Luke 10:38-42 - Jesus in the home of Martha and Mary.

Have you ever had that feeling on a Sunday morning that you just don’t want to come to church?  It’s not that you’re struggling with faith, or unhappy about church particularly, but it’s Sunday morning, you’ve had a long week, there’s so much else to do, and you’re just tired.

I had that feeling a few weeks ago – I had been at a day long committee meeting the previous day in London, and then my train home was delayed by an hour and a half so I didn’t get home till late.  That Sunday I wasn’t on duty, and I had got up planning to go to the 11am service, but I was going out straight after church for a work thing, so I was faffing about getting ready for that, and when the time came to leave for church I was still in my pyjamas and I realised I couldn’t come to church in my pyjamas.  Except then I realised I could.  I made a cup of coffee, sat down on the sofa, and joined you all on the live stream.

As I read this morning’s gospel reading, I found myself thinking back on that morning, going to church in my living room in my pyjamas.  It’s not so long ago that we were all doing that, during lockdown.  Then, we did it because we had to, because we weren’t able to come together in church buildings.  Now we have the choice, and I’m glad we still do the live stream here at St Mary’s, for me it was just what I needed that Sunday morning, to enable me to stop, in the midst of a busy weekend, and to sit and listen to Jesus.

I don’t know about you but I spend a lot of time being distracted by my many tasks, or perhaps I should say distracted from my many tasks.  As I was writing this sermon I was sitting in a house that needed tidied, trying to ignore all the life admin that I really need to do.  Meanwhile my work bag was sitting in the corner of the room, reminding me of all the things that are waiting for me to do on Monday morning when I get into the office.  And even when it comes to fun and relaxing things, there are still plenty of tasks that need to be done to make them happen.  My sister and I have been talking for weeks about that trip to Austria we are planning in October, we’ve searched for flights and accommodation, but never actually got round to booking it, and if we don’t it won’t happen (I did actually pause as I was writing this to text her to say again that we need to book it!!).

Life is full of tasks, stuff to be done.  And the anxiety, for me at least, comes from trying to balance the demands that these competing tasks place on my life – what is urgent, what is important, what do I want to do, what am I dreading doing, what just needs to be done? 

And I don’t think that Jesus wants us to think that these tasks are not important.  I’m pretty sure that he was happy to eat the meal that Martha spent all that time preparing.  But he wants her to know that something else is important too.  Something else that is important before anything else.

And here, if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to quibble with the translators of the NRSV.  I just read you their translation of Jesus’s words:

Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’

There are two words in the English here that I can’t find when I read it in the Greek.  The first is “only”.  There is need of only one thing, we read, but the Greek doesn’t use the word only.  It says simply “but one thing is needed”.  The second word I can’t find in the Greek is “better”.  In the Greek, we read “Mary has chosen the good part”.  So let me suggest what Jesus might, in fact, be saying.

Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; but one thing is needed. Mary has chosen the good part, which will not be taken away from her.’

Jesus is not scolding Martha.  He is directing her to the thing that matters, the place where she needs to start, the time she needs to give to listening, to being with the one who made her and who loves her.

And so in listening to this I give myself permission to put aside my many tasks and to listen, to be with the one who made me and who loves me.

I recently did this for a week, as I walked St Cuthbert’s Way, following the journey made by the Northumbrian saint from his monastery in Melrose, to the holy island of Lindisfarne.  I closed my laptop, deleted WhatsApp from my phone, and set off on my pilgrimage.  Sometimes I chatted to my friend as I walked, or I listened to my audiobook, or just walked in silence.  When we got to Lindisfarne I was both exhausted and refreshed – it was a gloriously sunny day and yet the picture I had as I arrived was of standing bathed in longed for rain falling on a parched and weary land. 

One of the special things about Lindisfarne, as you probably know, is that it is a tidal island.  When the tide is low, you can drive over the causeway, or walk like the mediaeval pilgrims over the sand.  And then when tide comes in, the sand and the causeway are covered and Lindisfarne is separated from the mainland by the sea.  There was something very special about being there when the tide came in and cut us off, and I honestly think I could have stayed there for weeks, months, years.  But I had just a day there, before I had to head back over the sands, back to the tasks that were wating for me at home. 

Because those tasks, the things that fill our lives day by day, these do matter.  I have quoted before the words of St Teresa of Avila:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,

Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Ephesians: We are each of us God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.  The way we live – the things we do and the way we do them – bear witness to the God we love, and build God's kingdom, piece by piece, here on earth as it is in heaven.

Just as the tide ebbs and flows on Lindisfarne, so we each need to find those rhythms of grace that sustain us, the times we spend at the feet of Jesus to equip us for going back in the midst of it all to do the work he has given us to do.

I’d love to say that, as we weave our prayers through life, the worries and distractions will fall away, and we will each glide through life in a serene and Godly way.  Oh that that were the case.  Our time with Jesus doesn’t remove the worries and distractions from our lives, but it does equip us to get through them. 

On the second day of my walk on St Cuthbert’s Way, we had a our longest day with a fairly hefty climb in the afternoon.  We set off after lunch, after the rain stopped, and the first half hour or so we were walking along a road looking for where the path crossed the stream to take us up the hill.  “Ah,” said my friend, when we found the ford.  “I think the stream is flowing faster than usual.  We’re going to have to take off our boots and socks for this one.”  “Are you sure there’s not a bridge nearby?” I asked.  “No, no,” she assured me, showing me the map.  “It’s marked as a ford.”  So, slightly grumpily, I took off my boots and socks and waded through the water – it was cold but not icy, and came to our ankles so we crossed with relative ease.  We dried our feet and set off, and just a few metres down the path my friend declared, “ah, there is a bridge we could have crossed.  Isn’t that funny?”  I did not think that was funny, I have to confess, in that moment.  But as we started the climb up the hill, I noticed something.  My feet had walked many miles that day, and still had many miles to go.

But since walking through the stream, they weren't as sore or as tired as they had been when we stopped for lunch.  The walk through the water didn't make the hill any less steep or hard to climb.  But it did mean that my feet were refreshed, and just a little bit more prepared for the task that was ahead of them.

St Cuthbert's Way

 
It started with the bus dropping us off in the wrong place. 

To be fair, the driver dropped us off where I asked him to, but it was the wrong place.  Fortunately I had a map with me, and also a friend who could read a map.  We were walking St Cuthbert’s Way and we were starting about 6 miles along the first stage - for various reasons, we couldn’t start the walk until mid afternoon on the first day, so I’d picked a random point on the first stage to join the walk (we planned to go and do the miles we missed on the last day).  With a bit of pushing through undergrowth, and avoiding the field with the bull in it, we found our way to the path and started on our way.

St Cuthbert’s Way is named for the c7th Northumbrian saint Cuthbert.  It is a contemporary creation by Ron Shaw, bringing together his work in tourism development with his personal interest in Anglo Saxon Northumbria.  Shaw worked with partners north and south of the border (or east and west as it is in this part of the world) to establish the route, weaving together a mixture of ancient ways such as the old Roman road Dere Street, and more recently developed rights of way, to create the long distance footpath.

While not an ancient pilgrim route, St Cuthbert’s Way echoes the journey that Cuthbert made from his original monastery at Melrose to Lindisfarne, where he was called to serve first as Prior and then Bishop.  Cuthbert’s life was marked by the pull between the two callings on his life.  As a monk his ministry was not limited to the monasteries in which he served.  He would travel to the surrounding communities, bringing God’s word and the sacraments. And yet his desire was to live as a hermit and to devote his life to prayer and meditation, particularly on the psalms.  He did this for several years, first on the small tidal island at the foot of Lindisfarne, now known as St Cuthbert’s Isle, and later on the Farne Islands.  He was persuaded out of his hermitage to become Bishop of Lindisfarne, but he returned to his hermitage on Inner Farne shortly before his death.

Following his death, Cuthbert’s reputation grew and he was venerated locally as a saint, with people making pilgrimages to pray at his remains, first to Lindisfarne and then to Durham, where his remains were moved to following the Viking raids on Lindisfarne.  While pilgrimages to the great holy places like Jerusalem, Rome, or Santiago were beyond the means of most, local pilgrim shrines such as Lindisfarne and Durham became well trodden routes.  For Mediaeval churchgoers, the mass could be a distant ritual, practiced by priests behind the rood screen and proclaimed in a language they didn’t understand.  The shrines to the saints, by contrast, were a place that they could come right up to, and often touch, and pray in their own words, asking the saints to intercede for them for forgiveness, for healing, or giving thanks.  Each pilgrim could approach with their own intention, and leave with their own blessing.

I had a few different intentions in walking this pilgrimage.  The first, to be honest, was to see if I could do it.  I’m not as fit as I was, nor as fit as I want, and I want to change that.  Obviously the sensible thing to do would be to build up to a long distance walk, but I didn’t quite manage to get round to that, so I was starting from my baseline not-very-fitness.  Turns out I could manage the distance – as my mum always used to say, we’re from Irish bog trotting stock, and we can’t go fast but we can go far.  The bigger challenge wasn’t the distance so much as the height.  I hadn’t twigged that we’d do the equivalent of two Munros worth of height gain over the course of the walk, and on days two and three I struggled with each successive thwocking great hill that appeared on our way.  My friend would faithfully wait for me at the top of each climb, and when she asked how I was doing, she would get the same scowl and grunt as I tried to catch my breath.  But I did it – yay me!

The second intention was a question – what’s next?  It’s a question that has been quietly brewing in my mind for a few months.  This isn’t to say that I’m looking to make big changes.  Quite the opposite in fact – the past few years have been plenty full of change and I’m quite content to move forward through life at a walking pace, not in leaps and bounds.  I’m passionate about my work (80% of the time I love it, 20% I hate it, but I’m always passionate and I reckon that’s pretty good odds!)  I’m in a church I never would have chosen and am really enjoying learning in a new spiritual tradition.  I have family and friends who love me.  All in all, that’s a pretty strong basis for a good life.

But I’m also aware that I’m past half way through my life.  I’m probably not close to the end – if I live as long as my mum I’ve got thirty years left in me.  But if I live as long as my dad, I’ve got not quite two years left to go.  I can’t plan to either of these timescales obviously, but it has made me pause and think about the things I still want to do.  The list only seems to get longer as my life gets shorter, and if my experience so far is anything to go by, I’ll end up going in ways I wouldn’t have predicted.  So this is as good a time as any to take a breath and think about what I hope to do in the years to come, and to look at weaving these things into my life.

One of the things that I know I want to do more of in the years ahead is writing.  Which brings me to the third intention.  I have a list of folders on my laptop of writing projects that I want to do, and one of these is titled Pilgrimage.  I’m interested in the stories of the Mediaeval Scottish Saints, and in the people who made pilgrimages to their shrines, as well as in what pilgrimage means to people today.  I have made several pilgrimages in the past few years and it has become a significant part of my spiritual practice.  For me it is a practice which allows me both to step out of my own life for a few days – I deleted WhatsApp off my phone before I started my walk which was just bliss – and also enables me to connect, with the environment I am walking through, with the history of the places I’m walking through and the people who have walked these ways before, and with God.  And so this walk (and this blog) is the beginning of my writing on pilgrimage – look out (if you’re interested) in more to come in the coming months.

“The end is where we start from.”  So said TS Eliot in his Four Quartets.  And so it was on this pilgrimage.  Because of the way the tides worked, we couldn’t walk onto Lindisfarne on the traditional route taken by pilgrims over the sand, but had to walk on the causeway – safer from the incoming tide but less devotional as we stepped out of the way of the cars.  So as we left, we took the pilgrim route off the island, walking in the morning sun across the sand to the lives we’d set aside for a few days.  Perhaps this was fitting, walking the pilgrim route away from the retreat of Lindisfarne back to the everyday.

And on to what’s next.