THE PARTY AT MARTHA'S:
the politics of sex

     Jesus out of touch with women's lives?

My mother has an eye for dirt like no one else I have ever met. She prides herself as a first class housekeeper and nothing in my experience has proven to me that she does not take high honours as such. She had a cleaning routine which could not be interrupted by protests on the part of my sister and me, ""But Mom, where's the dirt?" or, " Mom, we vacuumed that room yesterday".

I guess having lived in Saskatchewan during the dirty thirties she just knew that there had to be dust lurking somewhere. Every spring my mother cleaned our entire house from top to bottom. She washed every wall, ceiling, and floor, cleaned every closet and cupboard, and washed every window and curtain. She cleaned and carefully packaged and labelled every bit of winter clothing to be stored and replaced them with summer clothing which had received the same treatment the preceding fall. She also provided 3 meals a day, and during harvest time, prepared and transported to the field a huge midday meal for a gang of hungry men.

My mother would have made mincemeat out of Jesus if he had spoken to her as he did to Martha in this morning's text from Luke. I can just hear her saying to him, as she said to me on more than one occasion, "The kitchen's that way if you think its so easy to make dinner." In the cultural environment in which I grew up there were two great spiritual truths: cleanliness is next to godliness and laziness is the greatest of all evils!

I've always been grateful that my mother was a fanatic about cleanliness and not about religion. I'm sure if she had been the later I would not be standing in this pulpit this morning. I would still be using her zeal, like many people I meet do of their experience, as an excuse for dismissing any participation in the church.

Now I cannot recall ever discussing the story of Jesus' visit to Mary and Martha's place for dinner with my mother but somehow I know that she her reaction would be something like, "Just like a man to think that way, they don't do all the work"

     Seeking the food that truly nourishes

In preparing today's sermon I reviewed some of the different approaches to this text - on the internet and in various other resources. The most common one seems to be that of regarding it as a kind of allegory for recognizing where the good food is. According to Jesus, Mary has chosen the better part because she recognizes that the word God is food which lasts forever, whereas Martha is still at the lambchop stage . Mary has her priorities well ordered because she knows how special Jesus is and that learning from him is more important that fussing over dinner. Indeed, why fret over getting dinner on the table we all know well enough, if the food doesn't appear at the usual time, hungry family members, and maybe even guests, will ultimately make their way to the kitchen and find something.

This interpretation is certainly not without merit for us who live our lives "worried and distracted by many things" to quote Jesus' turn of phrase. True enough worries and distractions are the main reason why most of us have rather shallow spiritual lives- reflecting on God's word is something we keep for s spare moment- which never happens, - or for our old age which happens all too quickly. Unfortunately, by that time our habits are firmly set and we just don't have the energy or motivation to develop new personal disciplines. The result is many of us go through life with a religion of sentimentality or with the faith maturity we had when we left Sunday School at age 11.

     The Psychological Interpretation

Next in line among the more traditional preaching themes for this Mary-Martha text is what I would call the psychological approach. The preacher points out that Jesus' rebuke of Martha was a loving one, that his defence of Mary was because he instinctively knew her needs at that moment, and that, in fact, Jesus, was giving Martha permission to abandon her apron and join Mary at his feet where she really inwardly longed to be. On the internet I read such a sermon delivered by the great English preacher Spurgeon in London in the 1880's. I found it more amusing than edifying.

     Jesus Radical Challenge to the Law

The interpretation which I prefer you will not find surprizing: it has to do with the political and cultural critique which Jesus is making. Jesus is being outspoken if not downright shocking. Some would call it the feminist interpretation: Jesus is a feminist in the midst of the highly patriarchal cultures of both Israel and the Roman Empire. He is challenging the universally accepted gender roles of his day which institutionalized male superiority and female inferiority. Sadly, this is still a fact in most societies today.

You see, only men had the prerogative of interpreting the Law of God . Only males could go to Torah school. Only a male could be a disciple sitting at the feet of a teacher. But Mary was one who persisted in her determination to learn - so she took the traditional place of the student with the teacher- that is she sat at the teacher's feet. Not only was this reserved for males but the very fact of Jesus being in such an intimate context with women not of his family was a major breach of social and religious convention.

It is an almost perfect feminist text- if only Jesus had offered to go to kitchen and help Martha. He did not. It seems that Jesus was not averse to doing this clearly female task since he did make breakfast for his disciples in John 21:9-14!

