The brilliance and challenge of the Martha and Mary anecdote is, everyone nods when told that Mary has chosen the better part, yet we all live Martha lives.
I remember the Lord's words, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious about many things..." He knows us. Most of us are anxious about many things. Its hard to turn them over to him.
I guess not even Jesus Christ Himself understood how women were required to put on a big feed, never get thanked, and were left alone to clean up.
Either that or he made his point and then told everybody to get off their butts and help finish the dishes so Martha could enjoy his talk, too.
I used to have a perpetual novena going to St Martha, but the list of worries got too big. Instead I tell her what one or two things I want to get done and ask her to help me get them done with cheerful grace.
I see it differently. Jesus did not discriminate against women. When he failed to scold Mary for joining the men, he was teaching that women are equal to men. The cultural norm then (and very often now) assumed that women’s roles were to serve men, to support them so that they can do their more important work. This is what most religions teach also, including the RCC. JPII was pretty explicit on this when defining “ complementarity “. Men lead, women follow. Men act, women receive. Husbands are the heads of the family - not equal partners with their wives. Etc. But Mary joined the men, who stayed with Jesus to learn. Why? They needed to learn because he was sending them to teach also. He showed that women may also be called to teach, to lead, as equals to men. IOW, they too should be “ priests” - not just men. But Jesus also points out that Mary chose to learn, so that she, like the men, would be able to teach others what Jesus taught. Martha was willing to accept the traditional role that the culture, ruled by men, had assigned to her. Women today who wish to be priests are denied this role by the men who run the church. They are told to get back in the kitchen and serve the men.
Then don’t interpret this anecdote in terms of the traditional active versus contemplative dichotomy but interpret it in terms of what is important in hospitality, namely giving total attention to guests.
All the busy work of serving guests can just bring attention upon ourselves as if what we are doing is the important part not the guest. Martha even went so far as to interrupt Jesus to draw attention to herself. She did not like it that Mary was giving total attention to Jesus, and she was getting no attention.
Hospitality is an essential part of life. We do it all the time for our family, our friends, our neighbors, and colleagues at work. The most important part of hospitality is listening to the guest, understanding them more deeply, making them comfortable, attending to their needs and concerns, and learning from them. Making a lot of fuss, drawing attention to ourselves is likely to hinder this process.
In the first reading, all the work for the hospitality of the guests is kept in the background. Abraham even stands at a distance as the servant. And what does he get for this? The answer to the most important question on his mind, what he would never have dared to ask.
Hospitality has been a key ingredient of monastic life since the beginning. The desert solitaries would interrupt their fasting and prayer to listen to their guests. And guests knew that they need only ask for a “word” from the solitary. We now have books of these brief and profound sayings from the desert solitaires.
The Rule of Saint Benedict says that we are to treat each guest as Christ himself.
This gospel is a great opportunity to emphasize that great traditional of hospitality that should undergird our approach to synodality, i.e. walking together.
Hmm, I think it's easy to fall into anachronistic interpretation.
I want to believe that Jesus accepted women as equal partners with men. But I don't think it's there. He seems to be making a point about discipleship by using the two women before him: Spreading the Word is more important than your quotidian anxieties, just have a look at these two women. It's a teaching moment. For the men.
Martha as the attention-seeking host only works for me only as a way to villainize her as a noisy complainer. Which is often how women are stereotyped even now, as petty busybodies. Was Jesus saying, Look at Martha being a bad host. Men, do you want to be like a silly woman interrupting and sputtering?
Jesus upset a lot of the status quo, but didn't seem too eager to mess with gender roles.
I don't think that means gender roles are ordained by God. But how far would the mission have gone if all 12 disciples had been women? Nowheresville.
It will be interesting to see what Jim comes up with.
Luke is such a wordsmith. Using my BibleWorks program to understand his Greek words is always so rewarding.
This is definitely a hospitality story; the Greek says Martha gave hospitality to Jesus. The story treats her as the head of the household.
When describing her service, it uses the Greek noun from which we get our word deacon. It is the word that regularly in Acts and the Pauline Letters is translated as ministry. The correlated verb is translated as minister to. The word ministry includes attention to another person’s physical and spiritual needs. The former is referred to as table ministry as in the institution of deacons in Acts where their tasks are contrasted to the ministry of the word by the Apostles.
Martha is anxious. This is the anxiety that the parable of the lilies of the field asks us not to have. The problem is not that she is providing ministry to physical needs but that she is over concerned about those needs rather than concentrating on being attentive to others.
Mary is described in Greek as reclining at table with Jesus! The reference to feet is that she would have been close to his feet rather than his head. The latter would have been the more privileged position occupied in John by the beloved disciple. However, the reference to his feet likely was intended by Luke to remind us of another occasion of hospitality. Simon the Pharisee invited Jesus to dinner but failed to attend to his physical needs. A woman of ill repute did that very thing, bathing his feet and anointing his head.
Therefore, Mary in attending to the words of Jesus is providing that attentiveness that the woman of Ill repute provided for Jesus physical needs. Luke really celebrates the hospitality of women.
He does however not let Martha’s concerns for physical well-being be an excuse for curbing Mary’s concern for spiritual well- being. I suspect Luke had the role of women in his own communities in mind in telling this story. They had the backing of Jesus.
Public life in ancient cities had both a formal character in buildings and institutions in which women played little part and an informal character in the receptions provided by households, particularly those of prominent men, patrons who organized city life. From early morning clients came to give honor and respect to patrons, ask favors and do this bidding. In the evening there were dinners.
Women did play prominent roles in all this since they were the chief organizers of the daily life of large households.
Women heads of household who were followers of Jesus in his time and/or Luke’s likely played Martha role in attending to the needs of his followers; they were in effect if not in name women deacons. Some of these heads of households were like Mary devoted to the ministry of the word, the spiritual needs of his followers, probably especially the needs of other women. In effect if not in title they were elders (presbyters) in the community.
There is increasing evidence that these household churches and roles lasted even after the Constantine when the bishop began organizing the city church around his cathedra. That organization had little role for women presbyters but did especially in the East have a role for women deacons.
While some particularly prominent women, like later prominent abbesses, might have played a role comparable to a bishop, there was little room for such people in the very male oriented civic hierarchy.
If I were preaching on this story, I would emphasize hospitality both physical and spiritual by all Christians and stay away from words like ministry.
There was an effort after Vatican II to try to organize things around the word ministry, e.g., lay ministry, or even service. Prominent American theologians wrote books on ministry. The movement raised eyebrows in Rome, JP2 wrote critically about lay ministry. What we have left is a tame, churchly "lay ecclesial ministry" i.e., formal certification in some places of "church ladies."
I was very impressed by all the voluntary lay ministry when I was a member of the mostly voluntary pastoral staff at a parish in Toledo.
However, I was also impressed by all the voluntarism in the public mental health system. I was reluctant to call what I and others did there "voluntary ministry." Mentally ill people are impressed when you give them attention, i.e., hospitality. They are likely to become skeptical of your motives if you talk about ministry, i.e., religion.
When I wrote a grant to help empower mentally ill people, I called it a leadership development program. I pointed to our county's leadership development program for civic leaders as a model for mentally ill, namely working together on a common project while studying the needs and institutions of the county.
It was very successful in bringing everyone together around empowering consumers, using all their talents.
That experience led me to think of leadership rather than ministry as the model for Christian activity. The Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity use "apostolate" as the word for what we do as a consequence of baptism. Unfortunately, that is too churchy of a word for what we do in the secular world. I copied the Decree into a Word document and then had it substitute "voluntary spiritual leadership" for every occurrence of "apostolate." It made the document far more relevant.
We as Christians are "anointed," called to be priests, prophets, and kings, i.e. leaders. Leadership as defined by social psychologists is a fundamental dimension of life like economic activity. We all influence others and are influenced by others (discipleship).
