Usually we think that we reflect on a text. A wise critic, however, defined a classic as a text that reflects on us. That means, our attempts to find the meaning “in” the story force us to give an account of the assumptions and biases about life’s meaning that we bring to the text in the first place.

     So it is with this classic little tale of Martha and Mary visited by Jesus. In my own life, the story will always remind me of a very beloved family member who was an inspired hostess, looking after people’s needs with lavish love, except for one thing –she never left her kitchen long enough to enjoy the dinner. New guests in her home would undergo some uneasiness as we sailed through the appetizers and entrees with only occasional appearances by the hostess to add or remove serving dishes. The rest of us just became accustomed to it, but it still felt odd.

      In the history of the church, for many centuries, the story of Martha and Mary was interpreted as an allegory of the debate between the active life and the contemplative life. Martha was taken as the image of the life of practical tasks, Mary as a figure of meditation, study, and prayer. This reading turned Jesus into the arbiter who acknowledged the need for Martha’s duties but judged Mary’s choice superior.

      Our own age brings to this story a heightened awareness of the complexity of women’s roles, and a deep distrust for any story in which a man determines priorities for women, even if the man happens also to be God. Thankfully, however, we have discovered that Jesus was a feminist before the fact, because he habitually disregarded limits placed on women in his culture. He even dignified some women in ways considered unusual and shocking. With this approach, we have learned that what Jesus did in this morning’s story was not so much to put down Martha’s hospitality, but to point out that she was staying in a woman’s traditional role in the kitchen, while Mary had broken through into the sphere of men –into the first parlor, as it were. Mary’s position “at the feet of Jesus” was the posture traditional for male disciples of a male rabbi. Thus, Jesus was praising her audacity, her gumption, because Mary was overturning a traditional social taboo.(1) Bravo, Mary –look how far Jesus wants women to come.

      Not so fast. If we go that far in understanding the story, we may take it as a confirmation of our own liberalism, that generous instinct we seem to have in this city and in this parish to overturn even long–standing social priorities when they exclude or limit the lives and rights of others. But if that’s where we end our interpretation, then the text may have only reflected on us.

      The story of Mary and Martha carries a further feature, which we discover by its clever placement in Luke’s Gospel immediately after the story of the Good Samaritan. In that story, the Samaritan –an ethnic group avoided by any good Jew– the Samaritan overturned social taboos. He launched into expensive and dangerous action for the most practical of reasons, namely to save another person’s life. Good, practical common sense overturning social taboo: what’s not to love? But in this morning’s story, Mary disregards the most practical of tasks in a world where hospitality the most sacred and practical obligation. Moreover, she abandons the sacred, practical, common sense thing merely to sit still and listen.

      So on one level, Luke’s point is that Christian Gospel overturns custom in the name of human dignity. But on a different level, putting the Samaritan story side by side with Martha and Mary makes a separate but equal point, namely that right action and right reflection are both  about right timing. There may be a time when it is better not to do what may need to be done. There comes a time when even what may seem like a pressing obligation should wait until we have a higher wisdom.

      Perhaps now we can begin to reflect on this text, rather than project our assumptions onto it. Our culture has become so neurotically active that this week’s lesson will surely be harder for us to absorb than the lesson of the good Samaritan. The Samaritan so appeals to our lust for efficiency that we readily picture him with his cellphone doing triage by the roadside, calling EMTs to take the wounded stranger to an emergency room and putting him up at a Quality Inn to recover for the week. I have even known a former parishioner here to do virtually exactly that with a homeless veteran, an amputee who showed up outside one Sunday, and her heroism and depth of concern will never leave my memory. I am convinced she did the right thing.

      Mary’s choice to sit and do nothing, to let a social need go unmet, makes less sense in our culture. But in Jesus’s culture, which prized the need for Sabbath, Mary was an icon of sacred silence. Jesus’s own spiritual tradition (and ours, until about forty years ago) still legislates times when you were not allowed to do practical tasks. So in Jesus’s culture, Mary could be a familiar reminder of the sacred Sabbath, the need to sit and do nothing so that God’s wisdom could reach your inner ear. Most parishioners I know admit pretty readily that that is very hard for them to do.

      Yet Luke stations these quiet listeners along the whole road of his Gospel –people who know the sacred rule: Don’t just do something, stand there.

      Christian discipleship means that we also learn to stand still. We learn to discern a course of action by listening past the first knee–jerk of our own reaction, be it liberal or traditional. We also learn this in company with others –Mary is seated among the disciples, not by herself. We learn as Christians to wait together for wisdom, not to break out on our own. Discernment in community is something built into the very fabric of Christian spirituality, built into the ways that different church denominations have of governing life, whether in the parish, the congregation, or the worldwide church.

      On the other hand, Christian discipleship also means we overcome a kind of sitting still that merely protects our fear and complacency. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, famous letter from the Birmingham Jail was a passionate reminder about the sin of sitting still. But we may only recognize when sitting still is a sin by sitting still long enough to recognize it.

      St. Paul speaks out quite passionately about the need to forgo even legitimate action when it will leave others behind or scandalize them, because he insists on the need for unity in the Body of Christ.(2) Frankly, in the circles I travel in, that kind of sitting still, that love of Sabbath, that forbearance for the sake of the weaker brethren, are all a vanishing art. Knowing our tendency as liberal Episcopalians to rush forward, perhaps we need to be mindful of Emily Dickinson’s warning, “We must all hold hands together in the dark, lest, when morning comes, one of us be found missing.”

      The pace of summer may offer us some instruction in sitting still, in meditating on God’s word rather than rushing forth to carry it out. We need the balance of experiencing ourselves as recipients of Christ’s wisdom, not merely as agents of His liberation. Jesus makes the point again and again that the two go together. It is not about which is better, it is all about timing. As John Milton famously assured us, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”