How do we attain eternal life? How can we truly live? It was the question the lawyer, the expert in Mosaic Law, asked Jesus in the preceding text. It is our question.

"How do you read Torah on this?" Jesus asked back. The man answered by combining Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and your neighbor as yourself."

"Do this, and you will live," said Jesus. "And who is my neighbor?" asked the man. Jesus then told the parable of the Good Samaritan. Your neighbor is the one who needs you, Jesus in effect said, and then added, "Go and do likewise."

That story addresses the second part of what Jesus called the greatest commandment, the love of neighbor. But what about the first part, the love of God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength?

Luke addresses the first part of the commandment by placing the story of Mary and Martha right next to the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Eternal life, life truly, savingly lived, is not just determined by your relationship to neighbor but also by your relationship with your Maker. You were made to love God, who created you in love, in the divine image, and who loves you with all his/her own heart, mind, soul and strength.

We are made for wholeness, and this wholeness seeks a balance of active spirituality and contemplative spirituality.

Active spirituality can easily become compulsive spirituality. We so easily live out of our false self, and the false self is a compulsive self.

The compulsive self believes it will be saved if only it can do more, know more, ingest more, feel more, acquire more, attain more, experience more. Its soul is loud and noisy; it is busy and cannot rest.

Distinguished American novelist John Hersey grew up the son of Protestant missionaries in China. His novel The Call tells the story of David Treadup, an American missionary to China. "What is moving in his story," writes Hersey

. . . is his lifelong struggle to subdue the greater but sicker saint in himself and give himself to a more modest state of being: one of balance, sanity, serenity and realized human love . . . .

How many of us battle the same demon, the tug of war inside between the "greater but sicker saint" and a "more modest state of being."

The greater but sicker saint is prone to compulsive activity, heroic serving and constant personal sacrifice. We can do this to the point of self-harm and of harm to those closest around. If we cannot take care of our own self, we are not likely to take care of those in our closest extension of the self, our family and closest associates. We may find a desperate way to get out of the cycle, which is not a happy story for anyone involved.

There is another way, and Jesus points us there in today’s story of Mary and Martha.

It is about contemplative spirituality and the love of God with heart, mind, soul and strength: It is about stillness, sitting, gazing, listening, and learning.

Yes, sometimes Jesus says, as he said to the lawyer, "Go and do." Active spirituality. Other times he says, "Sit and be still." Contemplative spirituality. Quiet yourself and listen for God. Listen for God in scripture; listen for God as you listen to your own life. Seek that place deep within where your true self dwells, where you discover the rabbi within, the teacher within, where you can dwell with God and God with you. Where you no longer have to say anything or do anything but merely be in God’s presence.

Thomas Merton, America’s most famous monk, taught us that deep inner silence is needed for us to be able to hear "the deep inner voice of . . .[our] own true self" and for us to be able freely to "open the heart to the message of the sacred text." The compulsive self cannot clearly listen. Its heart is too noisy, its soul too crowded.

Jesus arrived at the home of Martha and Mary. The busy, resourceful Martha met him at the door and welcomed him into the house. She then returned to the kitchen to finish her feverish preparations for the meal.

Mary, her sister, meanwhile, "sat at the Lord’s feet and listened" to his teaching. This language startlingly describes the disciple/master relationship. What is wrong with this picture? She is a woman. Women were not allowed to be disciples of rabbis. Mary is breaking all social and religious convention. Jesus is encouraging it. Luke’s gospel clearly shows women among Jesus’ closest circle of disciples. Not among the original and symbolic twelve, but there nonetheless as disciples. Two thousand years later the church still struggles with Jesus’ emancipatory vision.

Mary sits at his feet and listens. Contemplative spirituality.

Martha, meanwhile, is busy in the kitchen fretting over all the details. Martha Stewart on speed. Her soul is in a frenzy. There in the compulsive soul of her false self is also a growing envy and anger at Mary, who is sitting adoringly at the feet of Jesus.

The text says Martha is "distracted by her many tasks." She is driven to distraction by her busyness. Frazzled by her attempts to make everything perfect, she flares out at Mary and says,

Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.

I’m sure you’ve never been part of a domestic conversation like this!

