| ||||
|
I've been thinking again of establishing an award of some kind - we could call it The Rector's Award - which would be given to people who ask good questions. The prize might be a book or an icon or an ice cream cone, depending on the tastes and age of the recipient. I'm not talking about those technical "how to" or "what is" questions, questions like "What is the liturgical color for Advent?" or "How do we set up the altar for the 10:30 mass?" What I mean are those hard-to-ask and hard-to-answer questions, the questions that bring us here to church in the first place and which, if they're not responded to here, eventually send us away discouraged to seek answers elsewhere. I mean the questions that are formed by our very lives themselves, the questions to which, as the bumper stickers say, Christ is the answer. The lawyer's question last week is one of those questions: What must I do to inherit eternal life? So is the stranger's question to Abraham this morning: Is anything too hard for God? So are lots of the other questions in the Bible, questions like Who is my neighbor? and How do you know when night ends and day begins? and Where were we when the world was created and limits were placed on the seas? and Does evil exist? and Does God really love everybody? These are all great questions. So is the question one of you told me you were asked by one of your children this week: What if there isn't a God and we're just floating around in space jabbering to ourselves? The askers of questions like these would all be sure-fire candidates for the Rector's Award. Another candidate for the award would have been a young mother in my parish in Wisconsin. We had a class on the topic of bringing up children in the Christian faith, and this mother asked, "What do I tell my daughter when she asks why we have to go to church? When my daughter asks what difference it makes if we are Christians, what do I tell her when everything about us seems to be just the same as it is for the non-church family next door?" It's a question, isn't it, that all of us ought to be asking, because, in fact, we're not better people, most of us - or less selfish or less materialistic people - than our unchurched neighbors, and our lives seem to have just as many worries and misfortunes. So what do we tell our children and young people when they ask what difference it makes if we go to church? Do we tell them anything? Do we ourselves have answers to the question, "What difference?" Why not think about how you'd frame the "what difference" question in your own life - right now - and then let's see if our answers are the same as the answer Christ is. Because, of course, the answer is here. The bumper stickers are right; Christ is the answer. Christ is the answer God gives us, in different forms but all pointing in the same direction, every time we read the Scriptures or receive the sacrament, every time we gather here as church. This morning we hear God's answer to the "what difference" question in the stranger's question to Abraham: "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" And we hear God's answer in Jesus' words to poor, harassed, crabby, victimized Martha: "Martha, Martha, you are fretting and fussing about so many things. One thing is needful. Mary has chosen the better portion, which shall not be taken away from her." Both these questions - and the answer - are found around the dinner table. Around the dinner table Sarah provides food and drink for the stranger who has been traveling all day over the hot and dusty trails of the Middle East and who turns up unexpectedly at her door. Around the dinner table Mary and Martha offer this same kind of hospitality to Jesus, who is on his own difficult road toward Jerusalem, when they invite him into their home for dinner. Such hospitality is a mitzvah, a charitable act, an act not unlike the act of the Samaritan last week, an offer of grace for one in need of it. And whenever I think about these biblical stories of hospitality, I recall the story William Willimon tells about the student who worked in a Jesuit home for the poor one summer in one of our larger cities. It was a center where they work all day, every day, handing our food and helping as best they can with the needs of the people on the streets. At the end of such a day, one just doesn't want to see any more guests. And at the end of one particularly long and difficult day, the student and an old Jesuit priest thought they had finally taken care of the last person and had just closed the big door for the night when they looked out the window and saw yet one more forlorn soul shuffling his way up the sidewalk toward the door; and when the student saw the man making his arthritic way up the walk toward them, he thought about what a long day it had been and how tired he was and muttered, "Jesus Christ...." And the old priest said, "Could be, could be. We'd better open the door." Hospitality is a biblical virtue. We are called to it throughout the Scriptures, and bundles of sermons on the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah and Mary and Martha are to be found in these two readings. But in both stories there is a turning of tables, and it's that turning of tables that I want to look at this morning. In both stories the one who, on the surface, is the host turns out to be the guest. And the one who, on the surface, is the guest turns out to be the host. Sarah entertains the stranger only to find that she has entertained an angel unawares, the Host of heaven himself, bearing gifts. And Mary, who has invited Jesus to dinner, finds that she is more hungry for Jesus' presence than Jesus is for Mary's pasta. Like the banquet of the Eucharist, meals in the Bible are significant. Meals represent life, life at several levels. Like the feeding of the multitudes, the Holy Eucharist we've come to church to participate in this morning points us to the banquet at the end our journey in time and space, to which we are all called as guests. And all meals, all the meals 'round our dining room tables, are banquets of the created world all around us, the world in which we have been invited by God to live and work. So life itself - that's the banquet Sarah laughed about in skepticism and derision. She laughed about the ridiculousness of it all, about the absurdity of her being the bearer of life at age ninety. The stranger had promised it, but it just didn't make sense! And life itself - that's the banquet Martha is worried about. Life itself is the banquet Martha is slaving over. "How will anything ever get done if I don't do it?" she asks. Sarah laughs at the banquet of life for the same reason Martha frets and fusses over it: God is a stranger to them; they do not see the place of God in the world and in their lives. For both of them, some things are too hard for God. Hope, for them, dies at the ends of their own ropes. Most of us, truth be told, are Sarah or Martha types, either laughing at the promise of God, like Sarah, because we can't believe that God can keep his promise, or fretting and fussing like Martha, who thinks she has to do it all. Like us. These are, after all, the two responses to life the world teaches: refusal to trust the promise of God and the belief that everything depends upon us. Martha thinks she is the host at life's banquet. Martha