One Thing

Luke 10:38-42

Is anyone here a multitasker?

Do you – on purpose or by accident – do two or three or more things at the same time?

There are plenty of studies out in the last year or so that suggest that multitasking is exhausting, ineffective, and maybe even bad for your brain.  But it’s still an incredibly popular practice.  I heard a commercial this week for a waterproof smartphone, so that – I kid you not! – “you can text in the shower.”

The simple forms of multitasking are like watching TV while you cook dinner; more advanced forms usually involve multiple electronic devices at the same time, and/or children. 

It feels powerful, sometimes – can make us feel needed and important.  Or it can feel like the only way to get through the day. And sometimes we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

Martha probably didn’t.

Martha is a remarkable woman.  It’s unusual in Biblical Israel that a woman owns her own home, and invites the rabbi over. So Martha is probably the sort of woman who’s a leader in her community and successful in her work.  She might even be the Sheryl Sandberg of her time and place.

And while her sister Mary sits to listen to Jesus (most likely breaking some gender barriers of her own!), Martha is busy juggling all the preparations for a feast to honor her guest.

Then because sibling dynamics were not much different two thousand years ago than they are now, Martha finally gets fed up and complains to Jesus that Mary isn’t helping.

The next part of this story drives me a little crazy every time:

Martha, Martha, Jesus says,

you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.  Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away….

I can’t stand for this story to have winners and losers, and it does sound like Mary wins.

And if Mary wins, the easy moral of this story is that the best thing to do is sit quietly and listen to Jesus – which, I will admit, sounds pretty attractive when my to do list gets long.

But I don’t think that’s exactly what Jesus means.

When Luke describes Martha as “distracted” he says she’s “pulled away,” drawn in many directions.

In other words, Martha was multi-tasking.

She’s probably been trying to listen to Jesus, be part of the conversation with the guests, while she’s juggling meal preparation and the small acts of hospitality to make everyone comfortable: Wine to drink, water for sore and dusty feet, oh that pot is boiling…what did he just say?

Martha is frantic about hospitality.  And this story is exactly about hospitality.  About welcoming Jesus.  Because for us, as well as for Martha and Mary, the practice of hospitality is a lot like the way we relate to God.  Because hospitality is about being present, and acts of love.

And so Jesus gently reminds Martha – and us - that only one thing is necessary.

There’s nothing wrong with Martha’s work to prepare a meal for her guests.  To do that one thing, to prepare a feast, can be a holy and generous act of hospitality, love in action.

The trouble is that Martha is trying to be all things, rather than to focus on her gift of hospitality.

Mary’s choice to sit and focus her attention on Jesus was an act of generous hospitality.   But it wouldn’t have been if she’d been working on the grocery list in her head, or doing whatever it was that we did to avoid boredom before smartphones.

There is need of only one thing, Jesus says.  One thing, with focus and love, to welcome guests or God.

Think about that now, because this gospel, this sermon, depends on your ability to focus on one thing, at least for a while:

Think about being a stranger, or a guest.

What “one thing” says hospitality and welcome to you when you go to a new place?

Think about your own gifts, your own life.  Are you a cook, a gardener, good with music, or arranging space, or listening, or….

What “one thing” do you love to do, that you do best to welcome or care for someone?

And think about Calvary.

What “one thing” could we do here to care for visitors, or to care for Jesus?

Those things are the gospel, the good news God has for us and for the world, just as much as anything that happens in the stories of Jesus that we read.

In fact, we don’t really know how the story we read today ends.

We don’t know if Martha sits down, relaxes, and listens to Jesus, and they just eat cold snacks when they get hungry.

Or if she starts a fight with Mary, and goes back to the kitchen angry and frustrated.

Or if she goes back to the kitchen, glad that Jesus appreciates her one thing, and focuses her love on the very best meal she can share with him.

But I hope it was the last one. 

I hope she heard from Jesus what I do, today.

That it’s not how much you do, or exactly what you do, but how you do it.

