Vision | Serve

Luke 10:38–42 NIV

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Margin

This conversation between Jesus and Martha is fascinating. Picture the scene with Jesus coming as a dinner guest, which likely means that with his disciples, there are many dinner guests. Martha is doing everything she can to be the hostess with the mostest. She’s timing that roast to come out of the oven at the perfect moment. And that means the potatoes and veggies need to be on schedule so everything stays warm. And the gravy needs to be stirred so that there are no lumps. And don’t forget to let the butter rest on the counter so that it is softened before spreading onto the rolls. The guests are already here and the cheese board isn’t ready to go out yet. Now Martha is starting to get a little uptight. She could use a little help. Where is her sister, Mary, anyway? Wait, she is over there just sitting with the other guests listening to Jesus? Mary isn’t doing anything to help out here?

What does Martha’s frustration produce?

This is where Martha’s anxiety erupts and she loses it. Maybe there are some details of the story that Luke leaves out. We can only speculate. Maybe Martha relatedly asked Mary for help and got no response. Maybe Martha just kept to herself letting her frustration stew and build until it just boiled over and she exploded with an outburst. Either way, Luke frames it in a way where Martha’s angry tantrum is not directed at Mary, but at Jesus.

Look at her words. “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” Even though Martha is asking a question, the Greek arrangement of the question assumes the answer. It’s like when I walk into the kitchen and see my kids fixing up a snack, and I say, “You’re going to clean up this mess when you’re done, right? Are you going to pick up after yourself?” I’m not really asking the question. I am telling them what I expect. That’s the tone of Martha’s question to Jesus; it’s not really a question at all. She is saying, “Jesus, I expect you to intervene here on my behalf.”

Martha is way past being nice. She is long gone with asking Mary to give her a hand. Martha is not making a polite interruption. “Pardon me for a moment please. Jesus, do you suppose that you might be able to excuse my sister Mary give me a hand with the dinner? I would appreciate it.” Nope. That’s not it. Martha is now out of control. She flies off the handle. She’s not asking Jesus anything. She is ordering Jesus. She is giving a command that she expects Jesus to do for her. “Look here Jesus, you ought to care that I’m doing all this stuff for you all by myself with no help at all! Mary isn’t pulling her weight and doing her share. Tell her to help me!”

Wow! How did Martha get to that point? She is not receptive to Jesus’ teachings. She is not concerned one bit with what Mary needs, or how Jesus is reaching to fill Mary’s need at that moment. Martha is only concerned with what Mary is NOT doing. Martha is judging Mary’s choice as wrong, and now she is demanding that Jesus judge her the same way. Look here, Jesus. I am right; Mary is wrong; and you need to tell her the same thing!

What does my Martha moment look like?

So much for being the hostess with the mostest. Maybe we can take a minute here and admit that we’ve all had Martha moments. I mean, I juggle quite a bit here. There’s a message to write, calls to make, visit to schedule, committee agenda to prepare, staff meeting, emails. There are those who always seem to be the ones called upon to fill committee positions, serve as mentors, take care of the grounds, nominated for council, arrange the Life Skills class, teach Sunday school. You get where I’m going here. We’ve got a busy place happening. There’s a lot going on. And sometimes I feel like I need to tell God that he needs to order some other people to get with the program and chip in.

We’ve got commitments to keep, spots to fill, deadlines to meet, bills to pay. Here I am preaching a sermon on serving. It’s time to twist a few arms and lay down a guilt trip. It’s time to pump up our volunteer roster with some new names. Lord, don’t you care that I am left to do all this work by myself? Tell them to help me!

Maybe the frustration looks different for you. Lord, don’t you care that I am working to raise kids as a single parent? Lord, don’t you care that I face health issues that limit my freedom and mobility? Lord, don’t you care that the bottom has fallen out from beneath my business and now I have to keep working when all my friends are retiring? Lord, don’t you care that I have been abused and mistreated and now struggle to find a way to bring myself out from this cycle of poverty and oppression? Lord, tell someone to help me out!

We’ve all had Martha moments. We’ve all had times of questioning God why it is we’ve been stuck working through stresses and anxieties. We’ve all been frustrated when it feels like we bear it alone and no one else is there to help. We’ve all faced moments in life when it seems like I simply cannot take on anything more—I cannot handle another task—I cannot be responsible for another detail.

And then the pastor comes on Sunday morning and wants to talk to us about our mission and vision to serve. Yeah, right. Whatever.

I’ve got no margin left in my life. You know what margins are—those blank open borders around the edge of a piece of paper. Margins are the empty space left to be filled. When I used to write papers for school, the professors would assign guidelines for margins so that there was space for them to write in comments on the paper as they graded the assignment. Without margins, there would not be any space left for those comments to go.

More and more we live busy lives with no margin. We have no space left in our schedules. Our margins have been shrunk by any variety of things. Maybe it’s overscheduling. Maybe it’s declining health. Maybe it’s loss of economic opportunity. Maybe it’s the hours I spend binge-watching YouTube. Maybe it’s an addiction I just cannot shake off.

Martha is living with no margin. I can relate. I know what life with no margin is like too. And just like Martha, when the obligation or expectation comes along to engage in service, I stressfully try to shuffle into the deck of my calendar. And that’s what service ends up looking like for us, doesn’t it? Overworked, overbooked, frustrated at God and others. Just tell me what has to happen. Tell me what needs to get done. tell me what has to get fixed. Just give me the task.