Leadership can be a too individualist word. Greenleaf tried to offset that by emphasizing servant leadership. Hospitality, i.e. paying attention to the physical and spiritual needs of others, offers another way of getting away from self-centered leadership.
Well, Jack, you have done your homework on this, but I have to say that it rather upends my long-entrenched personal views about what's going on here. I will have to sit with my disgruntlement for awhile!
It was a great program but went out of business. It really works well for computer program geeks like me. I love it like I loved SPSS. But I had a very difficult time teaching MSWs how to use SPSS to track client data.
It is really a digit bible. You can see Luke's use of words in comparison to himself. An author is always the best interpreter of his own work.
Then you can see Luke in the context of the OT. When you see him use a rare Greek word to describe Elisabeth's reaction to her pregnancy that is only used in the OT to describe Sarah's reaction to her pregnancy, you know you are either inside his mind or that of the Holy Spirit. When he uses all the language of killing the fatten calve to describe the homecoming feast of the prodigal son, the same language of all the festival regulations in the Torah that exclude no one, not even the resident alien from the feast, you know you are thinking like Luke thought.
The program convinced me that it is really impossible to translate scripture, to gather all the nuances of all these words in their various contexts. It's really a great experience to experience it digitally; I can't understand why so many scholars and pastors don't use it. I guess one has to be really computer literate to benefit from it.
Thanks to Jim, you and everyone for giving me the opportunity to experience one of my BibleWorks highs.
Such a lot of food for thought in this reading. I like Jack's hospitality emphasis. But the thing that keeps on coming back to me is Martha's anxiety, which Jesus sees and names. Because we all have anxiety, and its next door neighbor, fear, of one sort and another. It is said that the phrase "fear not" appears in Scripture 365 times ( one for each day of the year?). Many Gospel readings seek to calm our anxieties, such as the "lilies of the field" and the "more than many sparrows" narrative.
It's amazing how this brief sketch (five verses long) resonates, and is open to so many interpretations.
FWIW - I'm not preaching this weekend. But if I was, you all would have done my homework for me!
My initial thought was approaching it through a different lens than the interpretations I've seen so far. It hearkens back to Jesus's admonition from a few weeks ago to "let the dead bury their dead". Accepting Jesus's friendship is not for the half-hearted or lukewarm. Martha is trying to be a follower of Jesus while attending to her workaday concerns. Mary has prioritized. That leaves her open to criticism according to the standards of the kingdom of earth - something which I have observed many adult women are sensitive to - they still feel pressure to have the vacuuming done, the clothes ironed, etc., even though they are working a full-time job, and even though they are married to someone who could push a vacuum cleaner around if only she could crack the code to get him to do it.
Used to be that whether women had souls was open to debate. Once that was reluctantly put to rest--men seemed to love debating that--female ability to discern and understand moral issues without male supervision became a topic of discussion.
Apparently falling prey earthly concerns is a special preoccupation for us of the weaker sex. Good think men are immune to getting sidetracked by earthly concerns like cars, golf clubs, sports tickets in the sky box, and posh addresses!
Pity the poor homilists for this Sunday! After this discussion, they are going to have a really tough time pleasing any of us.
Jim, maybe you should try this more often? That was a pretty good opening question/observation. Maybe we could begin a new game. Try finding the most interesting question to ask or observation to make about next Sunday's gospel?
Our priest last night spoke about Mary representing the contemplative part of spiritually, and Martha the active part. He said they aren't in competition, we need both. And all are called to deeper prayer life, even though they live in the more active sphere.
That seems to be a popular interpretation. I have heard it from Episcopal and Catholic priests over the years. I don't think it really grapples with Jesus's preference for Mary. But it doesn't offend anyone.
There was a Ghanaian guest priest yesterday, and Raber said he could not understand most of what was said, so he had nothing to add on the topic.
At the Activities Club (formerly Men's Club) meeting, the Church Ladies were insisting on sign-up sheets, clean-up rosters, ingredients list, etc. for the parish breakfast, something Raber and another guy did for years on their own without much fuss. He said he had to bite his tongue not to say, "Dorothy, Dorothy, you are worried about many things."