That hospitality and relationship thrive when we focus on the one thing we love to do for others, letting go of the anxiety about doing everything.

Neither Martha, nor Mary, nor you nor I need to do everything.

We don’t earn relationships with Jesus – or anyone else – by doing more.

There is need of only one thing,

one generous, focused, loving thing at a time,

and the one thing that is love will never be taken away.

Do the "Wrong" Thing

Luke 10:25-37

Is anyone here a rule breaker?

I won’t tell the teacher on you if you say yes.

There are plenty of people who like the thrill, or the result, of breaking the rules –especially when you don’t get caught.  People who never color within the lines.

And then there are the rule-followers.

Most of the time, that’s me.  It’s how you make the teacher happy and avoid traffic tickets, and it usually makes life run more smoothly.

And many of us live in between. 

In today’s gospel story a rule-follower, a “lawyer,” a student of the Bible, is trying to learn from Jesus about the promise of eternal life. 

He knows the rules:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart…and your neighbor as yourself.

I bet you know those rules, too. 

This lawyer takes them very seriously. So, to make absolutely sure he’s going to live as God wants him to live, he asks Jesus more about his neighbor.

And Jesus tells a story.

A traveler is beaten, robbed, and left to die.  Other travelers come along – two whom all of Jesus’ hearers would know as holy people, the best of “us,” people who represent “our” faithful community – people you can count on for a good example.

Both of them cross the road.

And then comes a Samaritan. 

If you were Jesus’ congregation, you’d have reacted to that with hostility or a creepy-crawly feeling on your skin – so imagine the Samaritan as whoever makes you feel like that.

And this outsider, the icky person, is the one who stops. Helps. Takes care of the victim with open generosity.

Now, there are lots of morals to this story.

Prejudice is bad.

It’s everybody’s job to take care of those in need.

Don’t trust those self-centered priests.

And probably more that you’ve heard preached or taught.

But I suspect that what Jesus is trying to teach this lawyer, this man who works hard to live according to God’s teaching, is to do the wrong thing.

To live outside the rules.

Not necessarily always, but sometimes.

It was undoubtedly the wrong thing, in first century Israel, to embrace a Samaritan as a friend, a neighbor.  Someone you’d invite over to your house.

And that’s what this lawyer learns to do. He identifies the Samaritan in the story as his neighbor, and Jesus tells him to go and live like that.

To do the wrong thing, instead of only the right thing.

Now, you and I hear this story, and loving your neighbor – even if your neighbor is an icky, strange Samaritan – probably sounds like the right thing to do.

But is it the right thing to break your community’s identity? 

To create apparently unholy relationships that your family and friends are going to have to deal with?

This isn’t about rules like no right turn on red; these are rules about who belongs, and who we are – rules with a deeper grip on our lives. 

At Calvary we might welcome Samaritans.  But what about welcoming – as real Calvarians! – a group of people who insist that Christians can’t party, relax, laugh, or have fun?  That would break our rules.

Think about young men who brought home boyfriends thirty years ago – when AIDS was all about immorality, about drug users and men who had “forbidden” sex.  If you welcome that boyfriend publicly to your family, then you become dangerous to the neighborhood, and to moral Christians around you.

Think about a young white woman bringing home a black boyfriend in the early 1950s, when their marriage would have been illegal in most of this country.  Imagine them buying a house in a “white” neighborhood.

 

In our lifetimes, these “rules” have changed – gay and lesbian or interracial families are just plain families, in many places.  But they haven’t changed completely.  Tax law and Cheerios commercials demonstrate that.

And breaking those rules used to destroy families, and break communities. Still does, in some places.

Is it the “right” thing, to do that? 

Or is it wrong to break your mother’s heart?

So many people, for so long, wrestled with the challenges and did the “wrong” thing, because the wrong thing was holy, and right.

And so our “neighborhoods” have become a little bigger, and welcomed new kinds of Samaritans.

There are decisions, great and small, in all of our lives where this matters, where the “right” thing to do might also be wrong.

