lots and lots of drivers speed down the right lane and then cut in front of the cars in the left lane and then disappear onto the Kennedy, skipping the line the rest of us are waiting in like decent, responsible citizens?

Every time I see that I want to scream, “God! Do you even care?!”

There’s so much wrong that I think God could do something about if God cared to. People don’t act right; couldn’t the Almighty fix that and make it so that everybody made good choices that benefited everyone else, or at least that didn’t make things harder on people? Instead, people don’t do what they’re supposed to, and the rest of us have to pick up all the slack.

Sometimes it seems like God doesn’t care.

Jesus doesn’t care that Mary is just sitting there while Martha is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, running from room to room getting dinner ready and straightening the stacks of magazines on the coffee table and restocking the bathroom with toilet paper. He doesn’t even care, even though you know Martha is trying to let him know, trying to let Mary know, how annoyed she is.

This is how I make sure my family knows I’m doing all the work by myself. I work faster than I need to, and I express short, staccato sighs every several seconds. I don’t look at them, but if they ask if anything’s wrong I come back real quick with “Nope” and then start the cycle again.

But you see it’s more than just housework. Mary isn’t acting right. She is not behaving the way she was raised to behave, and she knows better.

Martha is acting right. Martha is demonstrating that she knows her role as host and as a woman in first-century Jewish culture, and that is to prepare food and lodging for (male) guests but to stay out of sight. If this were a kindergarten class, Martha would be earning herself a gold star.

Mary would be eating the paste. Conventions of the time separated women from men in homes so that women were confined to the kitchen and to the outside where the children were. Only the men gathered in the common room. And yet here is Mary in the common room with Jesus. It’s embarrassing.

It’s actually worse than embarrassing. It’s offensive, because she’s sitting at the rabbi’s feet, and that’s a posture of submission to authority as a disciple. Mary is acting like a disciple. Mary is a woman who is acting like a man.

For Martha, it’s too much. She has to speak up. Because Mary is trans . . . gressing the norms of behavior dictated to her gender by her culture and her religion and her family, and for the life of her Martha can’t see why Jesus doesn’t care about that.

Now watch this. (I worshiped with our high school mission trip team last Sunday at Right Directions Christian Ministries in Memphis, Tennessee, with Pastor Hampton, and Pastor Hampton does this thing in his sermons that I resolved right away to copy. He says, “Watch this.”)

So watch this. “Mary has chosen the better part.” Bad behavior by the standards of law and culture and custom might actually be good behavior by the standards of the kingdom of God that Jesus is bringing near.

Mary is in trouble with her sister, but it’s what the civil rights activist John Lewis called “good trouble” according to Jesus.

The word in Greek here for “better” carries real moral weight. The Common English Bible translation says Mary has made “the right choice.” According to Jesus, Martha has it backwards: the gold star actually goes to Mary.

Do you even care? Jesus seems to answer, “Yes, I care. I care that you’re not being as good a disciple as Mary. I care that you are too busy performing the role your family and your culture and your religion expects you to play to allow yourself to stop running around for a minute and to experience what this faith is all about.”

Watch this, right?

What if being a better Christian means disappointing people we care about? What if following Jesus more faithfully demands that we get a couple of B’s instead of straight A’s? What if willing, dedicated discipleship is in conflict with being good in all the ways we’ve been taught to be good—good women and men, good students, good professionals, good athletes, good citizens.

It looks to me from Jesus’ interaction with Martha and Mary like the better part of goodness might mean doing less, not more.

I mentioned earlier the high school mission trip to Memphis last week. We did a lot of work. On Monday night we prepared the evening meal at a shelter for people experiencing homelessness. That involved preparing a menu and grocery list days in advance (hat tip to Katie Patterson, our Youth Ministry Program Manager), then driving seventeen people to the Walmart on Elvis Presly Boulevard to shop for everything, taking it all to the shelter, and dividing into teams to wash and chop vegetables, cut up chicken, prepare cookie batter, cook noodles, and then assemble everything to serve to about forty people.

We did a lot, and it felt useful.

Then the very next day we worked at a place called Constance Abbey, an intentional community dedicated to serving people nobody else will. It’s a house in the middle of a neighborhood less than two miles from Beale Street where people in need of all kinds of help come and go all day long.

There wasn’t that much for us to do there, actually. We didn’t prepare a meal or pull weeds or any of the other kinds of things youth mission trip teams typically do. Some of us sat at a dining room table and organized files, while others of us tried to match donated fitted and flat bed sheets to make sets. About thirty minutes into it, I started to feel like we weren’t doing much good.

Then a man who’d been sitting quietly in the corner started talking to a couple of us, and he told us how he’d walked to Memphis from Joliet, in Illinois, how it took him over three weeks and how he spent nights on the side of the highway and tore up two pairs of shoes. He’s been in Memphis a matter of weeks, and he’s thinking of going back the same way he came, because his grandma is sick.

And all we did was listen. I wondered how often people listen to that guy. And I wondered how we might have missed listening to him because of my anxiety that we weren’t doing enough “real work.”

The German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “the first service that one owes to others in the fellowship [that is, the church] consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to [God’s] Word, so the beginning of love for neighbors is learning to listen to them.”

It occurs to me that Mary might be both listening to God’s Word and listening to a neighbor at the same time. Luke does not record what Jesus is saying to Mary, only that she “listened to what he was saying.” So he’s probably teaching her some things, perhaps about scripture, and as an attentive disciple she’s taking them in.

But it seems likely to me that he’s also just talking to her, maybe unburdening himself of the struggle he’s enduring. He’s on his way to Jerusalem, and the villages between here and there are not friendly. He’s been rejected by one village already, and in another he met a lawyer who tested him and tried to trip him up before a crowd. Plus, he’s said openly that he expects to be killed once he reaches Jerusalem.

Maybe he’s telling Mary how hard that is. Maybe he’s expressing some second thoughts about things? Maybe he’s processing everything that’s been going on by talking it all out with Mary.

Maybe Mary is the listening ear Jesus needs. And she had that ear to offer because she wasn’t busy doing what she should have been doing.

Jesus sees that and he praises it.

Jesus sees Martha, too. He sees how worried and anxious she is, and his naming of it is not a criticism.

Martha, Martha . . .

Repeating a person’s name like that is an expression of affection.

“Martha, Martha, you seem so worried.”

“Martha, Martha, you are really distracted, aren’t you?”

“Martha, Martha, I see you.”

“Martha, Martha, there is need of but one thing, friend, and you already have it.”

“Martha, Martha.” There is tenderness in it, and delight.

Jesus isn’t mad at Martha’s worry and her distraction; he’s trying to save her from it. He’s inviting her into the good part of knowing him.

He’s inviting us, too. I hope we can accept.

Amen.