“Kitchen Conflict….Sorting Out Roles Way Back When!”
Original sermon given July 17, 2022, written and delivered by Pastor Doug Groll at First Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church
Watch the sermon live here
“Kitchen Conflict”
Luke 10:38-42
Luke 10:38-42
38 “Now as they went on their way, he entered a village; and a woman named Martha received him into her house. 39 And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. 40 But Martha was distracted with much serving; and she went to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” 41 But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; 42 one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.”
Many of you have probably heard of the “Jefferson Bible”. It is actually a little book about 3/8th of an inch thick that is what Thomas Jefferson felt was the part of the Bible that was really worth paying attention to. What we have, then, is a book of “snippets”….it has what he wanted (mostly the ethical) and it left out what he didn’t..not so sure about the salvation stuff.
Maybe we all carry around our little “snippets” Bibles….. I could not help but think as I was preparing this message this week that if there was one part of the New Testament that the Lutheran Church Ladies I have known over the years would probably fall by the scissors and would become a “snippet” it would be this part of this Gospel….where Martha is sort of brought up short for what she probably does best….cook. And isn’t that a legitimate request….? “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?
I was taken back 70 years ago to St. John Lutheran Church in Holgate, Ohio, a village of about 1100 back then and a village of about 1100 now. St. John had a food stand at the Henry County Fair…..right beside the grandstand where Walter
Meier, the famed Lutheran Hour Speaker could fill with Lutherans on a Sunday
Afternoon. (There were a lot of Lutherans in Henry County). We had this church stand…and my memory is of my mother and all the other women of the congregation managing that food stand at the County Fair….every family had to put up five homemade pies and two chickens…..Two weeks before the women met in the church basement and made home made noodles that became the real stuff of the best chicken noodle soup you ever ate….. This is what they did….this is what they knew how to do….and as various commentators who have written about this text will tell you…..it makes Church Ladies…just a little uncomfortable.
SO, WHAT DO WE DO WITH THIS?
1. Let’s get to know the actors:
Jesus is not setting up Martha as an enemy…..as someone to be rejected….to be confronted in an antagonistic way ….she was not a moneychanger in the temple…..as in the case of a great deal of the New Testament, those close to our Lord are in a learning and growing process. John’s Gospel, where Jesus comes back to Bethany because his friend Lazarus has died shows us the close relationship between Martha and our Lord……She is a pretty good theologian:
5 Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus[1]
Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”She said to him, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world.”
So we have to be right up front…..Martha was a believer and a pretty good theologian. She was not alienated by Jesus or alienating him. So, what was going on.
2. To get a hold of our text….we have to see it in terms of Luke’s Gospel….for how he structured the flow….and we see this text come right in on top of last week’s Gospel lesson just verses before….also from Chapter 10.a lawyer comes to him and asks, “What must I do?”…..and the guy is able to recite book chapter and verse….you should love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself…. Who is my neighbor? Jesus then responds with The parable of the Good Samaritan…..Go and Do….. so the preface to our text today is Do….you can know everything…..but the bottom line is “Faith In Action”…..If we were to place this text into our modern settings we would probably say that the lawyer in the previous section is a “You are in our thoughts and prayers type of guy”. Heavy on thinking…..getting it right….a little light on getting his hands dirty.
3. But now Luke balances this parable off with this conversation with Martha….the doer……the task oriented doer….who not only makes a mean bowl of chicken noodle….but wants the Lord to compel to get her sister Mary to stir the pot. She wants the priority to be on the action……
The lawyer in the previous section wanted to get it right….wanted it to down in writing….wanted to get it all up here…and this woman wants it worked out in action.
4. And here Jesus breaks all conventionality and dares to say that women can and should hear the Word……that the word ……women were not permitted to sit at the feet of Jewish scholars….Jesus breaks this ….but the point here is not really that women are allowed to think deep…but that it is all about opening oneself to the Word…..this Word made flesh…..to the teachings by and through and around this Word….this Word made flesh…who taught while healing the sick…who taught while feeding the hungry….who taught the Word while restoring sight to the blind and the dumb to speak….. The Word made flesh is what Mary is listening to. There is nothing here about wanting to place the parable of the Good Samaritan and the “Do” of this against the Listening of our text…but a way to let the Word draw us into right, willing, unencumbered or demanded…legalistic action.
