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| Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, by Jan Vermeer National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh 1654-1655 |
Prayer and Action
Last Sunday I preached on the story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42). Martha has strenuously worked to fix dinner and gets worked up, watching Mary just sit and talk to Jesus, and she's angry at them both. I’ve been there. From the response Sunday morning, others have been, as well. Several parishioners formed a Mary society during coffee hour, challenging one another to “be” Mary five times during the week. I'm very pleased, because several minutes of “being Mary” counts—just listening to, thinking about, being with, Jesus. Stopping doing just to be. I"m trying it myself.
I’ve been Martha, often, and spoke her feelings last Sunday: “I was awake during the night, worried about the dinner I said I’d serve; and here is Jesus, talking about the lilies of the field, and how God loves all creatures, and all…Does God love me? Does anyone (especially Mary and Jesus) actually care about me? Worker as I am…without me, there would be no dinner… Does anybody care?”
I’m pondering this today because several stories in the recent The Lutheran speak about evangelism; what is the best way to “talk about Christ, ” to express our faith? Answer: to be a model of Christ-like love. And how can we be a model of Christ-like love without action?
Dr. Lisa Dahill writes in “Conversations with Atheists” in that issue of The Lutheran that many atheists reject “...the ways popular culture speaks of God: as, say, a watchful judge, a supernatural being, an old man in the sky or even a projection of our nation pride.”
But I don’t believe in that God, either! I believe in--relish in--the God of love incarnate in all that is.
Seemingly, so does Dahill (and actually many parishioners at Ascension).
Dahill invites us to follow Jesus into the world, rather than call athetists into the church, because Jesus is the DNA “...of all that is (John 1:1-5), the very abundance of life (John 10:10) for us and all creation. And thus what speaks this living Word perhaps most evangelically of all is lives opened up for the life of the world: Christians living this love in prison gardens and at deathbeds, in wetland restoration and after-school arts programs and (with [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer) organized difficult political resistance to evil.” (The Lutheran, August 2013, p. 19)
Wonderful stuff to think about and live. Like the strands of the DNA double helix, which encodes genetic instructions in all known living organisms, wholeness/wellness/salvation depends on weaving together times of reflection and action, prayer and work, returning home to rest, and going out to bring our unique selves and gifts to a beautiful, complex, suffering, glorious world.
Prayer and action: in discovering how they work together, we discover and become ourselves as followers of the Way of Jesus.
