The Woman Who Cannot Sit Down

The carafe has a crack in the handle and everybody knows not to fill it past the line, and she is the one who tells them.

It is twenty minutes into the service. Through the propped door at the back she can hear the singing, the good part, the part where the room actually opens up, and she is out here topping up two cups that did not need it. Then the thermostat, because the young mothers in the back corner get cold. Then the clipboard, which she carries to the welcome table and puts down and picks up again. Then the box of donuts, which she rotates so the good ones are not all gone from the front.

There is a strip of carpet by that table worn to the backing, and it is worn by her.

She has not sat through a whole service in something like four years. She could not tell you when it started. It is not that she does not want to hear the preaching; she catches most of it through the door and she can tell you what it was about. It is that sitting down in a chair with her hands empty, in a row, facing the front, with nothing to do, is the one thing in that building she cannot make herself do.

Last month her friend caught her arm in the hallway. Not unkindly. Really not unkindly. She said: honey, why do you never sit down?

And she laughed, and she said something about somebody having to do it, and she picked up the carafe and kept moving, and that question has been walking around inside her every day since, because the honest answer came up immediately and she did not like it. The honest answer was: because if I sit down, there is nothing.

You know the carafe. Yours might be a clipboard, or the sound booth, or the parking lot, or a phone that you take out the second a room goes quiet. And you know the question your friend asked, and the answer you did not say out loud, and how fast you found something to carry.

Martha, Martha

Let me take you to a house in Bethany, because there is a woman in it who would understand you better than anybody in your church does.

Her name was Martha, and I will not have her made a fool of. She was the one who opened her home to Jesus. Luke says it plainly: she welcomed Him in. That whole gathering existed because she made it exist, and anybody who has ever hosted anything knows exactly what she was doing in that kitchen.

Then she comes out and says the thing people say when they have been working alone too long, which is not really a question about the work at all. And Jesus answers her, and I want you to hear how He says it.

But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her."Luke 10:41-42

Martha, Martha. He says her name twice. In the Gospels that doubling is not scolding, it is nearness: Simon, Simon. Saul, Saul. It is the voice of somebody who has moved in close before they say the hard thing, and the Holy Spirit preserved that doubled name in the text so that nobody would read the next sentence as a slap.

And look at what He actually names. He does not say Martha, your serving is worthless. He does not tell her to sit down and let the meal burn. He names the anxious and the troubled: the churning underneath the serving, not the serving. You are being met the same way, and it is written that He came near and said the name twice before He said anything else. That is the word about how He handles a woman in motion, and it is His Spirit who makes a two thousand year old kitchen into the back of a church hall with a cracked carafe in it.

What the motion is actually doing

Now let me say the hard thing gently, the way He did, because you already know it and nobody has said it out loud to you.

The motion is not service. Some of it is, and it is genuinely good, and God sees every cup. But some of it is a proof. It is the thing produced so the question never has to come up: whether this is real in her, whether anything actually happened, whether there is anything underneath if a person is ever still enough for somebody to look. As long as the carafe is in your hand there is evidence in the room. Sit down with empty hands for four minutes and the evidence is gone.

And here is what Scripture says about that, and it is going to take the whole weight off you at once.

Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.James 1:18

Of His own will. He brought us forth. By the word of truth. Read that clause by clause and count how many of them describe something a person does. Not one. James uses the language of childbirth on purpose, and the whole point of birth as a picture is that the one being born contributes nothing at all to it. Paul says the same to the Ephesians: grace saved them, through faith, and it was not their own doing, it was the gift of God, not a result of works, so that nobody could stand up and take a bow.

You were brought forth and you did not do it, and it is written that it was of His own will and by the word of truth. Nobody births themselves, in the natural or in the Spirit, and the Holy Spirit who does this work has never once required a person to demonstrate it afterward in order for it to have happened.

So the carafe is not holding anything up. You are not the load-bearing wall in this, and the word says it was His own will that did it, His word of truth that did it, and His Spirit who bears witness with the spirit of a believer. The motion proves nothing, which is the best news in this article, because it means the motion also cannot un-prove anything, and you have been carrying a case you were never on trial in.

One thing is necessary, and the meal still gets made

Now hear the other half, because I am not about to hand you a birth and take away your life.

Jesus never told Martha to stop cooking. Nobody in that house ate air. The meal happened. What He told her was that one thing is necessary, and that her sister had chosen the good portion, and that it would not be taken away from her. That is not a sentence against serving. That is a sentence about what a person is standing on while they serve.

There is a way to carry a coffee pot that is worship and a way to carry it that is an argument with God about belonging in the room, and from three tables away they look identical. The difference is not in the pot. It is whether the thing was already settled before you picked it up.

Jesus put it as a vine and its branches: He is the vine, His people are the branches, and apart from Him nobody bears anything at all. Notice the direction of that. Fruit is not what makes a branch part of the vine. Fruit is what happens because it already is. You have a life that follows the birth rather than causing it, and it is written that apart from Him nobody bears anything. Scripture keeps the works and moves them behind the grace, and the Spirit who produces fruit in a person is not standing over them with a clipboard checking that enough has appeared.

So keep the Wednesday. Keep the nursery. Keep the cracked carafe. You are free to serve out of a settled thing instead of toward one, and the word says the good portion will not be taken away. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps it, not the one who withdraws it if the coffee runs out.