Awareness in Stillness

Introduction

We’re calling today, “Welcome Back Sunday.” The question is exactly who or what are we welcoming back today. Now, on the surface, today is about welcoming back people. Our United Methodist Men have prepared dogs and brats for us after the service, and today is about welcoming everyone back after a busy summer as we enter the fall and settle into a new routine. However, I think our text for today suggests that we would do well to welcome back into our lives not just people but also two rare qualities: nuance and hospitality to divine encounters.

Our passage for today comes from the Gospel of Luke is about Mary and Martha. The most common interpretation of this passage pits busyness against reflection. However, I would like to suggest that this story is first and foremost about hospitality. It’s about welcoming others, and as we welcome you back today, I think this text invites us to consider how we can welcome nuance and hospitality into our lives as we exit summer.

Nuance

Recently, Pastor Bob turned me on to a new podcast from Christianity Today titled “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church.”

In case you are unfamiliar with the situation, Mars Hill was a church in Seattle founded in the mid-90’s by a dynamic and charismatic pastor named Mark Driscoll. Under his leadership, the church exploded with growth. Mars Hill went from being a small group of people meeting in the home of an unpaid pastor in 1996 to becoming the third fastest growing church in America with 14 sites in five states and 13,000 attendees by 2012.

Driscoll was a controversial and polarizing figure. People seemed to either love him or hate him. There was no in between. At this point he is largely despised by people, and not without good reason. However, in my opinion, one of the most striking aspects of the podcast is the way it depicts Driscoll as it tells the story of Mars Hill. To be sure, they pull no punches when it comes to revealing the abusive and toxic environment he created in the church that ultimately led to its demise in 2014. If you search for Mark Driscoll on the internet, you’ll find a plethora of unflattering accounts of the scandalous pastor that involved plagiarism, bullying, crudeness, and unethical book promotion. Those tales are a dime a dozen leading us to take a black and white view of Mark Driscoll: the most common being that he is a terrible, unconscionable person who is a blemish on the body of Christ.

However, there is another side of Driscoll that the podcast uncovers (albeit less a dominant one). The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill reveals a deeply compassionate man with notable pastoral sensitivities who was sacrificially committed to the success of the fledgling church and its people.

For example, Mark went unpaid in the first three years of the church’s existence as it was getting off the ground.

One time, he and his wife Grace welcomed into their home on the night before Thanksgiving a woman whom they barely knew because her husband was in the hospital, and she had nowhere to stay.

In the early days of Mars Hill, when Driscoll wasn’t making much money, he would speak at youth events to help make ends meet. After one such event, he was talking with a member of his worship band who traveled with him to these speaking engagements. The band member had a longtime girlfriend he wanted to marry but didn’t have enough money to buy an engagement ring for her. Right then and there Mark handed over the money he made that night so his friend could buy a ring and get married.

Driscoll also had great compassion for single moms, and once he even went to the grocery store and bought groceries of a single mom in need.

So, what does all of this tell us about Mark Driscoll. It tells us that he is a complex person neither wholly good nor wholly bad. He does not fit into just one of these black and white categories. To accurately describe Mark Driscoll requires nuance - something that is nearly impossible to come by these days in our society.

As we turn out attention to the story of Mary and Martha, more often than not, Martha is portrayed as something of a villain in this narrative. However, a close reading of the text reveals a nuanced Martha who possesses both virtues and vices. Let’s think about some of her virtues first.

Note that the text begins with the statement that Martha welcomed Jesus into her home. In Luke 9.46-48, just one chapter before this one, a dispute arises among the disciples regarding which of them is the greatest. To end the dispute, Jesus embraces a child and declares, “Whoever welcomes a child, welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes the one who sent me.” Thus, Martha is extending hospitality to Jesus and in turn to the Father as she lives out Jesus’ exhortation to welcome the Lord.

