Service and contemplation: sisters, not twins
I can’t believe I’m about to do this. This morning I’m going to start my sermon with some advice from the beauty and make-up world. If, like me, you’ve grown up with thick, unruly eyebrows, ones that are difficult to wrestle into shape, first of all you should know that you are not alone. Not only are you in the company of your priest, you also share space with the likes of Canadian actor and comedy legend Eugene Levy, artist Frida Kahlo, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Roman Williams.
When I was growing up, raiding your friend’s mother’s bathroom for Veet Hot Wax was a regular Friday night affair. The results were disastrous, always! One year, I came to school after summer break with one eyebrow standing at attention and the other running a mile in the opposite direction. My Maths teacher said to me, “Well, I suppose eyebrows are meant to be sisters; not twins.”
This saying is, apparently, at least according to an AI summary on the Internet “a common phrase in the beauty and makeup world, emphasizing that eyebrows, while related, are not identical and shouldn't be expected to be perfectly symmetrical. Our faces naturally have subtle asymmetries, and trying to force perfectly mirrored eyebrows can look unnatural. Instead, the focus should be on enhancing natural features and achieving a balanced, harmonious look.”
I can’t say that in my 37 years of stewarding the eyebrows handed down to me by my father that I’ve managed a “balanced harmonious look,” but I am happy to have left the days of ‘perfecting your look’ according to Seventeen magazine behind!
What do eyebrows and hot wax have to do with today’s gospel reading, you ask? Well, the story of Mary and Martha, two sisters who have Jesus round their place for a meal, this story is anything but a balanced, harmonious story. Martha is in the kitchen racing around getting dinner ready. Mary is “busy hosting the guest” in the living room, pretending not to notice Martha’s passive aggressive huffing and puffing interspersed with comments under her breath— “Dinner doesn’t just cook itself, you know!”
When Martha finally does come out and say something—“‘Lord, do you [even] care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?”—Jesus has the nerve to side with Mary!
“Martha, Martha,” he says.
“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.”(I’ve always loved that the story ends here, as if the writer didn't want to put in print what happened next as Martha leapt over the counter and wrestled Jesus to the floor.)
The moral of the story is that when it comes to following Jesus, learning from his teachings, we can be distracted in life by many things. But what Jesus requires is that we set those things aside and come and sit with him. In our lives of faith, Martha is the embodiment of service, and Mary of contemplation. We need both.
But, contrary to sermons that usually get preached on this topic, contrary to sermons that I’ve preached on this topic, Jesus doesn’t weigh service and contemplation equally. Martha and Mary are sisters, not twins. Service and contemplation, while related, are not identical. Jesus says Mary has chosen the better part. Asymmetry is expected.
The English novelist and playwright Dorothy Sayers, in her 1946 book Unpopular Opinions wrote:
I think I have never heard a sermon preached on the story of Martha and Mary that did not attempt, somehow, somewhere, to explain away its text. Mary’s, of course, was the better part — the Lord said so, and we must not precisely contradict Him. But we will be careful not to despise Martha. No doubt, He approved of her too. We could not get on without her, and indeed . . . we must admit that we greatly prefer her. For Martha was doing a really feminine job, whereas Mary was just behaving like any other disciple, male or female; and that is a hard pill to swallow.
Service and contemplation in our lives of faith are sisters, but they’re not twins. Just as for Martha, so, too, for us contemplation is the harder one to get to, and no wonder in our attention-greedy economy. I don’t need to list the demands on our time in today’s modern world; you and I know them well. Nor am I here to shame any one of us for choosing Netflix over prayer at the end of a hard week working to make rent or care for aging parents or get the kids organized for summer. Many of the demands on our time are legitimate and good and life-giving and build up our faith. But, if Jesus is saying that pausing in stillness to listen with him is not just good and legitimate and life-giving but essential to our faith, then maybe there are ways we can begin to rewire some of those pathways in our brain that have us consistently choosing our many things over Jesus’s one.
I was thinking this week what I could recommend at the end of this sermon, what practical resources. There are several, of course. In the Anglican tradition: prayer apps, daily office books, meditations, Bible reading plans. But I don’t want to add another thing to your many things. So, instead I’m going to recommend a more subtle shift: every night for the next week, when I go to bed, I’m going to place my prayer book on top of my phone so that the first thing I pick up when my alarm goes off in the morning isn’t all of my social media apps, but some prayers. And even if I don’t in this first week get to saying those prayers when I first wake up, my hope is that it will at least start to create that subtle asymmetry in my brain, that has perhaps for too long been tipped too much the other way, that in time I, we, might remember how spending time in the presence of God away from our many things is indeed the better part.
Amen.