Tyndale Chapel Podcast

Dr. Jesse Sudirgo
Amen. Good morning. My name is Jesse Sudirgo. I am from the seminary side, and I'm going to start with just reading from Luke 10:38-42 to begin. Says, "As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister named called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet, listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, 'Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work for myself? Tell her to help me!' 'Martha, Martha,' the Lord answered, 'You are worried and upset about many things, but you have, but few things are needed - only indeed, only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.'" Amen. So my sister and I have a little bit of a rivalry going on. I have an old, I have two older sisters, but the middle one in particularly, we have a debate going on constantly; and the debate is, "Which of us is my grandmother's favorite?" All right. My grandmother has since passed. She's not here to settle that debate, but we carry this on; and and I just got to say, even though she's not here to make her case, I am her favorite. Okay, I just want to make that very clear; I am my grandmother's favorite. And although my sister is not here to tell her case, I would say that I am like my grandmother's golden child, all right. It's not out of what I did, it's just it's just a fact, and that's just the reality. And so, but to be fair, my sister has reason to believe that she is the favorite, all right. You see, my sister is the kind of person who is there in any kind of family crisis. She's the one who, she's the one who gets into her car to go for my uncle and aunts, you know, who get sick and they're in the hospital. It could be a small thing; my sister is there. She's the one, when my mother had breast cancer, who's the one who cared for my, for my mother daily and was there all the time. And so, as for my grandmother when she got dementia, and me and my sister were living together with her, eventually she had to be she had to live in a nursing home for the remainder of her life. And in their nursing home, it's quite lonely, and so she would require many visits. And although I'm the favorite, I did not visit much, I must say, and I'm guilty of that. But my sister, always there, she's always there to be present with my with my grandmother. She would translate for the nurses, bring her out to eat, and visit with family family members. She even took a leave of absence from work to set aside time to care for her. So, out of all these siblings and cousins, I would say that my my sister worked the hardest. Yet the fact remained, I was the favorite. I was the spoiled youngest of the family that she loved so dearly. I'm not sure why it just happened to be the case, and so this is what came to mind when I was reading this text. What came to mind in reading this text is that, in the same way that my grandmother's love for me, above my sister, perplexed us all, the response of Jesus to Martha also makes us question what it is that pleases God most; and, why He saw Mary's idle presence as the better way? It's not, by the way, for anyone in preaching classes, it's not good to put yourself as the hero of the story. But for a moment, let me indulge in that, okay? I am the I am the Mary, okay? In real life, I am not, but in this situation, I am. But in this text, I want to begin, all right. I want to begin not with Jesus' response to Martha, but rather Martha's question to begin with, all right? Because what strikes me about this text is how much of this dialog was prompted by Martha herself. She initiates everything actually. She invites Jesus to her house. She initiates the preparation. She takes issue with Mary just sitting there doing nothing. It's unprompted, but Mary just, Martha just expresses all these things herself. So you have to note, Martha is the type of person, Martha doesn't wait for things to happen to her, okay? She is a go-getter that makes things happen. She sees the world in a particular, perhaps linear way. She initiates, and whether she knows it or not, as she initiates, she anticipates a certain response to that drive and that effort, right? The issue is not necessarily her proactive posture and initiation; those are good things. Like, don't get me wrong; we're not here to not be go-getters and have initiation and to start things. The issue wasn't that, but actually, it was rather the response she expects in return. For me, in my home, I am not a very consistently clean person. I'm the kind of person in my home where, and anything needs to be done, I would go and I would like get things done in an evening, all right? I like to surprise my wife. So perhaps she's working late; I tuck in the kids to bed; these three kids that I I somehow got them all you know ready, and they are now clean and they're in there. I go do the dishes; I do all the dishes. I make sure all the countertops are spotless without streaks; that's what my wife wants, without streaks, and I have to get it all clean and ready for her. And and I'm hoping, as I do all that, I blitz it. I blitz these cleaning. I'm like, I I like even rearrange. I love to rearrange the house. So sometimes she comes and things are moved around, and I love that. And, and I do all of that. And as I do that, I cannot help, I just cannot help but expect like some kind of return. So when she's returning home, I hear the door, you know, the keys or whatever, and she's coming in. I'm like preparing myself to just kind of be chill, you know? Like just, just kind of relax as she comes in, "This is nothing. I just did this, and I just so happen to pull this off." And she comes in, and as she comes in, I'm expecting like this, "Wow! This is so clean. This is so wonderful." Like I'm expecting her to to come in, and and if she doesn't, all right, if she doesn't acknowledge my efforts, slowly the seeds of resentment begin to build. Right? I'm just waiting all night for her, as she's going to bed, I'm just hoping that there's some response for me to just say like, and if she will to compliment, I'm like, "Oh, it's nothing. Don't worry." But if she doesn't compliment, you know, if she doesn't acknowledge the great work that I have done inside of me, I'm like, "Do you not see the pile of clean dishes on that dry rack? Do you see the streakless countertops over here? Do you not see?" And so, when that doesn't happen, something disrupts us, and we become resentment, resentful. And for Martha, what stood out to me is not only the lack of recognition she did not receive that she anticipated, perhaps from Jesus, because that wasn't the central issue here. The central issue was the Martha's puzzlement of how Jesus can allow her sister Mary to sit idly by without any correction or rebuke, you know? Her issue actually was the fact that Jesus was watching all this happen and she did not rebuke Mary or like tell Mary to help. She did not. He did not make any correction. That's the particular issue. It's kind of like Jonah, right? Jonah like watching the Ninevites get forgiven, and he's he can't stand it. He can't handle that God would forgive them. He's just holding it over them as if it's something that should be done. We oftentimes like to push the hand of God to do things in light of our own sense of justice. In fact, notice that her initial complaint is not towards her sister; it's actually towards Jesus and the fact that He doesn't care about the uneven workload between the two. She can't believe that He's not seeing what she is experiencing; the injustice she feels. And I think we can all often feel these things as well, whether it's with siblings or whether others around us, we project our view of justice to the way we think God should think about it. For Martha, her value, what worship looks like to her is, which is good, hospitality. Hey, I teach a course, Radical Hospitality, feel free to take it. Hospitality, it's a very good thing. It's a virtue. It's something that we should aspire for. So, a hospitality where she extends herself beyond what is expected is worship to her. It's her initiation. It's her care for the details, the preparation, the many things according to Jesus. But as she's preparing the food, she's watching Jesus respond to Mary in a way that is inconsistent with her view of what is better. What's key is here is the word better, and doesn't this annoy you in life, right? There are these people we see thriving in life, gaining recognition and accolades, without perhaps in our view putting the effort we feel we put into our own craft and our own work. And the issue we have is not necessarily with the person, actually. It's not that we are envious of the person. We are often envious of the recognition the person receives. It's that everyone else values them more than us. We have an issue with the way people allocate value to one over the other, and this is no different than our feelings towards God and His view of that. There was another, by the way, another sibling rivalry. Actually, if you look at Scripture, a lot of it is sibling rivalries. A lot of it is sibling kind of conflict between the two. And this is the very beginning. This is the very first sibling kind of conflict. Of course, is Cain and Abel. And interestingly enough, I don't think Cain's issue was so much with Abel. His issue was the fact that Abel was getting recognition from God in his worship more than Cain's. It's not that God even said, "Hey, Cain, you know, get better." He didn't even utter those words. It's just by the fact that Abel's worship was received. Cain could not could not take the fact that God's estimate of his worship was not as valuable, perhaps, as Abel's was. So, like Martha, Cain's issue wasn't necessarily with his brother. It was with God's view and judgment of the offering presented. God favors Abel's worship of offering more than Cain, and I would say that it is this gap, it is this gap between offering and anticipated recognition, where the seeds of resentment begin in our horizontal relationships with one another. It's a fascinating thing that our relationship with God has horizontal consequences. This vertical engagement with God, that if we are not met with this sense of fulfillment or alignment with His values, for some reason our horizontal relationships are disturbed. And note how in both sibling scenarios we find that those vertical indignations to God, our disagreements with His judgment, distorts these relationships with our siblings. Our issue with God often manifests in the resentment among one another. But here's the thing, here's a really annoying thing about my beef with my sister; is that my sister does all of these sacrificial works, and she does it without resentment, which annoys the heck out of me, okay? Because she she shows for some reason