The Difference Between Doing For and Being With
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin on The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (C), July 17, 2022.
Colossians 1:15-28; Luke 10:38-42
Consider the relationship between doing for and being with [1]. Both can look quite similar in outward appearance. Both can be facets of faithful service. Both can be rooted in good intentions.
But, at the end of the day, doing for another and being with another are fundamentally different in one key respect – where the focus lies.
Mother Teresa was remarkable in many ways, but it was her apparent devotion to the unwanted, the unloved, the uncared for that made her something of a celebrity, even amongst the unreligious. She could be held out as a shining example of a life spent doing for.
And yet, what she did for others, admirable as it might be, was but a mere consequence of a more fundamental orientation, her belonginess to Jesus.
It is said that Mother Teresa was once approached by a young monk who shared with her that his vocation was to work for lepers. “I want to spend myself for the lepers,” he said. As the story goes, she looked at him and replied, “Your vocation is not to work for lepers; your vocation is to belong to Jesus.”
Everything in our culture orients us to the immediacy of doing, solving, and fixing. Whether the problem is the world’s economy, our personal and communal health, the scourge of gun violence, the poor at our doorsteps, or the rifts in our own families, the story we tell ourselves is that it is our doing which is primary.
Our doing defines us. Our doing condemns us. [It is] our doing that saves us.
Anne Lamott recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times. [I know many of you have read it, because many of you emailed it to me with the recommendation that I read it (and I really appreciate that!).] In it, she writes:
We are fighting furiously . . . and we mean business. We believers march, rally, and agitate, putting feet to our prayers. And in our private lives, we pray.
Isn’t praying a bit Teletubbies as we face off with the urgent darkness?
Nah.
Prayer means talking to God, or to the great universal spirit, a.k.a. GUS, or to Not Me. Prayer connects us umbilically to a spirit both outside and within us, who hears and answers. [2]
Prayer is the most profound form of being with God, God who delights in being with us. Doing for is important, and yet it must come from a place of being with. I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but I think Lamott gets at this in writing:
I lift up one of my grown Sunday school kids who is in the I.C.U. with anorexia. I beseech God to intervene, and she does, through finding my girl a great nurse later that day. (Nurses are God’s answer 35 percent of the time.) My prayer says to whoever might be listening, “I care about her and have no idea what to do, but to hold her in my heart [to be with her] and turn her over to something that might do better than me.” [3]
Sometimes, there is no way to fix, solve, and remedy, no way to do for except to be with; our presence is our most Christ-like offering. Prayer, a powerful form of being with.
Today’s Gospel offers another look at the relationship between doing for and being with:
In it, Jesus calls at the home of his friends, sisters Martha and Mary. Martha’s first impulse seems to have been acts of traditional hospitality: readying a meal. While Martha worked, Mary took a spot at Jesus’ feet, casting her full attention on Him.
It is not of little consequence that Mary’s posture in this scene is one of a disciple, typically reserved for men. Luke’s Gospel weaves a thread of expansiveness and inclusiveness, and we see that here. God’s kingdom extends not just to a chosen few, but to Jews and Gentiles alike, men and women, those who are free and those who are enslaved. . . . What Jesus brings to the world is for everyone.” Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus follows this thread made apparent in Luke’s Gospel.
Mary sits. Martha works. And, as she does, she begins to grow distracted and resentful.
How many of us have been there, in the kitchen perhaps readying a meal for dinner guests? Working to get things just right for them. Perhaps we want them to be impressed by us. Perhaps we want them to enjoy themselves. Perhaps we want them to know how much we care about them. So, we do for them, even at the exclusion of being with them.
And then there’s Mary. Isn’t there always a Mary? You can hear her and your guests talking together, laughing, enjoying one another. She’s doing nothing. You are doing everything. And, yet, the conversation, the laughter, the love seems all for her. Rather than addressing the insecurity and fear you suddenly feel, you begin to fixate on the injustice of it all. In the process, the potatoes boil over and you burn yourself on a pot as you try to salvage the meal. You become fed up. Enough is enough.
This is where Martha finds herself. The only thing left for her to do is to confront Jesus: “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her to help me.”
And Jesus responds: “Martha, Martha.” (Can you hear the “Bless Your Heart” here?) “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.”
Martha, in all her doing for her house guest, her friend, her Lord, became preoccupied with herself. She failed to focus on Jesus.
The Reverend Doctor Samuel Wells remarks that:
Stories told with heroes at the center of them are told to laud the virtues of the heroes – for if the hero failed, all would be lost. By contrast, a saint can fail in a way the hero can’t, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that’s always fundamentally about God. [4]
In the story Martha tells herself, she is the hero. There in that kitchen all of it depends on her. Even Jesus’ intercession, if it is to come, will only come at her bidding, “Lord, do you not care? Tell her to help me.”
Mary’s story, on the other hand and unbeknownst to her, is one of a saint. She is but a small character, a disciple at the feet of Jesus.
Martha, through self-preoccupation, has allowed worry and distraction to rob her of what mattered most, being with. Isn’t that always the better part? Isn’t that fundamental to the God we serve, Emanuel, God with us.
And yet, here is the grace. Jesus is not just in that home for Mary, who sits at his feet, he is there for Martha too. In the story of Jesus, somehow, we all get to be saints in the end. Because there is nothing about our collective story that isn’t fundamentally about God.
Hear what our Epistle testifies to – He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him (Col. 1:15-28).
As Mother Teresa says “your calling is to belong to Jesus. He has chosen you for himself [to be with you], and work is only a means of love for him in action.” [5]
Amen.
[1] The Reverend Doctor Samuel Wells preached about this once, and the idea is one I haven’t been able to forget. As I sought out that sermon (which I still haven’t been able to find), I found this article, which articulates the same idea in a similar way. I highly recommend it. Samuel Wells, “Rethinking Service,” The Cresset: A Review of Literature, the Arts, and Public Affairs, Easter 2013 (Vol LXXVI, No. 4), 6-14.
[2] Anne Lamott, “I Don’t Want to See a High School Football Coach Praying at the 50-Yard Line,” NYTimes, 8 July 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/prayer-supreme-court-football.html.
[3] Ibid.
[4] As quoted in Rupert Shortt’s, “God’s Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation,” (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 180. Wells speaks more about this dichotomy in his book “Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics,” (Michigan: Brazos, 2004).
[5] Mother Teresa, “Heart of Joy: The Transforming Power of Self-Giving,” (Michigan: Servant Pub, 1987), 104.