Our Beliefs : Sermons : Sermon Archive - 2007 : July 29, 2007

Theme: Drop the Clutter

Church year occasion: Pentecost 9

It seems that game shows are popping up all over the place these days on prime time TV. