Are We Wholy Present to the Unholy Unjust

The story of Mary and Martha is a story which on the surface is easy to preach from in many ways. We hear the story of two sisters whom are visited by Jesus. They are dear friends of his, as we will come to see in John’s gospel, and they are two very different women, as sisters often are. Martha behaves as an older sister would, she cares for the house, making sure everything and everyone is in order. She opens her home to a guest and extends a warm greeting, providing food and wonderful service to the guest. Mary, like her sister, is kind and welcoming, but she also has the ability to be fully present with her guest.

Martha is distracted by all she must do to see that her houseguests are well taken care of; she extends the warmest welcome and shows us the appropriate behavior in how we are to extend hospitality to our guests. In her distraction, in her busyness she sees Mary seating at the feet of Jesus and misinterprets what her sister is doing. Mary is listening to the words, stories, or simply talking with Jesus, and Martha becomes upset when she misinterprets this behavior. She asks Jesus to tell her sister to get up and help her. In fact it could almost be heard as an older sibling saying to the parent, “Mom/Dad, Mary’s not helping clean our room. She keeps playing with the toys before putting them away. Make her help me!”

Naturally we expect Jesus to say, “Mary get up and go help your sister,” followed by a parable about laziness or helpfulness, instead he says, “Martha, my dear Martha, you are so upset and distracted by all the details of our dinner. There is really only one thing worth being concerned about. Mary has discovered it and I will not take it away from her.”

In his response Jesus shifts our understanding of hospitality to become aware that we are not always the ones hosting. He urges Martha, not stop being a good host, but to become a complete host, one who is fully present with their guests, one who is able to not only give a blessing but to receive the blessing a guest may have to give.

The scriptures not only urge us to be a hospitable people (as an obligation of being a part of God’s people and following Christ) by opening our homes to strangers, they also tell us that guests are carrying precious gifts with them, which they are eager to reveal to their receptive hosts. In Genesis 18 Abraham receives the three visitors, offering them water, bread, and food, the visitors reveal themselves as the Lord announcing that Sarah is to give birth to a son. In 1 Kings 17, the widow opens her home to Elijah, he reveals himself to be a prophet of God offering her an abundance of oil (remember she gives her last bit to him) and meal and raises her son from the dead. In Luke after the death of Jesus, two travelers to Emmaus invite the stranger who had travelled with them to stay with them for the night, he made himself known when breaking the bread as the risen Jesus (Nouwen, Henri J.M. Show Me the Way pg 30).

Hospitality is a wonderful virtue, an important one, but even more than that as the stories show, the guest and the host can reveal their precious gifts to one another and bring new life to one another (Nouwen, pg 31). Jesus is urging Martha to allow Jesus to reveal to her the gifts that Mary is already receiving. He is urging Martha, not to be focused, but not to be too focused as to miss the important gift of her guest in her house. He wants Martha to give of her whole self by being wholly present, as Mary has discovered.

Are we wholly present to the needs of our neighbors? Have we become distracted by our “chores” to hear God say, “Bruington, my dear Bruington, you are so upset and distracted by all the details of your programs and buildings. There is really only one thing worth being concerned about.” As we think on our answer I invite us to hear from the prophet Amos.

“This was the Lord God showed me—a basket of summer fruit. The Lord said, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the Lord said to me, “The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by. The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day,” says the Lord God; “the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place. Be silent!” Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, “When will the Sabbath be over so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and the practice of deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. On that day, says the Lord God, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only child, and the end of it like a bitter day. The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.” Amos 8:1-2

Wow.

It would appear our story becomes a little more complicated when we compare it to the prophecy of Amos. In Amos’ context, Israel has become more concerned with their wealth by creating unjust, untrustworthy markets in order to cheat others. God is not, does not condemn markets, which will create prosperity for everyone and to be a fair means of exchange: You shall have only full and honest weight; you shall have only a full and honest measure” (Deuteronomy 25:15). In Amos’ world, units of weights and measure had not been standardized, so a measure (ephah) used in the markets of Jerusalem might be different than those employed in the markets of Samaria, or Damascus, or Tyre. Thus a merchant might need to have different sets of weights in order to trade in different markets. The merchants and people of Israel had taken to cheating the weights in order to make someone pay an unfair price. The markets had become untrustworthy and were contributing to an unjust system.

Amos is condemning those who long for the Sabbath (the first day) to end so they may go about deceiving and cheating their neighbors. We must remember that the Sabbath was not originally first and foremost about worship. It was a justice law designed to give rest to all of society—not just the property owner but to the livestock and the resident aliens in the town as dictated by Deuteronomy 5:14. If we were to trace these laws throughout the scriptures we would discover, what Patrick D. Miller calls “the Sabbatical principle” in which we see how these laws are creating a society in which more life can thrive. In these sabbatical laws, the poor and wild animals are provide with food (Exodus 23:10-11), slave are given release to freedom after six years (Deuteronomy 15:12-18, something our God fearing founders forget to include in the constitution), those in deep debt are forgiven their debts after seven years (Deuteronomy 15:1-11, again something our God fearing founders forgot to include), and there is a lot, lot more (Jacobson, Rolf ”Commentary on Amos 8:4-7” http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=752).

