Urban legend has it that in 1990 a woman entered a Haagen-Dazs ice-cream parlour in the Kansas City Plaza for an ice-cream cone.  While she was ordering, another customer entered the store.  She placed her order, turned and found herself standing face to face with Paul Newman.  He was in town filming Mr. and Mrs. Bridges.  She looked into those blue eyes and her knees went all trembly.  So flustered and distracted she finished paying and quickly walked out of the store with her heart still pounding.  Gaining her composure, she suddenly realized she didn't have her cone; so she turned to go back in.  And as she was about to reach for the door Paul Newman came out.  He said to her, "Are you looking for your ice cream cone?"  Unable to utter a word, she nodded yes.  He continued, "You put it in your purse with your change."

Let me describe another woman to you.  A great cook, a dedicated homemaker, a diligent worker around the house.  Martha.  Not Stewart, although if that’s what you were thinking I can see why, but Martha of Bethany.  She has a sister, Mary, not so great at housework, but pretty good at listening.  She also has a brother, Lazarus, who was the original ‘comeback kid’.  They were friends of Jesus.  And one day Jesus was visiting these three siblings.  And true to form Martha is getting everything read for the visit.  She’s running around cleaning and dusting, sweeping the floor, probably cooking a meal for Jesus.  But then, to her horror, Jesus arrives before she has finished her chores.  Now what would you do?  Would you carry on doing the housework and leave Mary and Lazarus to play host and then join them when you’ve finished the chores?  Or would you forget the untidy house and pay attention to your guest?  Well, before you answer let me remind you that the culture of Israel in Bible times was very very big on hospitality.  A woman’s honour and reputation at that time depended on her ability to manage her household well.  Service was a woman’s highest calling.  In fact, women were forbidden to become the disciples of a rabbi.    The place of sitting at a teacher’s feet and learning was reserved for men and boys.  Girls did not receive a formal education, and were only taught household duties like sewing and weaving.  One book of rabbinic teaching goes as far as to say, “If any man give his daughter a knowledge of the Law it is as though he taught her lechery.”   Martha’s prayer might have been this one:  Lord of all pots and pans and things,
Since I've no time to be a saint by doing lovely things,
Or watching late with Thee,

or dreaming in the dawn light, or storming Heaven's gates,
Make me a saint by getting meals, and washing up the plates.

So, now you know that, what do you think?  What would you do?  Would you carry on doing the housework like Martha, following her high calling, or would you sit at the feet of Jesus?

But, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Jesus commends the actions of a person who was breaking the conventions.  It is Mary, he says, she who is sitting on the floor listening to him, who has chosen the right thing.  Martha, he says, is worried and upset by many things.  She has chosen the poorer way.

Do you remember when you were a child buttoning up your short or coat and getting down to the bottom and finding that you had a button left over with no hole?  And you look closer and realize that you’ve put it on lopsided.  It all started when you got the first button wrong.  Instead of putting it in the first hole, you put it in the second.  Then you put the second button in the third hole, and so on until you reached the end of the shirt with a spare button.  When you don't get the first button in the right hole, all the rest go wrong too.  And that’s kind of how it is in life.  When we get the first thing in the wrong place then everything else goes in the wrong place too.  And nothing seems to work properly.  What’s the first thing in life?  What is the thing that should go first?  Jesus put it this way: "Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things shall be added to you as well."  Mary and Martha serve as a real-life illustration of this saying.  Mary got the first thing first.  The most important thing she could be doing at that moment was listening to Jesus.  Martha had got something else first.  Serving.  Not, in itself, a bad thing.  In fact there’s a good and proper time for service.  It’s just that it wasn’t there and then.  Right now Jesus was in the living room.  The main thing was paying attention to him.  Keep the main thing the main thing.  And because she had got her priorities in the wrong order everything else was out of whack too – she was upset and worried; she wasn’t at peace.  She was feeling hurt and protesting that things were unfair because she had to do the housework while Mary just sat there. 

