Unstuck: Along the Way

February 5, 2017

Dr. Tom Pace

Luke 10:38-42

We’re continuing – actually finishing – our series called “Unstuck.” And today we’re going to talk about maybe the most important part and that is the “Why?” So we’re looking at how we can get unstuck in our lives and move forward on our spiritual journeys, to move forward in our calling. But today we’re going to talk about the “Why?”
And the story today happens in Bethany, which is one of the Daughters of Jerusalem. These weren’t people, they were little towns, suburbs if you will, that surround a major walled city. So if there was ever an attack or any issue, all the Daughters of Jerusalem would run into the city to hide. It was a place of protection.
Bethany and Bethlehem both were Daughters of Jerusalem. This is the town that Jesus stayed in when he came to Jerusalem. He didn’t stay in the city. He stayed at Bethany in the house of Mary, Martha and Lazarus, some of his best friends.
This passage takes place there, and today we’re going to hear the Scripture read aloud from The Message translation which is a more modern paraphrase or translation of Scripture. What’s printed in your bulletin is the NRSV, so I would encourage you not to read along but just listen to story, and we’ll make reference to the Scripture in our sermon today. So hear now as we hear the Scripture read.
As they continued their travel, Jesus entered a village. A woman by the name of Martha welcomed him and made him feel quite at home. She had a sister, Mary, who sat before the Master, hanging on to every word he said. But Martha was pulled away by all she had to do in the kitchen. Later, she stepped in, interrupting them. “Master, don’t you care that my sister has abandoned the kitchen to me? Tell her to lend me a hand.”
The Master said, “Martha, dear Martha, you’re fussing far too much and getting yourself worked up over nothing. One thing only is essential, and Mary has chosen it—it’s the main course, and won’t be taken from her.” (Luke 10:38-42 The Message)

