Martha and Mary

     Jesus had set his face toward Jerusalem…..we know what Luke means to say – Jesus will not be deterred from his mission, but first, a stopover with very dear friends at that sheltered place called Bethany; we know its name from John’s Gospel.

     Bethany is a small town, perhaps a dozen rectangular shaped,white-washed dwellings, built onto the Eastern slope of the Mount of Olives, only 1 and 5/8^th miles from Jerusalem, the same distance from here to Washington Square.

     Jesus and his disciples could see the homes of Bethany as they approached the town, because those homes stood out in contrast to the dry, rocky soil of the hillside and the few cedar trees among the homes, standing tall against the cloudless sky. Orchards of fig, olive and almond trees were arranged in tiers on the slope of the hill, with tidy stone walls separating the levels to aid in irrigation when the rainy season arrives. . .

     No wonder Bethany was a favorite place for Jesus: familiar, quiet, restful, lovely to behold and hospitable.

     Jesus made this journey to Bethany on many, many occasions and always stopped at the home of Martha, Mary and their brother, Lazarus. Martha’s generous hospitality was well known.

     Martha, Mary and Lazarus were three of Jesus’ closest and dearest friends. He had probably known them from his childhood; his family had most likely stayed over in Bethany and then went up with them to the High Holydays in Jerusalem.     

     On this particular day, the day we hear of in our Gospel, Martha stood at the front door of her home and beheld Jesus coming along the road, up the hill, with his disciples, raising a dust cloud as he slowly made his way to her home. Martha set to work, immediately, filling the water jugs to wash his feet and towels to dry them – this was Mary’s task in their household and she performed this act of hospitality with great care and love and respect for the Teacher.    

     But, on this day, something very extraordinary occurred: Jesus invited Mary to sit at his feet and listen to his teaching – this invitation was quite contrary to custom – a woman sitting at the feet of The Teacher? A woman welcomed and encouraged as a Disciple? Equal to the male disciples!? . . . . And, Mary, being the introvert, the contemplative type, was pleased, although somewhat shy, to sit in that front room with Jesus, that front room cooled in the shade of the cedars, yet, so full of light. What deep joy!

     Lazarus was most likely there, also, because as soon as he was told that Jesus had arrived, he came in from their carefully tended orchard, where for generations, his family kept fig, olive and almond trees. . .

     So, there they were, Jesus, with Mary and Lazarus, in a very intimate teaching time, while the other disciples sat out of doors, in circles, in the shade of the orchard trees, and . . . .      

     All this time, Martha labored in the rear room, the place for the cooking fire. Martha was preparing a very special meal for her very special guest: grain pilaf, with special additions of lamb and succulent vegetables. Martha enjoyed making these welcoming meals for Jesus; Martha relished the moments with Jesus in her home. But……

     Many of us here, today, can imagine how Martha may have felt, having no company in the kitchen to assist her in the meal preparation. Not only was she overwhelmed, perhaps, with the details of the meal preparation, but, perhaps, she was also feeling left out – surely, she could hear the low voice of The Teacher as he explained the wonderful truth of the Creator’s love. And, she was not there in that select group!

     Like many high energy, ‘management oriented’ people, she could not put her complicated meal preparation aside and just go into the front room and sit with Mary, listen at The Teacher’s feet. Who but herself was going to prepare the meal? And prepare it to her high expectations? Only Mary was capable of working with Martha in their kitchen, only Mary knew Martha’s ways and only Mary could be the ‘second woman’ in that kitchen!

     Finally, after much head shaking and heightening resentment, we hear of Martha’s next movement. She places her mixing bowl down on the low table in the cooking room, probably with some agitation, and enters the front room in a bit of a huff.

     “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”  . . . . .

     Silence in the room, all eyes on Martha. Then, Jesus softly chides Martha: “Martha, Martha, 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 from her.”   . . . . .

      Was Jesus suggesting that Martha prepare a less elaborate pilaf? That he would be very content with a simpler meal? Yes, most probably, but there is something more to this.

     Jesus invites Martha (and here, today, invites us also) into a more balanced spirituality, a more complete holiness, a more intimate relationship with God. Jesus invites Martha, and us, also, to notice our need to be well nourished with the Word of God.

     Martha and everyone in that room (and everyone in this sacred space) has the words of Deuteronomy 8 written on the wall of our hearts: “(Neither men nor women nor children) can live on bread, alone, but from every Word that comes from the mouth of God.” Moreover, Jesus knows Martha’s heart (and, Jesus knows our hearts!), and invites Martha (and each of us) to desire Jesus’ indwelling and to make room, each day, for a ‘resting time with the Lord’.