And so it is for us.  When Christ is not our top priority then everything will just not click.  If other things are first in our lives then nothing will really fall into place.  I’ve heard the phrase “the tyranny of the trivial”.  And that is very much a power we live with.  There’s so much that clamors for our attention and our energy and our time and our money that actually is pretty trivial in the great scheme of things.  Distractions from the real priorities.  I have a confession to make about this.  During my time in Virginia a couple of weeks ago I wandered into the common room of the dorm where I was staying and some guys were sitting around watching TV and I joined them.  ‘America’s Got Talent’ is what they were watching.  And there was one young man on the show whose big talent in life was not especially brilliant and frankly the world could do very nicely without him having to share it on national primetime TV.  He can sneeze with his eyes open.  At least that’s what he said he could do.  The fact is he was not able to produce a sneeze when the time came for him to stand on the stage in front of the judges and do his act.  So he stood there with some cotton buds and poked them up his nostrils trying to irritate the back of his nose and produce a sneeze.  And there he stood for about a minute before the patience of the judges ran out and he was booed off the stage.  And I wondered – is this what we have become?  How much time, effort, energy and money were spent to bring us a guy sticking Q-Tips up his nose?  Well, he probably went home happy with what he’d set out to get – his one minute of fame.

A professor at the Harvard Business School, speaks about A, B, and C priorities, and then he notes that too many people spend too much of their time on the C priorities!  And then he asks, "Why do you think that is?" The answer is that the C priorities are, first, much easier to accomplish, and, second, they give you the impression that you are actually getting something done.  In other words you can keep busy with the C priorities all day and never get to the more important things. And it’s not like C priorities are bad – they aren’t things like ‘be mean to someone’, they are good things but not things that are urgent and important.  If you’ve worked in an office with pieces of paper you know that temptation.  Do something simple but less important, while placing the important, but difficult, task at the bottom of the intray.  The lesson from Mary and Martha is "Don't let the good (the C priorities) get in the way of the best (the A priorities).

And the number one ‘A’ priority, according to this event in Luke’s Gospel, is spending time with Jesus.  In our hyperactive culture these priorities seem upside down.  We believe, rightly, in hard work.  Only when the work is done can we afford to put our feet up and take it easy.  Yet Mary had made the best possible choice.  Our modern Western spirituality values doing things.  We think of following Christ and we think ‘doing things’.  We think of famous Christians and we think of their achievements and work.  We think about obeying God and we think of serving him in some way.  It seems that activity and Christian discipleship have become synonymous.  And some churches who have believed this have become very busy places.  I know churches where you can be out every night of the week at some church event or meeting.  And, of course, there is work to be done.  There is a neighbourhood that needs Christ and our tangible demonstrations of God’s love.  But the number one priority is spending time with Christ.  Listening to him, reading his words, talking things over with him, meditating on his life and character.  These things are more important than attending church meetings.

Who are you in this story?  In fact, who are you in life?  That is an uncomfortable question.  We live in a society where we all have different demands on our time.  We’re so busy and so fragmented.  We have so many roles that we somehow try to juggle so that everyone in our lives is happy and we can feel good about ourselves.  But just who am I?  Am I primarily a worker?  Does that define who I am?  Am I a husband, a father, a friend, a colleague, a brother?  Am I an Englishman, a priest, a doctoral student, a Cubs fan?  Are these the things that define me?  What is my essential identity?  Well, it’s simply this: my identity, my true self, what I am deep down is a child of God.  It is my primary calling in life to do what Mary did – to sit at the feet of Christ and listen and adore and worship.  That is what it mans to be me.  But, although I know that to be true I get distracted.  Those other identities try to tell me that they are who I really am.  And I listen to them frequently.  And when I do my activity goes up, my stress level goes up, my worry goes up, my sleep goes down, my peace vanishes, my relationships sour, and my whole life is diminished.  When I fail to pray my whole life suffers – not just the faith part.  When I get the first button in the wrong hole, they all go in the wrong holes.  Strip away all your callings and labels and relationships and activities and who are you?  God’s child whose main purpose in life is to worship him and enjoy him forever.  Don’t just do something – sit there.