God bless him. It took him 22 years to get overtly snarky about the Church Ladies. Took me about two months.
The homilist for the ND/Catholic TV Mass said that Martha-like hospitality (such as works of charity) that are not centered on Christ risk becoming centered upon ourselves. While that may be true, he did it in a too church promoting way. He cautioned us against the danger of thinking we can be good people without going to church.
He began his homily with the story of Martin of Tours dividing his cloak to cover the beggar. However, Martin only discovers later in a dream that the beggar is Christ. In Matthew Christ gives credit to those who help the hungry, the thirsty, etc. even if they are not recognized as Christ.
The reality of human charity is that what often begins by sharing our wealth with the needy can (if we are attentive to them) mature into an appreciation of their humanity and spiritual giftedness. We don’t need a lot of religious language for that to happen; often religious language can get in the road of attentiveness to others.
Particularly in our own time and place we Christians need to join with people who want to solve our social issues without complicating the issue by waving religious banners. In the gospel we are urged to pray, to fast, and to give alms all without proclaiming our religious values. Jesus was very concerned about spiritual pride.
I think these are some good thoughts on diakonia, and I was quite interested to read in Jack's earlier comment that a variation on that word appears in this Gospel passage ( early least I assume that is the word). But Jack also suggested the type of service under consideration is hospitality. The church evidently thinks so, too, as the first reading is about Abraham's idealized hospitality.
I remember the Lord's words, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious about many things..." He knows us. Most of us are anxious about many things. Its hard to turn them over to him.
ReplyDeleteI guess not even Jesus Christ Himself understood how women were required to put on a big feed, never get thanked, and were left alone to clean up.
ReplyDeleteEither that or he made his point and then told everybody to get off their butts and help finish the dishes so Martha could enjoy his talk, too.
I used to have a perpetual novena going to St Martha, but the list of worries got too big. Instead I tell her what one or two things I want to get done and ask her to help me get them done with cheerful grace.
Sometimes it works.
I see it differently. Jesus did not discriminate against women. When he failed to scold Mary for joining the men, he was teaching that women are equal to men. The cultural norm then (and very often now) assumed that women’s roles were to serve men, to support them so that they can do their more important work. This is what most religions teach also, including the RCC. JPII was pretty explicit on this when defining “ complementarity “. Men lead, women follow. Men act, women receive. Husbands are the heads of the family - not equal partners with their wives. Etc. But Mary joined the men, who stayed with Jesus to learn. Why? They needed to learn because he was sending them to teach also. He showed that women may also be called to teach, to lead, as equals to men. IOW, they too should be “ priests” - not just men. But Jesus also points out that Mary chose to learn, so that she, like the men, would be able to teach others what Jesus taught. Martha was willing to accept the traditional role that the culture, ruled by men, had assigned to her. Women today who wish to be priests are denied this role by the men who run the church. They are told to get back in the kitchen and serve the men.
ReplyDeleteThen don’t interpret this anecdote in terms of the traditional active versus contemplative dichotomy but interpret it in terms of what is important in hospitality, namely giving total attention to guests.
ReplyDeleteAll the busy work of serving guests can just bring attention upon ourselves as if what we are doing is the important part not the guest. Martha even went so far as to interrupt Jesus to draw attention to herself. She did not like it that Mary was giving total attention to Jesus, and she was getting no attention.
Hospitality is an essential part of life. We do it all the time for our family, our friends, our neighbors, and colleagues at work. The most important part of hospitality is listening to the guest, understanding them more deeply, making them comfortable, attending to their needs and concerns, and learning from them. Making a lot of fuss, drawing attention to ourselves is likely to hinder this process.
In the first reading, all the work for the hospitality of the guests is kept in the background. Abraham even stands at a distance as the servant. And what does he get for this? The answer to the most important question on his mind, what he would never have dared to ask.
Hospitality has been a key ingredient of monastic life since the beginning. The desert solitaries would interrupt their fasting and prayer to listen to their guests. And guests knew that they need only ask for a “word” from the solitary. We now have books of these brief and profound sayings from the desert solitaires.
