In Harris Teeter recently, my favorite source not just for groceries but also for sermon illustrations, I stopped my cart in the soup aisle to pick up a couple of cans of soup. Another woman pulled up beside me with her cart and also started peering at the shelves of soups. We stood there and stood there and stood there – both of us clearly searching in vain for whatever it was we were looking for. Finally she looked over at me and said, “You tell me what you’re looking for and I’ll tell you what I’m looking for and maybe together we can each find what we need.”

There are two difficulties having to do with the soup aisle. The first is that I have never, in any grocery store I’ve ever visited, been able to tell how the soups are organized. Are they alphabetical? Grouped by popularity? Or are they just loaded onto the shelves any which way? And the second issue is that there are just too darn many choices. All I wanted was a can of good old-fashioned Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup. Do we really need to have other tomato-based soups – like Tomato Bisque, Tomato & Rice, low-sodium Tomato Soup, Spicy Tomato Soup, and Hearty Tomato Soup with real tomato chunks?

You get my drift. Too many choices and too little time seem to sum up not just the aisles at the grocery store but life in general. We are pulled in a thousand different directions, we are offered overwhelming choices in everything from consumer goods and products to things we might do with our time, should do with our time, and must do with our time.

It may be that the 21st century offers people more choices about more things than ever before, but the issue of choosing is as old as the hills and certainly constitutes our gospel reading today – the story of Mary and Martha. That great gospel writer, Luke, places the story of Mary and Martha immediately after the story of the Good Samaritan, and with good reason. Both of these stories say something very important about what it means to follow Jesus and be his disciple.

In the story of the Good Samaritan, as you will remember, a lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus responds by asking him what is written in the law. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” The story of the Good Samaritan is a story of active discipleship – the Samaritan shows his love of God by helping his neighbor. It is a story of faith put into action, of deeds reflecting beliefs, of love lived out.

The story of Mary and Martha, on the other hand, is a story illustrating the reverse part of discipleship. Mary sits at Jesus’ feet, not doing a thing but simply listening to him, learning from him, and taking pleasure in his presence. Much to Martha’s anger and distress, Mary is concerned not with doing or serving or helping, but instead has chosen to “be” with Jesus.

The story of the Good Samaritan and the story of Mary and Martha illustrate both parts of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. On the one hand, we are to be listeners and learners, sitting at the feet of our Lord. On the other hand, we are to be movers and shakers, putting the love we have for our Lord into our care of others. Two aspects of discipleship: being and doing, contemplation and action, worship and work, or as Bishop Curry expresses it, making disciples and making a difference.

Jesus is absolutely clear that we are to make space for both “being” and “doing.” At the end of the story of the Good Samaritan, he tells the lawyer to emulate the Good Samaritan when he says, “Go and do likewise.” And in the story of Mary and Martha, Jesus tells Martha in no uncertain terms that Mary’s choice to be a listener and a learner is the right choice. “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.”

The issue for us is not in choosing between “being” and “doing” but in balancing the two and prioritizing the two. Again, Jesus is the model for us. Time after time in the gospels, Jesus withdraws from others to pray. He needs and wants to nurture his relationship with God the Father, knowing that without feeding that relationship, he won’t have what it takes to feed others. In the sequence of the Great Commandment, Loving God comes before Loving Others. Unless we are rooted in our relationship with God, for us fed by prayer, worship, and study, we cannot reach out to others. Being rooted first, then reaching out – that’s the pattern of the Great Commandment.

We never fully manage this sequence and balance successfully – it takes God’s merciful grace and our spiritual vigilance to make the balance work. All we have to do is think of the times we’ve been unbalanced, erring on the side of “doing” over “being” to know that this is so. I would venture to say that most of us have at one time or another, as my bible notes put it, “…been so busy doing things for Jesus that we haven’t been spending any time being with Jesus.” Don’t let your service become self-serving,” the notes warn. Unfortunately, that is an apt description of what was going on with Martha in our story, and frankly, it is an apt description of what can go on with us too.

In a book I read recently about Christian congregations, the author said that we all ought to pick one way in the church to be nurtured, and to pick one way to serve. He goes on to say, “And if you only have time for one thing, pick the thing that will nurture you, and the service will take care of itself.” I think that’s pretty good advice. Strengthening our relationship with God through prayer, worship and study comes first. We have to be rooted, after all, before we can sprout. And if the roots are not kept watered and tended, whatever flowering might be possible will be diminished. Loving God is our first order of business. That is our rootedness. Loving others through faithful service sprouts out of those roots.

Two aspects of discipleship: being and doing, contemplation and action, worship and work, making disciples and making a difference. And in Jesus’ life and example, we see that the first priority is on the “being”. As a 20th century English laywoman, Evelyn Underhill, wrote, “We spend most of our time conjugating three verbs – to Want, to Have, and to Do – forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in the fundamental verb, to Be: and that Being, not wanting, having, and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life.”

You’ve made a good choice today – you are here. In our worship, we are all Mary’s – sitting at the feet of our Lord, listening to him, learning from him, enjoying the pleasure of his presence. But his most lasting gift to us is that he feeds our very beings with his own Being, for that is what Holy Communion is. In a short while we will say together, “you have fed us with spiritual food; now send us out in peace to love and serve you.” May we all follow the example of Mary, rooted in Christ, so we can follow the example of the Good Samaritan, serving Christ in our neighbor.

Amen.