such generosity, and I'm okay, again, I am the favorite, but she does all these things without any expectation of this recognition. You know, in my debates with my sister, is that although she works harder than me, she releases me actually from that burden. She sacrifices so much without expectation of that recognition. She sacrifices so much for the care of so many of our family members, and never focuses for some reason on that sibling comparisons. I would say, like, if you were going through things with your family, how many of our family tensions revolve around this? You're reminded of another sibling, the older brother in the story of the prodigal son. What's his issue? The older brother, gets mad when the fattened calf is killed for his younger brother, who in the balancing of scales of the the economics of this person says, "I have been inputting all this work, yet your value for some reason you would kill the fattened calf for this one who's just wasteful of all these things." See, our version of our of our understanding of God's economics needs to be radically changed from this neoliberal way in which we see this world today. Imagine Joseph's brothers jealous of their father's affection for his colorful little sibling over here. How many of us can relate to Judah, who goes as far as to ship his brother away off to slavery? We look at all these examples of all these imbalances, but what what kind of solves this all, what allows us, through the gospel of Jesus Christ, what allows us to bring all of these things into its right perspective, a gospel-centered perspective you could say is, that thank God, that we have a different kind of older brother. Amen? We have a different kind of older brother, a brother while blameless took on the responsibility. The brother who took on the family burden, the weight of our mistakes in our sin. If anyone had the right, if anyone had the right to be calculating and weighing whether they're the workloads between the two. He has the right to be able to weigh the distinctions, to hold their accomplishments, to hold His accomplishments over us. It's this older brother, the one who surrendered His will in the garden, accepting the judgment and will of God that He would trust in God's economics, His balancing of the scales, His ordering of what is good and what is better. In Martha, in responding to Martha, Jesus says to her, "Mary has chosen what is better." And I would say, and it reminded me in his explanation, St. Augustine's explanation, St. Augustine suggests that we often love good things in the wrong order. Let me say that again: we often love good things in the wrong order. In diagnosing the issue in this story, we mustn't point to Martha's desire for great hospitality. That's a good thing. That's a good thing that we must esteem. We mustn't demonize the inclination to hustle, to labor, to work hard and seek excellence. Those are all good things. But when our desires are disordered, when we choose the good of hospitality over the opportunity to sit at Jesus' feet, we need to re-examine our convictions of what is good or what God sees as better. And for those of us here, as I close today, who find our value in the hustle; I was just saying to someone earlier as I was coming in here, I'm preaching a message that is very much for myself, in my own hustle; for those of us who find value in that hustle, as I often do, who find assurance in the doing, be mindful of whose value you are representing. Don't mistaken that value with God's value that is better. Be mindful of the way we it aligns with the message of the gospel. Whatever you think and you're trying to discern about whether things are in the will of the Lord to do, and as you're doing that, make sure it aligns with the message of the gospel. Let the gospel and let the work of Jesus and His life, you know, carve out these schedules that we have, carve out these workloads in which we are moving towards. That it is His work on the cross that was not dependent on our own initiation or our effort, but that He can He can inspire us. That the Spirit of God can inspire us to do likewise to our siblings by the power of the Spirit. Amen? So, Lord, today as we come before You, we ask Father that You can help us to understand the ordering of the way in which You desire for us to love, Lord God. You help us, Lord Jesus, as we seek out, you know, in the midst of our busy schedules, amidst the hustle, amidst the many things that we could be doing, it's so easy, Lord, to see all of that initiation and that work attached to Your approval, attached to Your recognition. I pray, Father, that we could live freely in our lives. That we can give generously. That we can act without any sense of needing of any kind of reciprocal kind of feedback. Father, release us from that. Allow us to be people to give and sacrifice without needing of it, because we know that we are seen through You, Lord Jesus. We are seen through Christ when You look at us, Father. And so, Father, I pray that You help us to find our value in You. Help us to not allow all the busyness to overcome the ability for us to just sit by Your feet. That the idleness and the fact that we can sit in in the presence of the Lord without doing anything can help us to see, Father, You in a different way. So we thank you, Father, and we give You glory in Jesus' name. We pray, Amen. Amen. God bless you all.