What I Have to Give

This is the sermon preached by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregations of Unfinished Community and Ashiya Christian Church on Sunday, July 20, 2025, drawing from Luke 10:38-42

I don’t mean to talk very long about the scripture today, to be honest. Really, I think that a lot of us are feeling the weight of things these days, and on a hot, tiring day like today the last thing any of us needs is a long, ponderous, lecture from a pastor whose main, defining characteristic is “dear GOD won’t this man ever stop talking???”

So I’ll skip my usual analogies, comparisons, and deep-dives into biblical language and context, and just get right to the point. 

When we read this verse as Jesus putting Martha in her place for doing all the prep work, all these other things, we’re reading it wrong. 

The situation at hand is simple; Martha was doing all the hosting duties - cooking, cleaning, serving, and the like - while Mary was sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening. And throughout the evening, Mary continues to listen to Jesus with rapt attention and laser-like focus, while Martha just gets angrier and angrier about how her sister just isn’t helping at all. 

Finally, as any reasonable person might expect, Martha just snaps, and comes to Jesus with a combination of indignant rage and pure frustration, asking, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her, then, to help me.” 

When we read the story from here though, we begin to make certain…assumptions. We read Jesus’ reply assuming that when he says that she is “worried and distracted by many things,” he’s talking about all the many “other” things she’s doing; the cooking, the cleaning, the serving, and all the other very necessary things that need to happen for a big gathering like this to happen at all. 

But when we put even the slightest thought to it, that utterly fails to make even a little bit of sense. 

These things that Martha was doing weren’t frivolous, unnecessary tasks. Sure, listening to Jesus is important, but so is feeding the people. So is cleaning the house. So is washing the dishes, and making sure everyone has a place to sit and no one is uncomfortable, making sure that everyone can hear Jesus and has a way to get safely home when Jesus is finally done talking. 

What Martha’s doing is also extremely important. 

Those of you who know me well know that my personality is far more Martha than Mary, in this situation, so it should be no surprise that this is one of the teachings of Jesus that bothered me the most when I was younger. It felt like a wildly unnecessary dismissal, like a condemnation; it felt like an immense arrogance on the part of Jesus, dismissing the hard and faithful work of Martha just because he could see Mary sitting there, watching him, hanging on his every word. 

It felt…personal…to me. 

And it wasn’t until I had children, and had to spend almost every waking moment mediating their constant bickering with each other that I finally, truly realized what was happening here. 

For years, I have tried to explain to my children the value of difference; how different people can live together in harmony not by thinking exactly the same, or by doing the exact same things, or even by believing the exact same things, but by complimenting each other. 

We all have different skills, different thought processes, different ways of viewing the world and different ways of understanding who we are, who God is, and how the world around us does, and should, function for the betterment of us all. And that is how it is meant to be. 

We are none of us exactly the same, but we spend so much time thinking and judging the people closest to us by our own standards. We form powerful, long-standing opinions about our family, our friends, our loved ones, our community based on how their decisions fail to measure up to what we would do in the same situation. 

We assume that what is right for us must necessarily be what is right for everyone. 

This is what Martha was distracted by in this story, by the way. Not by her work, the tasks she was doing, or the people she was - again, very necessarily - choosing to care for. 

No. That’s just who she is as a person. She’s a carer, someone who expresses love not with grand gestures, not by making sure she fits in with the crowd around Jesus, not by making certain that she’s listening to every word so that she can get the teachings word-perfect later. She’s not there to be a student of Jesus, not there to be a dry sponge just soaking up his presence. 

She is there to love and serve the Lord, and to serve anyone else she can get her hands on in the meantime. 

None of these things are a distraction for her. That isn’t the problem. It was never the problem.

In that moment, she was distracted by her judgement of her sister Mary.

The whole time she was serving, her thoughts kept drifting to Mary. Martha got lost in her own many expectations; she expected Mary to come and serve as she was serving, she expected Mary to be with her in the kitchen, to cook like her, wash dishes like her, refill people’s glasses like her, to show love just like here. 

But that just wasn’t who Mary was as person either.

Eventually, of course, the weight of Martha’s expectations broke her. She had built up in her head this whole image of who Mary was “supposed” to be that she lost sight of who Mary actually was in reality. Martha allowed this false image of who her sister was meant to be to grow so great, so overwhelming, that it physically hurt, that the mere presence of Mary at Jesus’ side was all she could think about. 

