Choosing What Really Matters

A sermon on Luke 10:38-42

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.com]

There’s an internet story you may have encountered before:

 It’s just a brief account of a social media argument in which one party asserts that, “people will generally change their minds if presented with compelling evidence.”

In response to which the other party presents evidence of documented studies that show: no, people don’t change their minds just because they are presented with clear evidence that what they believe is wrong.

And then the first person responds with, “whatever, I still think I’m right.”

I suspect this story to be fabricated, because the irony is just so on-the-nose, but I can’t be entirely sure because… it also feels true.

Human beings are just like this.

We get stuck in our mindsets and patterns of behavior. When something seems inherently obvious to us, we don’t tend question whether we are making sense.

And – to be fair – there are legitimate reasons for us to trust the assumptions we make instead of constantly stopping to analyze all the evidence.

In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell explores the phenomenon he labels the “adaptive unconscious.”[1]

Basically, the human brain is conditioned to look for patterns in our experiences and to use these patterns to enable us to make snap decisions in the future.

This capacity is adaptive because it saves us a lot of time by removing the need to process every micro-moment of gathered information. And in dangerous situations, such time that can be life-saving, because it enables us to think and act rapidly.

The problem comes when we apply the same fast-tracked certainty to situations that would benefit from more careful examination, whether because the available evidence would actually contradict our snap-assumptions, or because our mindless patterns are blocking us from seeing an important truth in front of us.

It is the second possibility, I think, that most clearly explains Martha’s error in today’s gospel story.

Unlike the laughable irony of my opening example, Martha is not actively closing her eyes to corrective information.

Martha’s cluelessness is much more subtle (and, possibly, more relatable). It’s the challenge of mindlessness: mechanically jumping into a proscribed role without any deliberation about whether that’s what she should do.

Jesus is in her house, so she does all the hospitable things.

Martha is not consciously making a choice to prioritize tasks over learning. It’s just automatic. She takes up the role dictated by the situation without ever pausing to ask if that’s really what matters.

And it’s hard to blame her for this, especially in her particular context.

Hospitality was a fundamental social expectation in 1^st Century Palestine. It was about more than just politeness or social niceties. Hospitality was a matter of righteousness.

The story of Abraham and his visitors from today’s first reading illustrates this same ethic.

The strangers appear unexpectedly. Abraham has no reason to believe that they are heavenly visitors at this point.

Nevertheless, he jumps into action as soon as he sees them: urging them to rest and refresh themselves, hurrying to Sarah to instruct her to bake them fresh bread, and instructing his servants to prepare a choice calf.

I imagine that even the most committed host or hostess of our time would find such efforts at bit excessive in response to three complete strangers appearing unannounced at their door.

But Martha would not. Her society functioned by the same rules. When people arrive at your home it is on you to ensure their comfort.

Which means that Martha was not being unreasonable and whiney when she complained to Jesus about Mary not lifting a finger to help with all the tasks.

According to the expected social norms, Martha was in the right. Jesus and his friends were guests in their house, and Martha AND Mary’s first responsibility was to hospitality. 

Once we recognize that reality, we can better understand the corrective that Jesus offers to Martha in response to her distress.

Martha’s request has been focused on tasks – “Tell Mary to help me” – but that request is based on the assumption that this is the only justifiable priority.

Jesus’s response shifts the focus to the step Martha skipped: the deliberation over what actually matters.

He points out that Martha and Mary have each made a choice and that Mary’s is better.

Jesus is calling Martha to take a step back and reconsider her assumptions about what has value in that moment – not what is expected… what has value.

It’s an assumption Martha probably had not even been aware of making – the sense of responsibility for hospitality was so automatic that she just jumped into the work, and got frustrated when her sister did not imitate her mindless performance of the expected role.

But the question of what has value is NOT one that we should surrender to our “adaptive unconscious.” This question requires our attention… even, or maybe especially, when social norms or repeated patterns usher us toward automatic, unthinking expectations.

I think that is the first lesson of this story for us:

the realization of just how easy it is to surrender our capacity for moral deliberation without any conscious decision to do so, because we are mindlessly following a familiar script.

The second lesson comes from Jesus’s diagnosis of the things that pushed Martha to shut down her critical thinking and slip into auto-pilot:

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things.”

As an anxiety-prone person, I cannot say I am surprised that worries would trigger mindless performance of an expected role to restore emotional equilibrium. (I actually wonder if my therapist might have taught me that phrase.)

When we feel worried, we look for familiarity – activities or things that communicate to our subconscious that we are somewhere safe and we know what is coming next.

That’s the idea behind comfort movies, or comfort foods: no surprises, no new sensations, just something we have consumed countless times and can count on to be just the same this time.

So, of course, when we feel worried, we don’t want to have to think about what actually matters to us; we just want the reassurance that comes from soothing habits.

The connection between distraction and mindlessness is a little different. Whereas worries are the motivation to turn our brains off, distraction is the means of doing so.

(That’s another insight I have gained from therapy: when I started spending hours numbing myself with mindless distraction, I need to book a session.)

Distraction is powerful because it keeps our hands (and often our minds also) busy with tasks, and often there is nothing inherently bad about the tasks.

Martha’s tasks connected to hosting Jesus and his friends – preparing food, and providing water for washing, and ensuring they would all have somewhere to sleep – these were all good things to do.

The problem was just that they demanded a focus that meant she wasn’t listening to Jesus.

They cut her off from the value of having him there in the first place.

And so, Jesus draws her attention back… he reminds her that before diving into tasks she has a choice. She can consciously engage the question of what matters most to her.

I have no doubt that once he gave her space to ask that question, it was Jesus who actually mattered to Martha.

She was one of his followers and probably one of the women of property who supported his ministry financially. She obviously cared about his teachings. I cannot imagine that she would actually rank housework as more important than learning from Jesus on an order of priority.

The barrier for her in this story was that the force of expectations and thoughtless patterns were crowding out what she actually DID care about.

And, if we think about it, we can probably all recognize that this happens in our lives too.

The skit that Aaron and Sue surprised us all with last Sunday made that point beautifully.

In the abstract, we all know that Jesus commands us to love our enemies, we would probably all agree that, even when it’s hard, we want to live according to this law of love.

But when the rubber hits the road in real life… when someone genuinely acts like an ENEMY to you, treating you unjustly, or hatefully…

It’s so easy for the mindless script to kick in:

To get distracted by the details of the injustice, or the defense of our “rights;”

Or to get trapped in worries about our safety (whether physical or emotional) to the exclusion of all other thoughts;

And it’s REALLY HARD to pause long enough to ground ourselves in our values… or even to notice when we might be tempted to betray them.

The good news is that Jesus’s challenge to Martha when she is caught in all her worries, and distraction, and mindless script-following, starts with compassion.

“Martha, Martha… I see you. I understand what’s going on… But there is another way. Mary chose it. You can too.”

Thanks be to God.

[1] Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005)