People // Projects

It’s not always that way. There are times of serving that feel different, invigorating, fulfilling, worthwhile. What’s the difference? Is it that some things are worth volunteering for and some things are not as worthy? What is it that has sometimes made some service opportunities feel so absolutely right, and other service opportunities feel so stressfully overwhelming?

Let’s look at what Jesus has to say in response to Martha. As Martha bursts into the room and lets her explosive tirade loose upon the entire room. I imagine here that Jesus interrupts. He has to say her name twice to get her attention. It’s not an angry rebuke. But Jesus has to get Martha’s attention in order to reel her back in. Look what he says. “You are worried and upset about much. But few is needed, in fact, one.”

Martha’s paradigm of serving — project matters most, and people are resources to make the project happen

Martha is worried and upset about the details of the meal. This dinner party is quite a project. In all the commotion of this project, it seems as though Martha lost track of the people and relationships for whom this meal is being prepared in the first place. The people disappeared from importance, and only the project mattered. Well, that’s not exactly true. The people didn’t disappear. But somehow in Martha’s paradigm of serving, the project of hosting dinner became most important, and the people who were there only served a subordinate function of the project. This is a paradigm of serving in which the project is king, and people are the resources I need to make the project happen.

Paradigm shift — people matter most, and projects connect & nurture relationships

Jesus turns that whole paradigm around. When it comes to serving, people matter most. Projects and programs are subordinate functions of real relationships with real people. In this particular instance, Jesus commends Mary for recognizing that the people in the room were more important than the timing of the food. People matter more than projects. Because when we mix that up and turn that around, so often we fall into the temptation to turn people into projects.

Nobody wants to be treated like a project

Nobody wants to be treated like a project. That’s dehumanizing. That takes away my value as a person. After all, I am a person created and loved by God—not a task or a checkbox on a list. I have a name and my life has a story and I just want a place where I belong and where that matters. That is what is most important. The project or the program or the task absolutely must not take priority over that—over the people.

I think that is what Jesus is demonstrating in this brief exchange in the home of Mary and Martha. Jesus is telling Martha, “Stop treating Mary and me and everybody else in this room as a project.” Nobody wants to be treated as a project.

A Vision for Serving

How does this become something for us to take this morning as a vision for serving in the church and as a Christian today? I think we can see a few checkpoints from this story to help guide our efforts of serving as a mission and vision of the church.

Checkpoint: create some margins

First: check your margins. If every opportunity to serve comes at you as something that needs to be shoehorned into your jam-packed calendar, then maybe it’s time to lighten the calendar and create some margin. Maybe you’ve got the best of intentions, and the one thing holding your intentions from becoming action is that an overbooked calendar keeps getting in the way. So, be intentional about serving. And begin by making intentional space in your time to dedicate for serving.

I remember when Laura and I first got married, we were volunteer youth group leaders. The job I had at the time offered me several weeks of vacation. We had the opportunity every year to go do a mission trip of some kind with our youth group. But in order for that to happen, I needed to dedicate one of my vacation weeks to be used as service. I had to intentionally create that margin by giving something else up. So often, this is the case. Margin does not just magically show up all by itself. We need to make intentional choices to create margins for service.

That’s the first checkpoint. Create some margins.

Checkpoint: put people before projects

The second checkpoint is to always put people before projects. Remember, this is not to say that programs and projects are bad things—they are the context for relationships to happen. And so, the relationships with people are the ultimate goal of programs and projects. Whenever we find ourselves in a place where the programs or the projects are getting in the way of relationships more than helping to create and nurture relationships, then it is time to shift our approach to how we make the programs work.

Whenever I have a hardware question, I tend to go to Ace Hardware store. I usually end up paying a little more, because a place like Menards or Home Depot is cheaper. But my experience has been that the people who work at Ace know what they are talking about and take the time to show me and explain to me what I need and how to use whatever hardware item I need. If I ask the worker at the door of Home Depot a question, he just sends me off to aisle 175 and I’m on my own. The worker at Ace takes me to the item, shows me exactly where it is, asks me what my need is, and then explains how to use it. That takes more time and it costs me extra. But it’s worth it because I get the sense at Ace that the customer is higher priority than the project.

That’s the second checkpoint. Put people before projects.

Jesus shows these things in the way he demonstrates service. In one village he is approached by a ruler named Jairus who asks Jesus to come heal her daughter. Jesus creates some margin in his schedule and goes with him. On the way there is a woman who has suffered from chronic bleeding who sneaks through the crowd and touches Jesus in order to be healed. Jesus stops everything and turns his attention towards the woman. He creates margin for relationship with this woman—not just the project of healing her. Then Jesus continues with Jairus. He shows the importance of having margin in order to serve.

But Jesus also shows that people came before projects. On one occasion Jesus is traveling through Samaria. He stops off by a well and asks a woman there for a drink. Instead of just thanking her for her hospitality, he begins talking with her and goes into her entire life story. This Samaritan woman wasn’t just a way to get a drink of water, she was a person.

One of the most well known Bible passages in all of scripture is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he sent his only son…” It does not say, “For God fixed the world by sending his only son…” God’s love for the world is the priority for why Jesus came to serve.

We are not God’s project. We are his people.

I am a sinner who needs saving. But God never treats me as a project that needs fixing. He treats me as a child of his family welcomed in love. We are not God’s project. We are his people. That is why Jesus came to serve. That is the way Jesus served. And that is the reason we are called to a mission of serving.