thinks that she has to make it all happen, that she has to put it all together, she has to win or lose, she has to furnish the answer to what life is all about. Isn't that truth? Haven't we mostly chosen the "Martha portion" for ourselves and for our world? Got to get dinner on, got to hustle, got to have a plan for life, got to "go for it," got to achieve. In fact, we often turn our churches into "Martha portion" churches. I know, because I do my share of it. Always doing. Always getting dinner ready for Jesus, forgetting that here - here in church and here in life - we are the guests and God is the host, who invites us in to lay down our lives as a question at the feet of Jesus' answer, not our own. It's that forgetfulness that is the problem. It's our forgetting that we are God's guests and that God is our host, it's our forgetting that we are God's guests in time and space, our forgetting that life itself is the rich banquet God invites us to sit down at with him, it's our forgetting all this that is the "Martha portion" of our lives. It's our forgetting that God is the host and we are the guests that leads to our being anxious and troubled, that leads to our fretting and fussing about so many things. And the "Martha portion" is, indeed, the lesser portion, the portion that will be taken away from us. Just talk to someone who can't do that portion. Just talk to someone who has lost his job. Talk to someone who can't get a job. Talk to someone who's too old or sick to work. Talk to someone who's too busy or shy to serve on those committees where all the action is at the "Martha-portion" church. Talk to someone who is dying. No banquets for them in a "Martha-portion" world! But talk even to healthy, young, employed white males. Talk to the "Super Marthas" of success, like those trying to get off the treadmill of ever-increasing achievement and consumption. Talk to them about "burn out," about lives so busy with doing they're coming undone in alcoholism, divorce, depression, and suicide. In just plain weariness. The Martha portion is the lesser portion, because the day does come when we can't do it any more. And what then? Well then, even the pretense will be taken away for us. And the "Martha portion" is, sadly, the only portion the world teaches us about, the portion we discovered back in the Garden of Eden, the portion of life lived without God, the portion of going it alone, the portion of living as our own answer to all questions, the portion of death. What is it Martha has not seen? What is it Sarah did not see? What did Martha's sister Mary see? These are questions we might ask ourselves this morning while we are at church, the place we come to to hear God's answer to them. Because that's why we come to church - to hear God's answer to the question of our lives which can make all the difference in our lives. We come to church to answer God's own question - "Is anything impossible for the Lord?" - with God's answer - Christ. We come to church to hear that the future is wide open at all times, wide open even to people like Sarah, wide open even to us, even in old age, even at the door of the tomb. That's what Mary saw. Mary saw that our Martha world has it all wrong. Mary saw that we're not the hosts at life's banquet, God is. Both sisters call Jesus Lord, but notice that only Mary treats him as Lord. Martha just wants to use his lordship to help her get her work done: "Lord, tell my sister to get off her you-know-what and come help me in the kitchen." But Mary chooses the better portion, which shall not be taken away from her. Mary does what all of us are invited to do towards Christ, who is the answer for our lives; she worships him. She listens to his words. And she does not laugh. Nor does she fret. She throws her life before Christ and sits at his feet at the banquet of life she recognizes in him. And I can just hear the wheels turning in your heads with the Martha-portion question: But what about dinner? Well of course, someone has to get dinner on the table if anyone is to eat. Of course, fields have to be plowed and homework done. Of course, the laundry has to be folded and the grass mowed and the committees served on, and both the children and the altar have to be dressed. But the work is not the issue, neither the work of preparing the table nor the work of life itself. The issue is the disposition, the attitude. The issue is the perspective, the heart with which both the work and the living are approached. What Mary sees that Martha does not see is that, at its very heart, life is not achievement, but gift. Just like the meal, and that's why we say grace at meals, because all meals, like life itself, are gifts. That's what many of us - skeptics and deriders, fretters and fussers all - cannot see much of the time, and that's why we laugh with Sarah, not in joy but in skepticism, because we believe it's ridiculous to think that life is possible for one who is weak or old. And it's why we fret and fuss with Martha, because we take it as our portion that everything depends on us. But later, of course, Sarah laughed not in derision, but in joy, when she finally got the joke, when the Lord himself answered his own question - "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" - and "showed favor to her as he had promised, and made good what he had said about her," and she bore a son. And then, as Frederick Buechner says, Sarah laughed in joy, like Mary, when Isaac was born in the geriatric ward with Medicare picking up the tab for God's banquet. What Mary sees is that the question that is asked by our very lives - the question that is formed by the very fact that we are, even though we ourselves did nothing at all in order to be - Mary sees that this question is answered and completed in the mystery of God, in Christ. That's what Sarah sees, too, in the end, when Isaac is born and she finally gets the joke. The Mary portion is our surrender of our lives to this answer - that God is the host of life. The Mary portion is our acceptance, in gratitude and trust, of God's gifts to us. The Mary portion, the greater portion, is God's offer of life to old folks like Abraham and Sarah whose lives have run out of achievement living and to Type-A folks like Martha who could use a break from stress and anxiety. And that, the Mary portion, is the answer to the question of the young mother in Wisconsin as well. The Mary portion, the better part which will not be taken from us, is the difference offered to us in Christ. It is the difference between life as achievement and life as gift, and part of the difference is the gratitude and humor and joy that go with realizing the difference. And it's only in church that we hear about it, which is why we come to church - to remember and receive the difference God offers us, and to be nourished by it. But the choice, as always, is ours. So the big question for today is the question we come to church to hear, the question of life: Can we accept God's answer, or will we insist on our own? Can we, like Mary, come to his feet? Will we, like Mary, come this morning as God's guests at God's table, abandoning the baggage of our fretting and fussing so that we might be nourished by his presence and promise? Or will we struggle on, trying to fix dinner for ourselves? In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |