“Word and Table: Making
Christ Audible/Visible in Our World”
What a great time to be alive and well and
planted by the Truckee! The flood of Artown and other events threatens to
sweep us away without so much as a place to park! The winds have wreaked
some havoc with our outdoor hospitality. Our damages and inconveniences
have been as nothing compared to those of our sisters and brothers near
Carson City. Please let us know how to support them. Thanks to all who are
helping us serve, like so many Marthas, at the concerts and plays, all who
are spreading the word to others, all who are coming out and enjoying
ourselves as a venue, for arts, for culture, for meditation. Thanks to
those making the stage in the Fellowship Hall more usable. We would love to
be set up as well for exhibiting art work around the parlor and hall!
Also be sure to see the Ageless Repertory
performances with Len Overholser. This week there is Great Basin
Chautauqua, too -- especially the populist poetics and prophetics of Woody
Guthrie, Zora Neale Hurston, and Carl Sandburg, author of this year’s theme,
“The People, Yes!” “The people yes / The people live on. / The learning and
blundering people will live on.” As if speaking for Mary and Martha
together, Sandburg continues, “The people hold to the humdrum bidding of
work and food / while reaching out when it comes their way / for lights
beyond the prison of the five senses, / for keepsakes lasting beyond any
hunger or death. / This reaching is alive.” This reaching is alive!
Reaching beyond what is for what may yet be!
Nevada Shakespeare Company gives us ongoing
“Chautauqua” with “A Single Woman,” the life and times of first U.S.
Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin. Her witness and service against war and
violence, especially toward women and children, speak to us all over again
today. Knowing the text for today, I put on my Mary/Martha glasses to watch
the show this week. Please do the same when it plays again a week from
Thursday. Invite everyone we know! See how Jeanette refuses to let herself
be “Mary/Martha-ed,” divided and conquered! She refuses to lose the Martha,
the home-making, part of herself. She wears an apron throughout as she
creates bread and lemonade from scratch and reads from family letters and
memories shaping the private and the public person she becomes. She moves
back and forth from kitchen counter to speaker’s podium.
Clearly the issues of justice and peace she
addresses politically are deeply grounded and richly shaped by experiences
of her personal life. The pressures upon her to choose between parts of
herself, parts of her work, for instance, between her pacifist and her
suffragist work, as upon Dr. King to choose between peace and civil rights,
grew immense and intense. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom Jeanette Rankin
alone in Congress opposed at the point of entry into World War II, claimed
never to talk politics with a woman! Women, though asked to surrender their
sons by the millions all over the world, were not thought capable of
grasping intricacies of ideologies leading to such lethal conclusions.
That is precisely the reason women were not
taught the Law in Jesus’ time. Mary is not just a personal scandal to
Martha, who sounds as if part of her would rather be studying, too. Mary is
a political threat to the systems of patriarchy patrolling and controlling
all of her world and much of our own. For that particular person at that
point in time, Jesus is clear, though law-breaking, that Mary is doing the
“needful” thing. Not necessarily the “right” or “good” thing in any
abstract, self-sufficient sense, but the thing that “fits” the occasion,
that responds to the call, the voice, the vocation, of her time and place.
Jesus by no means is judging or condemning
the many tasks of Martha. The work of hospitality is mentioned more
frequently throughout scripture than faith itself! Luke’s gospel especially
is bracketed between the “no room in the inn” of Jesus’ birth and the
invitation to dine along “the road to Emmaus” of his resurrection, embracing
such stories of caretaking and of homecoming as the “Good Samaritan” and the
“Prodigal Son.” Jesus and those who follow him live to be “taken in” in
more ways than one!
Jesus is very clear that the code of
hospitality takes priority over the code of purity. It is more important to
do the messy work of loving one another than to protect and defend the level
of our integrity, our self-righteousness, at all times. There is no way we
can be Marthas and serve the world without running the risk of getting our
hands and even our souls at least just a little bit tainted, stained and
strained. Krister Stendahl invites us to see “that it is the Samaritan, the
outsider, who proves truly to be a neighbor. It is the Samaritan who is not
anxious about keeping apart from one he is supposed to despise, who is not
anxious about his integrity. The Samaritan acts out of love, not heeding
special interest, and thus being free to be a neighbor to anyone in need.
This is the special twist, the point of the parable; this is love rather
than integrity.”