Note also that when Martha addresses Jesus, she addresses him with the title of “Lord.” Martha thus joins the company of those disciples who rightly recognize and identify Jesus as Lord. The text then goes on to indicate that Martha was “distracted by her many tasks” as the NRSV renders the text. However, another way of translating these words is that Martha “was overwhelmed/ burdened by her many services or ministries to Jesus.” In other words, Martha was concerned to lavish Jesus with service as her guest. What we discover is not a cold woman complaining about her lazy sister, but a devout disciple of Jesus doing the best she knows how to serve him.

As we can see, there is more to Martha than meets the eye. There is virtue in her and a strong desire to be a faithful disciple. In Christian circles, we often hear the phrase, “Stop being such a Martha and be more of a Mary.” The implicit assumption here is that what Mary is doing is good and what Martha is doing is bad. However, I think we need to look at this with a little more depth.

The other day, I decided to go through the drive-thru at Starbucks. I placed my order, and when I arrived at the window, I paid for it. My drink wasn’t quite ready so I waited there in a moment of awkward silence with the cashier at the window. After a few moments, the young man struck up a very pleasant conversation with me. Normally, the people working at the window continue working on other things until your order is ready and then they hand you your order and you’re off. Usually, that’s just fine with me. However, it was nice for this young man to be present and engage me in a pleasant conversation. And yet, I am grateful for the baristas working in the back preparing my coffee.

Here’s my point. Being a Martha in terms of active service is not inherently bad. In fact, serving as Martha did is an extremely good and necessary thing. If the whole world was like her sister Mary, nothing would ever get done. You’d just be sitting in the drive thru lane forever. However, if everyone was like Martha all the time, the possibility for connection and friendliness would be absent. The point is, we need to strike a balance in our lives of service and stillness, of labor and listening. Indeed, if Mary remains at the feet of Jesus long enough and has the ears to hear what he is saying, she will realize that she must get up because she is called to service.

Augustine puts it this way:

Both [Martha and Mary] were pleasing to the Lord, both amiable, both disciples … both innocent, both laudable—two lives in the same house and just one fountain of life.… Martha has to set sail in order that Mary can remain quietly in port.

So often we want to think in black and white categories: things or people are all good or all bad. However, this text forbids us from doing so. It forces us to acknowledge the nuance and complexity that exists in others and within ourselves. We cannot only adopt the virtues shown in Mary in this passage, we also need to cultivate the virtues of Martha that lead to faithful service. Thus, this text invites us to welcome back nuance into our thinking as we consider others and ourselves. Martha services as an ancient example of a person viewed largely in black and white categories. Mark Driscoll serves as a modern one. While Martha’s shortcomings are nowhere near Driscoll’s, she provides us with an invitation to consider those we villainize today and move beyond the categories of all good and all bad. It should not take us long to think of such a person.

Hospitality toward Divine Encounters

As I mentioned earlier, we also see Martha’s vices in this story, and we would do well to take note of them and learn from them for they invite us to be hospitable to God’s presence in our lives.

Unfortunately, Martha’s diligent attempt to offer hospitality to Jesus falls short. Part of the nuance and texture of Martha’s character is that her desire to serve results in an anxiety that distracts her from the presence of Jesus and pulls her out of the moment. I would argue, then, that the problem according to the text is not Martha’s busyness but her anxiety that prevents her from showing true hospitality to the presence of the divine in her life.

Earlier in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells the parable of the sower in chapter 8. In Luke 8:14, Jesus warns that our worries and anxieties can choke out the fruitfulness of the gospel in our lives. The problem, then, is not service, for that bears fruit necessary to the kingdom, the problem is being worried and distracted about other things that undermine our service.

At the end of July, Stacey and I had our first getaway since the pandemic began. We headed up to Vail to spend a few days. We noticed a number of people riding these electric bikes. It looked super fun to me, so we decided to rent some bikes for a couple of hours to try it out. In case you’re not familiar with these bikes, they aren’t like motorcycles; you still have to pedal. However, there is an electric engine that assists your pedaling making you go much faster without a lot of effort.

