In the early days of the fourth century, Christianity experienced a watershed event. Prior
to this time, Christianity had been an outlaw sect, at times tolerated and at times openly persecuted, but always
looked at with suspicion and always the first to be blamed when problems plagued the Roman Empire. In 322, Emperor
Constantine, who had always been tolerant of Christians, became a Christian himself and declared Christianity the
official religion of the Roman Empire. Christians who prior to 322 had been forced to at times hide their identities
and worship in secret for the first time could practice their faith openly and without fear. These Christians
didn't always handle freedom as well as they had handled persecution, and they began persecuting other religion
to varying degrees. Some Christian leaders feared that the legalization of Christianity could do more harm to
the faith than good. They predicted that the Church would merely become an instrument of the Empire, that the
faith would always be accommodating the state. Many of these people decided that the best thing for them to do
was to withdraw to a place where they could be free of these influences. These men and women became known as the
Desert Fathers and Mothers, Christian mystics who fled from the world to live in the desert to contemplate the
faith, to pray, and to study Scripture. They boasted about how uncomfortable they were for Christ, and legends
arose such as the one about one father who stood on one leg praying for three years. They were critical of their
sisters and brothers in faith who remained in society, considering them to be willing to sacrifice the purity of
faith for engagement with the world.
Fast forward 1500 years to the early 20th century. The previous century in Christian history had been a time
of great revivals where the Church focused on saving people's souls but had little interaction with the world around
it. Christian thinkers began to advocate a social Gospel, claiming that the message of Christ had at least as
much to do with society transformation as it did personal salvation. They took courageous stands on social issues,
spoke for the poor, for workers, for immigrants, for minorities, and for women. Many of the human rights advances
we've made in the past hundred years owe a great debt to the Social Gospel movement. They were critical of their
more evangelical sisters and brothers who continued to focus on personal salvation, and they found little need
of the development of a personal spiritual life, feeling instead that the focus on the Church's interaction with
the world was what mattered.
This is more than a history lesson. It is illustrative of the fact that the Church has always struggled with
the question of whether true Christianity is found in the contemplative life of prayer, worship, and meditation
or in the active life of advocacy, charity, and service. When I looked at the Scripture lessons assigned for this
morning, I was struck by the fact that this conflict was staring me right in the face. Amos is the fiery prophet
of social justice, insisting that those who neglect the poor, who oppress the outsider and the widow, and who cheat
at business will have to deal with an angry God. Advocates love Amos and other prophets, quoting their effective
rhetoric against all manner of social evil. Amos is critical of the worship of those who oppress the poor, insisting
that their worship is abhorrent to God and has been deemed unacceptable. But then there's Martha and Mary. Martha
busily working, serving Jesus, while Mary sits at Jesus' feet, listening and learning. When Martha complains about
the inequity, Jesus responds that Mary has made the better choice. Contemplatives love Mary and Martha, insisting
that sitting at Jesus' feet and listening for the voice of God is the Christian's highest duty.
This is not simply an intellectual question. This has a profound impact on how all of us live out our Christian
faith and, for at least some, on whether one desires to be Christian at all. This is also not a resolved or dead
issue. The comments on the Desperate Preachers' Web Page this week provided evidence that the debate is alive
and well. Greg in Nashville wrote about his church, which has been struggling with a staff that emphasizes social
justice work instead of discipleship, which is what the church believes is primary.
I think the important thing, though, is that those who try to use these Scriptures to advocate for an agenda for
the Christian life fail to read these passages carefully enough to get the whole point made here. Amos, for all
his rhetoric and emphasis on action, never discounts the importance of the worship of God. What he condemns are
those whose time in worship is spent planning for the next day's business deal and those who resent the time of
Sabbath rest because it interferes with their continuous striving to get ahead at any expense. In the Gospel lesson,
Jesus does not criticize Martha for being busy serving. His criticism is that she is busy serving while her heart
is elsewhere. Garrett Keizer writes about this passage that, had Martha simply prepared a meal and brought it to
him, he would no doubt have dug in and enjoyed like the glutton he was accused of being. Jesus only questions
her activity when it becomes clear that it is driving her to resentment, that it has become a source of pain rather
than a source of joyful giving. When she complains about her lot, Jesus invites her to choose the other way, the
way that for her may indeed be better.
These passages are too complex to be the property of ideologues who have agendas to advance. They call us to spend
time sitting at Jesus' feet listening, to worship, pray, and seek the voice of God, but not to become, as one old
cliché goes, "so heavenly minded that we're no earthly good." They call us to spend time actively
serving, to feed the hungry, to serve the poor, the heal the sick, to proclaim the word of God, but not so much
that, to use an other cliché, we become more focused on "the work of the Lord rather than the Lord
of the work." They warn us that when our service leads to resentment, it's time to sit at Jesus' feet and
be refreshed and that when our devotional practices lead us to ignore the world around us, it's time to get off
our knees and engage with the world.
Perhaps, though, many of us today find it difficult to locate ourselves on either side of this issue. Our problem
perhaps isn't that we spend too much of our time on one or the other of these, but that we don't spend enough time
on either. Our lives leave little room for either service or for prayer. Many of us are more like the people
Amos is speaking to than we would care to admit--sitting in worship and going through the motions with our minds
occupied not with God but with our plans for the next day, with our business deals and soccer practices, contacts
that need to be made and dishes that need to be done, car pools to plan and tests to study for. We leave worship
without having truly sat at the feet of Jesus, and we go through our days oblivious to the needs all around us.
When we do recognize these needs, they seem so big that we don't know where to start. Amos says that the Israelites
have entered into a time of famine, not from food but from hearing God's word. They are so occupied with their
own thoughts that they make no space for the presence of God or for service to others.
The question is, where are you in all of this. Are you like Martha, burned out and tired, busily serving but resenting
it? Are you deeply spiritual but closed off to the needs of the world around you? Or are you someplace else altogether,
neither busy serving nor praying, too caught up in your own experience to do either? My daughter just this past
week began eating meats, so now she has some food from each of the four food groups. If any one is lacking, she
will fail to get the proper nutrition she needs and will get sick. Our Christian life is like that--we must balance
our experience with God and our service to the world. If either our both is lacking, we will starve. But a feast
is offered to each of us, a feast that is both free and costly. It is free in that it is God who does the offering,
and it is costly in that it requires that we be willing to examine where we are, see where we need to be, and move
boldly to receive it. We can choose between the feast or the famine. Choose wisely. Amen.
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