[Sermon delivered at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, July 17, 2022]
✠ In the Name of the LORD God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
How many of you are tired of hearing about Mary and Martha and a squabble they no doubt settled almost two thousand years ago, give or take a couple of years?[1] We know the tale, Martha’s ministry was important, Mary chose the “better part,” everyone should be like Mary.
Blah. Blah. Blah.
Do not get me wrong, the story is important, but too often we eclipse other messages just as important as we agonize over every little detail in this one. For instance, our Old Testament lesson today is very dark, disturbing, even dreadful. The Epistle reading in contrast is joyful and hopeful, for it describes the nature of Christ and the economy of Salvation.
There is a subtle tie-in with each of these readings, however, even with the story of Mary of Bethany choosing the “better part.” Consider the prophecy in Amos:
“The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and from, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.”[2]
Or in our session psalm:
“I will give you thanks for what you have done *
and declare the goodness of your Name in the presence of the godly.”[3]
Or what St. Paul proclaimed to the Church in Colossae:
“…He has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him— provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.”[4]
These all tie into Mary of Bethany’s “better part.” St. Paul puts it this way, “It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ.”[5]
If we take a hard look around us, a convincing argument can be made that Western culture has entered a time of famine as described by Amos. A lot of people are searching all over for a real, meaningful connection to the Divine. We hear, “I’m spiritual, not religious,” or we see people bounce from denomination to religion to philosophy. We see people spend most, if not all, of their lives hunting for that elusive connection to something bigger than themselves. In short, people are looking high and low for God, but they are not finding Him.
Why? Why do we spend all this time and effort turning over stones, attending workshops, reading blogs, adopting new centering techniques, or in some extremes sweating ourselves silly or undergoing highly unpleasant dietary purges, and still come up empty? Why do we make so many trial runs only never to find the perfect fit? Part of it, I think, may be our cultural inability to sit still, to focus, and really to listen, and then once we hear the message to open ourselves up to allow it to transform us. For the most part, listening engagements that last longer than an hour are quickly becoming a thing of the past. People very rarely now have the patience to sit through a four-hour Wagnerian opera, to stand through a three-hour Orthodox vigil, or an all-day silent retreat. Even a ten-minute address after a banquet is a chore. Our culture has become a cacophony of do/do/do, or change/change/change, and our digital dependency is shrinking that already attenuated attention span even further. If it cannot fit into a tweet, then we have lost our audience.
Not only is that sad, but it is deadly. Any important skill requires concentration and focus over extended periods of time to master, and this includes any skill that may mean the difference between having enough or doing without, or whether one lives or dies. To truly take information and comprehend it requires time to hear, to reflect, and to process. To internalize something requires repetition and reinforcement. We know that is woefully true of harmful and toxic ideas and behaviours, which God help us we make plenty of time for, but this repetition and reinforcement is equally true for helpful and edifying behaviours as well. We have not evolved to handle constant rapid-fire information processing (as anyone driving in excessively heavy traffic can attest) and trying to hear the word of the Lord in this din, for example, gets overrun by the next slick ad or blogpost or tweet that clamours for our attention.
St. Paul enjoins us to remain steadfast in the faith to achieve the hope proclaimed in the Gospel, but if we do not slow down and actually work to hear that proclamation, it becomes only so much white noise, and we lose it. The stakes are high; if we did not take time to absorb the Good News given to us, then the chances of shifting away from the hope it contains is greater. Did we hear it right the first time? Did it stick with us? If we did not, and if it did not, then how can we be established in that Good News? How do we stay consistent in our faith if we cannot remember the Good News? How do we reap its benefits if its message sloughs off easily because it did not penetrate deeply? It is like the parable of the Sower,[6] when the seed falls on rocky soil where there can be no root, or on the path where it gets mashed in traffic, or among the weeds where it is choked out, it fails to thrive.
A couple of weeks ago I had spoken about the fields being ripe for harvest and our need to proclaim the Good News of Our Lord Jesus Christ.[7] Today we have heard about the famine around us of hearing the word of the Lord, the hope He offers to the sheep without a shepherd. And we have come to that brick wall confronting us, the inability for the starving to sit still long enough to be fed.
Some of you no doubt remember other sermons from Fr. Craig Bustrin about the subtle work of the principalities and powers in high places going at great lengths to obscure the Gospel and to perpetuate systems of oppression not only to them but to sin and death. This is part of their plan, to obscure the Good News of God’s deliverance from sin, from death, from oppression by excessive mindless activity and noise. So what do we do about it?
The place to start is with ourselves. The Apostles, Mary Magdalene, the Seventy, all took the same approach as Mary of Bethany, the “better part” as it were. Before they dispersed to the four winds they sat and listened at Jesus’ feet and listened time and again to Him proclaiming and teaching the Good News. They walked with Him for several years until his Passion, Death, and Resurrection, then continued to listen for the next forty days until He ascended. They prayed, constantly, fervently, with all their being about everything. They asked for…and received…the Holy Spirit. Then they were able to turn around and effectively proclaim the Good News of Our Lord Jesus Christ to all around them.
We need to do that. We need to learn to sit, to listen, to pray. We have the words of Our Lord given to us by the Apostles. We have the Law and the Prophets, which looked forward toward that Good News. We have opportunity to pray, particularly for the Holy Spirit to empower us to become effective messengers of the Gospel.
The Spirit has given us gifts to empower us to works, that is, to ministries that we undertake. If we have chosen “the better part” as Mary of Bethany has done, then we can, with the Spirit’s guidance, match up what we have learned in the Gospel with our gifts and then turn and perform those ministries around us. When people inevitably ask why we do these things, because we listened at the feet of Our Lord, then we in our turn proclaim the Good News of God in Jesus.
Keep in mind, some of what you sow will not yield results. While it took us a while to train ourselves to take the better part and actually listen, we need to realize the same about those to whom we become ministers of the Gospel. We need to realize that there will be people out there where the Gospel will not take root, or who will be hostile to the Gospel. Regardless, we still need to serve them the hope that is in the Gospel. One never knows which repetition of “love God and your neighbour” will stick and get through.
That is the “better part.”
✠ Through the prayer of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Father Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.