9th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 11C

9th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 11C July 21, 2013 Someone recently wrote, “I think that one of the great reasons the church is declining during our day is that most of our people have a hard time connecting what we do at church with what we do the rest of the week. Their faith practices on Sunday are nice, perhaps even comfortable, but they don’t inform their daily decisions at work, home, or school. In short, they don’t find their faith particularly useful.”i. In that same vein….in a reflection on the reading for Amos today, the Methodist Bishop William Willimon asks the question, “What would Amos preach to us today?” and he writes about a friend of his who teaches theology at Oxford University. Willimon writes that his friend likes to open his theology class by asking his students, “With what is theology concerned?” “The students typically answer, ‘God,’ or ‘Religion,’ or ‘Spiritual things.’ He corrects their misapprehension. ‘No, Christian theology is concerned with everything!’ There are presumably religions that are concerned exclusively with personal, private happiness, with individual morality, but neither Judaism nor Christianity is one of those religions. In Judaism and Christianity, God not only creates the world but continues to interact with it and to take care of everything in it. This God makes no distinction between ‘religious’ concerns and ‘secular, nonreligious concerns.’ This God is concerned with everything.” Today’s reading from Amos reminds us that “worship of the God of Israel and of the church is not limited to Sunday. Worship continues in what we do at the office on Monday and continues throughout the week. This God does not want just our ‘heart or our ‘soul.’ This God wants all of us.”ii Amos is about the work of afflicting the comfortable, about showing them how they have left behind God’s teachings because, no matter how faithful they are, they are taking advantage of the poor, rather than caring for them, which has always been a priority for God and an important aspect of being God’s people. His harsh proclamations can be a reminder to us that what we do matters. How we make our money and spend our money matters. How we spend our time also matters, not just in our own relationship with God but in terms of how God has connected all of us through Jesus Christ, who is the “visible image of the invisible God.” A modern day form of this indictment comes from a writer named Barbara Ehrenreich in her book, _Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America_. She writes that in her work as a waitress, “The worst [patrons], for some reason, are the Visible Christians—like the ten-person table, all jolly and sanctified after Sunday night service, who run me mercilessly and then leave me a $1 on a $92 bill.”iii And then there is Martha in today’s story from Luke’s gospel, Martha who is doing exactly the right thing in terms of Jewish culture and faith, offering hospitality to the one who has come under her roof. And yet she is worried and distracted and ultimately jealous about her sister’s inactivity. Martha is doing exactly what she is supposed to do, but she is not finding the joy in the ministry or the offering of her time and labor. And it is because she has forgotten that she is valued and loved-not because of what she is doing but because of who she is. It is true that what we do matters in this world and in our relationship with God. It matters how we make and spend our money; it matters how we spend our time and our attention because all of those things impact our relationship with God and with others—which are the most important part, truly the needful thing. But no matter how you spend your money, no matter how much you give or don’t give to the church or to the poor; no matter how you spend your time—whether it’s going to church every Sunday or only once in a blue moon, whether it is spending all your time helping out at Feed My Sheep or whether it is spending all your free time playing games on your computer, God is not going to love you any more or any less than God already does. That is the one “one needful thing” the better part that Mary is able to remember and choose and that Martha is not. But when you realize this, that God is not going to love you more or less than God already does, there is a freedom and a gratitude that comes with this, and we want to spend our lives and our money and our time in ways that are in keeping with God’s values and not our own. In closing, I leave with the words from the SSJE meditation by -Br. Geoffrey Tristram titled: Compassion from Jul 12, 2013: Compassion: “When we know ourselves to be judged with love and forgiven, restored and set free, the words, “I was hungry and you gave me no food. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,” do not fill us with fear about the final judgment, but break our hearts with compassion.”iv i.David Lose. https://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?m=4377&post=2644 ii.Willimon, William. Feasting on the Word. Ed. Bartlett and Brown Taylor. Homiletical Perspective. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010, p 246-248. iii.Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001, p 36. iv.www.ssje.org