'Some people have a strange term or expression for what’s going on here today. The expression is ‘worship service.’ What can that mean? What is the service that takes place at a service of worship? Who is serving, and who is being served?'
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
(Proper 11C)
July 17, 2022
The Rev. Maurice C. Frontz III
St Stephen Lutheran Church
Some
people have a strange term or expression for what’s going on here today. The
expression is ‘worship service.’ What can that mean? What is the service that takes
place at a service of worship? Who is serving, and who is being served?
The
same questions could be asked of our Gospel lesson. But we think we know a
little bit more about what is happening in that story. Martha is the one who is
serving Jesus. She has opened her home to the one who said of himself, ‘Foxes
have holes, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his
head.’ As a daughter of Abraham’s faith, she is showing hospitality to him, for
surely she would have heard the rabbis telling the story from Genesis of
Abraham at the oaks of Mamre, when he welcomed the three travelers and provided
for their needs. And so she is busy providing for his needs.
And
Jesus tells her to stop serving, to rest and sit with her sister Mary and learn
from him. Jesus tells her to stop serving - is that what is happening here, or
is there something else going on? What service is happening; who is serving,
and who is being served?
When
Dietrich Bonhoeffer led the illegal seminary in Finkenwalde in Nazi Germany in the
mid-1930s, he taught his young students in ministry that the first service they
owed to their neighbor, either their fellow seminarians or their eventual parishioners,
was to listen to them. He went on to say that pastors who couldn’t
listen to others would eventually stop listening to God Himself. What a
terrible vision, a world full of preachers thinking they are serving others but
really just filling up the world with empty words. I hope that never happens.
Often
we cannot tell how to serve a person rightly until we listen to them. The late
Orthodox archbishop Anthony Bloom tells a story of how, when he was a physician
during the Second World War, a wounded German was brought into his hospital
with one finger smashed by a bullet. As Bloom tells it, ‘The head surgeon came
round and looked at the finger and said, ‘Take it off.’ That was a very quick
and easy decision – it would take only five minutes to do. Then the German
said, ‘Is there anyone here who can speak German?’ I spoke with the man and
discovered that he was a watchmaker and if his finger was removed he would
probably never be able to work again. So we spent five weeks treating his
smashed finger and he was able to leave the hospital with five fingers instead
of only four…’
So
perhaps Jesus is not telling Martha not to serve – he is showing her how to
serve better, to listen to him and he will show her the kind of service she is to
do. He will show her the words to speak, show her the tasks she must do, but
she must listen first. Is this what is going on here? Perhaps, in a way, but we
must go deeper. Let’s go back to our questions – who is serving, and who is
being served?
Martha
has welcomed Jesus into her home – he has become her guest. As such, she has
believed it was her role to serve him. But what if the roles are reversed? What
if it is not Martha who is the host, but Jesus? After all, Colossians tells us
that ‘in him all things in heaven
and on earth were created, things visible and invisible.’ When Martha
encounters Jesus, she is encountering her Creator and her Redeemer, for he is
also the one who will reconcile sinners to God his Father through the offering
of his life on the cross.
This is even more important of
a guest than she thinks! No, she is his guest, he is the host –
and he wants to show hospitality to her, to make her distraction cease, to tell
her, to show her, who she truly is and whose she is. In Jesus’ presence, our
distractions may cease. Distraction is to lose focus, in the presence of many
urgent demands and many powerful messages, of who we truly are, who we were
made to be in God’s sight, and who God is. Colossians reminds us that Christ
Jesus ‘is the image of the invisible God.’ If we want to know the character of
God, we go to Jesus Christ.
We use the words, ‘Serve the
Lord.’ And these are appropriate words. They’re Scriptural words. But we can realize
with gladness that in Jesus, the Lord serves us, by speaking to us a clear Word:
who he is and who we are and who we were made to be. Those words in Colossians
are amazing to us. The cosmos is made for Jesus Christ because it was made
through Jesus Christ. The world was not made for Vladimir Putin, neither was it
made for Elon Musk – it was made for Jesus Christ! Perhaps the only man or
woman it could be entrusted to. It is of him that the psalm speaks, ‘He has
sworn to do no wrong and does not take back his word.’ Each human being is
created in and for Jesus Christ, who alone swears to do no violence to those
whom he has created but instead swears to nourish us and sustain us and redeem us
and heal us and present us to God the Father holy and blameless. For it is he who
reconciles us to God the Father, making peace through the blood of his cross.
In this way the worship
service is a service – but it is God’s service to us in which he speaks to us a
word that creates us anew. In this blessed time, in the presence of the Word,
we are recalled to ourselves, all our distractions may be laid aside. We sit at
Jesus’ feet in the posture of a disciple, like a lily opened to the sun, like
the soil waiting patiently for the rain. Let nothing and no one take this time
away from us; let no distraction or urgent matter interfere with the one thing we
need – let us never neglect to come be his guest and to be wholeheartedly in
his presence, for he desires to serve us. He seeks to reveal himself to us and
who we are in him.