The Rule of Saint Benedict says that we are to treat each guest as Christ himself.
This gospel is a great opportunity to emphasize that great traditional of hospitality that should undergird our approach to synodality, i.e. walking together.
Jim, if you are trying to figure out what to say this weekend, you already got a lot of material. Maybe too much to handle.
ReplyDeleteHmm, I think it's easy to fall into anachronistic interpretation.
ReplyDeleteI want to believe that Jesus accepted women as equal partners with men. But I don't think it's there. He seems to be making a point about discipleship by using the two women before him: Spreading the Word is more important than your quotidian anxieties, just have a look at these two women. It's a teaching moment. For the men.
Martha as the attention-seeking host only works for me only as a way to villainize her as a noisy complainer. Which is often how women are stereotyped even now, as petty busybodies. Was Jesus saying, Look at Martha being a bad host. Men, do you want to be like a silly woman interrupting and sputtering?
Jesus upset a lot of the status quo, but didn't seem too eager to mess with gender roles.
I don't think that means gender roles are ordained by God. But how far would the mission have gone if all 12 disciples had been women? Nowheresville.
It will be interesting to see what Jim comes up with.
Luke is such a wordsmith. Using my BibleWorks program to understand his Greek words is always so rewarding.
ReplyDeleteThis is definitely a hospitality story; the Greek says Martha gave hospitality to Jesus. The story treats her as the head of the household.
When describing her service, it uses the Greek noun from which we get our word deacon. It is the word that regularly in Acts and the Pauline Letters is translated as ministry. The correlated verb is translated as minister to. The word ministry includes attention to another person’s physical and spiritual needs. The former is referred to as table ministry as in the institution of deacons in Acts where their tasks are contrasted to the ministry of the word by the Apostles.
Martha is anxious. This is the anxiety that the parable of the lilies of the field asks us not to have. The problem is not that she is providing ministry to physical needs but that she is over concerned about those needs rather than concentrating on being attentive to others.
Mary is described in Greek as reclining at table with Jesus! The reference to feet is that she would have been close to his feet rather than his head. The latter would have been the more privileged position occupied in John by the beloved disciple. However, the reference to his feet likely was intended by Luke to remind us of another occasion of hospitality. Simon the Pharisee invited Jesus to dinner but failed to attend to his physical needs. A woman of ill repute did that very thing, bathing his feet and anointing his head.
Therefore, Mary in attending to the words of Jesus is providing that attentiveness that the woman of Ill repute provided for Jesus physical needs. Luke really celebrates the hospitality of women.
He does however not let Martha’s concerns for physical well-being be an excuse for curbing Mary’s concern for spiritual well- being. I suspect Luke had the role of women in his own communities in mind in telling this story. They had the backing of Jesus.
Public life in ancient cities had both a formal character in buildings and institutions in which women played little part and an informal character in the receptions provided by households, particularly those of prominent men, patrons who organized city life. From early morning clients came to give honor and respect to patrons, ask favors and do this bidding. In the evening there were dinners.
ReplyDeleteWomen did play prominent roles in all this since they were the chief organizers of the daily life of large households.
Women heads of household who were followers of Jesus in his time and/or Luke’s likely played Martha role in attending to the needs of his followers; they were in effect if not in name women deacons. Some of these heads of households were like Mary devoted to the ministry of the word, the spiritual needs of his followers, probably especially the needs of other women. In effect if not in title they were elders (presbyters) in the community.
There is increasing evidence that these household churches and roles lasted even after the Constantine when the bishop began organizing the city church around his cathedra. That organization had little role for women presbyters but did especially in the East have a role for women deacons.
While some particularly prominent women, like later prominent abbesses, might have played a role comparable to a bishop, there was little room for such people in the very male oriented civic hierarchy.
If I were preaching on this story, I would emphasize hospitality both physical and spiritual by all Christians and stay away from words like ministry.
