“The Business Of Busy-ness”
Text:
Luke 10:38-42
© July 22, 2007 by C. Edward Bowen at Crafton
United Presbyterian Church.
Did
you hear about the report that came out last month? Researchers did a study, and they came to the
conclusion that one of the things you can do to improve your life, to improve
the quality of your health, is to eat more chocolate. According to their study, if you eat some
dark chocolate every day, some chemical in the chocolate will help you to live
a longer, healthier life. Studies where
experts tell us to eat more chocolate – those are the kinds of studies we like
to hear about!
But
as most of us are probably aware, quite often a few months or a few years later
another study comes out and disproves what the original study said. For instance, for years I’ve heard – and
you’ve probably heard as well – that something you can do to help ward off a
cold is to drink extra amounts of orange juice and take in extra doses of Vitamin
C. But just this week experts came out
and reversed that opinion, saying that Vitamin C won’t help you with a cold
after all.
Or
likewise, for the past several years it seems that authorities have been
repeatedly stressing that one of the best ways to reduce your risk of cancer is
to eat more fruits and vegetables. But
just this past week – maybe you saw the article in the newspaper – other
authorities came out and said that that’s all wrong – that eating fruits and
vegetables won’t help when it comes to cancer.[1]
After
a while, it can get a little confusing.
What are we supposed to believe?
One day we’re told that if we do this certain thing, then we’ll have
longer, healthier, happier lives. But
then before we know it, those same authorities turn around and tell us to
forget about what they told us before, and instead what we really ought to do
is something entirely different.
And
as we listen to today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke, it certainly appears
that that very same kind of thing is going on there with Jesus. If you were here last week – and if you
managed to stay awake during the sermon – you might recall that we took a look
at the passage that’s right before the one that we heard today in Luke, a
passage that’s commonly known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. As you might remember, the story began with a
lawyer coming up to Jesus and asking him, “Jesus what do I need to do to
inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said,
“You know – you need to love God and love your neighbor.” And the lawyer replied, “I don’t have any
problem with loving God. But who exactly
is my neighbor? Jesus, tell me where I
can draw the line.”
And
so Jesus told the man a story. He told
him about a fellow who was walking down a road and who got attacked, robbed,
beaten, and left lying there half-dead.
And eventually two decent, respectable men passed that way – a priest
and a Levite. But even though they saw
the injured man lying there, they looked away and pretended that he wasn’t
really there and simply walked by without helping him. But then finally a lowly, despised Samaritan
came along, and even though he didn’t know that injured man, even though he
didn’t have any kind of official obligation to help him, the Samaritan went out
of his way to care for that man and to save his life. And Jesus ended by saying, “If you’re really
interested in inheriting eternal life, then go and do likewise. Go and do what that Samaritan did. Go and serve other people.”
And
listening to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus’ message to us seems
rather clear. If you want to have
eternal life, he says, if you want to make it into heaven, then get busy – get
busy and start doing what you can to help other people.
But
then when we read on just beyond that parable, when we read the passage that we
heard today, it sounds like Jesus is doing a complete U-turn. When we read this passage that we heard
today, it sounds like Jesus is telling us to forget about what he just told us
about serving other people, and instead to spend our time focusing ourselves on
Jesus.
Here
in this story that we heard today Jesus paid a visit to a house where two women
lived, two women named Martha and Mary.
And when Jesus arrives, right away Martha gets busy. Martha is out there in the kitchen peeling
potatoes and rolling out pie crusts and stuffing a turkey, doing everything she
knows to put on a terrific, unforgettable feast for Jesus. But while Martha is slaving away out in the
kitchen, up to her elbows in soap suds washing all the pots and pans, her sister
Mary is just sitting out in the living room, sitting next to Jesus and just
listening to what he had to say.
Finally
Martha gets so irritated that she’s left to do all the work, she marches out
into the living room, clears her throat, and demands that Jesus tell her sister
to get busy and get to work. But to
Martha’s surprise, Jesus basically says, “Martha, Martha, you’ve made yourself
so terribly busy – busier than you need to be.
Can’t you see that Mary has made the better choice? Instead of making herself busy, she’s chosen
to devote herself to listening to my words.”
So,
what are we to make of this episode? Is
Jesus saying to forget about serving, and to spend all of our time thinking
about him instead? Is he saying that we
should forget about loving our neighbors and focus instead on just loving
God? Because at first glance, that seems
to be what this story is saying.
But
instead of looking at this story about Mary and Martha as contradicting the
Parable of the Good Samaritan, maybe what the Gospel of Luke is doing is
setting those two stories side to side to show us that if we want to be Jesus’
disciples then we need to listen to both of the stories. We need to pay attention to the Parable of
the Good Samaritan’s message about the importance of serving other people. But we also need to pay attention to what
Jesus had to say to Martha and Mary about the importance of listening to Jesus,
listening and hearing what Jesus wants us to do. Because the risk is that if we don’t spend
time listening to Jesus first, we might very well end up making ourselves busy
– but we might end up making ourselves busy with the wrong things.
For
instance, there was a women’s group at a certain church that decided they
wanted to do a service project. Someone
in the group had read about various missionary hospitals in
After
doing that for more than a year, one day they received a letter back from the
hospital where they had been sending all those bandages. The letter said: “Dear Ladies, Thank you for all the bandages
that you’ve been sending us. But we hope
that you won’t be too upset that we’ve taken those strips of bandages and sewed
them into bed sheets, because bed sheets are what we need the most.”
For
over a year that women’s group had been busy – busy making bandages. But bandages weren’t what that hospital
needed. If only they had taken the time
to listen first, if only they had made the effort to ask what kind of help was
needed and listened for an answer, then they could have directed their efforts
to doing what really needed to be done, instead of doing simply what they
thought needed to be done.
The
story about Martha and Mary reminds us of how we live in a world where we prize
busy-ness. Nowadays if you walk up to
someone and ask them how they’re doing, more often than not, that person
doesn’t answer by saying, “I’m fine” or “I’m OK.” No, they answer by saying, “I’m busy.” “Hi, there, how are you?” “I’m busy, and how are you?”
But
God didn’t create us simply to be busy for the sake of being busy. No, God created us so that we might first
listen for what God wants us to do in our lives, and then to get busy doing
that. And the main way that we do that,
of course, the main way that we listen for what God wants us to do in our lives
is by praying.
You
see, despite what many people think, prayer is not supposed to be primarily
about us talking to God. Prayer is not
supposed to be primarily about us telling God what we think God ought to know
about and telling God what we think God ought to be doing. No, prayer is supposed to be primarily about
us listening to God, listening for God to speak to us and to show us what it is
that God wants us to be doing.
As
we enter into our time of prayer today, go ahead and name your prayer concerns
to God. Go ahead and tell God who it is
that you want God to heal and who it is that you want God to help. There’s nothing wrong with that.
But
as we enter into our time of prayer today, concentrate especially on listening
to God. Concentrate on what it is that
God is trying to say to you. Concentrate
on what it is that God is wanting you to do in your life.
If
you’re like most people, your life is busy.
But are you busy with the right things?
Are you busy with the things that God wants you to be busy with?