We face decisions about independence and support for our children – and then for our parents.

We face decisions as a country about whether it’s right to frack natural gas to produce electricity to avoid using smoggy coal or gasoline.

Decisions this week about how to respond – emotionally, actively – to uproar about a frightened man with a gun, and a dead teen with a pocket full of Skittles.

Sometimes even what’s for dinner can involve rights and wrongs about care for God’s creation, generous hospitality, moral commitments, finances and more.

Or, more often, the trade off between “easy” and “healthy.”

In a complex, busy world, it’s sometimes hard to tell if there’s a right thing to do.

But Jesus gives us one more clue about how and when to do the thing that might also be wrong.

It’s mercy.

That long-ago lawyer learned to break the community rules and welcome a Samaritan as a neighbor by considering that the Samaritan showed him mercy.

(Yes, I think we’re meant to hear that story as though we were the ones dying on the side of the road.)

Mercy isn’t the same as pity.

In this case, and in God’s case, it’s a generous, healing love.  Mercy goes above and beyond justice or fairness or simple kindness, and gives of oneself to make another whole.

And when you receive that mercy, sometimes that’s a holy call to break the rules, to welcome unwelcome neighbors.

Young men and women who have experienced “forbidden” relationships that made them strong and whole and loved have taught the rest of us not to be afraid.

Leaders who have received God’s mercy in the midst of oppression – Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King –have overturned the rules and customs that kept the powerful safe and have made us all a little more free.

Who shows you mercy?

Who shows mercy to the community you belong to?

Where do you find unexpected, generous love in the news stories we react to, in the daily realities of life in a diverse nation?

This morning, if your morning news and Facebook feed, like mine, were full of reaction to the Zimmerman trial, you might ask yourself: who shows mercy to the man with the gun?

And who shows mercy to the young man with dark skin apparently in the “wrong” neighborhood?

And from those answers, respond to the news.

I can’t tell you when it’s right in your daily life to break the rules, to do the wrong thing, but Jesus can.

It might not help with dinner,

but it could help with relationships, family, and big decisions at work or at home.

It’s all about receiving mercy.  When being loved, and healed, and made strong and whole, call you to break the rules, to challenge community norms, then it’s time to color outside the lines.

Because in the kingdom of God, all the rules come from mercy.  From generous, healing love that doesn’t hold back.

Eternal life – the question that started this whole story - is far beyond our rules,

and the way to life is all about how we respond to love.

A Cycle of Grace

2 Kings 5:1-14

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past week or so with doctors and prescriptions as I get ready to go to Africa, and I’ve noticed that our American health care system has gotten so complicated and specialized that you practically need a translator and a guide just for the travel immunizations. 

I’ve been immersed in incomprehensible vocabulary, trying to translate and coordinate a primary and a travel doctor, stuck full of needles, and informed of a tidal wave of symptoms and contingencies to track over the next month. I’ve sometimes felt frustrated or confused, or even helpless.

And that’s while I’m perfectly healthy.

So I imagine vividly what it must be like for Naaman. And if you’ve ever been under emergency care, or managed a major disease, you don’t have to exercise much imagination at all.

You see, Naaman has leprosy.

It’s an incurable degenerative disease, and it’s visible on his skin, ugly, and everyone avoids him, if they can.

Now, Naaman is a powerful man.  He’s strong and in charge; a winner. The world accommodates him, not the other way around.

But things change when you get leprosy.

You feel your body betraying you. People start to tell you no. No, there is no cure.  No, you can’t do anything, and you can’t come in here, now, either.  He can’t command or summon anyone or anything that will help him.

And then a slave girl speaks up.

This is an Israelite child captured in one of Naaman’s victories, a girl from a defeated nation, mostly ignored by everyone around her. But she speaks up, and from her own experience of God, announces that God’s prophet in Israel could cure the General.

It’s almost beyond belief that General Naaman hears of this, and listens to her, and acts on her word.  It’s like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs seeking medical or military advice from the immigrant doing housekeeping at his hotel.

