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"Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things: one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her." -- Luke 10:41-42


It is Mother's Day, a quasi "high holy day" on the American calendar. It was started by Ann Jarvis in 1907, to honor her mother who devoted her life to the Methodist Sunday school in Crafton, West Virginia. Ms. Jarvis (who never married) said she wanted to pay tribute to her mother's habit of secret prayer, her graces at table, and her abiding affection for favorite hymns.

Ann Jarvis tirelessly promoted the concept of Mother's Day by letter writing, personal contact, organizational support, and celebrity endorsement. Williams Jennings Bryan and Russell Conwell came to her side. The YMCA, the World Sunday School Association, and the Methodist Church endorsed the idea. Eventually, Woodrow Wilson gave a Presidential Proclamation in 1914, recognizing Mother's Day as a holiday. At the time, one Congregational paper wrote about the rising prominence of Mother's Day on the American calendar. Said the paper: "Not Christmas, nor Easter, nor Children's Day has stirred such depth of sentiment" as has Mother's Day (quoted in The Christian Century, 5/8/91, p. 522).

Ann Jarvis would have disagreed with most of the commercialized aspects of Mother's Day. She wanted to think of it as a holy day rather than as just another opportunity for commercial exploitation. She fought the florists and greeting card people. She wanted people to focus not on expensive gifts, but upon spiritual values, long letters to mothers, and personal visits with words of thanks and appreciation.

But if commercialism became a predominant force for Mother's Day, other forces lately have come into play. One feminist suggests the holiday extends the "cult of motherhood" and gives to women "flattery in the place of justice." Whereas traditionally Mother's Day promoted a rather sentimental picture of a pious, Victorian mother, in a thoroughly domesticated role, women of today have sometimes used the occasion for political activism and female consciousness-raising. And some are unsure about any observance of the day.

Consequently, we look now at a somewhat unconventional text for Mother's Day. It is the story of Martha and Mary entertaining Jesus with a dinner party in their home, in Bethany, a suburb of Jerusalem. It is a story, not about mothers and children, but about two single women without children.

Some scholars speculate that Martha was widowed and that the home belonged to her. Mary apparently had never married and there is no indication their brother, Lazarus, had ever married. There is no mention of children or parents. It is a story, not of a typical, traditional family, but of three single people sharing the same household.

There is no hint about what any of them did for a livelihood. Consequently, what they did in the nine-to-five workweek is unknown. Perhaps Martha's inheritance was sufficient. But we do have in our text a story that has to do with the after-work time of five to nine. And whether we are mothers, singles, or men, the story has some insight for our family living nine to five and five to nine.

Marthas and Marys have long been contrasted in our churches. We have had the Marthas, the doers, and the Marys, the thinkers. We have contrasted the materialistic Martha's with the spiritual Marys. The two have symbolized two approaches to life, especially the life from five to nine.

Who then shall it be today? Martha or Mary?

I.

Let's first consider Martha, and let her represent the working woman -- practical, career-oriented, materialistic, and determined to get ahead.

As we have said, we do not know the source of Martha's livelihood. That she had a house in suburban Jerusalem, we know. And that she entertained at dinner parties, we surmise from our texts. And that on this occasion she had planned a several course dinner, we gather from implications of the text. But whether she went to work, nine to five, we do not know. But we can assume she was working hard, shopping and then preparing food in the kitchen. In this regard, she was a good role model for some of the traditional notions of womanhood and motherhood.

Martha also seemed to understand the importance of material things. We can imagine she kept her home well. We also can imagine she knew where to shop for the best foods for her sumptuous dinner parties for celebrity guests like Jesus. And we can imagine she knew the importance of money, especially since her husband died. Widows were especially vulnerable once their husbands were gone. As a single woman, Martha may well have had an early appreciation of money and position.

Women and mothers of today can identify with Martha. Women have been working for a better stake in the economy for centuries. As members of agricultural economies, they have worked right alongside the men plowing the fields, milking the cows, gathering the firewood, harvesting the crops, and selling the produce. Indeed, the economy of the past was often centered in the agrarian home, where nine to five and five to nine welded into an inseparable lifestyle.