     Truth is, in Martha’s life, and in each of our lives, our servant-hood issues from our love for God, our intimacy with Holy Spirit and our oneness with Jesus. This is a most important truth, hear this again: our servant-hood issues from our love for God, our intimacy with Holy Spirit and our oneness with Jesus.   . . . . 

     In one of his most recent books, Marcus Borg, a noteworthy and highly respected Scripture scholar of our own day, makes this observation about our lives as Christians: “…The goal of the Christian life is participating in the passion of God, as disclosed in the Bible and Jesus. God’s passion is that we center more deeply in God (‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength’) and (that we center more deeply in) the world – a world of justice and peace. These are the inner and outer dimensions of the Christian life – union with God’s passion.” (Putting Away Childish Things, page 133.)

    Dear People of God, Jesus is our ‘Spiritual Director’ this morning, like Mary (and, eventually, Martha) we sit at Jesus’ feet and listen most intently for his wisdom to take root in our hearts. After all, Jesus is Way, Truth and Life.

     On a practical note: I imagine that if we were to ask any of the generous people who prepare the soup for our Saturday Soup Bowl, each would note that a part of each day is spent in quiet listening to Jesus, who speaks of his love in their hearts and that the soup preparation happens in a prayerful manner – and, perhaps, with a sip of the fruit of the vine and holy company?

    Friends, let us be full of joy and gratitude that Jesus invites each of us here, today, to sit at his feet, to know and experience, first hand, his deep, profoundly deep and complete love for each of us, his longing to be with us, always, in his word and sacrament and in each other. In the words of a favorite hymn: I come with joy to meet our Lord……

     Let us do that now……

Preached by Mother Marie Swayze

18 July 2010

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The Parable of the Good Samaratan

How many times in the course of a lifetime of slightly more than three quarters of a century have I read,  either publicly or privately, the Parable of the Good Samaritan?  I do not know, nor have I any way of even roughly estimating.  I do know, however, that in recent years it has more and more put me in mind of a nursery rhyme which Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations ascribes to that most prolific or authors : Anonymous. In other words, it is part of the common heritage of the English speaking world. “As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives, Each wife had seven sacks, Each sack had seven cats, Each cat had seven kits: Kits, cats sacks, and wives. How many were there going to S. Ives?”  This, of course, is not about a resort town on the north coast of Cornwall; nor is it a bit of proselytizing for the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints; neither is it an humanitarian plea to have one’s pets spayed or neutered. It is a riddle. “A question or statement testing ingenuity in divining its answer or meaning.”  Now for those of you who are still trying to reckon up wives, sacks, cats and kits on your fingers, I won’t leave you hanging. Only one was going to St. Ives, “As I was going to St. Ives, I met …” this bizarre multitude coming the other way. And so, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is a riddle as well – a question testing our ingenuity. Or rather, it is what our parents and teachers told us never to do. It is the answering of question with another question. From our perspective an exercise in rudeness, but with plenty of Rabbinic precedence. The initial question comes in response to what we know as the Summary of the Law, the two great commandments of Hebrew scripture to love God with one’s whole being, and to love one’s neighbor as one’s self. And that’s good, but, the questioner wants to know, how far? Give us some limits, give us some boundaries, Reb Jesuit! Who is my neighbor? And Jesus responded, and responds by saying “You’re asking the wrong question. You should be asking ‘What constitutes neighborliness?’ A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.”

