"This Woman's Work, This Woman's Time"
A Sermon Delivered by M. Christian Green, J.D./Ph.D
At All Saints Episcopal Church, Brookline, MA
Feast of Saints Mary and Martha of Bethany, transferred July 30-31, 2005
Readings:
Ecclesiastes 3:1-13, Romans 12: 9-13, Psalm 36: 5-10, Luke 10:38-42
When you go by a diminutive of your middle name, you are always asked about that first initial. People inevitably assume that you are hiding a very unfortunate first name. For many of my more casual acquaintances, the "M" in my name probably stands for "mystery." But those who know me better know the full story. Today I am here to tell you that the "M" in my name stands for Martha. It is a name that also belongs to my mother, two grandmothers, and a great-grandmother before me. And, of course, this week in the church, on July 29, to be exact, we celebrate the feast of the two sisters, Sts. Mary and Martha of Bethany. Mary seems to have gotten the "better part" of public attention in recent years - mostly through a regrettable confusion with Mary Magdalene, whose feast day was celebrated last week on July 22. It is Martha, however, who will be the focus of my remarks today, for the light that her example sheds on our understanding of work and time amid the bustle and busy-ness of contemporary life.
Growing up in the church, I was always aware that there was a St. Martha -- mostly through the account of Mary and Martha in the gospel of Luke that is our reading today. The first time I encountered the wider tradition surrounding St. Martha was during a high-school trip to several cathedrals in France. Our guide on the tour pointed out that saints who were martyred were usually depicted with symbols indicating the manner of their death -- St. Sebastian with the arrows, St. Bartholomew with the knife, St. Catherine with the wheel, etc. Then the guide mentioned that St. Martha was often depicted with a broom. As far as we know, since there are no biblical accounts or early traditions surrounding her death, Martha was not a martyr. Nevertheless, the first time that I heard it, the iconography of Martha with her broom, amid all the other images and instruments of saintly demise, suggested the disturbing possibility of death by housework.
When I moved to Brookline last summer, one of the many things that attracted me to this congregation was the beauty of the stained-glass windows -- which include, as some of you may know, an image of the cobalt-blue-robed sisters Mary and Martha of Bethany in the center of the Ella Winthrop Saltonstall window in the West Transept. Mary, second from the left, bears the alabaster jar of perfumed ointment with which she is seen anointing Jesus' feet in the window's lower panel. Martha here carries the bowl of fruit and keys to her house. Somewhat harder to see, the picture above Martha depicts a bowl and serving spoon, and the one below an image of Martha serving Jesus at her table, as recounted in John 12. The fruit, keys, bowl, and spoon -- but no broom, at least in this window -- are the symbols of St. Martha's celebrated in today's gospel and in the references to household abundance and displays of hospitality in today's psalm and epistle to the Romans. In some representations -- stemming from the French medieval legends of the journey of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus from Bethany to Provence that underlie the best-selling book, The Da Vinci Code -- Martha is seen leading a dragon by her sash. As the story goes, Martha saved the town of Tarascon from the dragon by leading it away from the town with her girdle. Aside from these legendary dragon-taming skills, Martha is more generally known as the patroness saint of cooks, dieticians, homemakers, waiters, and single lay women.
The story of Martha and Mary has most often been interpreted as depicting a division between the active and contemplative life. This is a famous distinction in much philosophy and theology. In my capacity as professor of ethics, I often begin my courses by displaying the classic painting "The School of Athens" by Raphael, in which the Italian Renaissance artist depicts philosophers Plato and Aristotle in conversation -- Plato gesturing upward toward the sky to emphasize the important of contemplating transcendent ideas and forms, Aristotle gesturing outward toward the world and emphasizing the importance of practical reason and virtuous action in the world. The active/contemplative distinction also plays on a common biblical trope of using siblings -- think Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah -- to contrast different character types and patterns in life and faith. Martha typically comes out badly in this interpretation, being mired in the worries of the world. But more conciliatory readings of Luke's account have seen the women as partaking in two different, but no less equal forms of diakonia, or service, to the Church - ministries of table service and ministries of teaching and preaching. Defenders of Martha have relished her feistiness, practicality, concern for justice, and inquisitive nature -- over and above what seems a primarily passive Mary, who has no words in the story, but merely listens silently and, perhaps, passively to Jesus' instruction.
If Mary's theological stature comes from being a disciple who studied at the feet of Jesus himself, Martha's theological role is no less significant, particularly when the story of Martha in the gospel of Luke is read along with the account of her activities in the gospel of John. In John 11, Martha is again troubled, in this case by the death of her brother Lazarus. Initially she seems to be deeply in the grips of grief, and something of a crisis of faith, as well. She seems to blame Jesus for her brothe's death, suggesting that he might have saved Lazarus had he arrived sooner. She requests, perhaps somewhat self-interestedly, Jesus' intercession with God for a life-restoring favor on her brother's behalf. When Jesus assures her that her brother will rise again, Martha provides the first gospel statement of faith in the resurrection, saying "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day." Jesus then proclaims to her, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die." When Jesus asks Martha whether she believes this, Martha responds, "Yes, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world." Immediately thereafter in John's account there is a moment of apparent reconciliation between the sisters, over the issue of Mary's desire to study with Jesus, as it is Martha who calls to Mary on Jesus' behalf, saying "The Teacher is here and is calling for you."
But besides these themes of action and contemplation, hospitality and resurrection, besides even the transformation of Martha from a somewhat grumbling servant in Luke to pillar of faith in John -- there is another aspect of the example of St. Martha that I would like to mention today. It is one that I think is particularly pertinent in today's busy world. Jesus tells Martha that she is "worried and distracted by many things" when "there is need of only one thing." Theologically, that "one thing" is the faith that brings knowledge of God and recognition of God's presence in the world -- a faith that Martha demonstrates aptly in the gospel of John. One Christian devotional writer describes the task of cultivating this faith as the task of "Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World" in a book of that title. For me this lesson of faith, and against worry and distraction, has come to center around questions of why we work and how we spend our time. Time, that increasingly precious commodity in the modern world, is the subject of today's Old Testament reading from Ecclesiastes, there interestingly connected to themes of work and business -- or perhaps more aptly, busy-ness.
This lesson about work, time, and busy-ness crystallized for me one day last fall on a day that was particularly filled with the business of modern life. E-mails were piling up in my mailbox. Several that I received were prefaced with those apologies for being too busy to get back sooner that seem to accompany so many e-mail and voicemail messages today in endless rounds of e-mail and phone tag. At dinner with a friend that night I lamented that so many of us seem to worship at what I called the "cult of busy."
Several weeks later, when I visited my sister, brother-in-law, and my then-eight-month-old nephew, Will, over the Christmas holidays, Will was deeply immersed in learning to crawl. As he crawled around the floor at an impressive pace he kept uttering what seemed to be the beginnings of a word. Bid-dy! Bid-dy! Bid-dy! It sounded like "busy" -- and he certainly seemed busy while he was uttering it.
My busy-baby nephew did fit the family work ethic. After all, even our family dog, Blackberry, used to run routinely to a particular tree in the yard whenever we opened the door to summoned her indoors. We interpreted this as her desire to appear to be constantly on the job when it came to chasing squirrels. Over time she wore a permanent path into the ground. Blackberry died many years ago. These days, the BlackBerry is wireless computer device that, according to the company website, promises not only to help exchange data with customers and clients, and but also "to better manage your life with family and friends."
This past spring, I taught a course titled "Work, Consumption, and Globalization." The main objective of the course was to think about the theological and ethical dimensions of work, the economy, and our patterns of consumption and how these affect our relations to small communities, such as our families, and larger communities, such as workers around the world. There is a feeling among many that we in the United States work too hard, consume too much, and, as a result, suffer impoverished relationships among ourselves and with the wider world. But there are disagreements among economists and sociologists who study these things about whether these feelings comport with reality and what they mean in any case.
One of the best-known scholars writing on these themes is Juliet Schor, formerly of the department of economics at Harvard and now at Boston College. Her first two books, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure and The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need, examined the work-and-spend cycle in which many Americans are said to find themselves. Her latest book, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Commercial Culture describes the efforts of marketers to induct children into the consumer club. Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at Berkeley, has written The Second Shift, chronicling the particular dual burden of work and family as it is borne by women, and more recently The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, in which some workers reported being happier at work than at home because time -- and relationships -- were more organized and manageable at work than amid the chaos that they felt their homes had become.
