Is God terribly busy?

Luke 10.38-42

38Now as Jesus and his disciples went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. 39She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. 40But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ 41But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; 42there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’

Sermon by Bishop of Whitby

IS GOD terribly busy? Our intercessions in public worship sometimes suggest that we think so.

It would be wrong to imply that the divine compassion of God does not embrace with redemptive love the torments of poverty, disease, conflict, and death. A conviction that this earth, in all its minute detail, is entirely open to God is, after all, what prompts our prayer of intercession.

But our quest for God in intercessory prayer is also where our changeability is confronted by God, whom we describe as unchanging. Much of what we change, we damage. Intercession seeks the God who is consistently compassionate and re-creative.

The story of Mary and Martha in today’s Gospel reading puts me in mind of these aspects of the nature of God. The story has sometimes been used unhelpfully, I think, to suggest that a contemplative focus on stillness is somehow incompatible with dutiful and busy engagement in the responsibilities of daily life.

We might think we are being asked to make a choice between Mary and Martha, but perhaps we are actually being asked to resist preferring one above the other.

I suspect the truth about most of us is that we feel more comfortable with Martha’s practical “doing” than with Mary’s reflective “being”. But resistance to an either/or assessment of what God asks of us is essential for our spiritual health.

It is worth noting that in the Rule of St Benedict much importance is placed on the value of manual work — the Martha stuff — in order to sustain the appetite of the human mind and spirit for God — the listening to the word of God, or lectio divina — chosen by Mary.

It seems that Mary and Martha might represent two sides of a single person. So the important point is the challenge of how any of us can sustain a healthy balance between activity and a still, listening attentiveness to God in today’s world.

Advice on this challenge should not be rigidly specific, since people’s needs and circumstances differ so greatly. But these are among the important things we would want to say: Every human being has some capacity for the portion of spiritual awareness chosen by Mary.

As Christians, we believe that this capacity leads us specifically to God, whom we know as Trinity — the creator, revealed in Jesus Christ, through the work of the Holy Spirit.

It is characteristic of us as human beings that this search for God uses a variety of media — music, poetry, art, drama, and so on.

We generally seek wise advice and encouragement from each other, especially from those who have an obvious gift of spiritual awareness.

The regular practice of any spiritual discipline that is attentive to God’s presence deepens the appreciation of our capacity for God.

The second reading appointed for today directs us to Jesus as the point of intersection between the unseen, unchanging character of the life of God, and this visible, mutable world. “He is the image of the invisible God,” the letter to the Colossians asserts confidently. Perhaps at this point we could deploy the medium of art to illuminate how our lives might embrace both the activity and the still attentiveness that lead to deeper experience of God.

I saw for the first time recently the new font in Salisbury Cathedral, designed by William Pye. If ever you get an opportunity, go and see it for yourself. It is astonishingly beautiful. It has a quatrefoil shape, like the tracery of a medieval window. The surface of the water forms a mirror in which the image of the pillars and vaulting of the nave are captured, bringing heaven, which is what the architecture of the ceiling depicts, down to earth.

Of course, when this still mirror of water is disturbed by the activity of being used for baptism, the life of heaven does come down to earth. The image of the risen, ascended and glorified Jesus is then indelibly marked upon us. The elemental matter of water is used in symbolic and ritual action to reveal something invisible: disturbance of the mirror begets the mystery of new being in Christian identity, so that heaven can be reflected in us.

In this working symbol, the Salisbury font shows us a vital relationship between activity and identity, “doing” and “being”. But there is further instruction on the character of stillness that captures the reflection of invisibility — heaven. The mirror is formed on water that overflows the font through its four ends. Its stillness is dynamic, moving, or, we might say, living. This seems to me to come close to what we want to say about God, whom we might describe as dynamic stillness.

Nor is this simply a question of theory or playing with words. If stillness can be understood as dynamic and not simply dead inertia, then the activity of our restless minds, imaginations, and bodies can also be allowed, with care and direction, to reflect heaven.

Disturbance can be a vehicle for deeper attention to the word and presence of God. Practise it, and see. If you don’t know how to begin, don’t be afraid to ask for help.