“There is a Time” based on Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 and Luke 10:38-42

If this if your first time hearing the story of the sisters Mary and Martha, welcome. These 5 verses pack a punch. Many people who have known this story well end up coming back to it regularly in thinking about their lives and how to live them well.

(Jesus MAFA image)

This week I was thinking about how we are such a Martha church. We are great at doing things! There are so many hospitable jobs to do to make breakfast happen, to prepare worship, to keep our building in good shape for people to use the bathrooms, to host various groups, to provide concerts, to extend our love out into the world in our work with the Sycamore Collective and UMCOR and VIM. We can Martha like anything! Martha was a householder who was hosting I’d guess a party of 30-50 of Jesus, his disciples, their families, and some other followers, and there can be some challenges with a party of that size. We know those. We do them.

But, as I was laughing at just how Martha we are, I realized that we are just as profoundly Mary. Because Mary took on the role of a disciple. That is to say, she sat at Jesus feet as a student and let him teach her. Dear ones, we love to learn! We do book studies. We do Bible Studies. We bring in speakers. We have overly intellectual sermons 😉 We discuss and reflect carefully on decisions, truly to hold in tension various needs and different aspects of things we know. We even do this seeking of the wisdom of Jesus thing in silence, in Contemplative Prayer, in meditative practices. We seek wisdom everywhere we can find it and try to apply it to our daily lives. We are very, very Mary.

And very, very Martha.

Which is probably good because many of us are also people who HATE false dichotomies. (For those who didn’t go to college at the turn of the century a false dichotomy is when many choices exist but only two are presented and those two are falsely assumed to be the only options.)

I think that it is probably really important to hear the two profoundly radical pieces of this story clearly before we do any more projecting on to. This story is a little bit too easy to project onto.

The first thing that is shocking in this story is that Martha welcomes Jesus into her home. To be more exact, for Martha to welcome Jesus into HER home, it has to be true that Martha is the person in charge of the home. Martha, let’s be clear, is a woman and women weren’t usually in charge of household much less households capable of providing hospitality for so many people. If Mary and Martha had a father, a brother, a nephew, or either had a husband the property would be theirs. They don’t. This is a woman owned, women only household and Jesus comes to it.

Nice. I love the stories Luke tells about Jesus.

The second piece is a lot like it. Mary isn’t helping her sister host because she’s too busy learning from Jesus. That wasn’t necessarily unprecedented. Other teachers – that is other rabbis – also taught women. The position of sitting at the feet of the rabbi was a position taken on by that rabbi’s students, their disciples. But not all rabbis taught women, and we certainly hear of challenges in the early church over whether or not women could in particular leadership roles. So when we have Mary sitting at Jesus’s feet as a disciple, and him praising her for it, we have an affirmation from Jesus that women are truly welcome in his circles.

Which gets me back to my gratitude to Luke for the stories he tells about Jesus and how careful he is to point out that Jesus upset all the hierarchies of the world and showed people once again that God’s way is not a way of exclusion or of hierarchy. In many ways the Jewish people already knew this, so Jesus was a reminder of it. In some ways he pushed a little further, but we always want to pay attention to the radical ways that God was already at work in the Jewish people of Jesus’s day and not dismiss the traditions of our siblings in faith.

Now, back to the story, Martha is holding a whole lot and she asks Jesus to kick Mary out of the position Mary chose for herself and make Mary do what Martha wanted instead.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I sometimes feel exactly that way too. (Sorry, Love.) Things like, “While I’m busy making dinner, can you set the table?” Which can miss things the other person is doing like, laundry, or childcare, or reading a book. Or sometimes I find myself thinking, “Why aren’t more people showing up at this one particular ministry I’m passionate about?” while missing that the people are showing up to other things they’re passionate about, or taking time to rest, or preparing for the next important thing they’re doing, or perhaps making dinner 😉 Or, heavens, “why isn’t this person at this protest?” Which forgets that there are many protests and we can’t all be at all them, that there are many roles in the resistance and people get to take on the ones that fit them best, and that this is a marathon and not a race and we all need to pace ourselves!

Anyway, I get Martha on this one. I feel her, hard. I’m often her.

And Jesus, like he does, has none of it. It turns out that EVERY TIME someone tries to triangulate Jesus into judging someone else he turns it back on them. This is rather fitting with the man whose most famous prayer includes, “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” He took forgiveness seriously, and refused to judge people in the ways he was asked to and told to.

So Martha asks Jesus to condemn Mary and he outright refuses.

Also, every time a person in power makes demands of Jesus he turns it back on them. And while Martha was unusual in being a woman who was in charge of a household, the woman thing didn’t seem to protect her from being a person in power. Jesus criticizes householders because Jesus criticizes use of power over other people.

Which leads me to wonder… what if Mary had complained about Martha? What if she had said to Jesus, “My sister is busy doing many things, but she is forgetting to sit down and learn from you. Tell her to sit with us!” I can’t figure out if Jesus would have condemned Mary for judging Martha or if Jesus would have sided with Mary because she was the one with less power. It may not matter, but it helps me a bit with this story.

Because taken directly, we could hear that learning is more important than service. And that rubs me wrong. I can handle it if they’re supposed to be in balance, or that we need to know about God’s love before we try to share it, or that we need to continue being connected to love to keep having it share or anything like that. But for me connections to Jesus and God and acting to serve those who are loved by Jesus and God are as connected as breathing in and breathing out. One isn’t better than the other, they’re too related to be separated like that.

Which is probably why I paired Ecclesiastes with this text today. For everything there is a season. There are seasons to act like Martha, there are seasons to learn like Mary. There are seasons to rest like Jesus, there are seasons to simply be in prayer (like all of them.)

And, while we are all together in working for the kindom, the particulars of the work come with different seasons. I’m always stuck by “a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together.” Mostly because its true but also because both throwing stones away and gathering them together is a lot of work and maybe we should stop doing things that just need to be undone …. except sometimes we need stones and sometimes we don’t!!! Life is truly seasonal like that.

In any case today when I hear this story of the woman who learned from Jesus and the woman who took care of Jesus and his disciples, I find myself reminded that for everything there is a season. We are Marthas and Marys around here, and both are good!

And, we seek God’s kindom in so very many ways. Some of us need to be at breakfast to connect with the guests who attend. Some of us need to be at book studies to hear other people’s insights. Some of us need to be at protests to condemn injustice. Some of us need to be at the Contemplative Prayer service to savor God’s goodness. Some of us need to connect with others at retreats, dinners, plays to strengthen our wholeness. Some of us need to be at worship to soak up goodness for the week. We’re Mary and we’re Martha, and we’re both and we’re neither.

The key, I think, is in letting people make their own choices in building the kindom and seeking their wholeness. That doesn’t mean we can’t invite people to the things we love! But the way we are not supposed to be like Martha is that we’re not supposed to judge people for making their own good choices when their choices are different from us. This kindom building work is for the long run, and we need everyone to be able to discern for themselves the ways they’re best suited for it. And, let’s be honest, it’s extra hard right now and we all need extra care. Which makes it harder not to judge others. And yet, it also makes it more important. We’re all a little tender.

We all need to hear a little bit of Jesus saying, “Don’t accuse my beloved. They made a great choice, the right one! There is a time for this choice. This is the time!”

Thanks be to God we have this story to remind us that Jesus tenderly defends us and is grateful for the ways we chose to become whole and build the kindom.

Amen

July 20, 2025

Rev. Sara E. Baron 
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 
Pronouns: she/her/hers 
http://fumcschenectady.org/ 
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady