It’s the anxiety, people!

Christ Episcopal Church, Bastrop, La., July 21, 2019

For those who don’t know or might not remember, in a former pre-retirement life, I was a professor of communication at the University of Louisiana Monroe. I taught public relations, writing and visual communication, graphic design and occasionally photography.

And one of the things I incorporated in several of those courses was how to make a Power Point to enhance your spoken presentation. I have to admit that I’m one of those rather tiresome people who think most oral presentations could be improved by a good Power Point!

Now I would never want the Episcopal Church to turn into one of those churches with a stage, and several video cameras, and gigantic screens… basically, where the sanctuary has become a TV studio where many of my former students did their media production internships! But I have to admit that occasionally I have felt the lack of a way to make a sermon visually interesting.

 

The Mary & Martha window over the altar at Christ Church, Bastrop, La.

 So… all that is by way of directing your attention to the beautiful window at the front of this church—a perfect Power Point slide for today’s sermon about Mary and Martha!

This story of Mary and Martha and Jesus’ visit in their home is very familiar to us. I have no idea how many sermons based on this text I have heard, but at this point in a lifetime of going to church virtually every Sunday, it has to be dozens. Does that sound reasonable? Anyone else?

And I would say most of those sermons made this story a sort of competition between Christian service, like that of Martha, and Christian study, meditation, prayer, etc., like that of Mary.

And many of those sermons make this story a reminder that we contemporary Christians have filled our lives with many, many things. More than ever before. We are busier than ever. With modern media and such, we have more demands on our time and attention than any of our ancestors, and we really need to develop the discipline to spend more time in prayer and meditation and study of the word of God.

At the very least, the preacher is going to come down on the side of “balance.” We need a better balance between service and prayer in our lives. Sound familiar? And that’s not a bad sermon! We DO need balance between service and prayer in our lives.

But today I want to direct our attention to an aspect of this story that can get lost or overlooked in that approach. Look again with me at how Jesus rebukes Martha—and it is a rebuke. A gentle one, for sure, but a rebuke.

He says to 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.

“You are worried and distracted by many things.” Is that not the very definition of “anxiety”? He might as well have said, “Mary, you are anxious. Calm down!”

Nothing is more contagious in human society than anxiety. Did you ever notice that? An anxious person can make a roomful of anxious people in a heartbeat!

One of the things I had to do under Bishop Bruce’s process for becoming a deacon was to complete a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, “CPE” for short. The Jefferson Regional Medical Center in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, had an excellent program, and so I spent a summer mostly in Pine Bluff, coming home to Monroe to spend the weekends I was not on call with my son.

And…, I can only think because I was older and more mature than my peers in the program, and generally speaking, a relatively non-anxious person, I got assigned to… wait for it… the hospice unit and the emergency room.

Now families with a loved one in a hospice unit have typically had some time to begin preparing themselves for what’s coming. That doesn’t mean the hospice unit is anxiety free, just that… it’s not much like the emergency room.

The emergency room is Anxiety Central! Some of you might have been there and know firsthand what I’m talking about. Bad things, terrible things, scary things, tragic things, end up in hospital emergency rooms. And so I learned a lot that summer about being what we call “a non-anxious presence” in the midst of over-the-top anxiety.

Martha’s anxiety in today’s Gospel story is not of that order, but… she is “worried and distracted” by many things. Clearly, Jesus is not rebuking her for serving. Jesus viewed himself as a server.

He said that many times in different ways: I came not to be served, but to serve. I am among you as one who serves. And he taught his followers to serve: As I have done to you, do to each other and to the least of these. So he’s not rebuking her for serving.

But why, we might ask, does Jesus care about Martha’s anxiety? Because riddled with anxiety, where is the joy of serving the Lord? Where is the peace that passes understanding of being in the Lord’s presence? Where is the gratitude for the gift of food to prepare for the table?

Riddled with anxiety, we lose sight of the knowledge that God is with us no matter the struggle of the day. Indeed, the very definition of “anxiety” is loss of confidence that regardless of what is happening in this time and place at this moment, our hearts, our souls, our lives are in the hands of the Living God.

Now, one more thing about this story gives me pause today. One more lesson I want to draw from it, and that lesson is, “Own your own stuff.” Right? You’ve heard that before, too, probably with a different word in place of “stuff”… but we’re in church today, so we’ll just say “stuff.” Own your own stuff!

Here’s what I mean. Look back at what Martha actually says: Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself.

Notice that she is not complaining about the task of preparing food. Or setting the table, or whatever else she was “worried and distracted” about. She is busy blaming her sister, Mary, for the choice she, Martha, has made. Martha is being a bit of a self-righteous martyr in this story.

Now…, the choice Martha made was not free of social pressure! It was customary, and even a principle of Jewish hospitality, that food be prepared for the table when a guest is in the house—especially a beloved guest like Jesus.

And rarely are the choices we must make on a daily basis free of conflicting pressures: social pressures, economic pressures, political pressures. That’s real. And it’s often not easy to negotiate those pressures. Many of our choices are fraught with equally good reasons to go any of several directions.

But we have choices. As I look around this room, I indeed see people of relative privilege. Our choices might be challenging, but rarely is a roof over our heads at bedtime tonight, or food for the dinner table, at stake in the choices we must make.

ALICE = Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. In 2014, on average, over half of Ouachita Parish families either live in poverty or fall below the ALICE threshold, which means they are not making ends meet in spite of being employed.

Well…, in my case, food for the dinner table is a bit of a problem. But that’s not because I lack money to buy food or transportation to the grocery store or… whatever! It’s because of the series of choices I made in organizing my week.

It would be easy to say, “I didn’t have time.” I am a busy person; I do many good—and fun—things. This week I went to visit an elderly friend who relies on me for essential companionship and help with various tasks. Good on me, right! But truth be told, I didn’t make it to the grocery store because of a series of choices I made, a set of priorities I enacted.

Most of the time there’s far more at stake than an empty refrigerator in the life choices we must make, so don’t let the homeliness of that example obscure the point.

And here’s the point: Jesus speaks to us through this story. Dear people of God, he says, your anxiety is sucking the joy and gratitude and confidence of my presence from your very life. Choose the better part; make me the center, make me the first priority, and whatever else you choose to do, my love for you and for all of my children will permeate and shine through.

In the name of God, Father, son, and Holy Spirit, AMEN.