Messy Mary -- FPC sermon excerpt

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.