Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let these gifts to us be blessed.  An old family mealtime prayer.  Do you pray at mealtime?  Does your family still gather around a shared table for meals?  Grab and go seems to be the way, now.  I’m just into my fifties, yet I’m coming more and more to appreciate my poor father, who more and more would talk as if he were a relic of a bygone era.  A few months back, Carl Coffman shared a facebook post with the happy thought that the number of years from 1918 to 1970—the year I was born—is the same as from 1970 to this year.  Somebody get me a cane, a shawl, and an earhorn.

The joy of the table is the joy of welcome, togetherness—what draws us together is not this table, though, nor the bread and juice upon it.  What draws us together is the one offered here, offering himself here, the one speaking here by Word and sign: even Jesus Christ.  Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest.  Be our Lord, our King, our Way, our Life, our Truth.  Jesus invites many people with many different backgrounds and different takes on life: a world of people, a church drawn together from every nation.

Jesus offers hospitality for life.  There’s a connection between that word hospitality and hospital: back of it all is the Latin word hospes, which can mean both host and guest, friend and stranger.  A curious word.  The earliest meaning of hospital is a place for travelers, for pilgrims.  Travelers need a place on the journey, to eat, rest, maybe heal and be renewed.  An old saying is that the church is a hospital for recovering sinners.  We are here for healing, beloved, but only the sick and wounded know this is what they need, just as it is only the hungry and thirsty who know their need for food and drink.  And as for the Word?  Who needs that?  If one feels the left’s call to compassion and another hears the right’s call to responsibility, can these two in our day continue to be in the same room?  Can they fellowship, here?  More, do they want to?  Do they want there to be such a place on earth?  If we’re to believe what we see on TV, the two just seem to want to be rid of each other.  The Church isn’t about being rid of certain people.  The Church is about God changing us all.

Martha offers Jesus hospitality: host and guest, friend and stranger.  Have you considered how tired Jesus must have been most of the time?  I have to believe that the Son of Man, with nowhere to lay his head, was always delighted, refreshed, by words and deeds of hospitality—to be welcome here.  Martha has done a very good, indeed, a blessed thing.  The problem, maybe a problem Martha did not foresee, is that Jesus has companions.  At least twelve, maybe more.  We can’t show hospitality to Jesus but not his followers!  That would be like offering Jesus no hospitality at all.  So, Martha, who did a good, blessed thing, now feels like she’s in a bind.  Maybe our grandmothers or grandfathers could whip out biscuits and gravy in the wink of an eye: “Hey grandpa!  What’s for supper?”  Not us.  Dominos?  “Every man for himself,” as my tired mother would say some evenings when she came in through the door.

So, Martha needs help.  Thank God she has a sister, Mary.  Is Mary younger or older than Martha?  I say younger.  As the older sibling in my family, it’s just obvious to me: Martha is knocking herself out to do all she can for everyone, while Mary . . . well, Mary is just good at . . . being Mary.

Our NIV tells us Mary was “listening to what [Jesus] said” (10:39).  The older RSV says she “listened to his teaching” while the newer NLT tells us she was “listening to what he taught.”  Two words stand out: listening and teaching.  When Jesus is teaching, it’s time to listen.  You and I, maybe with all compassion and sympathy, see that Martha is getting it wrong, even as she so wants everything to be right.  That’s the problem, isn’t it?  Martha is so busying herself with serving that she isn’t listening, so busy trying to make everything right, with the result that she is blinding herself to her guest.  He’s talking and she’s not listening—very politely and respectfully not listening, of course.  She’s the one who invited him in; she’s the one who wishes to serve him so very effectively.  Martha has temporarily forgotten that the one who makes all things right is with her, there before her, present, speaking, and watching.  All she need do is listen.  But who has time to just sit and listen?  What gets done, that way?  What happens, that way?

Isn’t that what a big part of our Sunday worship service is about, though: sitting and listening?  But it’s hard to pay attention even for five minutes, let alone twenty!  Market research is showing that the average consumer attention span is eight seconds.  If you can’t make an impression in eight seconds, well, forget about it.  One of the bigger causes for loss of attention: stress.

Hospitality—a place of quiet rest, near to the heart of God.  “But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made” (10:40).  Distracted—yes, that’s part of it.  The Greek word here has the literal sense of being dragged all around, like a rider who has been thrown from the saddle and gotten tangled in the tackle as the horse dashes this way and that, trying to shake this nuisance and failing, and getting frightened and irritated at the failure.  Life does that to us.  We’re a little bruised, a little busted.  Stress fractures.

“She came to him”—just how frazzled do you see her?—“and asked, ‘Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself?  Tell her to help me!’” (10:40).  In Mark’s account, early on, there’s a terrible storm out on the Sea of Galilee, and Jesus, well, he’s asleep on a pillow in the stern—worn out, as usual.  The disciples work frantically, doing what they can to preserve their lives; then, when it seems all is lost, they crowd around him, waking him up, shouting, “don’t you care if we drown?”  Are you just going to abandon us, forsake us?!  You ought to be doing something, Lord, and you’re not doing anything!  You’re no help at all!

I have to wonder, with all those people there in Martha’s home, when it was getting to be time to think about eating, wouldn’t there have been more than enough people to help get a tolerable meal together?  Some olives and cheese, some fruit, a little bread, clear, cool water, or bright red wine to drink?  If she’d just ask?  Some would probably even be the ones to ask first: what can I do to help?  Why did Martha think everything was her sole responsibility?  Because it’s her house and she’s the hostess—the hostess with the most-est?  Because she’s the elder sibling?  Well, we don’t know, for sure.

One thing some people want, like, and seek, is praise.  Some people will do things for the praise: they want to be praised, need to be praised.  How can they know they’re loved and valued if they aren’t being praised?  Though she’d never say so, maybe Martha desperately wanted praise, from Jesus.  If everyone helped, how could she get all the praise?  If they started helping, how could she ever show everyone that she was right and they were all thoughtless?

Martha doesn’t get the praise, though.  Mary gets the praise.  Of course.  Like always.  And Lord knows Mary wasn’t going to listen to Martha when she was asking or signaling, actively or passively—sigh!—for help.  Do something, Lord!  You’re no help at all!  Yet Jesus is help itself, beloved.  Jesus is help incarnate, love incarnate, salvation himself.  Mary seems to get it.  Martha wants help serving; so does Jesus.  Mary is serving, by listening, attentively, thoughtfully, heart and soul focused on the Word of God, taking it all in.  She’s listening to the teaching.  He’s feeding her.  Man does not live by bread alone.

How to get Martha to listen?  Well, comparing her to her sister might not be the way I would choose.  “‘Martha, Martha,’ the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one.  Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her’” (10:41-42).  The NLT translates it that Mary has “discovered” what is better, as if Martha hasn’t, hasn’t had the “Aha!” moment, yet.  It’s my guess that Martha is a worrier, an over-thinker.  Maybe like me, you’ve known people who just won’t be happy unless they’re worrying about something.  All their worrying never seems to make them happy, though.  And this—oh this!  And that—oh, that!

Troubled, upset, weighed down with care, distracted.  We’d like to be Marys, especially here, but even here, today, right now, we’re sort of Martha-ish: so much to think about, worry about, fret over.  Stress.  Fractures.  Our families, our friends, our church, work, bills, commitments, plans, ongoing To Do lists.  Our thoughts wander—eight seconds?  Ha.  Soon enough our hearts follow.  We get weighed down by it all, tired, hurting, worn thin.  What we’d like to do we can’t seem to do, and what we don’t want to be doing is just what we seem to be stuck doing!

Mary isn’t being lazy.  I suspect Mary does quite a lot of work herself but not now.  Mary has her worries and woes, too—we all do!  But she knows now is the time for attentiveness, which isn’t easy: it takes work to pay attention.  Amen?  Jesus knows this, too, and comes to us, and sits with us, and meets us more than halfway.  Beloved, Jesus is truly here with us and with al his very own around the world this very moment.

He didn’t need to get Mary’s attention: he had that, oh yes!  He needed to get Martha’s.  Do you think he did?  And this bread and this juice, are they not here for our attention?  Is this what Jesus tastes like?  Forgiveness?  Salvation?  What is he giving us, here?  Blessed assurance of life through his life.  We eat and drink, drink and eat, then repeat, day after day.  Our lives, though, are nourished by Christ.  Our souls need good things.  Here he is; he is here, for you, for us, for his very own.  Praise him, receive him, rejoice in life in him.  Few things are needed; indeed, only one.

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.