 Now I am constrained to tell you a story from my own experience of parochial ministry. I do this with some hesitancy, since there are some elements of this story which would tend to cast me in the role of Good Samaritan, but that would be unjustified. You see I find myself, as I suspect most of us do, guided by two apparently conflicting attitudes, apparently conflicting, but in reality comfortable coexisting. “Charity begins at home” we proclaim; followed by, “But not in my backyard.” And armed with those two mottos, when confronted with the man mugged on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, I find myself identified with my clerical colleagues, the priest and the Levite who after all, had they been going to Jerusalem, rather than from it, might have had at least a dim excuse for ignoring the victim by the side of the road. Had they been on their way to the Temple to exercise their ministry, they might have run the risk of defilement, rendering them ritually unable to perform their duties. But as it was, they were on their way to Jericho, where a salubrious climate offered its comforts for off-duty and well-to-do members of the Temple staff. So the risks of pollution constituted only a minor inconvenience. The priest and the Levite just plain didn’t want to be bothered. No, in this story I am about to tell you, the role of the Good Samaritan is best played by the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, than by me, or anyone else. It was New Year’s Day, 1990 (the date is significant). The previous week had been very busy, and I arrived home from a family luncheon in the late afternoon, wanting to do nothing more than to take a nap, but feeling impelled to check the phone first. And there it was: the answering machine insistently winking at me. Having pushed the right buttons, I began to listen to what proved to a life-changing message. Neither the voice nor the name was known to me, but the message went on and on. Its burden was that the caller was a member of another communion, but he had been told that Episcopalians were more compassionate, and he therefore wanted to become an Episcopalian. About the time I began praying for him to wind it up (I was afraid the answering machine would run out of tape), he concluded with the words “And by the way, I’m dying.” Yes, you’re right. This was a case of AIDS. In 1990 AIDS was still an urban disease. People in old, stable, even stagnant, decayed industrial boroughs in Southeastern Pennsylvania, towns with strong ethnic communities, didn’t have AIDS. But my caller had lived in the big city, and, finding himself suffering from a disease which pharmacy had not learned to control, had come home to his mother to die. Over the next few months I learned how ill prepared both intellectually and emotionally I was to deal with this disease. With the advice and support of the then bishop of Pennsylvania I saw to it that my caller was duly enrolled as a communicant member of my parish. He died a week before Palm Sunday, the undertaker telling me that it was one of the most peaceful deaths we had ever seen. His Requiem was celebrated in the church, with the interment of his ashes in the parish cemetery. During the service, at his request, I read that prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, which you probably know well enough to repeat along with me, at least under your breath.

“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon, where there is doubt, faith, where there is despair, hope, where there is darkness, light, and where there is sadness, joy. O, divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console, to be understood, as to understand, to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”

I still look back on those three months from the Holy Name of Jesus, New Year’s Day to the fifth week of Lent 1990, as one of the most demanding periods of my active ministry.

A few weeks after Easter that year I was waited upon one morning in my office by an elderly priest, recently retired as rector of a nearby parish. I had secured his services as a supply priest while I was to be away that summer. He was a crusty old party, never popular with his parishioners, and regarded as a joke by his colleagues, just the sort of person to get as a summer supply. It makes your own parishioners happy to have you back. At any rate, his visit was the first chance I had had to discuss these experiences with a fellow priest. And I remember saying that I had never even asked how my New Years’ caller had contracted his disease. It was a dumb thing to say, but not the first dumb thing I’ve ever said. My colleague almost jumped out of his chair. “Of course you didn’t,” he said. “You heard someone in need, and you responded.” Jesus said, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers? The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.”       

Preached by the Rev. Nicholas Phelps

11 July 2010

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

As you sow...

You reap whatever you sow.  Or, from an older translation: As you sow, so shall you reap.  (Gal 6:7)

This simple teaching from Saint Paul used to be a familiar aphorism in American culture; a statement whose meaning is so clear and so concise that it became a cliché, the type of thing you’d see cross-stitched into a sampler.  But then who cross-stitches samplers anymore?  And who worries about reaping what he or she sows any more?

Fifteen years ago, the great chef, Alice Waters, may or may not have been motivated by this rule of life – that as you sow, so shall you reap – when she helped turn an acre of asphalt-covered land into a vegetable garden at a middle school in Berkeley, California.  That garden and the movement it began is called the Edible Schoolyard.  “When children are encouraged to grow and cook and enjoy wholesome, delicious food all together, from the seed to the table and back again, in an atmosphere of caring and beauty, they fall in love with its lessons,” she wrote.  “It’s a way of making sure that children grow up feeling the soil with their own fingers, harvesting its bounty in the American sunshine, and watching their own hands make the kind of beautiful, inexpensive food that can nourish the body and the spirit.”

Waters tells the story of a small boy who one day came into the kitchen classroom connected to the garden.    “[He] was hungry – truly hungry, as in badly needing food.  So when class was over, [Esther, the teacher,] asked him very quietly what he’d had for breakfast that day.  He hadn’t eaten breakfast; he never ate breakfast.  Esther taught him right then and there to take eggs from the refrigerator and cook them for himself.  She told him to do this every single day before school, without ever asking.  Just come and do it.”  As you sow, so shall you reap.

All last week middle school children, and kids a little older and a little younger, ran around our mission parish during City Camp.  Many of you were there to help them and their high-school counselors.  For the second year of City Camp, once again Saint Mark’s volunteers were a major force in bringing this urban camp to life for kids who often do not have enough.  Bible stories were taught each day, songs were sung, prayers were said, meals were served, games were played, scrapes were bandaged, noses were blown, a few tears were shed, and a garden was even planted out back, behind the Rectory, where, before the church was abandoned the rector’s wife had tended vegetables and flowers.  I saw basil and some other herbs, some squash, and maybe even zucchini getting a late start, and lettuce of some variety.  It is late in the summer to be planting a garden, but better late than never.  As you sow, so shall you reap.

