Mary, Martha, and Maude

Sermon for July 20, 2025
Luke 10:38-42

Last Sunday, Mtr. Rita mentioned that the Gospel reading, about the Good Samaritan, is one of those stories we know too well.  And she wondered what on earth she might have to say about that story that you hadn’t heard many times before.

Well, this morning, our Gospel reading is the story of Mary and Martha hosting Jesus and the disciples for dinner.  It’s another one of those stories we know too well.  Like the term “Good Samaritan,” being “a Mary” or “a Martha” is scriptural shorthand for a lesson many of us have heard before.  But today’s reading brings with it the added fun of reinforcing a polarized message of goodness – that some people know how to follow Jesus, while others don’t get it.  Isn’t that just what we need these days...?

So, let’s do a quick poll.  Regardless of gender, how many of you would call yourself a Mary – someone who’d welcome Jesus into your home by sitting in the living room with him and hanging on his every word?  OK.  How many of you would call yourself a Martha – someone who’d welcome Jesus by trying to put on the perfect meal, meanwhile resenting Mary for taking it easy in the other room?  OK.  And now, of you Marthas, how many of you feel a little insulted when Jesus takes Mary’s side and tells you that, despite all your work, you failed to choose “the better part” (Luke 10:42)?

I’m right there with you.  As a recovering Martha, I’d absolutely want to honor the Messiah by putting on the very best meal I could.  And, at the same time … if I’m honest, some of that desire to give Jesus the perfect welcome just might come from the fact that I know, deep down, I’m not worthy to have the Lord come under my roof (Matthew 8:8).  And Mary, there in the other room – what makes her think she’s so special?  Does she really think she’s worthy of a sit-down with God in the flesh?  Sure, Marthas like me would appreciate another pair of hands in the kitchen.  But I think Martha’s real hostility toward Mary might be, “Just who do you think you are?”

The Light of the World,
William Holman Hunt,
St. Paul's Cathedral version (1904)

            We may hear this story being about the practice of hospitality in our homes, but of course it’s really about the practice of hospitality in our hearts.  And here, too, we spiritual Marthas might find ourselves feeling some self-righteous resentment.  I have always wished I were one of those people who can hold still and be prayerful.  You know the famous painting in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London,¹ the one of Jesus standing at the door, knocking?  It’s printed in the bulletin this morning.  Well, left to my own devices, if that were my house in the painting, I’d probably be so busy with what I was working on inside that I’d never even hear the knock.  It’s hard to let someone in if you’re making so much interior noise that you don’t realize he’s out there waiting for you. 

So, why do Marthas like me do that?  Why do we make so much noise and distract ourselves with our “many tasks” of life (Luke 10:40) to the extent that we miss the point of Who life is about?  I can only answer for myself, but here goes:  It’s less risky that way.

I mean that in two senses.  First, those of us who function as Marthas are doing that to live into our wiring, to lead with our strengths.  My hunch is that Martha in the story was one heck of a host – the Martha Stewart of Bethany.  If she’d had linen napkins, they would have been pressed, but not so obviously as to draw attention to it.  She would have planned the event so well she wouldn’t need to run back to the store to pick up ice or butter.  Martha knew she was good at this, so of course she took the lead in hosting the dinner.  If Mary had been in charge, they probably would have ordered DoorDash.

And, even more to the point, if Martha had put herself out in the living room with Jesus, anxiety would have seeped from her pores.  She’d have feared she’d say something stupid – or, worse, she’d have feared she’d have nothing to say at all.  Martha needed the safety of busyness to keep her from risking relationship with God in the flesh – because once you start down that road, God knows what you might have to do differently.

But for Marthas like me, the risk of setting aside our “many tasks” runs even deeper than that.  In the story, we hear Martha resenting Mary ostensibly for leaving Martha in the kitchen with all the work, but what’s that resentment really about?  You can nearly see the words in the thought bubble floating over Martha’s head:  “Just who does Mary think she is, sitting in there with Jesus?”  Martha’s angry because her sister thinks she’s better than Martha.  And adding salt to the wound, Jesus seems to affirm that Mary’s right.  “Mary has chosen the better part,” Jesus says (Luke 10:42).  Martha drops the dish she’s drying, unable to believe what she’s hearing.

But I don’t think what she’s hearing is what Jesus is saying.  Mary’s not better than Martha.  She just loves herself a little more.  And where does that come from?  My guess is that Mary’s a little more comfortable with her own belovedness in God’s eyes.  Some of that’s probably just who Mary is.  But some of it comes from her spiritual practice of being still long enough actually to hear Jesus knocking on the door and then realizing, “Wait, he’s come to me – and not with an arrest warrant but with the light of God’s love in his hand.”

That’s the “better part” Mary chooses – not just sitting in the living room with the guest of honor but resting in the peace that she’s actually God’s beloved.  As the bumper sticker on my refrigerator says, “God loves you whether you like it or not.”  And Mary’s living into it.

So, what are we supposed to take away from this well-worn story?  Let me update it just a bit.  I was at a friend’s house for dinner the other night with a few other people.  Let’s call her not Mary, not Martha, but Maude.  Now, Maude is blessed with an open-concept kitchen.  So, when we guests arrived, she led us to the kitchen, where we found drinks and light appetizers on the table.  After welcoming us, Maude went behind the counter, within the kitchen proper, as the rest of us stood or sat around, talking and laughing, drinking and eating.  Meanwhile, Maude made dinner.  She prepared chicken for the grill, sliced tomatoes, washed basil leaves, made a fruit salad, sliced a loaf of hearty bread – all the while listening and talking and being just as much a part of the conversation as everyone else.  Maude was the perfect host because she recognized we weren’t there to eat the best meal of all time.  We were there to spend the time with her, and with each other.

I know it’ll shock you to hear me find a middle way, but here you go:  In the lives we inhabit, day by day, we can’t be either Mary or Martha.  Mary chose “the better part,” recognizing her inherent belovedness – but we can’t spend all our life on retreat.  Martha was “worried and distracted by many things,” which kept her from seeing that God wanted her heart, not her cooking – but still, there are always those guests in the other room who do expect something to eat.

So, instead of striving to be the perfect Mary or beating yourself up for being the perfect Martha – instead, be a good Maude.  Jesus is knocking on your door because he’d like to be welcomed into the life you actually live.  He’d like to be there while you’re praying or meditating, absolutely.  But he’d also like to be there while you’re cutting up chicken or doing the dishes or talking to your customers or watching a movie.  Why?  Not to reward you for doing life well or to upbraid you for doing life poorly, but simply to stand alongside you as you live it.  Because, after all, you are God’s beloved, made in the divine image and likeness.  And that knock on the door you hear is Jesus trying to remind you of that – that you are worthy of a sit-down with God in the flesh.

1.       The painting The Light of the World that hangs in St. Paul’s, London, is the third version of this piece by William Holman Hunt. The first version was completed in 1854 and donated to Keble College, Oxford, to hang in the college chapel, but conflict with the architect led to the painting being hung in the college library until, later, a side chapel was built for the painting. Meanwhile, Hunt painted a second, smaller version between 1851 and 1856, which now hangs in the Manchester City Art Gallery. Finally, because Keble College was charging a fee to view the original, Hunt completed a larger, life-sized version in 1904, which was purchased by a British social reformer, Charles Booth, and donated to St. Paul’s in London after being taken on a world viewing tour. See The Light of the World (Hunt) on Wikipedia.

Looking for the City Upon a Hill

Sermon for Independence Day, transferred
Deuteronomy 10:17-21; Hebrews 11:8-16; Matthew 5:43-48
July 6, 2025

This is a messy time to be celebrating Independence Day as a feast of the Episcopal Church.  There are those of us who’d be comforted to see the American flag here by the pulpit every Sunday.  And there are those of us who’d say it’s inappropriate to post the flag here, even today, because of the message that sends.  So, what exactly would that inappropriate message be?

