It's the kind of feel-good story you love to find on page 1. June 29, the Atlanta airport, a man is waiting for American Airlines Flight 866 to Chicago when he begins to chat up a soldier returning from Iraq for a short trip of R&R. As the plane begins to board, the businessman asked the serviceman, "What's your seat number, soldier?" It's 23-B, sir, said the young man. "No, son, that's my seat. Yours is in first class."

The gesture turned contagious. As uniformed personnel boarded the flight, other first-class passengers began to trade seats with military men. All twelve soldiers traveling on that plane ended up in first class, being served in ways they were unfamiliar with. One flight attendant said the soldiers were so surprised they barely knew what to do. Said she: They were so humble and thankful-they spent the whole flight saying thank you. But we should have been saying thank you to them for what they're doing for us. [The Dallas Morning News (July 15, 2004): 1A.]

When you are used to serving, it is hard to be served, isn't it? When you know yourself as one who does for others, you get comfortable with your role, and you enjoy how you make other people feel by your service. It is your honor to use your gifts in a way that makes life better for others. These young people had to learn what it is to receive and be honored.

Is there anything spiritually beneficial about this? I mean, when you come to church, don't you expect to hear that the highest virtue is service? If you love God truly, you will seek to give rather than receive, to sacrifice for others rather than let others sacrifice for you? Right? You certainly don't expect me to tell you that what God might want you to do when you come to church is to stop doing long enough just to be. To sit and listen. To do nothing.

Oddly enough, that is what our gospel lesson seems to say. Jesus enters a certain village where a woman named Martha welcomes him into her home. Everything is quite proper as Luke sets things up. As this is Martha's home, she has the chief responsibility for hospitality. She is the host. And this fits her nicely, we find, as she busies herself in the kitchen, don't you know?! We should expect Mary to be there with her, working side-by-side, kneading dough for bread, crushing olives for oil to dip the pita in, pounding the garbanzo beans into hummus to spread on it, whipping up a chocolate souffl�???�??�?�¢?? for dessert, pouring the wine or brewing the coffee. The men folk would be off in the other room talking theology and politics and smoking cigars.

But that's not what happens in Martha's house when Jesus comes to visit. She is in the drawing room, sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening to what he is saying. And this is what gets Martha's goat. She comes bursting out of the kitchen, frazzled by the many tasks she still has going at once and short-handed because of her lazy, insolent sister. Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.

She doesn't come out and grab Mary by the neck, she appeals to Jesus. Do you wonder why? I wonder if it isn't partly that she wants Jesus' favor as much as Mary does, and she thinks she is being unappreciated for the quiet service she is performing. She wants the blessing she thinks she deserves. She is doing exactly what she is supposed to be doing according the customs of the day. Jewish women could not take leadership roles in the synagogue. They were to care for the home and the children. Their role was to serve in manual ways and to provide emotional support and stability for the family. The intellectual and spiritual life of the community was the work of men. The rabbis disputed how much of Torah women should be permitted to know. One strict first-century rabbi, Eliazer, said, If a man gives his daughter knowledge of the law, it as though he taught her lechery. Lechery?! And, Better to burn the Torah than to teach it to women. So you can see that there is something deeper going on here that Luke wants to show us than simply Martha's sibling rivalry for the affection of Jesus.

To sit at the feet of Jesus listening to what he was saying is a way of saying that Mary fancied herself as a disciple. She assumed the position, so to speak-the position of a man follower of Jesus, someone who audaciously aspired to learn things that she might then use to teach others. And just this is the crux of the dispute. Luke is hardly interested in telling us a little story of a curious spat between two sisters over who does the cooking. The real issue is that Martha is cookin' it up for Jesus and Mary is cookin' it up with Jesus. Mary lets Jesus serve her when Martha thinks Mary should be serving Jesus with her. Mary teaches us, however, that we do not host Jesus; we guest him as he hosts us. It's no accident that the Catholic Church calls the bread that is the body of Christ at the Eucharist "The Host."

