THE MESSINESS OF LOVING GOD AND OTHERS
(Preached on Sunday, July 18, 2004)
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.” -Luke 10:40
I don’t know about you, but the longer I live, the more I come to understand just how difficult this Christian path really is.
We remind ourselves each week that Jesus has condensed everything to two directives: Love God and Love neighbor.
The toughest part of loving others is that others are so, well, other.
The otherness of the other frightens us.
We are more comfortable with our own kind, people like us.
But even there, we find difficulty, for just who is like me?
Maybe it is just me, but in 48 years of life, I have found no one just like me.
Not my parents, or my two brothers and two sisters; not my friends in high school, or college, or seminary or since; not my first wife, or my second wife; not my children.
Anytime I begin to think I have found someone like me and try to develop a deeper relationship, draw closer in intimacy by opening up and sharing my deepest thoughts, feelings, fears and hopes, eventually something always takes place to remind me that no, this is not another copy of me, this is someone else, this is an other.
Therefore any act of hospitality requires a certain amount of courage.
To reach across our cherished boundaries, to open the door of our hearts and lives to another person, to welcome into the inner sanctum of our psyche someone else, this is not easy.
If this is true in our relations with our fellow human beings, how much more so is it true in our relation with Jesus.
Jesus, as the one come to us as God’s ultimate revelation of God’s self, is the ultimate other.
And loving God in this Jesus is not easy.
I don’t know about you, but Jesus makes me nervous.
God Almighty is one thing, but Jesus makes me uncomfortable.
Jesus actually makes everyone uncomfortable as far as I can tell.
Imagine asking the guy home for lunch.
Not only does he not lend a hand in setting the table or pouring the drinks, he’s got your other would-be helpers spellbound at his feet, drinking deeply of his wisdom of the ages while the pot roast withers and the salad wilts.
How does one prepare for Jesus’ visit?
Would you clean the house more thoroughly than usual, or — let’s be honest — would you clean the house for a change?
Would excessive cleanliness suggest that you’d been neglecting some spiritual-advancement opportunities?
Would you borrow fine china to show your deep and abiding respect for the Messiah — or use paper plates to symbolize an equally deep and abiding lack of interest in material goods?
Would you impress him more with a menu featuring Maine lobster — an edible version of pouring perfume in his feet? (Apparently he always knew a good wine when he saw one.)
Or would you fare better slapping peanut butter and jelly on Publix’s cheapest bread, carefully calculating the money you save and buying groceries for a homeless family you’d befriended?
Jesus might praise either choice.
Or condemn either.
He might say “good and faithful servant” or “you whitewashed sepulcher,” depending on nasty little intangibles like motivation and intent.
It’s all of this uncertainty which makes me nervous.
Other people have the grace to smile and politely mumble something vague when you make a social faux pas that sends you stumbling into the mop closets of their private lives.
Jesus, on the other hand, strides in quite intentionally, and before he has so much as set his backpack down asks another guest how her fifth husband — or was he just a live-in? — is proceeding with the delinquent child support payments to his former wife.
He’d welcome the uninvited entrance of neighborhood rabble who would insist on groveling at his feet and staining the carpet with dubious-smelling foreign substances.
The kind of guest you’d like to leash to the barbecue grill and leave there for a while.
Jesus called them as he saw them.
Public opinion swayed him no more than the storm-stirred winds and waves.
A desirable trait for a Little League umpire but a regrettable lack of tack for a dinner guest.
But he is so hard to pin down.
This story of Mary and Martha following immediately after the story of the Good Samaritan is a prime example.
Recall that Jesus had related that parable in order to illustrate one aspect of the twofold requirement to “inherit eternal life”: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”
If the Good Samaritan demonstrates what it means to “love your neighbor as yourself,” by showing mercy and hospitality to your neighbor, then what is going on in this story?
After all, Martha certainly seems to be showing mercy and hospitality toward Jesus and his followers, her neighbors, by making sure that their physical needs for food are met.
Yet when she expresses her frustration that she is doing all this by herself, expecting that Jesus will intercede on her behalf and direct Mary to get up and help her with the food preparations, she is somewhat rebuffed.
Instead of praising her, he tells her that she is over-worried and that Mary has chosen a good thing to be doing and it will not be taken away from her.
An extremely difficult lesson.
I know one woman in another church I once served who said that she never liked hearing this text preached because she always came away with the sense that it’s never possible to get things right.
If, like Martha, she works hard, she will be labeled “overfunctioning.”
If, like Mary, she sits and listens too long, nothing gets done.
Martha herself expresses her frustration, not just with Mary, but with Jesus.
Look again at her question to him: “Lord, do you not care?”
This is the same question Jesus was asked by the disciples when they were in the wind-tossed boat on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus was asleep in the stern: “Don’t you care.”
But Jesus does care.
God cares a great deal.
And both Jesus and God express that care in their gentleness with us; for Jesus never speaks or teaches with coercion.
Rather, through parable, metaphor, humor, and performance art, Jesus consistently invited his followers to enter the mystery, wrestle with the questions, and allow themselves to be transformed by the radical truths he both proclaimed and embodied.
He spoke with authority, but without authoritarian undertow.
Jesus always respects us as other — as completely separate and unique in our being — with full capability and integrity.
That is true hospitality: letting the other be in all of his or her otherness.
That is true love; for love is letting-be.
Love usually gets defined in terms of union, or the drive toward union, but such a definition is too egocentric.
Love does indeed lead to community, but to aim primarily at uniting the other person to myself, or myself to her, is not the secret of love and, actually, is usually destructive of genuine community.
Love is letting-be, not, of course, in the sense of standing off from someone or something, but in the positive and active sense of enabling-to-be, empowering the other to realize his or her full potential.
This is so difficult to do.
It is so difficult for us to remember that other people are unique others, different from us, especially when they have been our soul-companions for many years — our husbands or wives, our sisters or brothers, our parents or children, our friends.
Jesus showed us that it calls for a gentle spirit and the gift of self-control.
This gentle self-control allows us to offer empathy to the other as good listeners.
The other is then freed to speak without pretense, knowing he or she will truly be heard.
Respectful listening frees space for the Spirit of God to move in ways that bring comfort and healing and growth.
Henri Nouwen once described this type of gentle acceptance and letting be in a sermon on marriages. But his image is applicable to all human relationships. He said: “Two people cling to each other as two hands interlocked in fear. The connect because they cannot survive individually. But as they interlock they also realize that they cannot take away each other’s loneliness. And it is then that friction arises and tension increases. Often a breakup is the final result. But God calls man and woman into a different relationship. It is a relationship that looks like two hands that fold in an act of prayer. The fingertips touch, but the hands can create a space, like a little tent. Such a space is the space created by love, not fear. Marriage is creating a new, open space where God’s love can be revealed to the ‘stranger’: the child, the friend, the visitor.”
Loving God and loving others is messy business.
But then again, it is God who set the business up this way.
The same God who forces nothing on us, but who takes our hands gently, honors the space that is our personhood, and provides an open space of grace where we can twirl and dance and become everything we are created to be.
What a marvelous gift that is to us.