One Thing Necessary
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Sixth Sunday After Pentecost by the Rev. Holly Huff.
Martha is a modern woman. Apparently the anxiety we consider characteristic of our age was not unknown in the era before smartphones and social media that is most of human history. These are certainly aids in stoking the furnace of afflicting thoughts—for instance the ability to doomscroll a partisan digest of news filtered through reactive outrage before one has even rolled out of bed can’t be helping any of us—but the propensity to worry, and to be distracted by our many tasks, consumed by busy-ness, is baked into the human condition as we find it this side of Eden. Scattered in anxiety, in our ruminations about the past, and fears about the future, we run to and fro, blaming others, complaining, feeling resentful, wronged and abandoned. Flustered to find God incarnate under her roof, Martha is scurrying to prepare a meal adequate to the guest she has welcomed into her home, and distracted in these tasks she is missing the guest Himself. Martha, who we should remember is very faithful, takes it to Jesus—wherever we find ourselves, in whatever condition, that’s what faith does, take it to Jesus. She says, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her to help me.” Jesus’s answer is gentle yet grounding. He dispels the anxious busy haze of helping and doing, saying “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.”
When we hear Jesus say “Martha, Martha,” let the reader understand “Your Name Here.” Holly, Holly, worried and distracted by many things, there is need of only one thing. The one thing necessary, one thing needful, the better part that will not be taken away. And what is that one thing? Mary, surrendered at the feet of Jesus becomes the icon of this one thing needful, from which all our other needs will be met. Still at the center of activity, she is prayer embodied, devoted, obedient, enjoying God’s presence, attentive and receptive, that is, receiving what God is giving as a gift: the gift of God’s own self.
The essential faith of the Christian is that we are children before a loving God who we can rely on for simply everything. This is the one thing necessary. Jesus trusts his Father with a steady, dependable, easy intimacy, and he invites us to live from this same trust, just as he teaches us to call on “Our Father, who art in heaven…” for everything we need. No coincidence that today’s gospel passage is followed immediately by the Lord’s prayer! The better part which cannot be taken away is to trust God, to let God love us and give us what we need, to depend on God for daily bread.
I couldn’t help but think of Mary and Martha a couple of weeks ago as I was visiting my family. I watched my aunt flurry around the kitchen as she prepared food for the small army of Huffs who had descended on her backyard. Between checking the oven and fussing with the Instant Pot, we were talking about what it means to trust God. She was telling me that she has a strong faith, she sees the Lord’s hand in her life, and yet she still struggles to fully embody her trust in God. In the day to day, she still finds herself driven by worry and anxiety, and so she has been reading these words from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount every morning: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” (Matt. 6:25-30)
Trusting God is not a task among others to be accomplished in the way that we are accustomed to, Marthas that we are. The insight that emerged in that conversation with my aunt, slipped in between ensuring the chicken was done and confirming we’d made enough rice for hordes of hungry cousins, is that surrendering ourselves at the feet of Jesus, devoting ourselves to the one thing necessary in loving trust, is God’s work. You can’t try harder to trust God. You can’t improve yourself into surrender. You have to let God do it in you, is the point. Yes, we assent to God’s work in us, and that allowing is key, but even that is done by grace in us. It is a release, a yielding, allowing busy-ness to subside so that trust can spring up just as graciously as those lilies of the field. Often we have to learn this the hard way, after we’ve exhausted ourselves in trying. Worn out from treading water, we lay back and find out we float! The God who watches over the sparrow watches over me, too, and knows what I need before I ask. And there is no need to do anything to obtain the one thing that is truly needful, because that one thing is actually a Person who is already here. God has come under your roof, and there is nothing you need to do to entertain or play host. Jesus will be the host of this banquet. As Elijah was fed by ravens in the wilderness and woke to a hot meal under the broom tree, God will feed you. As the children of Israel opened their tent doors to holy manna, daily bread, new each morning, God will care for you, just as God cares for the sparrows.
Our anxiety comes from the illusion that we are separated from God. Much like the people Amos is calling to greater faithfulness, we “run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but [we] shall not find it,” as long as we persist in thinking it’s something to be found out there, outside, in scurrying about, running to and fro. No, “the Word is very near you.” “You are nearer to me than I am to myself, O Lord,” St. Augustine prayed. God has come under your own roof, and there is nothing to do but lay yourself down at his feet. Martha is trying to love God and serve God and a little stressed out by it all. This is often what we imagine faith requires. We’re more comfortable thinking of ourselves serving God rather than depending on God, receiving our life moment by moment from God’s hand. Yet the call is to let God serve us, to receive God whose very nature it is to be continually pouring out in self-emptying love. Amid frenzied activity, Mary sits, blissfully surrendered at Jesus’s feet. She is letting God serve her, allowing herself to be exposed to the relentless sunshine of God’s unfailing love, which can’t help but heal her. Again, it’s no mistake that this story follows directly on the heels of the story of the good Samaritan, which is of course the story of Jesus coming among us to be our neighbor, joining us in our fleshly human predicament, picking us up and showering us in mercy. Jesus finds us where we wander, out on the road, in the ditch, and Jesus shows up at home, too, right under our roof. And wherever we may be, this is still our calling: to trust from the posture of dependent children who know they can rely on a God of infinite tenderness for absolutely everything, following Jesus into surrendered obedience and receptivity as Mary has here.
One thing alone is needful. And as for everything else, “your Father knows that you have need of them.” Faith is not a retreat from the world but rather sends us out into it to bear the love we have received to others. From the one thing necessary, all other necessaries flow out naturally. From a surrendered heart emerges right action that is truly responsive to our neighbor. This becomes possible when we are no longer reacting from a scattered-shattered need to be busy and useful and helpful, but truly attuned to the person in front of us, just as we have learned God is always attuned to us. Would-be Marthas, take note: surrendered at the foot of Jesus, you actually get more done! Prayer is decidedly not a program for productivity but it does happen to be a more fruitful way, as gratuitous love faithfully received overflows naturally into loving action.
Our lives are full of distractions: to and fro, far and near, by the roadside and right at home, and the many tasks that keep us so frantically busy. Yet as the letter to the Colossians says, “In Christ all things hold together.” Each of these apparent distractions are given to us as daily bread. In all our endless searchings, our agitations and restlessness, there is need of only one thing, which will make sense of all the rest: to sit with Mary at Jesus’s feet. “I am like a green olive tree in the house of the Lord; I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever.”
Amen.