After we got the bikes, we went for a ride. It wasn’t long before I found myself worrying about several things instead of having fun and being present in the moment. First, I kept using the lowest assist setting or turning it off altogether because I was afraid I would drain the battery too fast. Second, I began to feel guilty about the electric assistance. I was afraid I wasn’t getting enough of a workout. However, the point of renting the bikes was to enjoy them and have fun. However, it soon became this weird competition for me where I felt like I had to turn the electric assistance off altogether to get a sufficient workout and to test my fitness to see if I could keep up with Stacey on her electric bike.

I was just like Martha. It was my anxiety about the battery and my fitness that pulled me away from the moment and deprived me of fun. Martha was so worried about providing service to Jesus that she missed out on the real point of the moment: being present and making a connection with Jesus.

Connection. Relationship. Experience. Encounter with the Triune God, the Divine Mystery that lies at the center of all existence. Is that not what we long for?

The theologian Karl Rahner famously put it this way, “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic,’ one who has experienced ‘something,’ or he will cease to be anything at all.” I think he is on to something here.

What Rahner is doing here is insisting on the importance and necessity of experiencing the Triune God by attempting to make mysticism less mystical. Here is what I mean by that. So often when we think of a mystic, we think of a person who has had these extraordinary experiences with God. Rahner is suggesting that instead of relegating encounters with the Triune God to the spiritually elite and to dramatic experiences, we must learn to identify and experience God in the happenings of our everyday lives.

This is exactly what is happening at the house of Mary and Martha. During dinner, an ordinary everyday occurence the Triune God is present in the person of Jesus. Mary is the one who shows authentic hospitality by being present to the divine encounter with Jesus while Martha misses out on this connection.

The story is told of a group of employees sitting together at a table before the annual staff Christmas Party was to begin. The room was filling up fast and a man came in right before the program was about to start.

He spied an empty seat at the table where this group of employees was sitting and approached the table. Very politely he said to the woman sitting by the empty seat, “May I sit here?”

She was waiting for someone from her department to come, and she rather curtly said, “No, that seat is taken.”

“Oh, okay,” he said, and walked away.

Once the man was out of hearing distance, everyone at that table (except the lady who just turned the man away) burst out laughing. Wondering what they were all laughing about, she asked, “What’s so funny?” It was then that they informed her that the man to whom she had just refused a seat at the table was the CEO of the company! She failed to recognize who he was.

This is what we do so often. We fail to recognize God’s presence in our lives and we fail to welcome him. We say, “Sorry, I don’t recognize you. No seat for you. That one’s taken.” In a sense Martha makes a similar error. While she welcomes Jesus into her home, she fails to offer true hospitality that results in a genuine connection with Jesus just as the woman’s failure to recognize the CEO resulted in a missed opportunity to connect with him.

Conclusion

I titled this sermon, “Awareness in Stillness.” There is a need for more stillness in our lives. Stillness can help us recognize nuance and complexity as well as the presence of God in our lives. Thus, our Psalm for today. Psalm 46.10 says, “Be still, and know that I am God!” However, stillness in itself is insufficient. We need awareness in that stillness. As Hebrews 13:2 says, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” In that stillness, we need a hospitality infused with awareness. The hope is that we not only welcome divine encounters into our lives but that we are also aware of them when they happen, and I would be so bold as to suggest that it is within the nuance and complexity of life that we so often miss out on the experience the gracious presence of God. So let us cultivate awareness in stillness and not only welcome one another today but also welcome nuance and complexity and an authentic hospitality toward God’s gracious presence.

Reflection Questions

Who is someone you have villianized as all bad? How is God inviting you to to see the person with nuance?

How have you experienced God in the complexity of life in the past?

How can you show authentic hospitality to God’s presence in your daily life? (I would invite you to consider something more than a daily devotional, which can lead to compartmentalization.)