Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Eighth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 11 Year C
It’s Not a Nice Story
Deacon Richard Buhrer

When I was in the Jesuits, my master of novices was a man named J. Gordon Moreland. He was the only Jesuit in the province who was a Republican (these were in the years of the Nixon presidency). The building we were in was built to house two or three hundred men but when I was there, we only numbered about twenty, so we were like marbles in a shoebox. There were what seemed like acres of low lying juniper bushes that were in constant need of weeding, so three days a week most of us were outside in sunny weather weeding the juniper beds. Consequently, we nicknamed the novice master I Garden More Land.

Father Moreland thought that “nice” was the most insipid (and therefore insulting) word in the entire English language. Occasionally he would get this really evil grin on his face and say, “That’s nice, brother!” When that happened, we would know that that something was not OK.

The story of Mary and Martha is often heard as a “nice” story, in just that insipid connotation. Martha is doing what she is supposed to do; our sympathies are often really with her. We all know that Mary is slacking off but Jesus is indulgent because he recognizes her love for him.

But something much more radical is happening here. “To sit at the feet of” someone, in the Jewish milieu of Jesus’ time, meant to become a rabbinical student of someone. The Hebrew word, yeshiva, which we hear in the name of the primary university of Israel (Yeshiva University) and hear again as the name of Hebrew schools of conservative Jews, comes from the Hebrew word meaning “to sit.”

Jesus is enrolling Mary, a woman, in his cadre of students (disciples) with equal status with the men who follow him. This amounts to disregarding all of the rules of society on gender roles. Jesus, in some sense, is ending the world as we know it and beginning the world of the Resurrection (where there is neither marriage or giving in marriage, as the Gospel of Matthew points out).[1] I have come to think of Jesus incarnation and teaching as a Great Reversal, turning the universe upside down and making it into something completely different from what it has become under the burden of sin. He does this by making the bottom into the top, as it were.

During this season of this year, we are reading about the ministry and teaching of the Hebrew prophets. Now we are reading from the Book of Amos. Today, Amos challenges with another aspect of this Great Reversal:

“Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, 6buying 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. Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt?”[2]

Incidentally the ephah was a measure of volume and the shekel is a measure of money by weight. So much of what Amos condemns is part of the way our culture does business. I would swear that McDonald’s hamburgers are smaller than they once were. It annoys me when I’m shopping for groceries that they inject water into bacon so it will weigh more.  So much of what the prophet Amos condemns is really just the way our culture does business always focused on maximizing prophets and minimizing costs. Rabbi Michael Lerner, in his book, The Left Hand of God[3], talks about the impact on the quality of our lives of living with our cultures emphasis on “the bottom line.” He sees it as interfering in our families, our intimate relationships, our satisfaction with our work, our hopes for our future. He also sees it as awakening a longing for meaning and relationship with God. This reminds me of Amos’ warning of a coming famine of hearing the word of God. Amos’ emphasizes economic justice as the prerequisite for a covenant relationship with the Lord. This, too, is turning our world on its head.

What amazes me in the life of Jesus is how unrestrained he was by the conventions of his culture. He didn’t ask permission, he didn’t pick fights with the rich and powerful. He didn’t make it a big deal. He just went through his life doing the right thing effortlessly. I really envy that and wish that I could learn how he did it. I tend to whine too much. Believe it or not, I feel like I have to plead with the powers that be for permission to color outside of the lines.

Somehow Jesus elicited this ability to do what is right from the people who followed him, especially the women who followed him, like Mary of Bethany in today’s reading, Mary Magdalene and the Samaritan woman at the well. I think it was because they were already on the bottom and had little to lose by stepping out of line and so much to gain.

We all have so much to gain by living this way: Doing so would free us from mountains of shame and regret and it would allow us to stand peacefully before “the great judgment seat of Christ,” to which the Prayer Book refers.

How do we do this? I fall short of this so often in my own life that I am embarrassed to try and tell anyone how it’s done. But the key, I think, is focusing on human beings: human needs, human longings, human relationships, human interactions. Looking the person who is panhandling on the street in the eye, asking him or her “how’s it going?” and listening to their answer. I think we do this by listening to our inner voices telling us when we are in pain, when we are longing, when we are dissatisfied, when we feel joy. And above all, I think we accomplish this by prayer, listening to the voice of the Father in the quiet of our hearts.

In Isaiah, another of the prophets who will speak to us this summer, there is a passage where Isaiah responds to the people asking why their fasts do not seem to change any thing. He responds with this passage:

Is not this the fast that I choose:

   to loose the bonds of injustice,

   to undo the thongs of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,

   and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,

   and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover them,

   and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

Jesus showed us how “not to hide ourselves from our own kin.” Let’s follow his example and win the promise that follows this passage in Isaiah:

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,

   and your healing shall spring up quickly;

your vindicator shall go before you,

   the glory of the Lord shall be your rearguard.

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;

   you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.