Across the years of my ministry, I've had occasion to be in a fairly large number of church facilities, and one thing I've learned is that there are two rooms you can count on finding in almost any church, no matter how small: a worship space, and a kitchen. This past spring I was attending a meeting at the United Methodist Church in Moreno Valley, a relatively new congregation which desperately needs more Sunday School classrooms. It has only one or two now, so classes have to meet in the sanctuary, which also serves as a fellowship hall. But you better believe the church already has a kitchen!

To me this reality of church life is symbolic of the fact that the Christian life always has two dimensions that need to be kept in balance: namely, being and doing. The sanctuary or other worship space is the place for focusing on our being, our awareness of who we are as children of God. In worship we attend to our relationship with God and open ourselves to being shaped by that connection. By contrast, the church kitchen symbolizes doing--our investing our energy in the actions that our Christianity calls for. Jesus made it clear that hospitality and the provision of food were expressions of service befitting the Christian life. Now, granted, the church kitchen may often feed us well beyond the requirements of our bodies, but that doesn't negate the reason for having it.

The challenge we face here is keeping our being and doing activities in balance, and holding in mind that it is a matter of both--and, not either--or. Serving in the kitchen is worthy, but it is no substitute for worship time in the sanctuary--and vice versa. Those who are most at home in the kitchen are not exempted from worship, nor are those who love worship best excused from kitchen duty, or at least from what it symbolizes. 

I offer this as a prologue to our looking at the story of Jesus' visit with Mary and Martha. Here it is very clear that Martha represents a doing focus; in the kitchen literally, while Mary, at the feet of Jesus, expresses being and the inner life. It may well be unfair to brand each of them as this type across the board, but at this point in time they clearly exemplified their respective orientations. Whether or not she always took the lead in the kitchen, Martha on this day clearly had claimed that as her responsibility. She was committed to seeing that Jesus, as their guest, was offered good food and hospitality, and she was very focused on the tasks that would make that possible. In fact, she was so focused on them that, in that moment, she was unable to see any other agendas as worth her respect. And so a cranky Martha barges in on Mary's and Jesus' conversation, demanding that her sister excuse herself and start doing the helping tasks she should be doing.

Mary, of course, had a quite different priority at that point. She recognized what a rich spiritual resource she had in her friend Jesus, and Mary was in touch with her own spiritual hunger and her need for nourishment. Remember that at this point in his ministry Jesus had already set his face toward Jerusalem and the uncertain future that he faced there. Knowing this, Mary may have realized that she might not again have this opportunity to sit at his feet and learn from him. So, without hesitation, she seized her chance to be fed, trusting in Martha's good efforts to provide for physical sustenance.

Luke's account makes clear how supportive Jesus was of Mary's spiritual quest. Mary had chosen the better part, he declares, and he was not going to deprive her of it. In saying this, Jesus is clearly saying that being fed spiritually is always a priority for us. We forego this kind of nourishment at the peril of our souls. Martha has no right to derail her sister from her pursuit of spiritual food; no matter how important she thinks her own agenda is at that point. In that moment Mary's quest was the better part for her.

But does that mean that Martha's priorities are skewed? I don't think so. Jesus recognized that someone had to get the dinner on; there was no sending out for Col. Sanders in those days. Hospitality for guests was always a priority in that culture. So Martha was doing what she needed to be doing on that occasion, and doing it as an act of love. Unfortunately, she does develop a case of tunnel vision in the process and forgets that her priorities cannot just be laid on everyone else. That's a besetting danger for many of us when we operate in the Martha mode. If I see so clearly what needs to be done, we say, then so should you, and you should be putting your hand to the oar along with me. Have you ever been aware of that dynamic in the church? "If I'm teaching Sunday School, then you ought to be, too"; or working in the church kitchen; or serving on a committee. We forget that we're not God, and therefore can't really tell another person what he or she is called to do.

But, I believe that, in and of themselves, the priorities of both Mary and Martha were on target that particular day. But what about the next day; or the day after that? It's highly likely they should be reversed. Mary, having been fed at Jesus' feet, may then be called to get into the kitchen or the community center or the work arena and do the jobs of caring and service that need doing. It may well not be happenstance that Jesus' story of the Good Samaritan immediately precedes the Mary and Martha story in the gospel. In no way is Jesus downplaying caring and service in today's story. Indeed, our times of spiritual nourishment are meant to strengthen and inspire us to service in God's name. Jean and I have a country-and-western tape with a song entitled "You're so heavenly-minded, you're of no earthly good." Or as the writer of James put it, "Faith without works is dead."