And the whole story cascades from there.  There’s some politics and comedy with kings and messages and treasure,

and Naaman finds himself in a foreign land, at the door of a foreign prophet – who then won’t even see him face to face – as though the only specialist in the country just phones in a prescription.

And that prescription – the unlikely and ridiculous-sounding instruction to wash seven times in the Jordan – leaves Naaman feeling baffled and more helpless than ever.

Think for a minute about times when you have felt helpless.  When you are face to face with a world you can’t control, when your friends and allies can’t help.

Maybe you, too, had a medical crisis.

Maybe it’s the seventeenth time you’re put on hold, waiting for someone else to come on the line and tell you that, no, you can’t do what the last person told you to do to get things sorted out, and you’ll have to start all over.
Maybe it happens to you all the time, at work.  Or as a parent, or with your parents.

And maybe you’re lucky enough, like Naaman, that this experience is rare, and brief.

Where are those places in your life?

Who are the people in our world, or in our country, who live in that vulnerable place?

Think about that, and you’ll feel the place that Naaman was in, when he stood outside the prophet’s door, still sick, brushed off with a message and a ridiculous instruction.

But that’s also the place where that young slave girl lived, all the time.

It’s the place where Naaman’s staff, his servants and chariot drivers, lived, often.

It’s the place a lot of people live in our world, today.

And in Naaman’s story, healing and grace depend dramatically on those powerless people. 

Healing and grace depend on that powerless, kidnapped child speaking up with her testimony of faith and possibility. Healing and grace depend on Naaman’s servants who create a safe space for their powerful master to try something nonsensical, even silly.

And because the powerless people in Naaman’s story take that risk - - speak up, and tell their truth, even protect and watch out for someone who wouldn’t seem to need it,

Naaman is healed.

He’s whole, and strong, and restored. And he finds God.

It’s not just the powerless speaking up that counts.

Naaman could so easily have ignored the slave girl and the servants, even punished them for discounting his dignity and authority.

But he stopped. And listened. And acted.

He let go of, or gave away some of his power, created a place for the powerless to be heard. And found grace, and healing, and inspiration, all unlooked for.

Think now for a minute about the times and places where you have power.  Where you feel strong, competent, safe and capable.  Where you don’t have to worry, at least for a while.

Maybe your home is a haven, a place where you can keep things right and secure.

Maybe you have authority at work, or in a volunteer role,

whether you chose it or not.

Maybe you know your way through the medical system from experience or training, and you can guide and assist someone else.

Maybe it’s subtle, like the power to get shoes or appliances to appear at your door, with the help of your credit card.

Many of us have power, whether we planned for it or not.

Think about those places in your life.

And think about the people in our world, who have power, official or informal.

Feel yourself there, for a moment, because in our world, in God’s world, just like in Naaman’s story, healing and inspiration and grace depend on the powerful to listen, and make room, and even give away their power. 
It’s the flip side of the powerless speaking up, and you can’t have one without the other.

And it flows, one to the other. Eric Law, a leader and teacher in the church’s multicultural work, calls this the “gospel cycle,” the ongoing, flowing exchange that gives power to the vulnerable or oppressed, and receives it from the dominant and strong.

Jesus just calls it the Kingdom of God.

Sometimes we go through that cycle of power and vulnerability ourselves, in a day, or an hour, or a year. 

Sometimes we’re called to start it for someone else, giving away power, or speaking up, to make space for wisdom and healing, inspiration and wholeness.

And whether you’re a slave girl or the king, we can start that cycle anytime, drawing ourselves, and all around us, into the kingdom of God.

So, when you’re secure and confident, remember Naaman, and make time to stop, and listen, and give your power away, so the helpless can be whole.  When you’re feeling vulnerable, remember his servants, and the slave girl, and speak up, or even make safe space for the powerful to be vulnerable.

It’s a cycle of grace. 

And it’s got to keep moving, like the living water of the Jordan,

to heal our world,

to make us all whole, and strong, and well.