David Tiede:
The good portion, in this case, is the freedom to be a hearer. Mary has not even asked what she must “do to inherit eternal life,” as if some task were the qualification. The kingdom is a gift, received by hearing the word in faith. The logic of what one must “do” is simply misguided in such an instance. The opportunities for service will come in great abundance and challenge in due time.[2]
This then brings us to faith in action…..the Word in and through us in action….and that probably gets played out in individual, corporate and societal ways. The Word Made Flesh….in a sense fleshed out in our lives has to move us as individuals and even as institutions. So many times this week after the shootings we have heard… “You are in our thoughts and prayers!”……that is the lawyer speaking…but then the other side…..”that is not enough”…make them do the right thing….that is Martha speaking up….. Maybe we have to studiously be both and…..
As you can well imagine, no guest pastor visiting with you once every month or so can give any other individual a guideline for doing the Word in action. When we ask the question, “Who is my neighbor?” in an individual sense we all have different neighbors….neighbor needs vary for each of us. Each of us come across “the neighbors” in our lives that can only be served by each of us as individuals . I won’t pretend to identify your “neighbors”.
We are not, nevertheless, only individuals. We are people in community…..in communities. The New Testament puts Christians together in bodies….the Church…..we live and move and act beyond the level of seeing the neighbor only as individual to be identified and served only as individual. And here, to be quite frank, I am sad to say that in so many cases our Lutheran churches have seemed so comfortable …..too comfortable in the “thoughts and prayers mode”. It bothers me that over the last year or so..with all that is happening around us ….Ukraine, the Pandemic….The Constitutionality of Prayer in Public Schools …..Roe Vs. Wade…..7 to 10 shooting deaths per weekend in Chicago alone…often little childrens…..as we have tuned into on our local news outlets…. Spokesmen and women of faith organizations throughout the nation and state have had some words of consolation and leadership except our Lutheran churches… I ask myself, “in what world are they living?” With the possible exception of a sort of an inappropriate triumphal response to the Overthrow of the R Vs.Wade by the Supreme Court in Synodical news releases a couple of weeks ago, one could get the idea that all evils of the world were now in the past….. “You are in our thoughts and prayers!”
Is there a way to hear the Word Made Flesh For The World for the community in a way that is not a Martha demand…..”Lord make them see and do and resolve the problems my way!” that is both a listening and an active approach? This Friday’s Chicago Tribune carried this article written by Father Pfleger, Pastors Siera Bates-Chamberlain, Otis Moss III and Rabbi Seth Limmer calling for the creation of a permanent Office Of Gun Violence Prevention with the request to the city to set aside an initial 100 million investment to get this program going. Over the years I have been in worship settings to observe and listen to Pfleger, Moss, and even Moss’s father in Cleveland. These people have listened to the Word….they come out of a Word context…..they are acting in a corporate …communal way to identify and serve the neighbor. I know nothing about the Rabbi…..but I have heard the Word from others.
What could we do practically? On local levels….congregational levels…..district and maybe even Synodical levels could we create arenas for listening…..?
We must find ways to talk to one another….to argue….to disagree and to act in meaningful ways…… WE MUST FIND ARENAS OF LISTENING.. Not as the lawyer……”Get it said right!” “Our thoughts and prayers are with you…” Nor as Martha….Lord, could you make everyone around me see it my way and do what they should do for their own good…but rather as the Children of God that we are through our baptisms……let the Word trickle down and through us to speak, to act and to love empowered….as we celebrate the Son’s presence with us in the Holy Supper as we openly disagree….and then act out in love in search of our neighbors.
As a young seminarian I spent the summer of 1963 in New York City as a student in the training program for chaplains of the U.S. Army. On Sundays the Lutheran students would attend worship wherever possible at the urban church where then Pastor John Richard Neuhaus presided…..I say presided ….because most reasonably “high church” practices that we would see in the Midwest would seem almost Southern Baptist compared to those services. Neuhaus later became a priest…but in the middle of the Vietnam War where he worked tirelessly against the U.S. involvement with R.C. brothers he did write a perceptive article for a Lutheran publication in which he explored how Lutheran families had lined up on both sides of the Civil War…and how this especially played out in Lutheran congregations in the South……how that was being repeated around the Viet Nam war radicalization. Radically different ideas about life and neighbors in society but only could be brought together to speak, and think and celebrate around the Word Made Flesh…..The listened to but acted out.
“You are in our thoughts and prayers!” is not an answer…..especially if played against….”Lord, make them see it my way!” Let to learn to listen and rejoice in the Word made flesh in our service to our neighbors. Amen.
[1] The Revised Standard Version (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1971), Jn 11:5.
[2] David L. Tiede, Luke, Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1988), 211.