"Martha or Mary – Which One Are You?", July 20, 2025 — Santa Teresa Hills Presbyterian Church

“Martha or Mary – Which One Are You?”

Luke 10: 38-42

Pastor Deb Troester, STHPC, July 20, 2025

Most of us can identify with Martha. Planning a dinner party takes time and effort. The possibilities for disaster abound: the Thanksgiving turkey that refuses to thaw, or somehow get baked with the giblet bag inside; the pasta that congeals into a solid mass and has to be sliced with a knife – My Mom told of a dinner party where this actually happened. The funniest dinner disaster Joe and I have experienced was in graduate school at the home of another student. One of our friends had just bought a microwave for his wife, but she didn’t know how to use it. She made a cake and baked it for the usual amount of time [pause] for a conventional oven. Too embarrassed to tell her husband about her mistake, she iced it and brought it to the party. The hostess noticed that it was hard as a rock and set it aside, but the husband kept asking when his wife’s cake would be served. Finally he got it and tried to cut off a slice. When the knife failed to chip off even a tiny piece, he and his wife departed suddenly and without ceremony, leaving the cake.

This being a geology department party, where a certain amount of alcohol had been consumed, the geologists, including my husband, took the cake out into the parking lot and chipped at it with their rock hammers, but the cake stubbornly resisted their efforts. Some engineering students studying properties of ceramics took note.

Despite this cake disaster, most people enjoy showing off their culinary achievements, both now and back in Jesus’ day. Martha didn’t have a microwave, but she certainly wanted to prepare something special for her honored guest. But, it’s easy to get wrapped up in our work, whatever it is, to the point that worry and fatigue take over, and that is what happened to Martha. That could happen to any of us - we begin to see our tasks as the most important thing in the world. We measure our value as a person by how much we get done – by how good our cake is. We may work so hard we don’t even take care of ourselves. Even when we have a moment to rest, thoughts of what we need to be doing cause us guilt if we don’t get right back to work.

When our daughter Christa was little. I was serving part-time as an associate pastor and part-time as a university instructor. I was pretty busy, but one day I managed to sit down for a few minutes with a cup of coffee. As I sipped, I looked around our living room and thought to myself, “I have to clean and dust in here. It’s a mess.” Suddenly a new thought jolted my brain. I told myself to stop, to just sit and enjoy my coffee instead of thinking about all I had to do. I decided to make a list of all the things I thought I should be doing each day and write beside them an estimate of how much time each task would take. When I added up the total, it came to more than 24 hours – without even allowing time for sleep! I decided I had unrealistic expectations of myself. I should stop feeling guilty if I didn’t get everything done. I have not always been successful, but that moment was the beginning of a change in my life. I no longer felt as if I had to do everything I thought I should.

Martha might have been that type of person – someone who was always busy, often doing things for others, who always had more to do than she really had time for. No wonder she was frustrated!

For those who are like Martha, this Gospel story reminds us, as the Psalmist said, to “be still and know that I am God,” to be quiet long enough to sense God’s presence in our lives, to see what God might have to say to us.

After all, Jesus seems to honor Mary’s path more, by saying that she “has chosen the better part,” sitting at Jesus’ feet, a place usually reserved for male disciples. He affirms that not just men, but women also have the right to sit and listen, even when there is housework to be done – a counter-cultural statement even today. On the other hand, he does not tell Martha to stop cooking. Rather, he suggests that her work has made her too “worried and distracted.” He isn’t scolding Martha as much as he is inviting her to put her worries aside and focus on what is really important – the opportunity to spend time with him. Some commentators interpret Jesus’ saying that “few things are needed—indeed only one” to mean that she didn’t need to prepare a banquet; one simple dish would suffice. Jesus challenged her to discern what was most important at that moment.

We often get so consumed by the chores of daily life that we neglect to notice the sacred in our midst.

Traditionally this story of Martha and Mary has been interpreted to mean that the contemplative life of prayer and meditation is better than a life of active service. The medieval church revered cloistered nuns who spent their lives in prayer, or ascetics such as the desert fathers, monks who retreated into the wilderness in search of solitude in order to escape the world and devote their lives to worshiping God. We think of great mystics, such as St. Teresa of Avila, who wrote The Interior Castle, and has greatly influenced our contemporary understanding of contemplative prayer. These are indeed spiritual giants whose lives and writings have guided many people into a deeper relationship with God.

On the other hand, we can name equally great figures such as Mother Theresa, who devoted her life to the poor and dying in Calcutta, and founded an order of sisters who now help the poorest of the poor in many countries around the world.

We think of Dorothy Day, who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement which integrated works of mercy, such as feeding the hungry and sheltering the unhoused, with activism for social change. She admired the saints of old, who cared for the sick and outcast, but she asked, “Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place?”

We could name many others who have dedicated their lives to helping their neighbors and working for peace and justice: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity, Rev. Arthur Simon, founder of Bread for the World. All of these embraced a life of active service to show love for their neighbors and to help the least of these.

So which path is the right one? Contemplation or action? It is significant that this story immediately follows that of the Good Samaritan. It is as if Luke in his retelling wanted to balance out an example of helping our neighbor with an example of someone sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening and learning.

This section of Luke is introduced by the two greatest commandments: “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.” Love for God and love for neighbor are both necessary. The challenge is finding the balance. The two sisters seem to echo this dichotomy: Mary showed her love for God by listening to Jesus’ teaching, drinking in his words. Martha showed her love by cooking a delicious meal for him and his disciples, so they would have strength to continue their work. Which one are you more like: Martha or Mary? Can we somehow be both?

Each person will answer this question a bit differently because God has given to each of us different personalities and different gifts. Everyone has something to contribute. All of us are needed in the Body of Christ. Like Martha, some are good at meeting practical needs, such as food and shelter. Some are good at organizing these efforts into programs, such as Louis Powell and Alfonso Mendez of Santa Maria Urban Ministry, who visited us last week.

Here at STHPC, we have people who are good at teaching, others who excel at maintaining our buildings and landscaping. Some have beautiful voices and musical talent, others artistic talent. Some can write a budget and manage money. We have doctors and nurses, computer experts, and more. The list goes on. But how can we know if we are putting our talents to their best use? How can we know that we are fitting in to God’s plan for our lives? How can we work with others in fellowship and harmony? These things require spending time with God, in prayer and discernment, reading and studying the Bible, and worshiping together.

Activist and non-violence trainer Daniel Hunter writes, “Being grounded is difficult when the future is unknown and filled with anxiety.” But, he continues, “For us to be of any use … we must pay attention to our inner states.” Mary paid attention to her inner state, her soul, by listening to Jesus. Even those great heroes of the faith who worked tirelessly to serve others spent time in prayer and worship.

Those familiar with the life of Mother Teresa say that intensive prayer was the source of her energy and compassion. She reminded the sisters that their strength to serve would dry up without daily prayer. Even during their busiest times, she insisted that the sisters continue in their daily hour of prayer and worship.

What we do flows from who we are. The stamina to continue serving others, loving our neighbors day after day comes from spending time with God, in worship, prayer, and meditating on God’s word. The Good News is, that whether or not we spend time with God, God loves us still. Even if we do not always show love to our neighbors, God doesn’t desert us. But God wants what is best for us - to live full lives, lives in which we put all our talents and gifts to use to further God’s kingdom and the well-being of creation. God invites us to join in the task of healing and reconciling the world. Love God and love your neighbor. So today, if Jesus sat down in your living room, what would he say to you? Let’s have a few moments of silent meditation….Amen.