Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 6C – Amos 8 1-10, Psalm 52, Colossians 1 15-23, Luke 10 38-42

There’s a really strong message in our readings this morning. Listen when God speaks! Listen to what God’s saying; make that our priority, and act on it. The flip side of that message, especially in the Psalm and the reading from Amos, is a warning about the awful consequences of not listening; particularly when powerful people reject what God is plainly saying to them about justice for the poor.

Listen when God speaks! Lots of us miss this priority in today’s Gospel story particularly. Instead, we react to it as a story where we think Martha gets treated unfairly. Our frequent response to the Gospel story is to identify with poor Martha, distracted by her many tasks. We, the chronically distracted, know just how she feels. Many of us automatically blame Mary for doing nothing more unusual than behave like lots of us men about a family home – sitting around, blind to the housework that’s going on around us. Is it something about her being a woman?

Context again can help set us straight. Remember that Jesus is on his Way to Jerusalem – he won’t pass by this place again. This is Mary’s only chance to hear him. Remember what Jesus said to his disciples just a little earlier: ‘Blessed are … you. For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.’ 10.23-24 Do you think Mary might just be onto something? She is hearing what Jesus says, and it’s the most important thing of all to hear. I heard Dr Rangan Chatterjee on the radio last Tuesday saying that we have to make time for what’s important in life, because if we leave it for when we’ve have finished all our routine tasks, it will never happen.

The funny thing about our habitual reaction to Mary’s unfair neglect of Martha’s priorities is that we’re oblivious to the scandal Mary’s action would have provoked back in her time. Everyone would have been stunned to see a woman behaving like a male disciple of a religious teacher would – sitting at the Master’s feet and learning! Think Afghan Taliban views on women’s education. And incidentally, they’d also have looked askance at Martha’s temerity. Who was this woman to act like the head of a household and publicly welcome a strange man into her home?

This is one of several occasions where Jesus stuns people of his time by defending a woman’s discipleship as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. Mary sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he had to say. And he said, Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her. We must cherish and protect that teaching of Jesus about Mary’s choice, and her rightness in making that choice, because it remains revolutionary. The abuse of women’s human rights and distain for women’s minds remain among the most profound injustices we still see around God’s world, including here in this land now called Australia.

Listen when God speaks! Listen to what God is saying; make that our priority! Amos and the Psalmist spell out the disgraceful behaviour of powerful people who are deaf to God’s speaking – and the consequences of that behaviour for the world. The wrongs Amos and the Psalmist describe are eerily evocative of the ‘globalised’ world we see at work today; a world where ‘culturally religious people’ behave as if God has no voice; as if God does not see; profiting in a world distracted by many things and deaf to God’s timeless teachings about justice, mercy and faithfulness.

We’re called to listen when God speaks; listen to what God is saying; make that our priority! A contemporary paraphrase of some verses from today’s reading from Amos might sound like this. Hear this, you who trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, ‘Let’s enslave the poor, lock them in overseas sweatshops for inhumanly long shifts, no holidays, no meal breaks, no toilet breaks, no fire escapes. Let’s turn people who bear God’s image into factory and farm consumables – nothing more than production costs.

And to profit even more from this slave-labour system, let’s change things here; get rid of religious rest days, push for 24/7 work and shopping hours. Let’s enslave the local poor as casualised ‘gig-economy’ units of delivery. Let’s put less contents in our packaging but still charge the same price! Let’s confuse pricing information so much that no-one can compare the cost of goods or services between suppliers. Let’s raise rents to the skies but blame migrants for the housing crisis. Let’s protect our obscene profits from the community by rorting the taxation system; quite legally.’ 8.7 The Lord has sworn … Surely I will never forget any of these deeds.

God does speak. We must listen to what God is saying and make that our guide! God speaks through the prophet’s and the psalmist’s condemnation of systemic injustice. They tell us how the poor suffer from the malignant deafness of economic colonialism; deafness to their cries of pain, grief and need. The consequence of our deafness is the silence of God. Amos again: 11 The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. 12 They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it. A famine of hearing the words of the Lord.

We must listen to what God is saying, and we must tell people what we hear. Otherwise that famine of hearing the words of God becomes our responsibility too. So where does this leave us? Like Mary, we need to make time to listen to God in regular prayer and regular study of scripture. We need to learn how to hear God’s voice; to listen when God speaks, and be bold to act on those words and speak them when God calls us to do so. That requires cultivating a habit of listening for God’s voice; talking with each other about what we hear, and when called on, being brave enough to act on what God says, and to speak out. Amen