By the same token, Martha may be called to go on a prayer retreat after Jesus leaves. Her spirit needs to be fed just as much as Mary's, and that means there are times when she needs just to drop her many projects and reach out for the nourishment that will build her inner life and help to ground her in the service she renders. Jesus' words to her in today's story have an edge to them because he cares about her and sees the danger of her becoming a spiritually-anemic perpetual do-gooder. She, like Mary, needs to live in the knowledge of who she is as a child of God.

So we are really talking about two priorities that apply to all of us: the priority of caring and service, which Greg talked about last Sunday, and the priority of being fed, which is the emphasis in today's scripture. It is not an either-or matter, but both-and. Or, as I put it a few minutes ago, it's a matter of both being and doing. It's spending time in both the sanctuary and the kitchen.

One of the earliest experiences of my ministry was serving for three years on the program staff of a retreat center named Kirkridge in eastern Pennsylvania. Kirkridge did not aim to be just another retreat center. Rather, its vision was (and still is) to be a place where a holistic view of the Christian life was always held up, and being and doing were seen as inseparable. In the Kirkridge lingo, picketing and praying were seen as two sides of the same coin. It was and is a worthy vision. But as I observed the retreatants who came there, I noticed it was often hard for the picketer-types and the prayer-types to fully appreciate one another. Those who were into prayer and devotion often seemed a lot more caught up in their inward agendas than they were on living out their faith in the world, while the doers and activists found it hard to turn off their motors and be still before God. Each group had a bias toward its own inclination, and resisted bridging to the other side. And 35 years later I see that we in the church still face the same kind of tension. We, too, struggle to put our being and doing together in the same package.

Since Greg focused on the doing side last week, I want to spend the rest of my time today on the priority of being spiritually fed. I'm convinced many of us United Methodists need to give this more serious attention. A week ago I was in a meeting in which an annual conference staff person was sharing the results of some surveys of laity in declining churches. What were the factors behind the decline? In some churches, changing demographics were a big consideration, while in others it was the loss of lay leadership or factionalism or an economic downturn. But there was one other factor that the laity reported in nearly every church, and that was a lack of spiritual grounding. Those churches were floundering because they lacked a clear sense of who they were as a people of God and what their reason for being was. They knew how to act out church, but they hadn't nourished a spiritual depth which would ground them in a sense of mission as a people called to serve God in the world. Many of them had been very active congregations with a variety of programs and outreach projects. A lot of doing had happened in them. But I can't help but wonder if they were beguiled by all their activity into thinking that their spiritual development could just be taken for granted. When we're engaged in a high level of activity in the church, we can be deceived into thinking that surely God is blessing us in all our doing and so our spiritual life must be in good shape. But friends, we don't build spiritual strength just by our doing. We build it by intentionally growing our relationship with God through study and worship and prayer and meditation. We expose ourselves to the various ways in which God may touch us and shape us and help us grow in the mind of Christ.

I celebrate the fact that this congregation is offering more spiritual growth channels than in the past. This fall a beginning section and a more advanced section of Disciple Bible Study will be offered. "Companions in Christ," the excellent new spiritual formation program of our denomination, will be offered again for the third time. More short-term learning opportunities will be available on Sunday mornings. The pastors' Bible study class will continue on Tuesday morning. A new Bible study and worship opportunity for young adults will begin on Sunday evenings. Our labyrinth ministry and music ministry will continue to provide occasions for spiritual reflection and deepening. These and other opportunities will be there for us so that we can reach out for the spiritual development we need.

I urge you now to begin thinking about your spiritual growth plan for this fall, and which channels may be right for you. For being spiritually fed is a God-given priority for all of us. It's the process by which we come to know who we are as children of God and what that means for our life in this world. It's the grounding that enables us to know better what things are worth our doing, and why. Jesus assures us it is a priority that will be infinitely worth all the energy and effort we put into it. May God help us to build it into our living!