This sense of justice, of God commands, and been lost (are they lost today?). The people longed for the Sabbath to be over so they could return to their exploitation. Amos writes, “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals refers to enslaving those who are in debt, even those who owed only a pair of sandals; as they were selling the “sweepings of the wheat” which was prohibited because they were to be left to the poor ([1] Jocobson, Rolf). Amos is crying foul on how far the people are from creating a just society.

Frederick Buechner tells it better:

“When the prophet Amos walked down the main drag, it was like a shoot-out in the Old West. Everybody ran for cover. His special target was The Beautiful People, and shooting from the hip, he never missed his mark. He pictures them sleek and tanned at Palm Beach, Acapulco, and St. Tropez. They glisten with Bain de Soleil. The stereo is piped out over the marble terrace. Another tray of Bloody Mary’s is on the way. A vacationing Baptist preacher plunges into the heated pool.
With one eye cocked on them, he has his other cocked on the Unbeautiful People-the varicose veins of the old waiter, the pasty face of the starch-fed child, the Indian winos passed out on the railroad siding, the ragged woman fumbling for food stamps at the check-out counter. When justice is finally done, Amos says, there will be Hell to pay. The Happy Hour will be postponed indefinitely because the sun will never make it over the yard-arm. The Pucci blouses, the tangerine colored slacks, the flowered Lillys, will all fade like grass. Nothing but a few chicken bones will mark the place where once the cold buffet was spread out under the royal palms. But according to Amos, it won't be the shortage of food and fun that will hurt. It will be the shortage "of hearing the words of the Lord" (Amos 8:11). Towards the end, God will make himself so scarce that the world won't even know what it's starving to death for (Buechner, Frederick. Peculiar Treasures pg 11-12).

The people of Israel had become distracted and concerned with their unjust system, they forgot about the just laws God established through Moses and God’s judgment is not a famine or drought, it is the loss of God. It is the loss of God’s voice that will be scarce and the people will be unable to hear it or perhaps unable to recognize it.

Are we wholly present to the needs of our neighbors? Have we become distracted by our “chores” to hear God say, “Bruington, my dear Bruington, you are so upset and distracted by all the details of your programs and buildings. There is really only one thing worth being concerned about.”

I wish to close with a story that has changed my life:

One Christmas, a group of developmentally disabled folks, accompanied by two assistants from “The Redwoods Group Home” entered the mall food courts. In the midst of hurried shoppers, these men and women lumbered through the crowd, smiling, clapping and yelling with genuine pleasure at the sights and sounds of the mall. The assistants helped, carefully, each person decide what food they wanted, stand in line with them, order a meal, pay, and carry the food back to the table. There was one man with Down Syndrome, who shook off every offer of aid by the assistants, made his gleeful way to McDonald’s line. When he reached the front of the line, he handed the cashier a coupon, spoke loudly, and gestured toward the cups and the coffee machine. A few moments later the young man returned to his friends holding a giant 32 ounce cup of coffee, his face beaming with pride.

The group eventually headed out the door, and standing under the awning as the rain poured down, the young man bent over his hard-earned brew, sheltering it from the down pour. One of the assistants brought the van around, and without any apparent direction from the other assistant, the young man took off from the side of the building, bolting for the warmth and security of the van. Startled by the heavy rain he stopped mid-run, and turned to return to the cover of the mall eaves. One of the assistants saw him turn back and yelled to him to continue his route toward the van. Increasingly shocked and confused, he twisted his body toward the voice of the assistant with a quick jerk that caused the 32-ounce coffee cup to slip from his hands and break open against the wet concrete. Across the gray sidewalk, the caffeine flowed like a mud slide. The young man froze, took in the sight of his lost purchase, and began to cry. Soon his body gave way, and he slumped down into the steaming puddle. He sat there, wailing mournfully, in a growing puddle of coffee, the rain soaking his clothes.

The Christmas crowd looked on helplessly when one of the assistants, a 20 something woman, stepped out of the van. She ran over to the young man, sat down in the cold wet coffee, wrapped her arm around him, placed his head on her shoulder, and let him cry. For several minutes she sat there with the patience of God, just holding the young man while the rain poured down. When he had calmed, the young assistant took his hand, lifted him from the concrete, and led him to the front passage seat of the van. She helped him with his seat, gave him a kiss, and shut the door. Her clothes slung with water, her jeans stained brown, she stepped in the van, slid the door shut, and then squeezed her body into the backseat (Yaconelli, Mark. Contemplative Youth Ministry, pg 117-1190).

Have we become so distracted by our chores of church that we have become blind to those who sit, mourning in the pouring rain? Have we become so distracted by our church chores that we have become deaf to the voice of Christ cry out beneath the injustice of us in power? Have we become so distracted by our church chores that we are mute on how God’s eye is on the sparrow? Then let us cast aside our distractions and become wholly present so that we too may sit in the rain with those who mourn, with the poor, the broken, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned.