Being Martha

Over the last few days we have been:
Driving people to and from their prayer slots, buying materials to sort out the basement, cooking roast dinner for the church leaders, washing up, fixing the leaky toilet, making people coffee, etc...

I think what I’m trying to say is that we seem to have done quite a lot of serving people in everyday practical ways.

For some reason I’ve been thinking a bit about Martha. You know the one everyone berates in their sermons as being too focused on getting stuff done and not taking time out to sit at Jesus’ feet.
I think all those sermons are wrong!
Let me explain:

Jesus needed to eat, the practical side of hospitality still needed to happen. The problem was not that Martha needed to stop preparing food, doing the washing up and tidying things away. The problem I think came in her attitude to it. Had she been doing it to serve and as an act of worship, she wouldn’t have complained that Mary wasn’t helping. Mary worshipped by sitting and listening whilst Martha’s worship could have been to make a lovely meal, do the washing up, fix the leaky toilet. Instead she chose to moan that she wasn’t being helped. Am I making sense? Both roles are needed, we’re not all the same and we can’t all do the same things, Romans 12 v 1-8 makes this abundantly clear.

I don’t really know where this is going but the blog title isn’t just fancy alliteration. This is a muttering of my muddled mind.