We’ve been working on this “Unstuck” series for five weeks, and this is our fifth week. Let me briefly review so if some of you have missed some of it along the way. I’m just going to use a word as a way to let us hold on to it.
The first word was “action.” You’re got to get up, do something, pick up your mat and walk.
The second word was “calling.” What is your destination? Where are you going? It’s fine to be up and moving, but is there a direction? What is it that God’s really called you to do? What’s Canaan – what’s the Promised Land for you?
The next week we looked at trying to go deeper than what it is we’re trying to accomplish in the world but rather who it is we’re trying to become. So as the Holy Spirit works within us to sanctify us, what are the values that we claim, and what kind of people are we trying to be? We talked about the Wesleyan image of “going on to perfection” to become mature Christians. What are those values that you really believe in and say, “I’m going to live in to those?”
And last week we talked about “perseverance” where you know when you get knocked down you have to get back up. If you quit… well, don’t quit. There are too many people who have given too much for the Kingdom for us to have the luxury of quitting. But if we do stop, we should just come gently back and get started again.
Today I want to focus on the “why” we do all of this. What is the reason behind us trying to accomplish or to become anything for God?
Join me in prayer O God, open us up, open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel and then O God open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
It’s a simple story really, and Julie told it so well for the children. Jesus comes to the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus and meets them for the first time. He sits down with Mary and Martha. He’s talking to Mary and Martha is working in the kitchen. As time goes on the minutes go by, and maybe the hours go by, and you can kind of feel the resentment building in the kitchen.
I have personally felt as I’m watching football I can hear the pots and pans clanging a little bit louder. You’ve been there. Finally Martha snaps and she says, “Hey, Jesus, come on, man. Tell her to get to work and to help me.”
Jesus says these powerful words, “Martha, Martha, you are troubled and distracted by many things. Mary has chosen the better portion. Only one thing is needful, Mary has chosen the better portion. And it will not be taken from her.”
So this really resonates with me. It gets me every time. It’s because what happens is that like with almost everyone I know, they get up wanting to put their shoulder to the wheel, to get stuff done and to accomplish things for the Kingdom and to really do it right and do it well and do it with all my heart every day.
So I do that, but what happens is that over time you begin to sometimes lose touch with “why.” And one of the clues to that is you begin to feel your resentment starting to build. And you can feel the fire that has been driving you begin to flicker. And you begin to ask yourself, “Why am I doing all this anyway? What’s the point?” So this story really addresses that very issue and gives us a pretty straight forward solution.
There are three things I want to lift up. The first is sort of the most obvious and simple. And that’s you have to take some time along the way to stop and just be in the presence of God. Just be in the presence of Christ and to experience that presence and let it renew and rejuvenate you.
I have always bristled against the idea where people will say to me, “You know, I love to come to church, because it just fills me up. It’s like a filling station for me. I come to this place, and I leave ready to go and give my all.”
I’ve always kind of bristled about that because I don’t want us to think of worship when we gather here together as a spectator sport. I don’t want you to come to receive. I want you to come with a mindset of “I’ve come to give. I’ve come to give my all to Jesus. I’m coming to worship, to sing my praises to God. I’m coming to study and really engage in the Scripture. I’m coming to worship – and that’s an action.”
So I continue to try and draw that out of the congregation. I don’t expect you to be jumping pews or anything, but you know, let’s sing a little louder. As Sid said, “Let’s employ our loosened tongues.”
But then I read this passage, and I think to myself, “You know sometimes you just have to stop and get filled up.” And maybe it’s okay at some point in some ways the church is our filling station. We come to worship, to be with others who will encourage us, will lift us up and challenge us and just wrap us in the Holy Spirit so that we can go do the things we need to do in the days ahead, to be a filling station.
And I think we have to do that on a daily basis. Not just every week. Here’s my confession, and it’s that about maybe at least a third of the time that my prayer time and my morning study and devotional is just another task to do. I wish it weren’t that way, and I miss the point when I do that. When it’s just okay – I’ve got my prayer done, my study done and I can now get going!
The word Sabbath just means to stop. Stoppage, to stop and experience the presence of God, not by working but to just stop. I think this idea of stopping and experiencing the presence of Christ along the way isn’t just about that.
My family communicates by text message. Yes, it’s true. And so we have all these group text messages going. I have five daughters, so there’s one for the whole family. And sometimes when something’s going on it’s just like bzzzt, bzzzt, bzzzt… and then I got this Apple Watch, and it’s still bzzt, bzzt, bzzt… It’s seems to go all the time. I’ll go into a meeting and when I come out, there’s maybe 132 text messages. I think, “What is the deal here?”
So finally I said, “Look, I cannot have 132 text messages every hour, so you’re just going to have to take me off this thing and you let me know when something important happens.” So they do. They start one without me and then I’m at home one day, and I hear people talking about what happened last Wednesday. And I ask, “What happened last Wednesday?” They say, “Well, your grandson took his first steps.”
And I say, “I missed that! How did I miss that?” Then they say, “Well, Dad, you weren’t on the text messages.” Then it occurred to me that I had been viewing those text messages as distractions from something that was really important, a matter of consequence. The work that I’m doing is important; it’s a matter of consequence.
What if the work is the distraction and the real presence are the holy moments, those thin spaces where God or heaven and earth almost touch. And I miss those. You see, there’s a mindset that says, “I’m going to recognize that the presence of God is available to me and I’m going to look for it and claim it all along the journey.”
