Welcoming Nuance (stand alone)

Order of Worship

Prayer Reflection ~ Praise Team/All Sing (Come to the front toward the end of this song)

Introduction - Ordained deacon, stole difference, TLUMC, PVH

Passing of the Peace from Seats

Blessings and Concerns ~ Pastor

Ask for joys and concerns - write down and include in pastoral prayer

Pastoral Prayer ~ Pastor

Let us pray for the Church and for the world.

Grant, almighty God, that all who confess your name may be united in your truth, live together in your love, and reveal your glory in the world.

Guide the people of this land, and of all the nations, in the ways of justice and peace; that we may honor one another and serve the common good.

Bless all whose lives are closely linked with ours, and grant that we may serve Christ in them, and love one another as Christ loves us.

Comfort and heal all those who suffer in body, mind, or spirit; give them courage and hope in their troubles, and bring them the joy of your salvation.

We offer these prayers through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Offering ~ Pastor and Ushers (background music during collection)

*Doxology ~ Praise Team/All Sing

Offertory Prayer ~ Pastor and congregation recite in unison

Dear Lord, we give back to you in thankfulness

for what you have given to us in kindness.

We dedicate this money for the work of the church.

We acknowledge that the world and its resources are not ours but yours,

and that you have put us in charge as your trustees.

Help us to exercise responsibly the authority you give us in your world.

Help us continue to be the salt of the earth as we accomplish our mission of making disciples of

Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. ~ Amen

Scripture ~ Pastor

Luke 10:38–42 NRSV

38 Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. 39 She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. 40 But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” 41 But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; 42 there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

Message ~ Pastor

Nuance

I’ve been listening to a phenomenal 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 most 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 at Mars Hill 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, and they lead 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 also 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.

There is one beautiful account where Driscoll and his wife Grace welcomed a woman whom they barely knew into their home on the night before Thanksgiving because her husband was in the hospital, and she had nowhere to stay.

Driscoll also had great compassion for single moms; he would even go to the grocery store and buy groceries for single moms in need. That’s right, he didn’t just give them money or a gift card; he took the time to make the trip himself to relieve the burden of these weary moms.

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 our 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. Then the text 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 or burdened by her many services or ministries to Jesus.” In other words, Martha was concerned to lavish Jesus with service as her guest. It reminds me of the story in John 12 where a woman breaks an alabaster jar of costly perfume and pours it over his head. It was a lavish act. Martha is doing the same but with her acts of service rather than perfume.

So, 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.” 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, and that’s fine, it doesn’t bother me. However, it was nice for this young man to be present and engage me in a pleasant conversation. And yet, I am also grateful for the baristas working in the back preparing my coffee. Without them, I’d still be waiting for 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 always 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 and serve because rightly hearing the word of Jesus requires this.

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 lavish service. Thus, this text invites us to welcome back nuance into our thinking as we consider others and ourselves. Martha serves 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 what we know about Driscoll’s, she provides us with an invitation to see those we villainize today in a way that moves 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 toward 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.

Last July, my wife, 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 really 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 motor that assists your pedaling making you go much faster without a lot of effort.

After we rented 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 warmer 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 turns out that the man to whom she had just turned away 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 the type 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

This beautiful passage from Scripture involving Mary and her sister, Martha, is so often interpreted without nuance. Too often Martha is practically made out to be some sort of villain in this passage while Mary is portrayed in an overly generous way. We didn’t do so this morning, but we could also have explored some of Mary’s shortcomings, such as her lack of consideration toward her sister, Martha, in allowing all of the work to fall at her feet. However, as we saw, a close reading of the passage revealed that Martha is no villain. On the contrary, Martha is a woman of virtue whom we would do well to emulate. Yet in spite of these virtues Martha’s anxiety prevented her from connecting with our Lord in a more meaningful way at dinner that evening. If we put it all together, I think we can identify two invitations from the Holy Spirit in this passage. To be sure there are many, many more invitations in this passage, but I want to focus on these two. First, we are invited to welcome nuance back into our thinking and avoid placing people in black and white categories, whether that be a person from ancient times, such as Martha, or a modern day example like Mark Driscoll. Second, this text invites us to see our everyday experiences with new vision, to see that the Triune God manifests himself to us not only in the extraordinary, but in the mundane experiences of every day life. I always like to end my sermons with reflection questions and a time of silence to allow God to speak to us. Thus, I’ve got two reflection questions to help us sit with the invitations I just mentioned. After I share the reflection questions with you, I’ll open us in a time of prayer and then we’ll have a time of extended silence to reflect and allow the Spirit to move in our hearts. It may feel a little uncomfortable, but that’s ok. Then I’ll close our time of prayer together.

Reflection Questions

Who is someone you have villianized as all bad or idealized as all good? How is God inviting you to see that person with nuance?

How can you welcome nuance and create space to experience God’s presence in your daily life? (I would invite you to think beyond a quiet time, which can lead to compartmentalization.)