ReplyDeleteThere was an effort after Vatican II to try to organize things around the word ministry, e.g., lay ministry, or even service. Prominent American theologians wrote books on ministry. The movement raised eyebrows in Rome, JP2 wrote critically about lay ministry. What we have left is a tame, churchly "lay ecclesial ministry" i.e., formal certification in some places of "church ladies."
I was very impressed by all the voluntary lay ministry when I was a member of the mostly voluntary pastoral staff at a parish in Toledo.
However, I was also impressed by all the voluntarism in the public mental health system. I was reluctant to call what I and others did there "voluntary ministry." Mentally ill people are impressed when you give them attention, i.e., hospitality. They are likely to become skeptical of your motives if you talk about ministry, i.e., religion.
When I wrote a grant to help empower mentally ill people, I called it a leadership development program. I pointed to our county's leadership development program for civic leaders as a model for mentally ill, namely working together on a common project while studying the needs and institutions of the county.
It was very successful in bringing everyone together around empowering consumers, using all their talents.
That experience led me to think of leadership rather than ministry as the model for Christian activity. The Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity use "apostolate" as the word for what we do as a consequence of baptism. Unfortunately, that is too churchy of a word for what we do in the secular world. I copied the Decree into a Word document and then had it substitute "voluntary spiritual leadership" for every occurrence of "apostolate." It made the document far more relevant.
We as Christians are "anointed," called to be priests, prophets, and kings, i.e. leaders. Leadership as defined by social psychologists is a fundamental dimension of life like economic activity. We all influence others and are influenced by others (discipleship).
Leadership can be a too individualist word. Greenleaf tried to offset that by emphasizing servant leadership. Hospitality, i.e. paying attention to the physical and spiritual needs of others, offers another way of getting away from self-centered leadership.
Well, Jack, you have done your homework on this, but I have to say that it rather upends my long-entrenched personal views about what's going on here. I will have to sit with my disgruntlement for awhile!
ReplyDeleteJean, BibleWorks gave me an unfair advantage.
DeleteIt was a great program but went out of business. It really works well for computer program geeks like me. I love it like I loved SPSS. But I had a very difficult time teaching MSWs how to use SPSS to track client data.
It is really a digit bible. You can see Luke's use of words in comparison to himself. An author is always the best interpreter of his own work.
Then you can see Luke in the context of the OT. When you see him use a rare Greek word to describe Elisabeth's reaction to her pregnancy that is only used in the OT to describe Sarah's reaction to her pregnancy, you know you are either inside his mind or that of the Holy Spirit. When he uses all the language of killing the fatten calve to describe the homecoming feast of the prodigal son, the same language of all the festival regulations in the Torah that exclude no one, not even the resident alien from the feast, you know you are thinking like Luke thought.
The program convinced me that it is really impossible to translate scripture, to gather all the nuances of all these words in their various contexts. It's really a great experience to experience it digitally; I can't understand why so many scholars and pastors don't use it. I guess one has to be really computer literate to benefit from it.
Thanks to Jim, you and everyone for giving me the opportunity to experience one of my BibleWorks highs.
Such a lot of food for thought in this reading. I like Jack's hospitality emphasis. But the thing that keeps on coming back to me is Martha's anxiety, which Jesus sees and names. Because we all have anxiety, and its next door neighbor, fear, of one sort and another. It is said that the phrase "fear not" appears in Scripture 365 times ( one for each day of the year?). Many Gospel readings seek to calm our anxieties, such as the "lilies of the field" and the "more than many sparrows" narrative.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing how this brief sketch (five verses long) resonates, and is open to so many interpretations.
ReplyDeleteFWIW - I'm not preaching this weekend. But if I was, you all would have done my homework for me!
My initial thought was approaching it through a different lens than the interpretations I've seen so far. It hearkens back to Jesus's admonition from a few weeks ago to "let the dead bury their dead". Accepting Jesus's friendship is not for the half-hearted or lukewarm. Martha is trying to be a follower of Jesus while attending to her workaday concerns. Mary has prioritized. That leaves her open to criticism according to the standards of the kingdom of earth - something which I have observed many adult women are sensitive to - they still feel pressure to have the vacuuming done, the clothes ironed, etc., even though they are working a full-time job, and even though they are married to someone who could push a vacuum cleaner around if only she could crack the code to get him to do it.