Jesus is not at the end of the journey. God is not in Canaan. God is with us on our journey to Canaan. And that’s where we experience God – on that journey along the way. So we stop and look for those holy moments that can remind us just what matters, why we’re doing this.
Now I think there’s really something a little deeper and more significant in this passage. And that is that I think it tells us that we cannot earn God’s acceptance by working hard in the kitchen or anywhere else for that matter. We can’t earn God’s acceptance or approval or salvation. It just can’t happen.
Anytime Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg get together something good happens. “Saving Private Ryan” was just an amazing movie. If you’ve never seen it I’m sure you can find it now pretty easily. It’s about where just after Normandy Captain John Miller was sent into France to find Private James Ryan. His brothers had just been killed, and they were going to pull him out so he wouldn’t be killed as a way of humanitarian compassion for his mother so she wouldn’t lose all of her sons.
So Captain John Miller leads this team, and yes, they have lots of adventures along the way. They find Private Ryan, but in the end Captain Miller is killed in the effort to save James Ryan. There’s this scene where Captain Miller is dying and James Ryan has his ear down to hear what he says. He’s muttering and Ryan says, “What, sir? What did you say?” And Captain Miller just says, “Earn this. Earn this.” Boy, it’s powerful.
Then the last scene in the movie is that James Ryan is now a grandfather and he’s taken his family and they’ve gone back to Normandy. He goes in to find the cross that marks Captain Miller’s grave. He stands at the grave of Captain Miller talking to the cross that’s there and says “Every day I think about what you did to me. What you said to me that day on the bridge. I tried to live my life the best I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that at least in your eyes I earned what all of you have done for me.”
He looks then at his wife and he says, “Tell me I’ve led a good life.” And she says, “What?” He says, “Tell me I’m a good man.” And she says, “You are.”
I think this is so powerful and it resonates with us so much but it’s really sad. Here’s a man who lived his whole life … listen to what he says, “I hope that I’ve earned it. I hope that I was enough.” To live your whole life wondering if you’re enough.
This is full of Christian symbolism of course, but frankly it’s bad theology. You can’t earn it. It can’t be done, and you can’t live your life out of the place of deficit. That somehow you think, “I’ve got earn my way back. I’ve got to climb just a little more. I’ve got to be a little better so somehow I’m worthy of what God has done.”
There’s a difference between that approach and an approach that says, “What an amazing thing you’ve done for me. And I’m going to live my life in gratitude for it. I’m going to love you for it.”
You see, one operates out of a place of deficit where you think, “I’m trying to be enough. I don’t feel like I am.” And one lives out of a place of overflowing, of saying, “God has poured God’s self into our lives and filled us with God’s grace. And we are viewed by God as righteous. We are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. Yes, we’re enough. God loves us that much.”
And out of that then what we do is that we live in response to that. We live in gratitude; our whole life becomes a “thank you” for that, not “I’m trying to earn it.” And while the actions of our lives may be the same, this striving to be good, the rationale is different.
C.S. Lewis says it so powerfully. He says, “God does not love us because we’re good. God makes us good because God loves us.” You see the difference? Our striving is to join God in response and gratitude and love for what God has done for us.
I confess that the line that’s in this Scripture really jumps out at me and sometimes I need to be a good person. I need to be successful. I need to be a good husband and a good father and a good son. I need to be a good pastor, to be worthy of the privilege of serving as the pastor of St. Luke’s. I need to do those things.
What? Jesus says, “Tom, Tom, you are all wrapped around the axle, boy. You’re distracted and troubled and only one thing is needed, only one thing. And you’ve got that and you’ve got me.”
And when we have that sense in our heart and in our lives – wow! Everything else just flows from that.
The last thing I want you to see, I really don’t want us to misunderstand. We still work. So one of our pastors when we were talking about this passage said, “So if Jesus was working where would Mary be?” This is a moment when Jesus has stopped, and he’s teaching and Mary’s there. But Jesus did a lot of work. He’s healing, he’s preaching and he’s doing all of these things. The question is he asks the disciples, “Come and follow me. Come and be with me while I do these things.” So Jesus is working, and we’re working too. Our work is a way of worshipping.
I have a friend who is a colleague, he’s a pastor. And in his church they have this little practice that they do. Whenever they meet, when any of their groups meet, their working groups, there’s somebody designated to be like a chaplain in the group. What they do is bring a little devotional, they read a Scripture and they light a candle. They leave the candle lit the entire committee meeting, whether it’s finance or whatever it is they’re doing that’s the work of the church. They call it “worshipful work” that what they’re doing is to offer it to God as worship. It’s not trying to earn something; it’s a “thank you” to God. “I’m doing this, God, just to thank you. I’m doing this, God, because I love you, not because I should or I have to, or I’m supposed to, or I’m obligated to, or I said I would or I want to pull my weight. Whatever those sort of sense of obligations and “shoulds” are. When we serve we do it as a statement of love and gratitude, not because we’re supposed to. Worshipful work.
A few Lenten seasons ago we had a series we called “Everyday Worship.” And what I challenged you to do I want to challenge you to do again today. That is that as you go through your daily life, all the tasks of your daily life, all the work you do, advancing the Kingdom of God, trying to become a better person, working for those things that matter, as you do them, view them as a worship experience, as an offering to Christ because you love him.
Let’s pray together. Lord God, we ask that you come into our hearts and just fill us with your grace, that we know we are approved and loved and accepted by you. And out of that place of overflowing grace and security may we respond in gratitude and love as we give our lives back to you. In the name of Christ we pray. Amen.