I wonder how God feels about the way we use scripture.  The way we ignore instructions that couldn't be any more pointed than if a sky writer had emblazoned them across the horizon:  not, “eat at Joe’s” or  “surrender Dorothy” but “share your belongings with the poor”, ”welcome the stranger in your midst”, “turn the other cheek”.  In the meantime, we obsess over and play up the significance of issues scripture mentions once or twice – if ever. 

I wonder if God feels discouraged as Sunday follows Sunday and preacher follows preacher, taking scripture passages, yanking them out of their context, twisting and stretching the words and then stuffing it all into a container labeled biblically fortified, pre-digested dogma.

The story of Jesus’ visit with Mary and Martha is particularly vulnerable to this self-serving mistreatment.  Like so many of Jesus’ more controversial teachings – especially the ones about wealth and self, it has been explained away from thousands of pulpits over the centuries.  All of these teachings get the same kind of treatment.  It goes something like this:

"It might seem as though Jesus was saying thus and so, but I am here to tell you that what he really meant was this…” 

And so, contrary to what we might have concluded on our own, we’re told – among other things – that it’s really okay to have a lot more coats and money than other people, that loving your enemy doesn’t preclude killing him, and where would we be without the Martha’s of the world – I mean everyone can’t be Mary.  Someone has to attend to the details.

As a result many, many preachers have negated what would seem to be the most obvious point of this story.  Probably because they were afraid that the more accurate and therefore (in their minds) more reckless interpretation, might give all those devoted church ladies subversive ideas and take them out of the kitchen.

But even though I’ve always come at this story from a different angle, I too am guilty of misapplication.  Over the decades, a mental picture of Mary at Jesus’ feet has soothed my conscience as I have avoided or ditched work that has seemed inconsequential to me.  Work that I simply didn’t want to do because it was tedious or messy.  After all, wasn’t I taking the better portion?  Haven’t women always deprived themselves of the important stuff by attending to the mundane details?  Wasn’t it time to be liberated from kitchen and other duties.  Obviously, it was.  Jesus said as much to Mary and Martha both.

But Jesus’ encounter with Mary and Martha isn’t really about the relative value of housework over spiritual pursuits.  Or vice versa.  It isn’t about who should be doing what at all.  Literalists on both sides of the aisle are wrong.

First of all, this isn’t a story about women.  It’s about all of us – men and women both.   As things about women always are. And as we do with so many biblical accounts, when we make this about women’s roles,  we further marginalize women – as if Jesus dealt with them in a different way than he did with men.

But he didn’t.  So when we do -- not only do we do a disservice to women -- we bury truths meant for all of us.

No, the story of Mary and Martha isn’t about housekeeping, but the two kinds of restlessness that inhabit all of us.  The restlessness that drives us down the years of our lives to find our heart’s true home. And the restlessness that serves to distract us from anything but the most trivial of details – a closed circle of minutia – kind of like space debris orbiting the earth – protecting us from really seeing the human agony and carnage that surrounds us.

Rather than seeing a lazy sister versus an industrious one, we should be seeing the two types of restless hearts that these sisters personify through their words and actions.  And it’s Mary’s restless heart that seeks what Jesus names the better portion.  She does this by answering his call to her deepest self, while Martha sends her heart into a flurry of justifiable but actually meaningless activity.  After all, how many times do you need to check the seasonings and straighten the rug?

Both hearts have been set in motion by the presence of Jesus – who always brings change and upheaval into every situation.  How did we ever fall into the error of perceiving him a some sort of mountain top guru exuding peace and serenity wherever he went?  After all, Jesus himself is the restless heart of God, searching, searching, searching, like the shepherd for his sheep, the woman for her coin, the father for his son.  Of course this great heart would evoke a response from every heart it met.  And the response always falls one of two ways:  open or closed, accepting or resisting;  an embrace or flight.