     Martha unable to step outside of social taboo

When we hold this image of Jesus teaching Mary seated at this feet in mind we may understand why Martha intervened. Not because she needed help with the meal but because Jesus and Mary were transgressing a deep-seated prohibition from which Martha, much as she loved both, could not free herself. She needed some reason to get Mary out of that posture. One might make the point that Martha had already cleared one barrier of social inferiority in inviting Jesus to her home but the second one, that of usurping the male prerogative of sitting at the teacher's feet, she simply could not overcome. What might be an equivalent in our culture- two men holding hands deep in conversation in a restaurant? Well, everybody would know what that would mean, wouldn't they!

     What of the Feminist Agenda in the Church?

Here at St John's we have prepared a fine new brochure - one we will be putting in the pews during the Chamber Music Festival and generally making available- thanks to the work of Janet and David Humphreys. On the front page we read "You have heard that St John's is a different kind of church". Inside the text goes on to address issues that people have with the church and how St John's might help them with those barriers. In one place we describe St John's as a feminist church.

Now many of you will know that to use that term, as well as the one to describe ourselves as being open to gay and lesbian people, is to totter on the edge of respectability. This is partly because many regard these as secular not religious issues and partly because these labels are in themselves ambiguous.

What on earth is a feminist church? Well, for Janet and David and I, a feminist church is one which believes that Jesus regarded men and women as equal in all respects before God and God's laws. While the feminist agenda in society in general is vast, as far as the church is concerned, the agenda of feminists and feminist theologians has been at least to remove the patriarchal screen which culture has placed over the word of God and thereby to open up God's word and God's church more fully to women. As we do this we are prompted to ask ourselves, "What other cultural screens ancient and modern prevent us from hearing God's word?".

     The Bible is Androcentric

The bible is a male-centre document in the extreme. It was written mostly if not entirely by men. It was edited by men, it was interpreted by men. It describes a succession of societies over a period of roughly 1200 years whose public life was dominated by men. And because the bible's focus is predominantly on public rather than private life, it talks almost only about men.

In the Hebrew Bible as a whole, only 111 of the 1446 people who are given names are women. The proportion of women in the New Testament is about twice as great, which still leave them a small minority. Can you see why this aspect of the Bible is a problem in our culture? Can you see how this aspect of the Bible has influenced the life of the church.

In less than 30 years feminist theologians have contributed immensely to helping us all separate the baby from the bath water, so to speak, in terms of this androcentric bias. I'm convinced that many of you women who are here this morning which not be here if it were not for their work in helping the church see new truth in holy scripture, a truth which includes all of humanity, especially the 52% which is female.

     The Bible is like a Pilgrim

This issue, like the issue of homosexuality, invites us to see the Bible not as a record of immutable timeless truths which must be applied the same way in all times and places. Rather, the bible is rather like Jesus himself, a pilgrim forging new relationships over time with each person and culture. Like a pilgrim the Bible engages in a new conversation with everyone along the way speaking of God's truth in a language and thought-form which people along the way can understand.

     A bowl of summer fruit?

In our reading from the Hebrew Bible this morning God places a bowl of summer fruit before the prophet Amos and asks Amos what he sees. Amos replies, "A bowl of summer fruit" But for God this bowl of summer fruit is but a point of departure for a revelation to Amos of a whole new perspective on what God thinks and wants. God goes on to a searing indictment of the social injustices of Israel and commands Amos to warn the society of his time of the consequences of persisting in these injustices.

In a like manner the story of Martha's dinner party seems to be obvious and at its simplest level to a call to take time to hear God's word. But when I read the story of Mary and Martha in the context of what we know now about the politics, culture, and religion of the time, it is just so clear to me that Jesus was making a radical gesture of inclusion and taking a great risk in doing so. It is clear to me that the gospels are unequivocal in placing women prominently among the marginalized people who made up so much of Jesus' circle and that women in the New Testament are shown as having been instrumental in opening up the Jesus community to non-Jews. Can we go so far as to speculate that none of us here would know Christ today if Jesus had not succeeded in breaking down that first barrier which excluded women from a significant role in the assembly of God.

     The Church succumbs to patriarchy

It is unfortunate that the church in just a few decades after the New Testament was written succumbed to the immense pressure of the patriarchal societies in which it began- just like it gave up Jesus' crucial teaching on non-violence and succumbed to the doctrine of state violence. I believe we can now begin to take heart that these long-buried truths of God's self revelation are now being recovered .

     In Christ there is no longer male or female

Let me end this sermon by reminding you that Jesus' vision of inclusiveness was so powerful that it became the hallmark of much of the theology of St Paul. For the Christian Church Paul has immortalized that great vision in his letter to the Galatians,

" ...for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith....There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ."                Galatians 3:26ff.