Luke 10:38-42

As Jesus and his disciples went on their way, Jesus entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. 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.” But the Lord answered 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.”

“There is need of only one thing,” Jesus says to Martha about Mary’s choice to sit at his feet and listen. “There is need of only one thing.”

I am a terrible gardener. My approach to gardening is to take a bunch of plants throw then in unprepared ground and hope that they do well. I have also never been a person who was very good at thinning a flower bed. If one plant is good, I reason, why aren’t five or ten or twenty better? And anyway, how am I supposed to go about choosing which plants to leave in the bed and which ones to pluck up? How is it possible to forgo some in favor of others? Isn’t tending to them all and simply seeing what happens be a better plan?

And so, based on this reasoning, my typical pattern has been to plant many seeds, or to put my energy in many directions and to see which plant would end up yielding flower or fruit, which direction would end up leading someplace real and true.

This approach, you might say, is a bit of Martha’s approach in our gospel for today. She is pulled in many directions, which is the literal meaning of the Greek word for “distracted” that Jesus uses to describe her. I wonder if this is a pattern for her—it feels that way to me—similar to my tendency to plant many seeds, to go down many roads.

But more importantly, in our gospel for today Martha’s many directions are wigging her out. And she’s not only anxious and worried about all the things that need to get done, she’s anxious and worried about someone else—her sister Mary.

Ah, Mary—the one who has chosen not to do what her sister is doing. Mary, the one who has chosen not to get up and help out the way that women of the time would be expected to do in order to serve Jesus and the male disciples that would’ve inevitably come along with him into the household. Mary—the woman not tending to the needs of the men but choosing to do one thing only, to sit with the rest of the disciples and to listen to the Lord of Life, to listen, in fact, as a disciple, herself.

And this is a threatening action.

In choosing to do this, Mary is threatening to her sister whose life had in part been founded on the assumption that she as a woman would selflessly and invisibly serve while others ate.

In choosing to do this, Mary is threatening to the disciples whose assumptions had been that women were not capable of being faithful hearers of the word much less doers of the word.

And, finally, in choosing to do this, Mary is threatening to us, not, these days, because she is a woman who goes beyond her station, but because she dares to turn away from the distractions and anxieties so tempting for us to get lost in today and to sit and listen to the voice of the Holy One come close to her: the voice that reminds her of who she is and what she has come on this earth to do, the voice of the firstborn of all creation whose voice is as imposing as the silence of a great mountain, whose voice that is a as deep and vast as the murmur of the ocean, whose voice that is as clear and as true as the presence of a towering evergreen.

And so for us, this is the invitation and the thing that makes us anxious, to bring the parts of ourselves that had we had hoped to keep tucked away in the kitchen, the parts of ourselves that will easily go in a million directions, be driven to distraction, in order to be useful to people and things that are thought to be important, to bring these reticent, timid and big-eyed parts of ourselves forward to sit and listen to the one whose voice is as imposing as the silence of a great mountain, to one whose voice is as deep and vast as the murmur of the ocean, and to hear the one whose voice is as clear and as true as the presence of a towering evergreen.

We are invited, like Mary, to hear and to listen to the voice of the Holy One who has come close and, out of this listening, to discover the source of our dignity and to discover the one thing, the portion that will never be taken away from us, the calling in Christ that we uniquely have been given.

“There is need of only one thing,” Jesus says to Martha about Mary. He is also saying it to you and to me. “There is need of only one thing.”

What is it that keeps you distracted and anxious and away from the one thing that would enable you to become the full human being, the disciple, the Lord of Life invites you to be? What is it that sends you away into the kitchen, away from the table of your own dignity and the quiet listening of your own discernment? What impulse keeps you from being claimed by the Lord of Life and out of this, claiming the vocation that is given to you?

Father Steven Sundborg, President of Seattle University, preached on this very text some four years ago at the University’s Commencement ceremony. This is the story he tells about the difference between being distracted and anxious about many things and being in the space of “the one thing”:

“I walk around Green Lake a couple of times each week before dawn. It’s where I take my soul—rather than my dog—for a spin and where I do my thinking, although it feels more like my thinking does me. At this time of year there are many fishermen there. Just look at one: sitting patiently in his collapsible chair on the shore of the lake, thermos of coffee or whatever in hand, alert to a pole in a sprocket, pointing out to the lake, line, leader, hook, sinker, bobber, spinner, lure, worms, egg, rusty tackle box, large plastic pail for hoped-for fish, and always a huge net at the ready just in case Moby Dick the Whale should happen into Green Lake. We, fishing from the shore of the pool of the Mystery of our life, patiently hopeful to catch the big one, hear: ‘Fisherman—you—are busy about many things, but only one thing is needed.’

Further around Green Lake I come upon a Great Blue Heron standing in the calm shallow water on the edge of the lake, absolutely still, poised, ready to strike, unable for the early light to see into the water, but, I realize, also fishing, alert to feel the slightest movement of a fish against its toes or against its two thin legs, no gear, just fishing with its feet. On the existential level only one thing is needed, the better part that cannot be taken away, and the Great Blue Heron knows how to fish for the one needed thing. Somehow each of us knows that to find what we are really looking for, we have to stand utterly still in the pool of Mystery in which we live and fish with our feet for the one, only needed thing.”

Whatever is it for you: loving service to another, the pursuit of beauty which is the pursuit of the truth of human experience, working for justice, the living of a generous life, being peacefully present to all that is distracted and anxious in the world—whatever it is—it will come, I believer after all of our rushing around has fallen in on itself. It will come when, drawn past all our excuses and attempts to escape, we dare to sit at the feet of the one in whom all things are held together, the one in whom the fullness of God and the fullness of our own humanity is pleased to dwell.

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