The separation of home and work place came largely with the Industrial Revolution. Men and women and children went off to work in the sweatshops. But when men began to make enough, children, and then women, stayed home. Consequently, "The notion of the middle-class home, in which the woman's role is primarily that of a support to her husband and children, is a relatively recent phenomenon," says Anita Shreve in her book, Remaking Motherhood (p. 14).

Shreve goes on to point out that it wasn't until the mid-nineteenth century that a woman's exclusive job became that of caring for men and children in the home. However, twenty percent of American women did work outside the home at the turn of the century. Nevertheless, a woman was to be the wife and mother and homemaker.

More than that, she was expected to be the protector of values and culture and refinement. In the Victorian equation, a rather sexist equation when you think of it, men were regarded as base, vulgar, materialistic, and more interested in sex. The Victorian woman was thought to be above such materialistic realities and strove to inculcate the higher values, values which tended, however, to degenerate into fastidiousness and prudery.

Women did go to work during World War I, and by the end of World War II, six million women were in the work force. In 1947, thirty percent of American women worked outside the home, but the ideal of women at home as wives and mothers persisted.

But by 1984, fifty million women were working full-time, many of them mothers of children who were still at home. Today, of the mothers who have children under five, two-thirds work outside the home. About 75 percent of two-parent families have both parents employed. And nearly one-half of all families are headed by a single parent, most of whom are women. Consequently, 80 to 85 percent of our children grow up in the homes of working mothers. As Anita Shreve puts it: "Women who thought they would have marriages like their parents that lasted for fifty years are now twice-divorced and single-handedly raising their own children" (p. 10).

Nevertheless, women are working, and working hard. Women now surpass men in the professions. From 1972 to 1982, the number of women lawyers increased fivefold. Women are becoming engineers, mail carriers, physicians and surgeons, insurance agents, heavy-machine operators, and combat fighter pilots. Many mainline seminaries have student bodies that are one-half female.

Anita Shreve says that "women now resemble male workers in the strength of their commitment to the workplace ..." (p. 18). They have increasing social ties to the workplace and identify themselves more in terms of their career goals and monetary success than they do as mothers, wives, or family members.

Of course many women are working out of necessity. They are single and have children to support. Others, married or single, have college tuitions to pay or payments to make on the house, the vacation house, the boat, the ski condo, the BMW, and the club memberships. With all those obligations, it's hard to make ends meet!

Martha, Martha, if ever women agreed with you, it's today. Good home, good address, good food and entertainment, material success, and financial well being are important. And women know it as never before. Even Jesus knew it, because the moneybox held by Judas contained contributions from wealthy women, some of whom even traveled with Jesus. And Jesus was frequently entertained at other dinner parties which cost money to put on.

Martha, Martha, you know the score. It's money that makes the world go round. Everything revolves around money, sex, and power. So use them all to your advantage in this tough world, whether it's nine to five or five to nine.

II.

But now let Mary take the stage and let her represent the other side -- the spiritual, the intellectual, the ethical side of things. What about Mary nine to five and five to nine?

I have long felt that the Marthas of the world must resent the ensuing dialogue which takes place between the sisters and Jesus. I mean the Marthas who have had the almost thankless task of cooking hundreds of church dinners, the Marthas who have taken thousands of casseroles to families in need, the Marthas who have baked ten million dozen chocolate chip cookies for one reception or another, the Marthas who are there when you need some envelopes stuffed, some rooms cleaned out, some nitty-gritty tasks done, Marthas who will do almost all the dirty work -- all except windows, for no one does windows these days!

Yes, and after the Marthas have done all that; after the beautiful Martha of our story, shopped, cooked, prepared, and served so that all, including Jesus, might enjoy a lovely dinner; after all that, Jesus has the audacity to say, "Martha, Martha, you are troubled about many things. Come and sit with Mary, for she has chosen the better part."

At that time, I can imagine Martha was almost ready to bop Jesus on the head with his dinner plate. "Isn't that just like a man?" she might have thought; not unlike those guests who tell their hosts, "Come now and chat or sit a while," hoping, of course, their hosts won't until they have finished serving the food and drink.

Martha had had a hard day preparing all this food. Whether her sister Mary had helped in preparation, we are not told. But one thing we know, she was not helping in serving. She was sitting listening to Jesus speak to the group during the several courses of dinner. Martha approached Jesus to ask Mary to come help her with serving. Could he not see she was in need of help? And especially could not Mary see that? Of course she could and ignored Martha's glowering looks in her direction. That is why Martha appealed to Jesus.