I want to share a memory from growing up in Springfield, Missouri.  In the weeks before Christmas, at a busy street corner near our house, there would appear a manger scene – painted, freestanding figures of Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and the angels, all staring devoutly at the manger holding the Christ child.  None of that was strange, especially in Springfield.  But here’s what was strange, something that might disrupt the mental picture I’ve given you:  The manger was painted red, white, and blue, featuring the stars and stripes of the American flag.

That flag-wrapped manger is an example of a corruption of the Gospel called Christian nationalism.  That’s a term we hear often these days, though it’s tough to pin down exactly who is and who isn’t a Christian nationalist.  The short version is that Christian nationalism conflates being a Christian with being an American.  As the Theology Committee of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops has written:

“Christian nationalism defines national identity in terms of membership in a particular form of Christianity, … a story often based in Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism….”¹  That “divinization of one group over another”² … “fuses the interests of the nation (or at least a portion of it) and the interests of God.  It blurs the differences between being a good American and being a good Christian.  It puts its faith in the state, not in the gospel.”³

The bishops also are clear in naming what Christian nationalism is not.  It’s “not Christian nationalism if a person’s political values are shaped by … Christian faith.  The problem with Christian nationalism is not with Christian participation in politics, but rather the belief that there should be Christian primacy in politics and law.”⁴

I know clergy who would say what we’re doing here today is taking a step down Christian nationalism’s slippery slope.  They would say that, because of the American government’s policies supporting things like slavery, land theft, and racial separation, the flag certainly shouldn’t be posted near the altar or the pulpit and perhaps not in the church at all.  But, today, as we observe this feast of Independence Day, we have the flag right here, next to the pulpit.  Is that, indeed, a step down the slippery slope of equating America with the kingdom of God?

Here’s how I see it.  For me, to observe Independence Day in church is to offer the nation to God.  So that begs the question, what are we doing when we make offerings?  What do they mean?  You know, every Sunday, we offer God our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving with prayers, songs, bread, wine, and financial gifts.  Most of us make offerings to God throughout the rest of the week, too, as we set aside time for prayer, or read Scripture, or serve people in the community, or tend God’s creation, or work for justice, or love our families and friends.  So, what’s the purpose of those offerings?

Well, first, I think we offer them to say, “Thank you.”  We offer tokens of our lives to God to recognize that all we have was God’s first and that God is gracious and generous in sharing it.  The old-school offertory sentence some of us grew up hearing captures this perfectly:  “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”

I think we also make offerings in order to dedicate, to consecrate, to hallow our lives as instruments of God’s purposes.  That’s what Lincoln had in mind on the battlefield at Gettysburg, but it’s also what we intend about ourselves – that we would participate with the One who is Love in bringing Love to bear in this world God’s redeeming.  As we say in a Rite I version of the Eucharistic prayer, we offer God “ourselves, our souls and bodies” (BCP 336), acknowledging that, unbelievably, the sovereign of the universe wants to use even you and me to reveal God’s reign and rule on earth.

That’s why we’re observing the feast of Independence Day here in church this morning.  We’re giving thanks to God for the blessings we’ve known in this nation, and we’re asking God to bless and empower it, that the United States might live into the goodness to which it aspires.

So, marking Independence Day doesn’t mean simply baptizing the nation and its deeply complicated history.  As we all know, in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal” and deserve a government that guarantees their right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  But for Jefferson and the other White men in the room where it happened, that Declaration of Independence applied only to other White men who owned property – not to poor White men, not to any women, not to Black people considered to be property, not to Indigenous people whose property the White men had taken.  For the Church to mark Independence Day doesn’t say any of that was OK.  Nor does it say we should ignore the broken parts of our history because the nation’s good outweighs the bad.  Instead, it says that our founding principles are aspirations, holy but incompletely fulfilled, so we pray that our nation will do the work to live them out.

And where could we turn to see what that might look like?  Let me suggest three sources.

