A Tale of Two Sisters - July 22, 2007

Luke 10:38-42

My little sister used to get away with murder.  Now I know lots of people who grew up with siblings claim that the other child was the family favorite--that somehow the other child seldom had to do any chores, got more privileges at an earlier age, and never got blamed when there was trouble between the two, but in my case it really happened!  The absolute worse was when our mother took us shopping.  As soon as the three of us would enter the store, my little sister would take off like a shot to find a way to make mischief, and my mother would turn to me and say the words I dreaded hearing, “Julie, go after her, and make sure she doesn’t get in to trouble or get lost.”

If I had known then what I would grow up to become, I might have  come back to my mother with something snappy—something form the Bible-- like, “Am I my sister’s keeper?”  But instead I seem to recall saying, “Mom, I don’t want to chase after her.  Why can’t I stay with you?”  But my mother never would bite.  “Take care of her.  You’re older than her.  She might get lost.”

And so off I would go, looking for this four year old whirling dervish who loved to hide in what I called the “spinny racks”—the big round racks for displaying clothing. Once my little sister climbed into the middle of a spinny rack, the only way I could find her was to spin it and wait for her to holler. Unsuspecting customers used to find her there, too.  While I was going through the store spinning rack after rack, looking for the one which held my mischievous little sister, other customers would look at me as if I was the naughty one.  “Young lady, would you please stop doing that?”  Ten feet away I could hear my sister giggling from behind a rack of lady’s skirts.  My little sister used to get away with murder.

I wouldn’t really appreciate those shopping trips, just the three of us, until much later in my life.   In my seven-year-old perspective, it seemed as if the only purpose I served was little sister finder.  That changed several years later, when my parents were seriously injured in a car accident the winter I was eleven years old.  Our family had grown to include three foster siblings by then, making us a family of eight.  Suddenly as the oldest girl in the family with three younger sisters, I was thrust into some rather adult responsibilities.  Chief among them was making sure my little sisters got ready for school, had clean clothes, and baths, and that the family had dinner every night while my parents recovered from some pretty serious injuries. It was a long time before I felt like a child again.

But I learned something, even as a sliver of my childhood slipped out of my eleven year old hands—hands too busy carrying laundry up two flights of stairs or drying off a slippery little sister—I learned that I got an enormous amount of respect and admiration from adults by doing adult-sized chores as a pathetically skinny sixth-grader.   That respect and admiration became like a drug to me, filling a hole left where a normal childhood, spent with two healthy parents, had been.  Like most addictions, my need to do more, to be better, to anticipate the other’s needs came from a life out of balance and a skewed sense of my self as a child of God.  I had achieved by age eleven what takes some people thirty years—the belief that busier is better.

This Mary and Martha story—this other tale of two sisters—is a favorite among some clergy women I know.  Finally—a story with Jesus and two women, where the disciples or some other men in the town are not center stage!  A lot of self-assessment goes on in seminaries around this story.  And most women I know can locate them selves on the Mary/Martha scale. We know if we are full-blown Marthas, ultimate Marys or perhaps solid Marthas with slight Mary-like tendencies after the laundry is finally caught up.  (That last one is me, by the way.)

I like to think that if Jesus was sitting in my living room, I would be on the loveseat cattycorner from him, just soaking it all up.  But who am I kidding?  If his glass is empty I’m not going to just sit there. “Lord, did you try the brie?  It’s surprisingly good for cheese from the supermarket.”   A person has got to be hospitable to the Savior of the world!

So when Martha turns to Jesus and says, “You know, my little sister gets away with murder.”  I’m sympathetic. How many times have I wished to be the one sitting relaxing and enjoying life instead of all of the doing I seem to have done?    It’s Jesus’ response to her that makes me (all the other self-confirmed Marthas) flinch, and is the sticking point to this story: “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."

Thanks a lot Jesus.  What am I supposed to do with that?  If I sound a little defensive, its perhaps because the culture backs me up on this.  Busier is better.  That lesson I learned the hard way as a child was reinforced pretty quickly out in the real world, where I found it was not only the attention and respect of adults in my immediate circle that I could get by trying to overachieve, but was the attention of scholarship committees and college recruiters—things I desperately needed. After that came professors, employers…other people whose respect and admiration I wanted.  And I needed that like a junkie needs a fix.

It seemed as if I was on a runaway busy-ness train until I finally came across people who couldn’t care less how efficient, how effective I was at keeping up with the house, or how hard I worked at being hospitable.  Babies don’t care about any of that.  They just want to be loved.

Perhaps we can look at what Jesus said to Martha this way: instead of reprimanding her, Jesus was trying to teach her the lesson my babies taught me: that all the clean dishes in the world, all the busyness that the culture rewards, all the admiration we might gain from being in perpetual motion won’t matter, if we do not take the time to love.  That pure grace can replace—surpasses, even— accolades for a job well done.  In fact, isn’t that what the gospel stands for—the truth that we are deeply and irresistibly loved despite our ability to measure up to what other people expect from us?       

We don’t know what happens to Martha after Jesus says this to her.  Like many stories, hers is unfinished.  Maybe she bristled at his words, feeling slightly stung at the gently implied rebuke/grace lesson. But maybe when the sting of his words wore off a little she was able to understand were Jesus was really coming from, was able to feel the love and acceptance that is ours as children of God.  It is that love and acceptance—that grace—that allows us to reorder priorities, that loosens the grip that the idolatry of our own sense of essentialness has on our hearts, that prompts the joyful response of the people of God in the work of the kindom where there used to be grim capitulation to the gods of busy-ness.

As for this sister—I’m a work in progress.  Sometimes I need the occasional whack with the cosmic 2x4 to remember.  That’s where the Church comes in.  We are called and gathered here to be the reminder for each other and for those outside our midst whom we can reach with the real message of grace—that we are loved beyond reason, and cherished beyond all sensibility.

I’ll be your 2x4.  Will you be mine?

Thanks be to God.