In their book Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time, published in 1997, sociologist, John P. Robinson, and professor of leisure studies, Geoffrey Godbey, report the results of a thirty-year study in which participants chronicled hour-by-hour in "time diaries" their activities over a typical day. They found that Americans had actually gained an hour of free time since 1965. Moreover, while participants in their study estimated that they had, on average, about 18 hours of free time per week, their time diaries showed that they had more than twice that amount. Perhaps the most significant finding of the study was that 40 per cent of that free time is spent watching television, which is thought to cut into many other activities, including family time, civic engagement, and spiritual pursuits. Though one might wonder whether things have become even busier in the time since Robinson and Godbey published their study eight years ago, we were then spending about the same time sleeping and interacting with our children, and we were actually more productive at work in 1995, as compared with 1965. Against Schor and Hochschild, Robinson and Godbey found that we are moving toward a more gender-equal society when it comes to time expenditure, though they detail some worrisome divergences between socioeconomic classes. Specifically, those with more education and higher socioeconomic status reported working more hours and taking less enjoyment from their leisure time than workers of lesser education and socioeconomic status.
The most interesting aspects of the Robinson and Godbey study, at least to this reader, had to do precisely with these subjective and perceptual aspects of time -- whether we enjoy what we do when we do it. And this corresponds to the major point that I have been pondering of late when it comes to work, time, and the busy pace of modern life -- namely the connections between what we work for, how we spend our time, and what we value. In his quintessentially American observation, Benjamin Franklin maintained, "Time is money." But more and more I have begun to think that time has to do what we value, which is another way to say that time has to do with what we love. We make time for what we value. The capacity and drive to make time for what we value would seem to be an important aspect of human freedom. But with freedom comes the responsibility always to ask the question, and maybe even to worry a little bit, about whether our allocation of work and time is going toward those people, endeavors, and experiences that matter most, as well as toward that "one necessary thing" toward which Jesus directs Martha's attention in today's reading from Luke.
Is busy-ness good? Is it really a gift from God, as the reading from Ecclesiastes suggests. The more famous and better known part of the passage reminds us "there is a time for every matter under heaven," but even in our world of e-mail, cellphones, palm pilots and multi-tasking we cannot do everything at once. What is our place in time? What should we do with our time? Do we enjoy our time?
The Jewish and Christian traditions have an interesting relationship to time. Some biblical scholars have noted that the passage from Ecclesiastes actually was written at a time when Judaism was moving from a more ancient and agrarian understanding of time based on reaping and sowing, and the changing of the seasons, to a more linear notion. Indeed, the narrative quality of Judaism and Christianity, tied to the journey of families, communities, nations, and the world through time emphasizes the temporal, or timebound, character of our existence -- that we have a past, present, and future. The Christian texts play up the notion of the eschaton, or end time -- the sense that time is short and fleeting, that our time can be up and we know not when. This eschatological focus could serve simply to heighten our sense of anxiety and urgency around time, but for another feature of the Christian sense of time -- that is the incarnation, life, and resurrection of Jesus as a divine interruption of our earthly time, introducing new values and a new order of time. Lawyer and theologian Cathleen Kaveny, who teaches at Notre Dame, in a wonderful article titled "Billable Hours in Ordinary Time: A Theological Critique of the Instrumentalization of Time in Professional Life," compares and contrasts notions of time in the legal profession and the Christian tradition, describing the "Christ event" as the "inbreaking" of divine time into human time.
There is a sort of legal gallows humor in Kaveny's writing that had the lawyers in the room laughing out loud when I first heard Kaveny read her paper to an audience. Law is, after all, a profession in which some firms require associates to keep track of their time in six-minute increments. This is actually considered normal. Most of us resist keeping quite such close scrutiny over our use of time, but we do often wonder where all our time goes. The good news of the Christian tradition is that we need not be quite so obsessive about time. Our time in this world is relativized, or made relatively less pressing a matter, than our time in the world to come. But Christianity does introduce new values into our understanding of time in this world -- and these have not to do with the commodified and easily quantified and multi-tasked uses of time that are so valued today. From this I conclude that there may be good reason to ask from time to time whether our allocation of time corresponds to what we value most. The example of St. Martha is an example of the task that we each face every day -- to remember the past, attend to the present, and have faith in the future -- taking happiness, pleasure, and enjoyment in our time in this world and anticipating an even "better part" in a time and world to come.
Bibliography
_ Joanna Weaver, Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World: Finding Intimacy with God in the Business of Life (WaterBrook Press, 2002).
_ Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (Basic Books, 1993),
_ Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need (Harper Paperbacks, 1999)
_ Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Commercial Culture (Scribner, 2004).
_ Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift (Viking 1989).
_ Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (Owl Books, 2001).
_ John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey, Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time, (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2nd. ed., 1999).
_ M. Cathleen Kaveny, "Billable Hours and Ordinary Time: A Theological Critique of the Instrumentalization of Time in Professional Life" (the Baker-McKenzie Lecture in Ethics at Loyola University Chicago Law School), Loyola University of Chicago Law Review 33 (Fall 2001) 173-220.