Here at Saint Mark’s, it is a blessing that our founders had the sense to leave green space around this urban church.  Thousands of commuters pass by here every day, and I know from chatting with enough of them that the beauty of our gardens is a gift to them and to this city.  I think of the roses silently singing the Gospel to all those people on their way to work.  And the garden here thrives because of Libby and Todd and Bob and Claire and Ed and Aaron and Isabelle and Aileen, and a few others who care to sow in it.  As you sow, so shall you reap.

In the church at large, you have to wonder whether or not we have remembered this lesson.  We are obsessed with squabbles over property and sexuality, and the place of women in the church.  As we battle for power amongst Anglicans, we see the pathetic slow-motion drama of our Roman brothers trying to come to terms with a history of sin that is glaringly obvious to the rest of the world, not least to other churches who have our own fair share of sins to own up to.  We see churches emptying and struggling to stay open, at least in part for failure, I contend, to teach and to learn this basic calculus: as you sow, so shall you reap.

On our national birthday we might do well to reclaim this cliché, this little aphorism of Saint Paul’s.

What are we sowing, as a nation, in the vast monoculture fields of industrialized agriculture?  And if it is so good for us, why is it making us fat, sick, and unhappy?

What are we sowing in the too-big, under-funded public schools of our cities where children are falling behind rather than catching up?

What are we sowing for the lives of immigrants who came to this country, like our own ancestors, in search of a better life, and who sustain our way of life by doing the work no one with a green card or better would deign to do in America?

What are we sowing in the villages of Afghanistan, and the cities of Iraq as our still ill-defined mission there drags on an on?

What are we sowing in the lives of our service men and women who suffer the consequences of those wars on our behalf, at the expense of their lives, their limbs, and their happiness?

What are we sowing behind the barbed wire of Guantanamo Bay?

What are we sowing when we allow our justice system to take an eye for an eye, as it were, in the execution chambers of our states?

What are we sowing in the Gulf of Mexico, and on the oil-stained shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida?

What are we sowing as the argument about abortion enters a new decade of shouting and posturing, and we remain so ineffective at helping prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place?

What are we sowing with the gun violence that takes so many lives in this city and across our nation?

As you sow, so shall you reap.

And still Jesus reminds us that the harvest is plentiful.

As Americans, even in tough years, like this one, we do well to remember that the harvest is plentiful.  But it cannot be taken for granted, and the laborers are few.

As you sow, so shall you reap.  It is a double-sided truth that allows for either bounty or famine, strength or starvation.  And it lays out for us choices to make every day.

The Fourth of July would be a good day for making resolutions.  And this Fourth of July would be a good day for resolving to remember that as we sow, so shall we reap.

If we cross-stitched that motto onto our hearts what would we sow in our lives, in the church, and in the world?

In our own lives, would we pray more fervently and carefully and frequently?  Would we practice forgiveness more and better?  Would we learn how to offer hospitality at the drop of a hat even when it is inconvenient?  My life would be improved by those choices, I know.

In the church, would we learn from the edible schoolyard that a diversified farm is healthier than a monoculture.  The one is self-sustaining precisely because of its diversity, and the other requires scads of artificial chemical fertilizer just to revive the depleted soil every year?  And one resembles the kind of garden God first planted far more than the other, anyway.

In the world, would we learn that peace is not accomplished when the Nobel committee hands out an award, but by sowing the seeds of peace; and that very few people in uniform seem to have been adept at that task since General Marshall; and perhaps we should be looking for other avenues to peace, particularly in areas of the world that have proven themselves resistant to the armed intervention of supposedly superior powers?

As you sow, so shall you reap.

I dearly hope and pray that as a community, we at Saint Mark’s will hold fast to this little motto, that as we sow, so shall we reap.  I hope we learn as individuals and as a community to make choices on the basis of this small cliché,

And on this Fourth of July, I hope it might be helpful to us to reflect on words written by one of the sixth-graders who learned in the Edible Schoolyard garden in California; words that seem to show the results of reaping what you sow: “The bees, the spiders, the ants, the rolly-pollies, the bugs, the sound, the sky, the birds, the clouds, the yellow leaves… the leaves rustle with hidden secrets that even the laziest man would be dying to know.  And the bees gracefully floating from flower to flower, sing of flowers and gnomes and fairies who never seem to show themselves to anything but the bees, the birds, and the trees.  I smell fresh air… I see beautiful white flowers… and figs.  I wonder, when are the figs ready to eat?”*

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

4 July 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

---

* All quotations from Alice Waters, Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2008