The first is Scripture.  I think it’s interesting what readings the Book of Common Prayer gives us this morning.  On this feast honoring our nation, our readings urge us to turn away from the fireworks long enough to heed voices in contrast to our culture.  As the Israelites are about to enter the land God’s given them to possess, Moses calls them not to lord it over the people they’ll defeat but to “love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut 10:19).  To Jewish converts trying to understand Jesus’ way of love, the writer of Hebrews tells them not to imitate David or Solomon, their nation’s founding fathers, but to consider themselves “strangers and foreigners on earth … seeking a [new] homeland, … a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (11:13,14,16).  And in the Sermon on the Mount, what you might call the Constitution of the kingdom of heaven, Jesus tells his followers what they should do to those who work against their interest:  “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,” Jesus says – I’m sure bringing groans from the nationalistic partisans in the crowd (Matt 5:44).  Throughout Scripture, we hear the God who is Love calling us to do what’s hardest and least personally satisfying.  If you’re blessed with abundant resources, give them away.  If you have the power to oppress people, build them up.  If you have the power to take things away from people, give them the cloak you’re wearing.  Feed the hungry.  Heal the sick.  Clothe the naked.  Care for prisoners.  Welcome the stranger. In the kingdom of God, these are the supreme laws of the land.  They’re the things that we as individuals, and as a nation, must do – in personal action and in policy.

So, Scripture can guide us in sharing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with all.  Our second source is our own Episcopal guide to holy living, the Baptismal Covenant.  Over the next six weeks, on Thursday nights at HJ’s, we’ll explore what it means to follow Christ in our culture.  Rather than wrapping the baby Jesus in the American flag of Christian nationalism, we’ll explore how to be a Christian American – how the promises of the Baptismal Covenant can guide us to practice Christian ethics as American citizens.  The first session, this Thursday, will set the stage with some reflection on Richard Niebuhr’s classic book Christ & Culture, and then we’ll explore the five baptismal promises week by week.

Finally, as the third source to guide us in living out our nation’s founding aspirations, I’d suggest we look back at our nation’s founding sermon.  There is such a thing.  And there’s an image from that sermon I know you know: the thought that God was calling the English Pilgrims to the new world in order to be a shining “city upon a hill” with “the eyes of all people upon” them.⁵  Presidents of all stripes – including Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama – have used this image to paint a picture of American exceptionalism that springs from God’s favor.⁶

But that’s not really what the sermon’s about.⁷

It comes from John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  As he and his fellow Pilgrims neared the shores of North America in 1630, Winthrop took the opportunity of a captive audience to cast a vision for the colony as an outpost of God’s kingdom.  As he borrowed that image of the “city upon a hill” from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:14), Winthrop explicitly applied the Constitution of God’s kingdom to the English people’s colonizing efforts.  Now, the notion of holy colonization is pretty troubling for us, to say nothing of the Pilgrims’ belief in theocracy as a system of government.  But setting all that aside for a moment, I think some of Winthrop’s other words in his shipboard sermon could be a blessing to our national life and discourse today.  Here’s why:  For John Winthrop, this new English colony was to be God’s “city upon a hill” not because it was full of religiously minded Englishmen.  Instead, they would be a “city upon a hill” only if they remembered their fundamental calling.  I’ll leave you with Winthrop’s own words:

[I]f we shall neglect … the ends we have propounded and … embrace this present world…, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us….  Now, the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of [the prophet] Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.⁸

That offering of ourselves is what may yet make us a shining city upon a hill.

 

1.       Shin, Allen K., and Larry Benfield. The Crisis of Christian Nationalism: Report from the House of Bishops Theology Committee. New York: Church Publishing, 2024. 16.

2.       Shin and Benfield, 18.

3.       Shin and Benfield, 17.

4.       Shin and Benfield, 20.

5.       Winthrop, John. A Modell of Christian Charity (1630). Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, 1838), 3rd series 7:31-48. Available at: https://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html. Accessed July 4, 2025.

6.       Shin and Benfield, 16.

7.       This discussion of the sermon’s point relies on Shin and Benfield.

8.       Winthrop, John. A Modell of Christian Charity.