Used to be that whether women had souls was open to debate. Once that was reluctantly put to rest--men seemed to love debating that--female ability to discern and understand moral issues without male supervision became a topic of discussion.
DeleteApparently falling prey earthly concerns is a special preoccupation for us of the weaker sex. Good think men are immune to getting sidetracked by earthly concerns like cars, golf clubs, sports tickets in the sky box, and posh addresses!
Now, where did I put my can of Pledge???
True - men aren't immune. And maybe it's not all women who are trying to bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan.
DeletePity the poor homilists for this Sunday! After this discussion, they are going to have a really tough time pleasing any of us.
ReplyDeleteJim, maybe you should try this more often? That was a pretty good opening question/observation. Maybe we could begin a new game. Try finding the most interesting question to ask or observation to make about next Sunday's gospel?
Our priest last night spoke about Mary representing the contemplative part of spiritually, and Martha the active part. He said they aren't in competition, we need both. And all are called to deeper prayer life, even though they live in the more active sphere.
ReplyDeleteThat seems to be a popular interpretation. I have heard it from Episcopal and Catholic priests over the years. I don't think it really grapples with Jesus's preference for Mary. But it doesn't offend anyone.
DeleteThere was a Ghanaian guest priest yesterday, and Raber said he could not understand most of what was said, so he had nothing to add on the topic.
At the Activities Club (formerly Men's Club) meeting, the Church Ladies were insisting on sign-up sheets, clean-up rosters, ingredients list, etc. for the parish breakfast, something Raber and another guy did for years on their own without much fuss. He said he had to bite his tongue not to say, "Dorothy, Dorothy, you are worried about many things."
God bless him. It took him 22 years to get overtly snarky about the Church Ladies. Took me about two months.
I think the Church Ladies need an eponymous Netflix series. So much material.
DeleteI used to send weekly fish fry reports during Lent to a friend out of state. That drama was better than reality TV.
DeleteNow that the Church Ladies have forced the dissolution of the Men's Club, nerves are pretty frayed, and it's far less humorous.
The one good thing about it is that Raber can see that my controlfreakery is way below the Olympian levels of his new club members.
The homilist for the ND/Catholic TV Mass said that Martha-like hospitality (such as works of charity) that are not centered on Christ risk becoming centered upon ourselves. While that may be true, he did it in a too church promoting way. He cautioned us against the danger of thinking we can be good people without going to church.
ReplyDeleteHe began his homily with the story of Martin of Tours dividing his cloak to cover the beggar. However, Martin only discovers later in a dream that the beggar is Christ. In Matthew Christ gives credit to those who help the hungry, the thirsty, etc. even if they are not recognized as Christ.
The reality of human charity is that what often begins by sharing our wealth with the needy can (if we are attentive to them) mature into an appreciation of their humanity and spiritual giftedness. We don’t need a lot of religious language for that to happen; often religious language can get in the road of attentiveness to others.
Particularly in our own time and place we Christians need to join with people who want to solve our social issues without complicating the issue by waving religious banners. In the gospel we are urged to pray, to fast, and to give alms all without proclaiming our religious values. Jesus was very concerned about spiritual pride.
Some Protestants are very averse to charity because it makes people think that doing good can make up for incorrect belief and other sins.
DeleteThis world is so messed up, that I think God appreciates whatever charitable action helps keep someone from despair.
Getting scrupulous about whether we perform charitable acts with sufficient humility seems kind of useless.
I think these are some good thoughts on diakonia, and I was quite interested to read in Jack's earlier comment that a variation on that word appears in this Gospel passage ( early least I assume that is the word). But Jack also suggested the type of service under consideration is hospitality. The church evidently thinks so, too, as the first reading is about Abraham's idealized hospitality.
Delete