"Doing" and "Being" Faithfully

There is an old vaudeville joke about a man and woman dancing together at a singles resort in the Catskills. The man says, “I’m only here for the weekend.” To which the woman responds, “I’m dancing as fast as I can!”

Martha is just like all of us, women and men, dancing around her house as fast as she can, trying to get things ready for her honored guest. She is trying in her own way to make the most of their time with Jesus.

My hunch is that Mary was not normally in the habit of entertaining visitors by sitting at their feet while her sister did all the work. Martha’s complaint to Jesus suggests that Mary’s behavior was not normal for her, and Martha was saying to Mary (by way of Jesus!) “snap out of it!”

Now here’s the trap: we are tempted to read this passage as a kind of Biblical “Goofus and Gallant” comic…remember those from Highlights for Children, where Goofus was the rude “bad” kid and Gallant was the polite “good” kid? We are tempted to say, “Martha bad, Mary good!”

But it’s not one versus the other. What we are witnessing is a lesson about the movement, the oscillation, between “activity and rest.”

Jesus does not deny the value of who Martha is or of what she is doing. He is saying that what Mary is up to is also valuable. Jesus is about priorities; first things first.

Look, Jesus is not against activity or work or even going out of one’s way to do good—just look at Jesus’ story of the Samaritan who stopped to care for the injured stranger, a story which comes right before this in Luke’s Gospel—what Jesus cares about our focus.

In the 14th-century, the anonymous author of a spiritual discourse called The Cloud of Unknowing, speaks about Martha and Mary as repre­senting the Two Ways of Prayer.

“My friend, do you see that this whole incident concerning Jesus and the two sisters was intended as a lesson for active and contemplative persons of the Church in every age? Mary represents the contemplative life and all contemplative persons ought to model their lives on hers. Martha represents the active life and all active persons should take her as their guide.”

In other words, we all have periods of activity and periods of rest. A healthy Christian life depends on being active some of the time and having times of renewal. If we don’t have both in balance we all go a little cuckoo—either in hyper-busyness or sluggish inaction.

Have you ever noticed how Episcopalians and other Christians divide up time?

Our day has times of prayer for morning, noonday, evenings and before bed. So we are grounded in prayer.

Our week is grounded with Sunday… each week’s ‘little Easter’ and the Sabbath where remember that even God rested after a busy week of creating, well, everything!

And our year is organized by seasons which tells us that God’s time has a rhythm, purpose, and direction for us and all creation.

Taken together we see a movement… and oscillation… between activity and renewal with God and the center and prayer as the fulcrum.

All of us will have Martha-times and Mary-times. We need both for a balanced and healthy life. I call this the do-be cycle. We need to do. And we need to be. Doing without being is empty. Being without doing is wasteful. We need to both do and be. Sing it with me. Do-be. Do-be. Do-be.

Society has forgotten the tune. When everything is open 24/7, every day is the same. Our world is a continuous round of endless media input, so we forget how to reflect, and where we substitute entertainment for rest. We value productivity, but for many people a forty-hour week is the baseline for work not the limit.

Recently, I saw a New Yorker cartoon of two people in a bar. A man is talking to a woman through one of those doggie cones, you know like the one you get at the vet for your dog. He says, “I wear it because it keeps me from checking my phone every two seconds.”

Do you know what the busiest shopping day of the week is in all those big box stores? It’s right now! Sunday morning!

And many Christians get caught up in the whirlwind of being “busy” and Sunday is just one more day on the list of things to do. For many of us, Sunday is the “open” day to catch up…catch up on the chores, catch up on the shopping, catch up on some sleep…because in our day and age, we are expected to be efficient and productive, all the time.

Jesus and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing assume something quite different. And that is that everything we do can be (and is) prayer! Everything we do can be an offering to God. Everything we do can reveal God’s love and power and presence and grace to us and those around us. But for this to work, for our work to truly become prayer, we have to hold God at the center of all that we do and we have to keep Christ at the heart of who we are.  We have to have the right balance of “do-be.”

Sing it with me: Do-be. Do-be. Do-be.

If we are to make Christ the center of our work, we must take the time to let Christ be at the center of our renewal.  Martha sets the table for Jesus in order for us to attend to Jesus. Not just make him comfy but to clear the decks so that she and her family and guests can, like Mary, live the moment and sit at Jesus’ feet and listen.

An ancient custom of hospitality in England holds that when a sovereign comes to your house, while in your home, it is no longer yours but his. A sovereign becomes the host under any citizen’s roof.  So remember that, should King Charles pop over to your house for tea, your house literally becomes his house. Think about that. Some of us learned a common table grace as children where we invited Jesus to come and be our guest, but if this ancient royal custom teaches us anything it is that when let Jesus sit at our table, we invite him to be our host and for us to be his guest!  We invite him to feed us. We invite him to care for us and attend to our needs. We invite him to refresh us, teach us, and treat us as the honored wayfarer, so that we can continue the journey renewed, refreshed and oriented.

Let’s take that image a step further: in our baptisms, we invited Christ into our lives, into us. He who is the guest is now the host.  And in our Eucharist, Christ sits at the head of the table. We allow him to nourish us in our common life, in our worship, in our times of quiet and prayer, in times of retreat, and even in a few minutes reading Forward Day by Day or saying the daily devotions found in the prayer book (or on a prayer app!), and in how we order our common life.

We who emulate our image of busy Martha can sometimes forget the focus and purpose of our work. We can be so busy doing good and necessary things that we sometimes forget the balance required to sing “do-be, do-be, do-be.” The good news is that now the guest has become the host.  And as Jesus enters our living, he feeds us, meets us where we need him the most, and helps us rest in Him.

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Scripture for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, July 20, 2025

Website for The Episcopal Church of the Good Samaritan, Clearwater, Florida

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here.

Here is the bulletin for 6 Pentecost C, July 20, 2025, the Episcopal Church of the Good Samaritan, Clearwater, Florida.