The early church had a dilemma. Jesus welcomed women into his inner circle. While they were not part of the Twelve per se, that probably had more to do with the symbolism of the twelve tribes of Israel being mirrored than with Jesus' view that only men should be leaders in the church that would come after him. Luke tells this story, like so many other stories he tells, to say to his church some 50 to 60 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus that Jesus authorized the role of women as spiritual leaders in the congregation. They can attend to the Word of God alongside men. Whether they assume leadership as ministers or decision-makers in the congregation or remain in more-traditional roles, they are now equally responsible for their own spiritual lives before God. They cannot revert to the old saw that they are just doing the women's work they were designed for. They cannot claim that husbands or fathers are their access to God.

It's the year 2004, and many still haven't gotten this yet. We still don't get that gender is not the issue in the kingdom of God or in the church. This only shows how pernicious sin is that we should be so confused. Some think that enforcing specific roles for men and women is doing the Lord's work to restore proper order to a society that has gotten confused with women in the workplace instead of the home. Others have such disdain for women who see their primary calling and giftedness to serve in Martha-like ways that they make these wives and mothers feel like traitors to the cause or second-class citizens in the church because they are not challenging traditional stereotypes. This is nonsense; it is ungracious and unbecoming. We must respect the decisions of each and every man and woman. The issue is choice. Mary chose to sit at Jesus' feet, while in that time Martha was acting out of cultural obligation.

We have had just such confusion in our own church in recently. Some of you have seen the print campaign we have run in community newsmagazines and such. One featured one of our women deacons serving communion. The tag line said: Looking for a church where women serve more than punch and cookies? We're that kind of church! Now, what's interesting about that is that we might have expected to hear criticism from folk who go to churches where women cannot serve communion, pray or read Scripture in worship, teach men over the age of 5, or hold any position of leadership in the church. But some of our women thought we were criticizing or denigrating their decision not to be deacons or enter the workplace, but instead to stay home and take care of their children and husbands and bake cookies for the PTA. No, no, no. That would be to misunderstand Jesus' rebuke of Martha, who could have just as well received Jesus' blessing by fulfilling her calling in the kitchen.

Martha, Martha, Jesus says, you are distracted by many things. One thing is needful, and Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her. Jesus says that Mary chose to sit at his feet and be fed by the Word of God. Mary understood, in other words, that Jesus was the true host and she was the guest. The one thing-the thing that Mary was willing to choose-was the main course that Jesus was dishing out. Mary was eating with her ears. She was sitting with the Lord, simply being with him the way lovers do.

When you love someone, you don't have to do anything for your beloved except be together. Of course, part of that being with your beloved is being attentive to what he or she says. Listening to. Sitting with. Taking the other person with such seriousness that you are changed yourself by the encounter. This is why we come to church: not to have our own ideas confirmed but to listen to what Jesus wants us to know about himself. We come to know him, so that then we shall also be able to serve him well. We do not do for him first what we want to do for him; we have to know what pleases him first.

This passage comes right after the parable of the Good Samaritan. And that comes on the heels of a lawyer asking Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. When Jesus put the question back to him, he answered in good Jewish fashion: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind; and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus goes on to answer his question about who is his neighbor by telling the story of the Good Samaritan. By telling the Mary and Martha story right after that, he teaches us how to love God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind.

We are to make our relationship with Jesus our primary concern. That is true for women and for men, both. For some women that may mean taking spiritual leadership in the church, even if the culture is telling you that is not your part. To choose the better part for you might mean listening to Jesus and not worrying about what other people think. It's interesting that Anglicans celebrate the feast of Mary and Martha every year on July 26. Twenty-five years ago they chose that day to ordain the first women priests in the Episcopal Church.

But many women serve Jesus well and lovingly by their gifts of cooking and baking and hospitality in general. Which is fine. The key point is that they not do so the way Martha did-criticizing Mary for choosing a different part. And Marys must not look down on Marthas for their choice. We must all be gracious to one another and realize that while we may have different parts to play based on our gifts and callings, we all share a calling to love God and neighbor, to listen to Jesus as he serves us and then serve others in his name. Marthas are as responsible for their spiritual lives before God as Marys, and Marys still have get off the floor and do something in Jesus' name like Marthas. We are all both Marys and Marthas at the same time.

Lutheran scholar Gerhard Forde puts the Martha challenge to Mary this way: What are you going to do, now that you don't have to do anything? You don't have to do anything to gain Christ's favor. But knowing that you have it, how will you serve in response? Mary's challenge to Martha is this: What are you going to do about your own spiritual life, now that you are responsible for it? Well .?