Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Text: Luke 10:25-42

Did you ever have the experience of talking with someone, and feeling like they weren’t really listening?? I’m sure we’ve all had that experience. And if we are honest, I think we all have to admit to providing that experience for others – we’re not always the good listeners that we would like to be. There are lots of reasons that we don’t listen well – sometimes, we are only listening long enough to formulate our own response. We do that in arguments especially.

Other times, we are listening hurriedly, because we are rushed and distracted, and like Martha – worried about many things. When our spouse comes home from work and wants to share, we are thinking about what time to put on the potatoes, and whether our teenager needs a ride home or has a ride home, and – oh gosh, I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning! And, I’m sorry, were you trying to tell me something??

Some of us don’t listen well because we have attention deficit disorder – we are easily distracted by surrounding noise. Others are hard of hearing, and are trying to read lips to catch the words might otherwise be missed.

And our whole society is getting a little impatient anyway. We don’t seem to have the mental stamina for complicated ideas, for nuance, for shades of grey or ambiguity. We want things clear, sharp, basic, and brief. It’s fine for a mission statement be simple enough for a 10-year-old to memorize and understand, but the people who shape national policy need to be willing to read reports of more than a paragraph. We’ve become a nation of sound bites.

We prefer amusement to substance. We’ve become afraid of complexity, impatient with depth, and just plain intellectually lazy. As a citizen this frightens me – many issues are very complex, and in order to evaluate policy and its implications in order to vote, we need to be willing to spend some time and energy in understanding. Our country is becoming increasingly polarized and most people aren’t really willing to engage in the possibility of open conversation where their mind might be changed. We don’t have conversations, we have debates. And in debates, we aren’t looking for understanding, we’re trying to win. When a conversation is about winning, everyone loses.

My Mom pointed out years ago that one of the problems around the abortion issue in our country is that neither side is trying to build consensus – everyone is simply trying to win by legislative or judicial solutions. An exciting new proposal is coming from a group called Democrats for Life – now of course, some folks will dismiss it because of the “For Life” part of their name, and others will dismiss it because it’s from Democrats. But these folks are proposing something called the 95-10 Initiative which projects reducing abortion by 95% over the next 10 years, not because of any limitations on abortion but because of proposals to support pregnant women. Nothing in this proposal limits choice – it’s all about providing ways to help pregnant women, to provide access to healthcare, tax support for adoption, maternity group homes. 95-10 is not a perfect proposal, but it’s a creative, consensus-oriented initiative that aims to reduce abortion by creating possibilities, not eliminating them. And that’s exciting. It’s also complex, and will require some reading and thinking in order to evaluate. Building consensus takes time, and listening, and thinking. And we don’t have time, we’ve forgotten how to listen, and we are too lazy, or afraid, to think. This has dire consequences for democracy.

This lack of time, unwillingness to listen, and fear of thinking has an equally bad impact on discipleship. We are so impatient and intolerant of ambiguity that conservatives and liberals alike don’t want to take the time to deal with the Bible in a discerning way.

Usually, on a Sunday morning, we listen to a sermon based on one or two short passages from the Bible. For some of us, this is the only time we spend time with the Bible. Yet this gives us a distorted perspective on the Bible. It gives us the tendency to think of Scripture as a collection of neat isolated stories, which might relate to one another, but are not necessarily connected. This is wrong, and it leads us to simplistic moralizing, or dismissing the whole Bible.

The Bible is not meant to be chopped up into little, stand-alone pieces. Let me quote from Paul David Tripp, who writes [in Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands, pp. 26-27] “The Bible makes a poor encyclopedia. If that’s what God had intended, Scripture would have been arranged differently and included many volumes. As it is, there are many issues that the Bible does not address in a topical fashion. The Bible has nothing explicit to say, for example, about schizophrenia, ADD, teenagers, family television viewing, or sexual techniques for married couples. If you try to use your Bible as God’s encyclopedia, you will either conclude that it has little to say about some crucial issues of modern life or you will bend, twist, and stretch passages to suit your purposes. Either way you are not getting from the Word what God intended….In the Bible…every passage is dependent on the whole, and the whole Bible is held together by independent themes that run through every passage like rebar, the steel rods that reinforce concrete. If I handle Scripture topically, I will miss the overarching themes at the heart of everything else God wants to say to me. These themes give me a sense of identity, purpose, and direction that will fundamentally alter the way I think, desire, speak and act.” Paul Tripp is a conservative evangelical, and he and I don’t agree entirely on our reading of the Bible, but we agree on this – there is a wholeness to the Bible, and it’s important to read passages in context, and in conversation with other passages. It is not a collection of divine sound bites. It is the complex, rich, lively story of God’s activity in history, God’s love for a certain people, their response to that love, and God’s challenges to us. When we read it piecemeal, we miss a lot. And no wonder the Bible is boring, confusing and irrelevant to us then.

The original manuscripts of the Bible did not have chapter separation, verse numbers, and they certainly didn’t have those little italicized sub-headings that tell us what the next section is all about. While the Bible was written over a long period of time, by different people, and has diversity of perspective represented within it, including some outright internal contradictions, it also has a certain wholeness and consistent themes, such a concern for justice, hospitality, the poor, and the alien, the connection between loving God and loving other people. Last year, when Rev. Tricia Dykers Koenig of the Covenant Network came to meet with our Session and the Sessions of the Marshfield, Wausau and Preble Park churches, we talked about how the Bible is misused by opponents of homosexuality – and she made this same point: when we read a passage of the Bible, we need to look at it within the context of the whole Bible.

With this background, let’s look at the Bible passage we read this morning. Usually, this is split into two passages. The first part of the passage – the Good Samaritan story – was the lectionary reading for last Sunday, and the second part of the passage – the episode with Martha and Mary – is today’s lectionary passage. And each piece certainly has enough to discuss separately – but they become rich, more nuanced, and more complicated when studied together. That’s the problem with studying the Bible – the more you know about it, the more complex it becomes. Studying the Bible is much more like getting to know a person in that way. Think about it – sometimes when you don’t know someone, it is easy to neatly categorize them. “He’s a jerk”, or “she’s a nice person”, “they have such a good marriage”, “he’s a good Dad”, “she’s a bad Mom”. But when you get to know someone really well, those categories become inadequate. People are more complicated than labels. He might be a jerk, but he’s a jerk who’s really sweet to his little sister, and who gives one afternoon a week to the Cub Scouts, and who likes to garden. She may be a nice person, with a drinking problem, who doesn’t pay her bills. They might have a good marriage, but they’ve never figured out how to talk about the tough issues, so they keep it superficial…and so on. People are complicated. Labels are not.

When we look at the Good Samaritan story on its own, we tend to simplify it into easy morals, like: serving and caring for people is more important than piety. We can see that the priest and Levite didn’t do the right thing, though they valued holiness, and were religious people who sought to follow the law to please God. We might think that doing good works is more important than learning about God’s Word.

But when we look at the next story, the one about Mary and Martha, we seem to get the opposite message. Jesus seems to be saying in this story that it’s more important to sit and listen about spiritual matters than to be busy doing good deeds.

At first reading, the two episodes seem to be contradictory, but if we look at them together, we find in the ambiguity a real richness, and a harmony that reaches deep. I told you last week that I was doing some extra reading on living contemplatively. Contemplation is not navel-gazing as some folks think – it’s a way of paying attention that takes the present moment seriously. The contemplative approach to life is one of accepting life as it is, in the present moment, as a gift from God. This means paying attention. And that is the common link in these two stories. The Good Samaritan was open to the moment. But, he wasn’t just out for a stroll. The road from Jericho to Jerusalem was an unsafe traveling road. He was on his way for a purpose – but he didn’t let his own purpose prevent his being present to life as it was in the moment. He was present to the stranger, and to the possibilities of the moment. And he was open to the caring about the person in front of him.

Mary, too, was present to the opportunity in the moment. Nothing in the story suggests that she habitually failed to help – in fact we might conclude the opposite, as her behavior clearly unsettled her sister. And Jesus didn’t tell Martha that working was wrong, or suggest that caring for others through her deeds was misguided. What he suggested was that on this day she was distracted and unfocused – “Martha, Martha,” he said, “You are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.” Perhaps he was intending that she not be so locked into her own plans that she misses the opportunity in the now. I’ve certainly been guilty of that as a hostess – spending so much energy fussing over the details that I missed the opportunity to sit with my guests and enjoy being with them. Contemplative prayer is a way of prayer that involves just being present to the moment, and to the fullness of God’s love in the moment. It takes time, and can’t be hurried, but it helps to develop in us an openness to the fullness in each moment. Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest whose writing I like so much, is the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico – he has said that the most important word in his organization’s name is “and” – focusing on either action or contemplation alone is not enough. Contemplation should lead to action; action should arise from contemplation. Paying attention to the present moment should lead us to know how to act in it.

I went to a Quaker high school, and learned there to appreciate the depths and richness of silent, contemplative worship. It took time to learn to just be present, and available to the moment. It was hard not to be impatient, and to not rush to evaluate each time of silence, but to just be. And holding the moment so gently in some ways required more from me than the ways in which I seize and analyze life most of the time. But holding that moment so gently left me with a sense of also being held gently. And I learned to be present to that. When we take time to be present to our own being, we find that at our own center is a largeness, which connects us to all life. We begin to experience that the love that loves us, and the love with which we love, are the same love. And our experience of that unity and fullness develop am openness to possibility in life. So the expression “life as it is, just as it is in the present moment” actually begins to bear a fullness that feels something like joy.

Are we open to the possibilities in life as it is in the present moment?? There is depth and abundance in each moment that is available if we can be present to it, but if we really want to get to experience God, or live abundantly, we can’t be impatient, afraid of complexity, lazy in our thinking, or unwilling to listen. Jesus was not just a nice guy with some good sayings who died on a cross. He was brilliant, challenging, lively and fully present to those around him. He cares deeply for us, too deeply to offer us a life simple enough to be understood in slogans or sound bites or lived on the surface. The people who killed him were afraid of the crazy kingdom Jesus offered that seemed to not make sense, or fit into neat little boxes. Those who want to settle for less are missing the kingdom, and bypassing the gifts love offers in each moment. Let’s not be afraid of complexity, of mystery, and let’s not be in a hurry. Let’s be willing to listen, really listen, to each other and to the Spirit present in each moment. Let’s be open to love, to God’s love for us, to the love in our midst and to the opportunities we have to love others. Let’s be truly present to life as it is. Amen.