Does every family have a Martha and Mary? We did. While most of the family might be involved in preparing or serving a dinner, one daughter would have her nose in a book, oblivious to the pressing demands of the home. It is so annoying, so irritating, to be working so hard to provide for our material well-being and have someone just sitting there reading, or thinking, or, God forbid, praying.

I mean, Jesus, can't you make those people see what's really important? Can't you get them in gear, get them to realize how tough it is to succeed in today's world, get them to realize how much they depend on our material and financial success? Come on, Jesus, tell all these thinking, researching, reflecting, praying, spiritually-minded Marys of the world to get with it, and help us in the really important things of life.

And if we can calm down a little and listen a little, we can hear him say, "Martha, Martha, you are troubled and anxious about many things. One thing is needful and Mary has chosen the better dish." The Martha in us fumes, "Better dish indeed; as it turns out, no dish at all. She hasn't carried a single dish from the kitchen."

"Martha, Martha, you are indeed a wonderful hostess and cook and a delightful connoisseur of fine food and wine. But despite all that, Mary is a connoisseur of things even more important -- things intellectual and spiritual, things of lasting and even revolutionary value, things which will reverberate throughout history long after this excellent dinner is digested and forgotten."

I imagine Jesus might note with sociologist Lyle Schaller, that today, the primary place for socialization is not the home, but the workplace. I imagine he might point out how our homes are designed to eat and sleep and watch television, but not to converse and share and nurture. Some of the homes of the South depicted in movies like Places In The Heart and Steel Magnolias had conversation and reading and game centers. They looked as though people really lived together there, knew each other, shared a lifestyle and value system, rather than just nodding in the hall on the way to the next activity.

If we identify primarily with our work rather than with family or spiritual values; if we are primarily money, power, and success-oriented, what does that say about child-rearing and the values we pass on to the next generation? Harvard's well-known physician-professor, T. Berry Brazelton, says, "The old myth of raising a child by instinct has disintegrated as our culture has become less certain of its values." He goes on to say: "How can we raise children by the principle of 'do what feels right' if we don't know where we're headed?" He then adds, "With the breakdown of the extended family and the disintegration of our cultural values, today's parents are working in a vacuum. We have," says Dr. Brazelton, "lost the kind of instinct that is directed by a culture or an extended family, and unfortunately, there's nothing to replace it yet" (quoted in Shreve, op. cit., p. 125).

"Martha, Martha, you are fussing and fretting about many things." One thing is needful, the spiritual center of life, and Mary, for all her faults and failures at dinner parties and material success, has chosen the better course.

I am reminded of Tom Wolfe's tart description of Manhattan social climbers, women in this case, who work hard, dress to the nines, and starve themselves into a chic, skeletal thinness which makes an x-ray technician's work superfluous. Joey Adams says, "Show me a woman like that who exercises morning, noon, and night, who diets to look chic and thin, and I'll show you one hungry woman!"

Hungry indeed! But hungry for what? Hungry for yet another material acquisition? Hungry for yet another social event to see and be seen in all the right places with the right people? Or to be seen in the latest "in" restaurant, as Tom Wolfe notes? Hungry for more success at yet a higher level in the career? Or increasingly hungry for spiritual truths which last and last, and satisfy the soul of self and family for the eternal dimension.

Through one of its surveys, Better Homes and Gardens magazine has determined that because of so many women working, our homes are dirtier now! But, of course, for many families, it doesn't matter as much, because they are rarely home anyhow! Fretting, fussing, anxious about many things, we all have become Martha's in our materialistic excesses.

But Jesus said Mary chose the better portion. For her the question was not so much living to eat, as eating to live; not so much the daily bread, as the bread of life. For her it was not so much a question of how we look or dress or eat or vacation or exercise, but how we think and pray and worship and nurture and teach and share and relate and serve; and yes, how we love. Do we really love anyone but ourselves?

However, the spiritual breakdown of our society surely isn't due to working women. Most of the people involved in the Wall Street scandals, the Savings and Loan scandals, and the insurance scandals, have been men. And the breakdown of the family surely cannot be blamed on the working mother. Men long ago abandoned family, church, and school for the sake of their careers, identifying themselves primarily by their jobs.