A minister in Kentucky told once about visiting a woman at her home. It was pouring rain. She met him at the door with a mop. As he walked in the room she mopped up all the drops of water as he walked -- all before offering him a seat. Martha ² (Martha Squared)

How did Jesus respond? "Martha, Martha," he said, calling her name not scoldingly but imploringly, lovingly:

You are anxious and fretful about many things. One thing is needful.* Mary has chosen the better part -- which shall not be taken from her.

*Or, "few things are needful, or only one," a manuscript variation. In other words, a simple meal would have been enough.

May I say a word in defense of Martha. Isn’t it a bit unfair to take one day in a person’s life and reduce them to how they acted that one day? How many remember Martha only from this one scene! We forget that in John’s gospel it is Martha who makes the supreme confession of faith which in the synoptic gospels is spoken by Peter. Why do we remember Peter’s confession and not Martha’s? She says:

I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God who has come into the world.

She did not learn this in the kitchen, but at Jesus’ feet. She had discovered contemplative spirituality.

Elizabeth Moltmann-Wendle describes Martha as "the competent extrovert." (An early piece of Christian art shows Martha slaying a dragon. Not George, Martha!) There are a lot of you out there. The kingdom needs competent extroverts. But competent extroverts can become their own worst enemies. We are tempted at the point of our strengths as much as at the point of our weaknesses. Competent extroverts can become compulsive Christians pulled apart by their much serving. Even competent introverts.

We all need an alternation of active spirituality and contemplative spirituality. We are by nature perhaps given more to one than to the other, more on the active side or the contemplative side, but we are called to both. We need to tend the Mary in us and the Martha in us.

Mother Teresa said of her mission work in India: "I am not a social worker; I’m a contemplative in the middle of life."

You’re not a lawyer; you’re a contemplative in the middle of life. You’re not a housewife, a mother, a doctor, a teacher, a politician, a volunteer, a business person; you’re a contemplative in the middle of life. That is, if you follow the call of Jesus.

He calls you to the saving alternation of active and contemplative spirituality. Jesus himself had such an alternation: at times busy, exhaustingly so, in the service of others, then withdrawing to a lonely place to be by himself with God.

VI

We come to church and say, "Do you not care that I am working myself to death?" And Jesus says, "And why are you working yourself to death? Is this what you think I want? You don’t have to be Martha all the time; you can be Mary too."

What are you thinking of at this point in the sermon? My closest friends are probably saying to me: Physician, heal thyself! Others may be thinking, "That is all well and good, but tell me how? It’s not like I haven’t tried."

I could offer a list of impertinent suggestions, places to start:

Try spending thirty minutes a day this way: ten minutes in silence; ten minutes praying alone with a passage of scripture (ask God to speak to you in it); ten minutes in intercessory prayer for others.

All these might help. But there is a prior recognition: that there is a place deep within where you can dwell with God and God can dwell with you, where you can know yourself as God’s beloved. Do not rob yourself of such a place.

To live in touch with such a place is a way of experiencing what Paul called "praying without ceasing."

In the Russian spiritual classic, The Way of the Pilgrim, a Russian peasant goes to church and hears the text from Thessalonians about "praying without ceasing" (I Thessalonians 5:17). He wonders what this means and starts out on a quest to learn. He goes to church after church, hears sermon after sermon, but does not hear anything that helps.

Then one day a holy man teaches him the "Jesus Prayer": Lord Jesus, have mercy on me. While traveling across Russia as a pilgrim, he begins to say the prayer over and over with his lips. Then one day the prayer passes from his lips to his heart. He writes:

. . . it seemed as though my heart in its ordinary beating began to say the words of the Prayer within its beat . . . . I gave up saying the Prayer with my lips. I simply listened carefully to what my heart was saying.

The Jesus Prayer is not a prescription, a magic formula, but the story points the way. As you walk and work, pray and play, hear these words from God. Let them become the beat of your heart:

You are my beloved
live in my love
You are my beloved
live in my love

You are
my beloved
live
    in
        my
            love.

The first essential of a true life of prayer is freedom.

Not all men [and women] are called to be hermits, but all . . . need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally.

. . . on listening to the Word of God . . . . For this listening to be effective, a certain interior silence is required. This in turn implies the ability to let go of one’s congested, habitual thoughts and preoccupations so that one can freely open the heart to the message of the sacred text.

The rain has stopped. The afternoon sun slants through the pine trees: and how those useless needles smell in the clean air.