Sermon for Pentecost 8
Amos 8: 1-12; Psalm 52; Colossians 1: 15-28; Luke 10: 38-42
July 18, 2010
John Wall In the Name of God: Our Creator, Our Redeemer, and Our Comforter. Amen.

We who are the people of God are gathered in this place on this day to join together at this table, where Jesus our Christ is our host. The writer of the Epistle to the Colossians speaks to us of this Jesus in today's Epistle reading: He says that through Jesus God has acted to overcome all that separates us from God, and through knowing Him we know God:

“Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; the head of the body, the church; 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.”

And the writer of Colossians speaks of us as well:
“You who were once estranged he has now reconciled in his fleshly body, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.”

Beloved, we read those words as written to the Church at Colossae, and we are bold to say that they refer to us today, in this time and this place.

Hence we pray in today's Collect, to a God who knows “our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord.”

So we who are those people gather here today to hear what the Spirit is saying to us. The readings from the Bible we hear each week provide us with a wide range of information and resources for our Christian living. Sometime what they give us is models for things we might say under certain circumstances.

For example, the Psalm appointed for today (Psalm 52) provides us a very helpful model for what to say when someone has done something very annoying to us. For example, cut us off in traffic. I can imagine it being very helpful to say to someone who just cut me off,

“Oh, that God would demolish you utterly, *
topple you, and snatch you from your automobile,
and root you out of the land of the living!”

I'm sure I would feel much better after saying that, probably a lot better than I feel after the things I usually say in those circumstances.

Well, in any case, in addition to the Psalm's advice about what to say under trying circumstances, and in addition to the insight into who we are as the People of God in the Epistle to the Colossians, we have the Old Testament Lesson and the Gospel reading for today. And what we have in these readings for today is a couple of stories.

In the Gospel reading for today we get the familiar, but nonetheless puzzling story of Mary and Martha, and Martha is busy in the kitchen and Mary is sitting devotedly at Jesus' feet. Now Martha is – no surprise here – unhappy with this turn of events. But Jesus says to her, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."

So what does that mean? We ran into Jane Gurry, our former Rector, last week and I told her I was preaching today, and she said, oh, yes, the story of Mary and Martha – Jane said, It's a companion story to the Story of the Good Samaritan, and it's about being, just being with God, while the Good Samaritan story is about doing, and together, they are about the way we are called to balance our lives, between just being when it's appropriate and doing when it's appropriate, and so we move back and forth, seeking a balance in our lives between being and doing.

Which makes perfectly good sense to me, and so you can take that away with you for today, if you like, as one of the messages of this sermon. But I also have to say that this story always gives me the odd feeling that Jesus has just gotten back from one of those Seven Habits of Very Successful People classes and has just learned the difference between things that are urgent and things that are important, and that some things feel urgent but they really aren't all that important.

Anyone who has been involved in organizational development seminars in the past few years will, I think, recognize what Jesus is getting after here, and can only hope that Martha can relax a bit, and live in the moment, and sort out her priorities and recognize that the dishes are of course important, but not urgent, and maybe Mary will help her with them after Jesus has decided it's time for doing again, and gone out to heal someone, or preach another sermon, or some such, that will free Mary to pitch in in the kitchen.

But the Old Testament Lesson is one of my absolutely favorite stories from the Bible, a story about hospitality, and about sharing a meal, and a story about surprises.

It's a story about Abraham and Sarah, from Genesis, and in it Abraham is taking his ease under the oaks of Mamre, and as he sits at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day, he looks up and sees three men standing near him. So he runs to greet them, and offers them hospitality -- he has water brought to wash their feet, has bread baked, and he slaughters a calf and they have a beef barbeque.

Now, this story exists in Genesis in a couple of versions, and this version is very stripped down to the essentials. In the other version, we learn that Abraham and Sarah are both old, so old that Sarah has passed through menopause, and they are childless.

So when the visitor here says that "I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son," this is startling news indeed. In the other version, Sarah doesn't believe the story. She laughs, she says, oh come on, I'm too old and my husband is too old to become parents – the text of Genesis is rather graphic about it – and so she laughs, and God laughs with her, and so they name the son Isaac, which in Hebrew means, laughter, or more literally “he laughs,” so Isaac is the embodiment of their laughter or God's laughter.

Although Abraham and Sarah are traditionally about 150 years old at this point – so I'm not sure how much they laughed when they had to get up at night to feed and change this baby.

But this is a story, and it's the story that accounts for everything else that happens in the Bible, because without Isaac there is no Jacob, and without Jacob there is no Israel, without Israel there are no people of Israel, and no Moses, and no David, and therefore no City of David for Jesus to be born in, and so forth. So you see how central to everything else this story is.

Its sort of like the story my friend Ann Scott likes to tell about how she met her husband. She was working in Washington one summer and took the 8:30 bus every day to work, and one day she slept late and missed it and so took the 8:45 bus that day, and the only seat left was a seat next to this guy named Andy. Ann says her children hate to hear that story because what it means is that if her mother hadn't missed her bus that day they would not exist.

Its that kind of story – how through chance and serendipity -- and against all odds -- amazing things sometimes happen. Of course having the grace and laughter of God in the story helps out. It's the kind of story that explains things, that gets things started, that initiates and informs patterns of motifs that recur and that have a way of holding disparate stories together.

This story is about surprise, about how God works through unexpected events and unimportant and obscure people. After this story it should come as no surprise that practically every important person in the rest of the Bible has an unusual birth, or is the youngest rather than the oldest child, or is the overlooked, unimportant one who suddenly is chosen and is discovered to have special talents.

I remember when I read the first Harry Potter book, we met Harry when he was a real misfit in the Dursley family, and they made him sleep in a closet, and he was a terrible inconvenience to everyone, until one day an owl shows up, and I thought, oh, yes, I know this story, I know where its going. And so it was no surprise to me when Harry turns out to be a boy of wonder with marvelous gifts, and with a full scholarship to Harvard, or at least the wizarding world's equivalent of Harvard.

Nor should it be a surprise when later stories in the Bible have a way of picking up on events in this story and repeating them. Jesus – like Abraham – will wash his disciples' feet and show them hospitality at table with bread and meat, although the menu, by the time we get to that story, has shifted from milk and beef to wine and lamb, the Lamb of God, who will become the host at the blessed wedding-feast of heaven and earth when the holy city , the new Jerusalem, comes down out of heaven adorned like a bride prepared for her bridegroom. Which is of course the church, which is us, as God sees us in Christ, those blessed, redeemed, splendid people, and not the ordinary, scruffy people we know ourselves to be.

In fact, the point I've been working up to is that as the people of God we are called – among other things – to attend to stories, and to tell stories – to listen to stories like the story of Abraham and Sarah, and the story of Jesus and Mary and Martha, and to tell our stories of how we came to be here, and what we remember of our time together, and what we look forward to, and how we came to understand things in this or that way. In other words, stories of what a friend we have in Jesus.
But to be those kinds of stories, the stories in the Bible need to be free to be those kinds of stories. In other words, we need to think about how we use the stories in the Bible.

We often turn to the Bible's stories for answers, for truths about God and what God is doing for us, and what God calls us to do with him. And that's important work for us to do. But I think we need to understand the logic of stories and allow them to do their work without demanding of them that they be a literal record of “what happened.”

Stories often tell us about things, communicate to us the truth of things, whether they are true in a literal sense or not. I remember years ago I was studying the Great Depression in a history class and I realized that my father had lived through the Great Depression, and so I asked him what that was like, and he said, son, times were hard. Times were so hard that your Uncle Vernon got the same toy pistol for Christmas three years in a row.

When I first heard that story, it made a big impression on me, since getting presents at Christmas was really important to me. Later, I ran the numbers, as they say, and realized that during the Great Depression my Uncle Vernon was in his 40's and not eager to get a toy pistol for Christmas. So the story wasn't true literally – although it may have been true of an earlier economic turndown in the USA -- but it was still true in giving a powerful, and I think true sense of the struggles with money and with hopes and expectations that people dealt with in the Great Depression.

If I insisted that it be true literally I would have to decide it was false – and it would lose all its power to be true experientially or metaphorically.

There are other times when stories are important not because they are true in a literal or even experiential way. Sometimes we tell stories because that is what we do because of who we are and when it is that we tell that story.

In our family we have developed a tradition that on Christmas Eve after the late service but before bedtime I read – to whoever is there -- Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales. Now, I'm not Dylan Thomas, and this isn't Wales, and the events in that story took place years and years ago, but it's part of the occasion – it says this is that time of the year when this is what we do because of who we are and how we feel about being together on this occasion.

I think my doing that contributes something to the occasion. I know I would miss it if I didn't do it. I think its something that I want my family to remember me for doing, and valuing, one way of saying how much I value that time together with them.

When I think about what we do week by week, here in this place – how it is in part always the same -- as we gather to listen to the old stories and sing and pray and to break bread and share the cup of wine – and at the heart of it is always the story about how our Lord Jesus on the night before he was betrayed took bread and broke it and took the cup and blessed it --- in that sameness is the reminder of what we do and who we are, and how this story makes possible our being together in this place -- people from very different places, each of us with very different stories, yet this story brings each of us here, week by week, month by month and year by year – to be one body, one community, in this place.

But it is also always different, because each day we gather is different, for the world changes and we change, and each time we gather the story is also different, speaking to us in our new places, individually and collectively – assuring us that we are God's people, beloved of God and called into relationship with him, surprising us, like Abraham and Sarah, with new possibilities and new opportunities, and new understandings of God and of us and of what we are called to do.

This is what I think it means to speak of a living Word of God, not a word shut up in a book that is finished, closed, final, but a collection of saying and stories that constantly open our world for us, inviting us from our humdrum existence of more of the same every day to a world of surprise, of possibility, of joy, and of thanksgiving.

Or, at least, that's my story, and I'm sticking with it. Amen.

©2010 John Wall