Sermon of 22 July 2007
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Readings:
Genesis 18:1-10a,
Psalm 15,
Colossians 1:15-28,
Luke 10:38-42There was once a young man named Agamemnon. Born the first of two children in a small but growing Midwestern town, Agamemnon had a fairly normal childhood in the post World War II era of the late forties and early fifties. His father said of him that Agamemnon was a very serious and responsible child – that he kept to himself a lot and was always interested more in entrepreneurialism than in childish games.
These skills lent themselves well to the family’s survival when at thirteen, Agamemnon put himself to work to help keep his mother and his younger brother afloat after his father left. Plying all his young skill, Agamemnon helped to make a living for the family as well as finishing high school. His early high school love remembers him as his father does – as a very serious and hard working young man.
His quick mind and determination earned him a place aboard a naval ship during Vietnam, where he again proved his skill by keeping temperamental radar equipment functioning. While overseas, he wrote letters back and forth to his young bride until he finally came home in 1969.
Agamemnon scraped by on practically nothing as a child and vowed to make a better life for his family. When his tour of duty ended, he took a job with the Railroad, working his way up to engineer and eventually being asked to represent the railroad workers with the union. During this time, his first and second sons were born.
Dedicating as much time and energy as he could to his work, Agamemnon worked his way up through the ranks over the years to finally run for vice president of the whole union before he retired. He had a beautiful house, two cars and a pickup in the driveway, money invested in stocks and bonds, and an ever growing retirement pension – all preparing for the day when he could finally retire and enjoy the fruits of his labor.
Unlike his own father, Agamemnon had provided security, stability, and a future for his family. Until the day he came home to find his family gone.
Amidst the terrible stresses of his sixty-plus-hour per week job, amidst the struggling to save and scrape whatever he could to provide for his family and their future, amidst the forty eight weeks per year of office work, weekend business trips, late nights, and week-long conventions, Agamemnon lost touch with his family.
His growing irritability from the rigors of his professional life, combined with his expertly honed arguments from years of union negotiations made him a formidable and intimidating opponent both professionally, and unfortunately at home.
Agamemnon was and is a good man. He is honest, hard working, loving, faithful, and fiercely protective of those he holds dear. But how do you tell someone who has worked their entire life to eek out a solid living for their family that all you really ever wanted was a father?
The kind of hospitality demonstrated in our scriptures today paints a picture for us of the way God intends for us to be in relationship with one another.
Abraham too was a hard-working man – struggling in the desert to find enough resources to keep his herds and his family alive as he followed God’s call to him to leave his home and set out on what often seemed like a fool’s errand. More than once, he thought he was going to die childless and forsaken by God, yet we see in today’s lesson from Genesis that even in the midst of whatever hardships he was enduring at the time, Abraham dropped everything to reach out to the three strangers who appeared at his door. He took of the fruits of his own labor to provide what could only be described as a feast. He sat with them in conversation, heedless of the work that was left undone. He held up a model of hospitality that welcomed the stranger out of a hostile and deadly environment, providing them with an oasis of God’s abundance and safety. Given the option between valuing work and physical prosperity over the needs of these strangers, Abraham stopped what he was doing to engage in relationship – and again and again, we are told, it was accounted unto him as righteousness.
Again, in our Gospel reading for today, we see the familiar story of Mary and Martha welcoming Jesus into their home, providing an amazing model of the kind of relationships God wishes for us.
Martha, the pragmatic, responsible host, busies her self with the work of the house while Mary, the inveterate feminist of the story places herself at Jesus’ feet as a disciple, turning the normal system of her time on its head. The story begs us to make our own judgment as to which sister is in the right, and it seems as though it must be Martha until Jesus comes to Mary’s defense.
The key piece of the story for me today came from Christ’s explanation that “there is need for only one thing.” While Martha worried and distracted herself with the many tasks of making her home, she neglected the one thing that her guest needed – her presence. As unfair as it seemed that Mary chose to sit at Jesus’ feet rather than helping Martha with the busywork of tidying the house, Mary was the one that demonstrated the value she placed on the relationship with her guest. In the moment of choice between leaving her guest to sit while she helped to scurry around the house, giving him only passing attention, and letting go of the business to focus on Christ, Mary chose the relationship. And as was the case with Abraham, it was accorded unto her as righteousness – “Mary has chosen the better part,” Christ explains, “which will not be taken away from her.”
What kept Martha from similarly sitting at Jesus’ feet was only her sense of duty and responsibility to provide for her guest. She was certainly not a bad host, nor was she in the wrong for trying to provide for those dear to her, but amidst the stresses of completing her daily chores as well as providing additional resources for her guest, amidst her commitment and dedication to the traditions of her time, amidst her valiant attempts to complete her work so that she could then get to the business of concentrating on relationships, Martha risked losing touch with her guest.
We will doubtless each find at some point in our lives that we are concentrating our energies so much on a single task that we begin to lose sight of the bigger picture.
Whether it be school, work, taking care of the kids, creating the “perfect” life, or even caring for a loved one during a time of illness or reaching for a life-long dream, we will one day be forced into the realization that we are out of balance. It comes in the form of high blood pressure, heart attack, and other stress induced diseases of the cardio-pulmonary system; it comes in the form of alienation from friends and family, it comes in the form of one day finding oneself surrounded with every material thing ever hoped for and suddenly finding them empty without deep and lasting relationships that feed the heart and the soul, and it comes in the form of crises of the soul.
I phoned Fuego on Friday night from the car. I was on my way home from shopping for a retreat, picking up pacifiers for Emjay, stopping by the office to check my email, picking up change for a youth group parent from our trip to the water park earlier in the week, picking up tickets to the new Harry Potter movie, and was on the way home to scramble through the house and get back over to the theater for the 7:00 showing – where I was due in a half hour. This kind of thrilling scavenger hunt through town pretty much described my daily life as a young adult. Scurrying from place to place, always rushing to make it to the next destination in my overbooked schedule between working 50-70 hours per week at Intel, leading youth group, Sunday school, the acolyte team, the healing team, and acting as clerk for the vestry at church, attending five to seven martial arts classes per week, and squeezing in one or two meals and up to six hours of sleep per day. I lived for the chase and went about two years without a vacation. Then I met Fuego. Suddenly all the terribly important details of my franticly paced life seemed trivial. And as I began to slow down and enter more deeply into relationships, not only with Jane but with friends I hadn’t spent any truly quality time with since high school, I found myself feeling more alive than I had felt in years. So as I drove home on Friday, feeling stressed out and tired from just a few hours of what used to be my whole life, I called Fuego to tell her affectionately, “honey, you’ve ruined me.”
For all the emphasis I put on becoming instruments of God’s kingdom, the true heart of Christ’s ministry, and the core of bringing God’s kingdom to each other is found in relationships with one another and with God.
“Mary chose the better part” by seeking the balance of working toward the end of furthering the relationships that feed our very existence in ways that ‘a job well done’ simply cannot.
With Martha, we are called today to examine the emphases in our lives. We are called to take a close look at where our energies are concentrated and strive to make the changes necessary to find a balance between the work that sustains us in the world, and the relationships that feed us and feed God’s own community amongst us.
And as for Agamemnon? Well, I still think he works more than he should for the balance he needs in his life, but I sincerely believe that he has come to recognize that Mary’s part is at least a close second to Martha’s. And when it comes to his grandchildren, Christ himself would be proud to see Agamemnon sitting at his feet.
It is up to us too to choose the better part. It is never too late to seek the balance in life that draws us to sit at God’s feet.
Amen.