But if moral integrity and spiritual depth are to return to our homes and families, men and women will have to take responsibility. We are going to have to stop giving approval to cheating in school, to lying to authority, to abusing drugs and alcohol, to cheapening and making banal the sexual experience. If our children are to become something more than worker bees in a mindless drive toward more and more things, we parents are going to have to give up worshiping at the shrine of the dollar. The Marys of the world call us to our spiritual and ethical foundations.

The Marthas of the world are important and crucial. They get the research into practical application. They get the architect's drawings into a real building. The newly conceived product gets from concept, to production, to sales by the Marthas of the world. Without them, the world, the practical, everyday world, would screech to a halt.

Nevertheless, Jesus said, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious about many things. One thing is needful. Mary has chosen the better." And what did Mary do? She sat at the feet of Jesus and listened as he said the true reality, the spiritual reality, comes by way of self-denial and worship of God. And then with prophetic intuition, she anointed his feet with costly oil, anointed the feet of him whom millions would follow, anointed the feet of him who would turn the heads of history. She chose the better part.

Martha. Martha. Mary. Mary. Who are you? Who am I?

Prayer

Almighty God, Creator of the universe and our Creator, you make the world in majesty and beauty, and sustain the earth and all living things by the power of your word. Conscious that we are marvelously made, male and female, and aware of an innate reverence within, we would worship you, Lord God, with all our heart and mind, soul and strength.

On this day, we especially praise you for the gifts of masculinity and femininity, for maleness and femaleness, and for the marvels and mysteries, the agonies and ecstasies, of human loving. If ever our minds become numb and our hearts hardened, the birth of a child awakens us anew to your creative power to knit us together in our mother's womb. When we behold again the tiny baby's fingers and feet, when we note the curious eyes and winsome innocence, when we sense the unique presence and personality, we know again you are beginning the world again, ever new and ever hopeful. We give you thanks for love and conception and the miracle of birth and new life.

If the creative process is yours, the burden of the process is with our mothers. They know the morning sickness, the nausea, the aches and pains, and the ordeal of giving birth. And theirs is the responsibility of nursing and nurturing, of bathing and bonding, and of caring in those special ways which cause us to revere our mothers and to hold them in special esteem.

And so now, in your presence, O God, we call to mind our mothers. Some sacrificed for us, working two jobs to put us through school. Some read us stories and listened to our stories when the rest of the world ignored us. Some eased our hurts and soothed our wounds. Some gave us inherent patterns of work and discipline without our knowing, until later years, when we realized much of our success was due to those inherent patterns.

Some mothers were patient and understanding, putting self aside for our more insistent needs. Some instilled spiritual depth and a sensitive conscience, giving us inward integrity and moral stamina. Some, when we compromised our integrity, were forgiving and accepting, but uncompromising, calling us to greater courage and high resolve. Some were there to comfort us in our grief and to forgive us in our regret. Self-made men or women though we may claim to be, we acknowledge with thanks before you, Almighty God, how much we have been made by our mothers who were made by you.

If we raise thanks for our mothers, we also raise our prayers for them. Some are old and arthritic, feeble and forgetful, and too often lonely. Bless them with your special comfort and strength in their old age. Some mothers are young, working outside the home and short on cash and patience, trying to please boss and husband. Help them find a balanced life. Some are middle-aged, the sandwich generation, caught between college tuitions and nursing home bills. Strengthen them for their arduous double-duty.

Some mothers are stressed out with work and family and need strength and understanding. Some are newly free as empty nesters and need guidance in a new phase of life. Some have lost their little ones and have an unrequited grief. Some have wayward children, worse than prodigals, nearly lost on drugs or booze or the bawdy life. Strengthen them. Some mothers are self-centered and bored and need the stimulus of your judgment and grace.

And Lord our God, how many millions of mothers are poor and suffering -- in the ruins of Bangladesh, the famines of Ethiopia, the slums of Rio De Janeiro, the poverty-stricken masses of mothers of the world who themselves are so emaciated and so decimated with disease they have no milk for the babies at their breasts and no food for the infants at their feet.

See what overwhelming needs we have in the world, O God. Grant us your mercy and relief. And once again, as with Eve and Sara and Rebecca and Rachel and Elizabeth and Mary, raise up mothers who will raise up men and women to change the world for the better. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.