Stendhal goes on to say, “I have always
liked the story of the boy scout who knew that it is good to help old ladies
cross streets. He had, however, really started to understand the
seriousness of Christianity, so that he had started to realize that he did
such good deeds – leading old ladies across the street – just to show off.
One day there was an old lady who needed help in crossing the street, but
the scout withstood the terrible temptation to help her because he knew he
would be doing so only to show off. So he kept his integrity, and the old
lady was run over. Indeed, he had kept his integrity but he had lost the
perspective of love. Perhaps it is more important to help than to be
totally pure in one’s integrity.” We may ask ourselves as churches and
faith communities, confronting “wedge” issues and temptations to “divide and
conquer” us, who among us and in our culture is getting run over while we
protect our purity?
Reflecting upon true integrity, the
integration, the wholeness, of Mary and Martha, of word and table, word and
deed, soul and body, baptism and communion, faith and works, contemplation
and action, sanctifying and sustaining, -- going beyond the usual
“either/or” way of choosing to “both/and,” – to the “third way” the Holy
Spirit is always about revealing to us, if only we will open ourselves to it
-- Stendahl concludes, “Church or ethical problems are really group or
community problems, because Christianity is not a principle to be followed
with utter clarity or precision. Christianity is an experiment in living
together – and with a certain flexible ability to take differences into
account without being divided. . . . Love allows for not insisting on one’s
own integrity at the expense of the unity of the community. . . . Love
allows for the full respect of the integrity of the other, and overcomes the
divisiveness of my zeal for having my way in the name of my own integrity.”
(Paul Among Jews and Gentiles)
Paul says here the Jesus whom we know as
“Christ,” -- as one who for us fulfills and brings to pass all the promise
of God for God’s love of the world, -- is like cosmic glue who holds all
together in spite or because of all of our differences! In Christ nothing
human, nothing created, nothing about us in any respect, is alien to God who
“is pleased to be reconciled to all things . . . making peace through the
blood of Christ’s cross,” through the willingness of Jesus to follow God’s
call to love us all, even to death and to life again! The depth and the
breadth of God’s love for us in Christ, -- so free and so full, so
gratuitous and so generous, -- the vertical and horizontal points of the
cross, -- reveal to us that very “mystery that has been hidden throughout
the ages and generations.” Everyone is included in God’s love. No one is
excluded from God’s love.
Think back upon Paul’s own call to ministry
with the excluded from the established faith community of his time and
place. Paul’s secret revelation and the wisdom of his call was that those
on the outside, the Gentiles, did not have to pass through the law, to
become in every respect like those on the inside, the Jews. Who is on the
outside of faith community today, and how might we be tempted to think
“they” have to become “like us” before they can come in? We hear “call” as
spoken, as voice, as vocation, to ministry and to mission for all.
Sometimes “call” comes completely and
dramatically and, like Paul, we are knocked from our horse and blinded to
what is happening to us, until another is able to help us reflect and find
the particular way, one step at a time, we are called to proceed. But even
Paul did not cease to be the person he was. As we say to those who come to
us for marriage and holy union, we decide for this commitment, -- not out of
weakness, not because we feel we have to, -- but out of strength, because we
are free to join ourselves with another in such a way as to work out love in
faith and in hope to learn, to grow, to witness, to serve, -- together, as
we might not ever get around to doing if we stayed apart. For Julie and me
it began with entry into the Peace Corps, -- three days after our wedding!
More often our “call” is to even a slight
but a critical change of desire, of direction, of emphasis, of priority in
our lives. We often know “call” as contrast between what we used to think
was most important to us and what has become more or even most important to
us now. It is of the same spirit in which Jesus says, setting out the law
for his time and place, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient
times . . . But I say unto to you!” Jesus says this, --repeatedly, without
certifying credentials, at much ridicule and much risk to himself, -- on his
own authority, the authority of his experience and his wisdom, his insight
into experience, -- the authority of his calling. Surely, we, too, may be
called to set out the law for our own times and places. Bill Stringfellow
says, “The curse of being Christian is eternal dissatisfaction with things
as they are!” Jeanette Rankin quotes Gandhi: “We must become the change we
want to see in others and in the world!” Our call is to change. Change is
our call. So let the ever- and all-changing church say, Amen!
Rev. John Auer
