Good morning, Church. For the benefit of those who don’t know me,
my name is AnnabeI, and I’m M’s daughter and M’s
older and wiser sister. I’ve been a Methodist preacher for thirty years now
– it’s a long story, but basically at the time, the church where
we worshipped in London was what they call a Local Ecumenical
Project, both Anglican and Methodist, and when the time came to
answer God’s call, it turned out to be becoming a Methodist
preacher. Which turned out to be just as well when the Anglicans
unilaterally pulled out, leaving us as a Methodist congregation
only.
Anyway, I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be
here with you this morning, having worshipped here on and off for the
past 65 years. I was a very small child indeed when I first sat in
the family pew down there, and my brother C wasn’t much more
than a baby – M hadn’t even been born then. And although I
haven’t lived here much since I was ten years old and went off first to
boarding-school, and then to work first in Paris and in London, I
have frequently worshipped here down the years, and always love it
when I do come. And I have always loved looking at the statues
carved into the pulpit – I have always felt sorry for the dragon,
he looks so uncomfortable with St George treading on his wing like
that!
And there is St Wilfred with his Bible, and two
other saints round the other side that you can’t see from our pew.
My father, who I know you will remember, said that when he was a
small boy, he used to think St Wilfred was carrying a petrol-can
rather than a Bible, so that he could come to the aid of stranded
motorists – probably a good idea in his boyhood, when petrol
stations were few and far between and the tanks on cars smaller than
they are now.
Talking of my father, he used, you might
remember, to have a fairly bottomless stock of Bible jokes and
anecdotes, and one of these was that he said that if you asked him
whether he preferred Martha or Mary, he would reply:
“Before
dinner, Martha;
afterwards, definitely Mary!”
Me,
I’ve always felt a bit sorry for Martha.
There she was,
desperate to get all these men fed,
and her sister isn’t
helping.
And when she asks Jesus to send her in,
she just
gets told that Mary has “chosen the better part”.
Yet
it was Martha who, on another occasion, caused Jesus to declare:
“I
am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me, even
though they die, will live,
and everyone who lives and believes
in me will never die.”
And Martha herself gave us that
wonderful statement of faith:
“Yes, Lord, I believe that you
are the Messiah,
the Son of God,
the one coming into the
world.”
Martha was seriously a woman of faith.
And she
wanted to show her love to the Lord by providing him and his
disciples with a really good meal.
Maybe she overdid it –
the
Lord might have preferred Martha’s company,
even if it did
mean dining on bread and cheese, and perhaps a few olives.
The
family at Bethany has many links in the Bible.
Some people have
identified Mary as the woman who poured ointment all over Jesus’
feet in the house of Simon the Leper –
and because he lived in
Bethany –
Simon the Leper, that is, not Jesus –
some
people have also said that he was married to Martha.
We don’t
know.
At that, some people have said that Jesus was
married to Mary;
again, we don’t know.
What we do know is
that Martha and Mary were sisters,
and that
they had a beloved brother, called Lazarus.
We do know that on
one occasion Mary poured her expensive perfume all over the feet of
the Lord –
whether this was the same Mary as in the other
accounts or a different one isn’t quite clear.
But whatever,
they seem to have been a family that Jesus knew well,
a home
where he knew he was welcome,
and dear friends whose grief he
shared when Lazarus died,
even though he knew that God would
raise him.
Lazarus, I mean, not Jesus, this time!
In
some ways the story “works” better if the woman who poured
ointment on Jesus’ feet in the house of Simon the Leper and this
Mary
are one and the same person,
as we know that the
woman in Simon’s house was, or had been,
some kind of loose
woman that a pious Jew wouldn’t normally associate with.
Now
she has repented and been forgiven,
and simply adores Jesus,
who made that possible for her.
And she seems to have been taken
back into her sister’s household, possibly rather on
sufferance.
But then she does nothing but sit at Jesus’
feet, listening to him.
Back then, this simply was Not
Done.
Only men were thought to be able to learn,
women
were supposed not to be capable.
Actually, I have a feeling that
the Jews thought that only Jewish free men were able to learn.
They
would thank God each morning that they had not been made a woman, a
slave or a Gentile.
And even though St Paul had sufficient
insight to be able to write that “In Christ, there is neither male
nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile”,
thus at a stroke
disposing of the prayer he’d been taught to make daily, it’s
taken us all a very long time to work that out,
and
events in the United States would show we haven’t really worked it
out yet!
Anyway, the point is that
Mary, by sitting at Jesus’ feet like that,
was behaving in
rather an outrageous fashion.
Totally blatant, like throwing
herself at him.
He might have felt extremely uncomfortable,
and
it’s quite possible that his disciples did.
Martha certainly
did, which was one of the reasons why she asked Jesus to send Mary
through to help in the kitchen.
But Jesus replied:
“Mary
has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from
her.”
Mary, with all her history, was now thirsty for
the Word of God.
Jesus wanted to be able to give Mary what she
needed,
the teaching that only he could provide.
He would
have liked to have given it to Martha, too,
if only
Martha could be persuaded that they’d be quite happy with bread and
cheese, and perhaps a few olives.
But Martha wasn’t ready.
Not
then.
Later on, yes, after Lazarus had died, but not then.
In
many ways, Martha and Mary represent the two different sides of
spirituality, perhaps even of Christianity.
Mary, wrapped up in
sitting at the feet of her Lord, learning from him, listening to
him,
was perhaps so heavenly-minded she was of no earthly
use.
Martha, rather the reverse.
She was so wrapped up in
doing something for Jesus
that she couldn’t see the importance
of taking time out to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen.
Or if she
could, it wasn’t something she wanted to do while there was work
that needed to be done.
She expressed her love for Jesus by
wanting to feed him,
wanting to work for him.
All of
us, I think, are like either Martha or Mary in some ways.
Many
of us are more or less integrated, of course,
finding time both
to sit at Jesus’ feet in worship, adoration and learning,
and
time to serve Him in practical ways,
mostly through working
either in the Church or in the Community.
Others of us are less
balanced.
We spend our time doing one or the other, but not
both.
Mind you, it usually balances out within the context of a
church;
the people who do the praying and listening,
the
people who do the practical jobs that need to be done around the
place,
and the people who do both.
And perhaps in an area,
too, it balances out,
with some churches doing more in the way
of work in the community than others,
but perhaps less in the
way of prayer meetings,
Alpha, or similar courses
and
other Bible studies.
And so it goes on.
But,
you know what? Just look at the first reading this morning, from
Paul’s letter to the Colossians. This letter may well have been
written in about 62 AD, so probably less than 35 years since that
evening in Bethany. People who had known Jesus as a human being
would still have been alive. Maybe even Mary, Martha or Lazarus was
still alive. They might have remembered that evening, Mary, sitting
at her Lord’s feet with the men; Martha, bustling about in the
kitchen and wishing for another pair of hands to help dish up. We’re
not told what Lazarus was doing, or even if he was there, but if he
was there, he was probably sitting at Jesus’ feet with his
sister.
And yet, only a few
years later, Paul writes of Jesus: “He is the image of the
invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him
all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and
invisible,” and “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to
dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all
things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the
blood of his cross.”
Imagine – all the fullness of God
sitting in your living-room eating olives! It kind of blows your
mind, doesn’t it? And yet, this was what Martha and Mary
experienced, and learnt to believe that Jesus was “the son of God
who has come into this world”.
And, of course, the even
more extraordinary thing is that we, too, can know Jesus, if not
eating olives in our sitting-room, exactly, yet still alive and
living within us – indwelling us, they call it – through the
power of his Holy Spirit. Indwelling us, delighting in us, loving
us, growing us, changing us, helping us become, day by day, more and
more the person we were created to be.
You know this, of
course. And you know, too, how easy it is to slip away from being
God’s person, how it’s a commitment you have to keep on making,
not just the once.
The first time you make such a
commitment is huge – and, by the way, if you never have, you really
do have nothing to lose by saying “Yes” to Jesus,
deciding
to be God’s person,
deciding that what you say and do here on
a Sunday
should carry over and be part of who you are during
the week, too.
Truly, you have nothing to lose and everything to
gain!
But the point is, even if you first consciously made that
commitment, as I did, over fifty years ago, you know how you slip
away, usually quite unintentionally, and have to keep on coming back
and back. But the Jesus who let Mary sit at his feet, who reminded
Martha that she, too, could, and should learn from him, the Jesus in
whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell – that Jesus will
always, always, always welcome us back! Amen.
