It might just be because it’s been a hot summer and I’m getting close to vacation and I’m a little grumpier than usual when I’m sitting down to write a sermon, but I looked at our readings for today earlier this week and I thought to myself, “I don’t really want to say ‘thanks be to God’ or ‘praise be to you Lord Christ’ to any of these three!” Sometimes I wonder if I sound to you like Andy Rooney from 60 Minutes – starting every sermon with a complaint. I really don’t mean to be that annoying!

It does remind me to tell you, though, why it matters to me that people say “the Word of the Lord” after a reading, rather than “this is the word of the Lord.” “The Word of the Lord” is a prayer and a hope and a promise that somehow the Word of the Lord will be made manifest through our engagement with scripture. (The Word of the Lord is the very prayer and hope and promise that Amos is predicting will not be realized for people who trample on the needy and bring to ruin the poor of the land through their rapacity.) “This is the Word of the Lord” sounds to me more like a factual or declarative statement about what has just been read. I am, by nature, quite contrary. My reaction to the statement “This is the Word of the Lord,” is always, “well maybe, maybe not.” (I feel the same about the communion distribution words, by the way.)

My apologetic for Colossians (probably not written by Paul at all) is simply that this passage is most likely a hymn text – and as we all know very well at Emmanuel Church, we can put up with all kinds of difficult and downright offensive theology when it’s set to beautiful music. Unfortunately for us, the ancient score has not accompanied the hymn text in our Bibles.

This Gospel story might be a lesson about the superior value of being still for reflection and prayer, about Sabbath time. It might be about privileging one ministry – the ministry of discernment and prayer over another ministry – the ministry of hospitality and service. It might be the earliest Christian example of triangulation in the Church! It might be a radical assertion of the right of a woman disciple to study just like a male disciple of a rabbi. It might be a reflection of the tension in Luke’s time about the leadership of women. Martha was the head of her household and her welcome (hupodexomai in Greek) indicates extra enthusiasm and warmth. Surely Jesus would not be criticizing that! Some think that Jesus’ rebuke had to do not with her work but just with her grumpiness at not having enough help, and to that I want to say, “don’t go there Jesus.”

Is it a radically affirming story about the importance of sitting at Jesus’ feet? Yes, probably. Is it a terrible story about discouraging ecclesiastical leadership of women? Yes, probably. Is it something else altogether? Yes, probably. This is what was going around and around in my head this past week. This story is probably all of these at the same time, and we naturally see one or the other. I thought of the famous drawing of a beautiful young woman and an ugly old hag that is used to teach about perception. Do you know it? Depending on how your mind interprets the various lines, your visual system will lock into a meaningful understanding or explanation, seeing either the beautiful woman or the ugly old hag. Your age, your interests, your experiences, and other factors, will all influence the interpretation. Often, with some study or assistance, you can “see” the alternate understanding or interpretation, and with practice, even go back and forth between the two interpretations at will.

Then on Friday, while a number of us from Emmanuel Church were helping to shepherd 75 or so kids at the B-SAFE field trip to the Museum of Science, I took a little break from the mayhem and had a few minutes of quiet time to explore an exhibit about perception. Eureka! I looked at a dozen or so examples of visual presentations that demonstrate how our brains search for resolution to perceptual ambiguities. I read about how, in the smallest fraction of a second, our brains create explanations and interpretations to reconcile conflicting information. Our brains are wired to wrap things up neatly before we even know that there’s anything amiss! The museum exhibit had all kinds of helpful suggestions to counteract the jumps to conclusions about visual ambiguities: move closer, move further away, move back even further, close one eye, look with both eyes, stare for an extended time and watch the image shift, see if you can shift your interpretation at will.

Applying these ideas about perception to scriptural ambiguities seems like such a subversive activity! (So of course I love that!) It suggests, to me, that while the canon of scripture in our Bible may have been closed, the texts of scripture are wide open. Barbara Lundblad, homiletics professor at Union Theological Seminary, refers to this wide open-ness of scripture as its untamability. She argues that “untamability is a virtue rather than a problem or a threat…the problem [she says] comes when we try to tame the texts and erase the tensions. Whether we do this by insisting that there is only one static interpretation of a text or by reading all texts through a prescribed doctrinal formula, we wring the life out of the … text.” She cites Walter Bruggemann’s warning “that this not only muzzles the testimony of the texts but leads to [what he calls] a ‘thinning of God, the attempt to flatten and refine [the Holy One’s] dense interior.”(1) We have surely all suffered from a thinning of God that comes from narrow or singular interpretations of Scripture.

It’s striking to me that “do you not perceive?” is a question that Jesus asks repeatedly in the Gospel stories. There are ten different words in our Greek New Testament that get translated “perceive” – the idea of perception was very nuanced and seems as critically important then as now. How might we improve our perception – our ability to see and understand the realm of God that is, as Jesus said, at hand. How might we improve our perception – our ability to see and understand the realm of God that is, as Jesus said, within each one? (Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Blessed is the day when one realizes that within and above are synonymous.) What is our version of stepping back and stepping forward, of closing one eye and opening both eyes, of staring long enough for our perceptions to shift? How can we increase our recognition and appreciation of ambiguity?

One answer, for Christians, is always in present community. By asking questions and hearing one another to speech in the context of community, if we’re listening carefully, we can learn to recognize and honor multiple interpretations in such a way that they strengthen people’s resolve to stand up for their own dignity and rights, and to stand up for the dignity and rights of others.(2) Starting with the familiar questions of what strikes you, what speaks to you, what difference does it make. There are also questions like, what if this story were a dream that you had, and all of the characters in it represented a part of you? What part of you is represented by Mary? What part of you is represented by Martha? What part of you is represented by Jesus? There are always questions about culture, religious education or experience, age, gender, class, race, sexual orientation, financial circumstance, and how they affect one’s perception. There is employment of the ancient Jewish tradition of midrash – of interpreting scripture by imaginative story-telling that fills in gaps left in the Biblical narratives.

One answer for Christians is engagement with tradition – an appreciation or regard for listening to history and tradition – but with a critical eye – maybe squinting – to rediscover, reclaim and reconstruct when necessary, our theological and historical understandings. And I think that one answer for Christians has to be with an eye to the future – our engagement with the well-being of creation – of creatures, and a fervent hope to get back to the thickness of God, to cultivate a desire to experience the density of the Holy One.