What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
This question comes from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.” It is a great one to ask and answer on this particular summer day, as we think about the visit of Jesus to the house of Martha and Mary.
It’s a question we can ask the two women in this story.
What is it that you plan to do, Martha?
Martha might say, “Oh, straighten up the house, welcome Jesus, prepare a meal for him. This is my duty, after all. Anything else would bring shame on my family.”
And what is it that you plan to do, Mary?
“Sit at the Lord’s feet,” she says. “Listen to what he is teaching. I have just one ‘wild and precious life,’ so I’m going to use it to soak up the word of the Lord.”
So, Martha’s a worker.
And Mary’s a shirker.
The duty of a first-century Jewish woman is to help with household chores, and Mary knows this. By sitting at the feet of Jesus, she is acting like a man ... taking the place of a disciple! She is violating a crystal-clear social boundary, and bringing shame upon her house!
“Wild and precious life.” Oh, come on. Be serious, Mary.
We know how the story ends, with Martha asking Jesus to put Mary in her place. “Tell her to help me,” says Martha, assuming that Jesus will want their house to be in order. But Jesus answers her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:40-42).
The surprising final score is Mary 1, Martha 0.
Now, as enlightened 21st-century Christians, we might want to give Mary a thumbs-up for her come-from-behind victory, but the fact of the matter is that we tend to honor Martha in our day-to-day lives. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but we do. We Americans have a deep desire to be neat and tidy and organized, and we feel badly that our desks are overflowing with papers, our closets crammed full of clothes, and our garages and basements packed with tools, toys, sports equipment, and boxes of who-knows-what.
According to The New York Times (December 21, 2006), sales of home-organizing products keep going up and up, from $5 billion in 2005 to a projected $7 billion in 2009. That’s a lot of accordion files and label-makers and plastic tubs. The industry that makes closet organizing systems pulls in $3 billion a year, according to Closets magazine.
Can you believe that there actually exists a magazine called Closets? That says it all. 854 million people around the world are hungry, and we spend money on a magazine called Closets. This supports the fact that we have a fear of being Messy Marys. We really want to be Methodical Marthas … people with perfectly organized closets.
I understand the desire, but I think there’s a problem here.. God wants us to take seriously the value of our “one wild and precious life.” We must pay attention to Jesus when he honors Mary for listening instead of laboring. And we need to accept the fact that a perfectly organized life is not all that it’s cracked up to be.
The New York Times reports that a new movement is afoot, one that calls you to embrace your disorder and “say yes to mess.” Can you do that? Say yes to mess. Recent studies are revealing that
- messy desks are the marks of people with creative minds and higher salaries
- messy closet owners are probably better parents than their tidier counterparts
- really neat people are often humorless and inflexible, and not as great as they look
It might be that Messy Mary is a better model for us than Methodical Martha. I’ll use that as an excuse when you catch a glimpse of my cluttered desk.
The power of Mary is that she has her priorities straight. Neatnik Martha fusses around in the kitchen, “distracted by her many tasks” (v. 40), while Messy Mary leaves her stuff in a pile and plops down at the feet of Jesus. She is showing that she loves the Lord her God with all her heart, all her soul, all her strength, and all her mind (v. 27) — she is demonstrating her love of God by focusing intensely on his Word as it is coming to her through Jesus.
Martha, on the other hand, is distracted by her work, and unable to hear the Word of God. Bible scholar Alan Culpepper reminds us that Jesus told a story about what happens when a seed — representing the Word of God — falls among thorns. In that case, the fruit of the seed cannot mature, because the thorny people are preoccupied with “the cares and riches and pleasures of life” (Luke 8:14). Poor Martha, as hard-working as she is, is a thorn. Although she is fulfilling her social obligations, she is allowing her duties to distract her from hearing God’s Word. In this situation, she simply doesn’t have her priorities straight.
As for Mary, she “has chosen the better part,” says Jesus, “which will not be taken away from her” (10:42). Mary knows that a person “does not live by bread alone” (4:4). Like the disciples, she leaves everything to follow Jesus (5:11). Like the good soil in the parable of the seed, she hears the word, holds it fast in an honest heart, and bears good fruit (10:15).
Mary may be messy, but she keeps her priorities straight. She is like the teenager who skips a high school dance to go on a church retreat. She is like the man who takes a week off from work to attend a spiritual conference at Montreat. She is like the woman who devotes an hour every week to leading a Bible study for the homeless at the Lamb Center. She is like the family that makes a commitment to be in worship every Sunday morning … even on a Sunday like today, in the middle of the summer.
These priorities are critically important, but they don’t come cheap — they cost you something. Just as Mary shattered expectations and brought shame on her family by sitting at the feet of Jesus, those of you who focus on God’s Word are going to find yourselves on a countercultural path. The teenager who chooses a church retreat over a high school dance will be lumped together with other Christians, sometimes in a derogatory way. The man who takes a week off from work for a conference at Montreat may lose some income, or have his loyalty to his company questioned. The woman who leads a Bible study for the homeless won’t have as much time to accomplish things at her home or her office. And the family that is a regular participant at church is not at the beach or the lake or the amusement park every weekend — it is clear to everyone that they have a different set of priorities.
To those who are here in worship this morning, I commend you. You are showing your commitment, and stating your priorities. You are being Messy Marys, sitting at the feet of the Lord. That is the very best place for you to be.
In my own life, it’s not always easy to be a Messy Mary. There are so many phone calls and emails that come to me every week — I could easily spend all of my time responding to requests from church members and colleagues and the steady stream of needy people that are always coming to the church for assistance. This is all good work, similar to the hospitality that Methodical Martha showed to Jesus and his disciples. But if I am always responding to requests, then I’m not sitting at the feet of the Lord. And if I’m not listening to Jesus, then I cannot possibly prepare sermons and Bible studies that are going to meet your spiritual needs.
So I’ve discovered that I need to be a Messy Mary, even if it means that I don’t answer every email that pops up on my computer. Sorry about that — I hope you’re not offended. I need to say yes to mess, in order to say an even bigger yes to what God is trying to say to me.
In the end, being a Messy Mary is the very best way to grow closer to God. When you say yes to mess, you make obedience to Jesus a top priority — even higher than the organization of your closets. When you say yes to mess, you carve out time for prayer and Bible study, and you listen for what Jesus is saying … you open your calendar to what God considers a priority … you open your wallet to what the Holy Spirit wants you to support. When you say yes to mess, you focus on listening to Jesus, loving God, serving your neighbors — and as you do this, you find that you have “chosen the better part,” which will not be taken away from you (v. 42).
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we should become so messy that daily life spirals out of control. It’s still important to cook nutritious meals for our children, pay mortgages and bills on time, and maintain good tax records in case we ever get a friendly call from the IRS. But these activities should be kept in their proper place, and not allowed to distract us from the higher priority of hearing the word of our Lord. To say yes to mess is to be willing to lay everything else aside, and pay attention to Christ’s teachings.
If we do, we’ll find that God has given us one wild and precious life, a life that can be filled with love and challenge and comfort and purpose. It’s a life that may be messy at times, but is always filled with meaning.
So put down the closet organizer, and walk away. It’s time to take a seat at Jesus’ feet. Amen.
Sources:
Culpepper, R. Alan. “The Gospel of Luke,” The New Interpreter’s Bible. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995. 230-232.
Green, Penelope. “Saying yes to mess,” The New York Times, December 21, 2006, www.nytimes.com.