Hillside Swedenborgian Community Church

Being There

Hillside Community Church

June 14, 2009

Rev. Jim Lawrence

Luke 10:38-42

A stitch in time saves nine!

God helps those who help themselves.

Know where you want to go and get up and go!

Doing nothing is not an option.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Just do it!

American culture reveres doers, and lots of us are profoundly programmed to do. Doing gets you to your goals: that big checklist for success which tends to program ours days with non-stop doing.  But this hallowed gospel scene of when Jesus came to the home of Martha and Mary appears to crash headlong into such logic.

I once had a parishioner tell me that the one Bible story that really got up her nose was this one. I think she saw herself in Martha, and that Martha is a good way to be. She empathized with Martha, felt the urgent cares of Martha, carried the burdens of Martha. And not only is Martha not thanked for all her hard work in this revered story, but she is actually rebuked for all her doing–and her sister who hasn’t lifted a finger—is praised. An intensely irritating little scene, she declared.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of us don’t surreptitiously identify with Martha, and like my former parishioner, are a little proud of it.  In our society people will sometimes cleverly refer to themselves as a workaholic in an apparent self-criticism but really as a way of boasting. Our culture is full of biographies of workaholics whose immense efforts pay off in Herculean results. The great doers, after all, are the ones who get featured, praised, and exalted in our cultural discourse. Many folks secretly would place Donald Trump in the place of Jesus, and in the Gospel according to Donald, he says, “Martha, Martha, how ceaselessly and efficiently you produce. Mary: you’re fired!”

What is this vignette really about? The story has been interpreted in different ways in different periods of Christian history.  In the modern period of Christian history, it has been made increasingly clear through social analysis of ancient Near Eastern society that in the gospels Jesus broke molds of social roles for women–that Jesus was a feminist in his social context, and in the early church, before patriarchy became organizational theology, women often played rather revolutionary roles. Mary was sitting at the feet of a rabbi like a student would, but then only men could be students. She was refusing to stay in the kitchen, literally and figuratively. So interest in the “Martha and Mary” account in recent times has highlighted this angle—that Mary was breaking boundaries, and Jesus was affirming her in choosing this, the better part.

As far back as late antiquity and the early middles ages this Lukan story emerged as a powerful symbolic text in the monastic tradition. Both women and men in religious orders have seen in Martha and Mary as spiritual types—the first of the active life and the second of the contemplative life, interpreting Jesus as preferencing contemplative life. Jumping forward more than a millennium, throughout Protestant history there have been countless “Martha and Mary” societies and guilds, which have been women’s auxiliary groups who do Bible study (Mary) and service projects (Martha). In this appropriation of the classic gospel story, the two sisters are put rather on a par.

The Swedenborgian lens I think adds a great deal. Swedenborg also sees in Martha and Mary a presentation of two types, but it isn’t two equal types. Rather, the sisters represent two types of love guiding spiritual life, but they picture a progressive journey of spiritual life. Martha he calls natural love and Mary spiritual love. One isn’t bad and the other good, nor are both equally good, but rather there is a progression of state in spiritual formation that leads from a Martha state to a Mary state, which in turn then enriches and uplifts the active life represented by Martha.

What Swedenborg describes as natural love is an early stage in spiritual formation. It does not see deeply into the affairs of life, it is not aware of the larger sphere of the deep source of being that come from God in all things. Its gaze is more on the ground, and in the natural love stage we are still largely self-focused.  Martha is caught up in how much she is doing and so is focused within her self-effort. Mary, by sitting at the feet of the representative of God, blossoms as an emblem of trust anchored beyond the self in God. Mary doesn’t stand for doing nothing, but for being centered in God and thus so in her doing. When spiritual love becomes the ground and anchor, we don’t do less at all. But we do with spiritual sight, vision, and compassion. Swedenborg calls this rebirth, and he understands the inner sense of scripture to be frequently an illustration of the most important theme of the Bible, which is regeneration from a purely “natural” person to an angelic one. Everybody gets a natural birth and a capacity to love themselves and love aspects of the world, but to be born from above requires an intentional journey.

Joseph Campbell, the late-great philosopher of world myths, once used T.S. Eliot’s line to describe what he viewed as the waste-land lives of the majority of people he knew. “Many,” he wrote, “are just wandering in the waste-land without any sense of where the water is—the source of what makes things green.” Campbell was a man who spent a brilliant lifetime studying the religions of the world and how they nurtured people. He found a lack of this nurturing quality in contemporary America—a culture he deemed so busy and distracted that most are not getting deep soul nurturance. I might add that since his death with the explosion of communications technology, matters have yet deteriorated. I’m no Luddite, but I walk around in a culture where large numbers are wired all day long to the internet, to texting, to downloading, to “sharing” with fifty people at a pop. Educators have raised the alarm around the change-the-focus every few seconds and the famed plunging attention span among our young. Marthas on triple-espressos all day long.

At the heart of Jesus’ reply to Martha are these words: “You are worried and distracted about many things; there is a better way to abide in your doing: you need to take your game up a notch—spiritually.” Gandhi’s nurse, Rambda, used to take little boy Gandhi to watch the elephants process on holy days through the Porbander bazaar in the small city in which he grew up. As the elephants ambled down the streets among the shops and vendors, their trunks would often swing restlessly from side to side, dipping into the stalls, searching out coconuts and bananas. To settle the elephants down, each might be given a bamboo stick to hold with its trunk. The moment the trunk wrapped itself around the bamboo stick, the elephant settled down. There was no more restlessness, no more pilfering. Rambda taught the child, “Your mind is very much like the elephant’s trunk. When you enter into meditation, this restlessness falls away.”  The elephants in the bazaar story remained with Gandhi later in life. He liked to tell the elephants fixed upon the bamboo sticks and an example of the teaching of the Bhagavad-Gita, “To make your mind steady in every circumstance victory and defeat, praise and blame, love and hatred – and wherever you go, nothing can shake you from your goal. Then you can call yourself free.”

That may not be anything different than today’s Lukan version of spiritually-infused action when we have likewise learned the better part, and from there better engage the world.

How do we learn this better part?  It isn’t, in my opinion, an easy place to get to. Life tends to challenge us constantly. No sooner than we have some victories and feel that we’ve made some progress in the way in which we are engaging life spiritually when then suddenly we find life throwing nasty curve balls back at us.

The royal road to learning the better part is conscious and conscientious spiritual practice. Is there any matter in life that one can think of where practice is of no use? No. Why would spiritual life be any different? Whether it is meditation, prayer and devotional study, focused social action, finding a zazen in which one immerses regularly, certainly participating in a good church program with consistency and close attention—the main realization is, as our American mogul culture might put it: Just do it!