And when it finally became too much to bear, she finally broke. 

In that moment, she left behind all the serving, all the loving, all the compassionate care that defined who she was as a person, and gave into the rage she felt at this entirely fake image of her sister, this phantom of who Mary was “supposed” to be. She set down her towel, left the dishes in the sink, and charged right into that room to publicly embarrass her sister in front of Jesus.

Consider, for a moment, how socially harmful that action must have been for Mary. Because the truth is that she wasn’t doing what was expected of her, by Martha or the world around her. The expectation of all was that the women of the house should be back there serving, and she was absolutely not doing that. Nobody cared at that point, it seems, because Jesus didn’t seem to care either, but once it was called out so publicly it’s quite possible that a few others thought the same thing; “Yeah, why is Mary just hanging out here when there’s work to be done? Isn’t that her job? Isn’t that what she’s supposed to be doing?”

If Martha truly loved her sister, why would she do it that way? Why would she just out her so brutally in public, and bring Jesus Actual Christ into the equation too?

Imagine the hurt Mary must have felt, seeing Martha’s anger erupt like that. Because Mary, the real Mary, was just sitting in the presence of Jesus, doing exactly what she was called to do in that moment, being her best and most authentic self; listening to Jesus. She quite likely had very little idea that Martha felt that way at all in that moment, because all of Martha’s frustrations weren’t actually aimed at Mary-actual;

They were aimed at the false Mary that Martha had created in her own head.

When we understand that, Jesus’s rebuke of Martha in that moment, I think, starts to make sense. Jesus put Martha in her place because she had abandoned what she was called to do, abandoned what defined her as a person, stopped being the person God had made her to be, because she had lost herself so completely in her rage and judgement of Mary for not being the same as her. Jesus uplifts Mary because Martha’s rage, though it certainly felt justified to Martha, did a real and measurable harm to Mary, and at that for no real reason. 

The hardest part of the story, for all of us I think, is that there is no one person here who actually feels wrong. Martha’s complaints seem entirely justified to her, and to many in the room with her too, and its only when Jesus stops everything to point out how much pain and damage she’s caused just because she expected Mary to be just like her, just because she built Mary up in her own head as an idol of hate rather than just talking to her sister instead, that the cold horror of realization finally sets in.

I tend to imagine that Martha and Mary had a lot to talk about that night, and for many nights yet to follow. After this story ends, there is a whole bunch of repentance that had to have happened in order for them to stay in relationship with each other. Apologies had to have been made from Martha to Mary for not loving her as the person God made her to be, and for burying her under the weight of her own expectations instead. 

We are all of us, at times, like Martha. I know I very much am. I have often found myself in Martha’s place, indignantly wondering just why it is that people I love, or care about, don’t live up to my expectations of who they ought to be as people. And, at times, I have found myself in Mary’s place as well; sitting at the feet of Jesus, having set myself aside, focusing utterly on trying to be the person I am supposed to be and utterly oblivious to the fact that my decision to live and act as I am is boiling the hearts of people I care so deeply about, who are in the next room growing in rage and hurt because I do not, or cannot, see the hurt that I am causing them. 

This is the great challenge of community; to overcome the distractions of rage and selfishness, to stop ourselves from turning our expectations of one another into idols of hatred and anger, and to discipline ourselves into remembering who we are meant to be, when all we feel we want to do is to toss that aside in anger, and wreak unexpected vengeance on someone we love. 

I wish I could promise, even as a pastor, that I would never make this mistake, that I would never lose sight of anyone because I have been blinded by my own expectations, but the truth is that I make this mistake as often as anyone else, perhaps even more. I wish this was a problem that came with easy solutions, or really anything we could do other than to be aware that this is a thing we all often do to each other, and maybe we should try not to. 

In the end, all I have to offer is who I am, who I am called by God to be, complete with all the brokenness, inexpertness, foolishness, and frustrating long-windedness that it includes. All I have to offer is my word, as a pastor and friend, that I never mean to hurt anyone, though I know full well I do. 

All any of us truly have to offer is this: that we are the people God made us to be, in all our imperfect glory, and that being ourselves often means harming each other in the process. But so long as we recognize the goodness within each other, so long as we see the real person, and not the idols we make of our own expectations, these relationships can endure, grow, and blossom.

And in this way we may all of us, not despite our differences but because of our differences, live and love together in peace. 

Amen.