SISTER ACT Luke 10:38-42 Discipleship is a balance between inward growth and outward service. A sermon preached by Dr. William O. (Bud) Reeves First United Methodist Church Fort Smith, Arkansas October 9, 2016
Many years ago there was a famous tightrope walker named Charles Blondin, a.k.a. The Great Blondin. He became famous by walking a tightrope stretched across Niagara Falls. He crossed from shore to shore on that slender thread of safety numerous times once with his manager on his back! and he never faltered or failed. But Blondin had a secret. As he made his way across the falls, he would keep his eyes fixed on a large silver star on the opposite shore. Ignoring the rushing water underneath his feet, he centered his attention on that goal, and it guided him to the other side. 1 Effective Christian living depends on focus. We made that point last week with Peter walking on water. Today s Scripture is also a marvelous lesson on getting a proper focus in your life. Jesus taught Mary and Martha what it means to have your life grounded on the solid foundation of faith. When your life is grounded and centered in this way, then you can face the challenges and decisions of life from a position of confidence and strength. Your outlook can be positive, and your efforts can be effective. This little passage of Scripture has a lot to teach us today! Losing focus can have disastrous consequences. One of the other great tight-rope walkers of all time was Karl Wallenda, the patriarch of the Flying Wallendas, the famous circus acrobats. The world was shocked in 1978 when Karl Wallenda, at the age of 73, fell to his death attempting to walk a tightrope between two buildings in Puerto Rico. Later, Wallenda s wife said that just prior to his death, Wallenda had been concentrating on not falling, rather than on walking the tightrope. He had personally supervised the attachment of the guy-wires, something he had never done before. He was beginning to get anxious and fearful. He lost his focus, then he lost his footing and fell to his death. In disciple-walking as well as tightrope-walking, you have to keep your goal in focus and your priorities in perspective if you want to be effective. How are we supposed to do that, in the kind of world we live in?
This was Martha s problem in our Scripture today. She had become bogged down in the details of running her household, and she failed to attend to the real business at hand, which was Jesus in her home. Luke says she was distracted by many tasks. Her distraction, her lack of focus, shows in her anger and frustration at her sister. She finally got so exasperated that she complained to Jesus himself: Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me. 2 Does this sound familiar? Can you blame her? Have you ever tried to take care of a house full of guests with no help in the kitchen? Can I get a witness? If Martha was that distracted in ancient Israel, how much more can we get easily distracted today? Today with the demands of family and career and community, it s tough. Technology can keep us in touch with the world, but it can also keep us at work 24/7, and we never get to slow down and shut it off. A recent study by the American Management Association showed that multi-tasking could actually squeeze 31 hours of activity in a 24-hour day. But why? We may be more productive than we have ever been, but at what price? More anxiety, more fatigue, less balance, and less focus. Ed Reilly, CEO of the AMA, says that through technology, people are accomplishing more in less time, but they are feeling overwhelmed by the multiplicity of their lives: "There's a sense of fatigue that comes from multitasking. You can force yourself to keep doing things, but you may not be as effective." 3 We live in a Martha world. But let s look at Mary. She is the antidote to her sister s distraction. Somehow she found the one thing that was necessary. She sat at the feet of Jesus, listening to his words, basking in his spirit. She had her focus fixed, her priority set. She was there to be with Jesus. I believe the ultimate priority for a life lived effectively is a relationship with God. Faith grounds us to the Heart of all creation. Without God, whatever other important things there are family,
friends, career, home will ultimately be meaningless and unsatisfying. We find our focus by centering on Jesus. Did you ever ride the merry-go-round on the playground at your elementary school? I think every school had one, or at least every city park. (They probably don t meet OSHA requirements any more.) But we had a big time as kids taking turns pushing the platform and riding. The smaller and more cautious kids would stay near the center of the merry-go-round, because the centrifugal force was not as strong. The bigger and braver you got, the closer to the edge you would ride. The ultimate daredevils would lie on their backs, hold the rails, and drop their heads backwards into thin air. That was scary! Safety and stability on the merry-go-round is found near the center. If your life is spinning out of control and you are feeling overwhelmed by it all, the place to find security is in the center of your life. Where is that? Your family, your career, your recreation, your favorite team? Let me suggest that the only center that will truly anchor your life is a relationship with Jesus Christ. He s the one thing that matters most. Contemporary novelist Andrew Klavan grew up in a secular home. His only acquaintance with Christianity was a Christian babysitter who kept him over Christmas Eve one time and a radio interview with a Christian baseball player that helped him when he was a troubled young man. As a novelist, Andrew was fascinated with stories, and he became fascinated with the story of Jesus. The life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus formed the hidden logic behind the literature that meant the most to him. He testified: I was reading a story when that logic finally kicked in. I was in my forties, lying in bed with one of Patrick O'Brian's great seafaring adventure novels. One of the characters, whom I admired, said a prayer before going to sleep, and I thought to myself, Well, if he can pray, so can I. I laid the book aside and whispered a three-word prayer in gratitude for the contentment I'd found, and for the work and people I loved: "Thank you, God."
It was a small and even prideful prayer: a self-impressed intellectual's hesitant experiment with faith. God's response was an act of extravagant grace. I woke the next morning and everything had changed. There was a sudden clarity and brightness to familiar faces and objects; they were alive with meaning and with my own delight in them. I called this experience "the joy of my joy," and it came to me again whenever I prayed. Naturally I began to pray every day. 4 At the age of 50, Andrew Klavan was baptized into the Christian faith, and his new book about his spiritual journey is called The Great Good Thing. This is the one thing necessary. This is the priority: to discover Jesus Christ, to know him, not just to know about him, but to know him in a personal relationship. This is not to say that all those other things family, career, community, and so forth are not important. This is not to say we should live our faith from a sitting position. Not at all. The Christian life is a balance of inward growth and outward service. I don t know about you, but I rebelled a little bit at Jesus words to Martha. After all, she has all these guests in her house; she s trying to be a good hostess and get some supper on the table, and Mary is sitting on her fanny listening to stories with the men, for goodness sake! It just wasn t done. Martha is doing some important stuff here, too. What if nobody fixed supper? Could Jesus and the rest of them go without food? Don t you think Jesus is being a little unfair, telling Martha she s got her priorities all wrong? Maybe so, but the point Jesus is making is so true it deserves to be stated with the greatest force possible. Service is important; what Martha is doing is good. But without attending to the needs of the spirit as well, without nurturing the inner relationship of faith, then all that service is just empty and draining. It takes a balance. I think one of the real keys to understanding this story of Mary and Martha is to look at its context in the Gospel of Luke. Just prior to
this passage, a lawyer asked Jesus what to do to gain eternal life. The answer: to love God and neighbor. Then, to define the neighbor, Jesus tells the story we call the Good Samaritan. A man is attacked by robbers on the road to Jericho and left for dead. A priest comes along and passes by without helping. So does a Levite, who was also a religious leader. But a Samaritan, widely regarded as a worthless race of people, saw the man, knelt down, and took care of him. The last word of Jesus to the lawyer was, Go and do likewise. 5 With the lawyer, Jesus was making the point that to love your neighbor, you have to help those in need, regardless of their racial or religious background. But if you re not careful, you might get the idea from the parable that eternal life lies not in our faith, but in how we treat other people. And that is not true. So in the very next verse, Jesus enters the house of Mary and Martha. This incident provides a necessary counterpoint to the Good Samaritan. In one instance, Jesus tells the lawyer to get out and starting helping people. In the next moment he is praising Mary for sitting at his feet and letting the serving fall to others. Effective Christian living is a balance between inward growth and outward service, a mixture of Mary and Martha. We need to be like both sisters! I know it s a busy time. It s a busy time at church. We have all of our fall programs going on full force. We have a stewardship campaign coming up because we need financial support for next year, and you need to do something holy with your money. We have all the year-end business of the church getting our ducks in a row for next year. I have often said that in the church we dive in the pool in the middle of August and we don t come up for air until the week after Christmas! But that s no different from the rest of your lives. You work. You go to school. You travel. You have family responsibilities. It all can get overwhelming sometimes.
Dane Womack raised a question this week in staff meeting as we were looking at our church calendar for the rest of the fall. Are we focusing on the right things? Are we just adding to the busyness of everybody s life? Are we taking people deep into discipleship, or are we just skimming the surface and wearing people out? It s a question worth asking, because we don t want to lose our focus. We want to keep the main thing the main thing. We want to be on point with our mission. That s why I think the Encounter weekend is so important. Yeah, it s another thing. Yeah, everybody s busy. But the Encounter is more than that. It is a chance to get away without having to pack. It s a chance to let all the other go for 48 hours and focus on what is really important our relationship with God, our spiritual walk, our prayer life, our family life. It s Mary time. If we ever expect to have a spiritual revival at this church, we have to get this part right first. Discipleship is a balance between inward growth and outward service. A spiritual relationship with God is expressed through works of service. But before your service can become meaningful, you have to sit at the feet of the Master. In fact, you have to come kneel at the foot of the cross. Some years ago, there was a student in Denmark who was trying to put some balance back in his life. He was skeptical about religion and very turned off by the Church. But one rainy and dreary day, when he was feeling kind of low, he went into the cathedral in Copenhagen and just sat in one of the pews for a long time. No one else was in the cathedral at that moment. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he began to see a large statue down at the front of the church. It was Bertel Thorvaldsen s famous sculpture of the resurrected Christ with his arms outstretched and the words Come Unto Me inscribed on the base. The young man walked closer and closer, looking intently at the statue. He noticed that the face of Jesus was turned toward the ground; he couldn t see the Lord s face or eyes. This was puzzling at first, but then it dawned on the young man why the sculpture had been
crafted this way. He realized that the only way he could look into the face of Christ was to kneel down and then look up. So he did, ever so gently and ever so quietly and reverently. And when he did, he felt his heart move, his attitude change, and a turning point take place. Kneeling before Christ, he found a new perspective that changed his whole life. 6 Discipleship, following Jesus, is a balance, and you can achieve that balance by both kneeling down to help someone in need and kneeling down at the foot of the cross. Then your life will have a peaceful center that most people cannot even imagine. When the hard times and tragedies break in on your life, when you are trying to walk above the troubled waters, this balance will stay your course and keep you on an even keel and see you through your journey. Balanced discipleship will keep you focused. Here is the one thing that is necessary to know the Jesus who loves you, no matter what happens. This love will strengthen you for service. This love will give you balance on the tightrope of your life. This love will make you a hero of faith. 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/charles_blondin. 2 Luke 10:40. 3 Houston Chronicle, June 21, 2006. 4 Andrew Klavan, "How a Man of the Coasts and Cities Found Christ," Christianity Today (8-22-16). 5 Luke 10:37. 6 From a sermon by Dr. Norman Neaves.