Like most of us, Martha’s response is less one of hostility or rejection as it is a flight from intimacy and the painful encounter that it can bring.  It’s so much easier to observe Jesus from a distance than lay her heart open and risk who knows what kind of result.  And the act of distancing is so easy to disguise as involvement with other things.  Presumably, more important things.  I’m just too busy to take time for that.  The perfect excuse.  Avoidance that brings admiration.

Even more than the culture Martha lived in, we live in a Martha culture.  Many of us, most of us, scurry around like ants from one activity to another, one upping the other ants with examples of how busy we are and complaining loudly and – dare I say -- proudly about our fatigue.  Of course, we are productive – making, doing, achieving.  With longer and longer workdays and less and less re-creational time.

But our productivity is not a productivity that brings abundance.  At least beyond an abundance of things.  Because all of the abundance that surrounds us does not seem to be enriching the larger community – including those who rely on excess to survive, like the gleaners in the story of Ruth.

No, the abundance that surrounds us has not brought us healing or fulfillment, or made us more generous.  It’s brought us fear.  The prevailing mentality seems to be, grab all you can before it’s gone.  The poor of other cultures have a much more high developed sense of abundance that we do.  They give freely from their poverty while those of us with insurance policies and pension plans act as though we don’t know where our next meal is coming from.  When you consider the only thing that counts -- our behavior – our productivity is a bleak thing that fills the hours but not our souls.

Then suddenly, unexpectedly, we encounter the heart of Jesus, asking us to give what we don’t want to give.  To become a person that doesn’t fit our self-image.  To go places that aren’t in our best career interests.  To open ourselves up to self-giving, and sacrifice, and even pain.  Certainly pain.

Now there are decisions to be made.  How are we going to respond?  Are we going to respond?  Our answer will determine whether our hearts grow even more busily distant or soft with the exercise of compassion.  Of course, soft things are easily hurt.

That second choice always leads to the sacrifice of things we never thought we could live without.  Or to embrace things we never thought we could endure.  Because when we allow ourselves to be led down the path of compassion and enter the lives of others, we find ourselves leaving our old way of living behind.  The mindless activity is replaced with active involvement.  Numb detachment with heartfelt engagement.  The illusion of efficiency with the humbling awareness that our best efforts do not always bring about the results we long for.

We may have alternately judged or admired Mary’s sitting at Jesus’ feet while her frazzled sister scurries around the house.  That’s how the story leaves them.  And that’s how both traditionalists and feminists take them.  But the end of the reading isn’t the same as its conclusion.  To sympathize with poor Martha is to ignore what it means to sit at the feet of Jesus.  Because even though Mary’s response to Jesus initially seems to be the easier of the two, the truth is that to sit at the feet of Jesus invariably ends one kind of life and begins a far more demanding one.  Mary’s rest is temporary.  The heart of Jesus will issue a call to far more profound service than Martha at her busiest could ever imagine.

Incidentally, this story is a companion piece to last week’s reading -- Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan.  Although they might not seem similar -- one is a story the other describes an actual encounter --they are both about the way we use distraction to wall ourselves off from the suffering that surrounds us. Whether we’re talking about a preoccupation with ritual cleanliness that allows us to step over someone bleeding on the ground in front of us or Martha’s ritual busy-ness that provides a welcome even as it avoids true hospitality, this kind of restless heart is never content because it never finds the remedy to its restlessness.

Which is the rest we find when we allow our hearts to beat in rhythm with the great heart of God, Jesus Christ himself.  Come unto me all who are heavy laden, for I will give you rest.  No matter what kind of heart beats within us Jesus can transform it.

Martha’s delusion, which is the delusion we all indulge in, is that busyness can be a substitute for engagement with God’s world and the hard work of its transformation.  But it can’t. And in the long run, that delusion is the source of more profound pain than anything we might encounter in our struggles in the world.  The pain of emptiness, of a life wasted in trivial pursuits, the sense that we’ve missed what our time here is all about.

Come unto me, his heart calls, and I will give you rest.  But the rest will only come after we have allowed our restless hearts to wear out through compassionate service in Jesus’ name.  Amen.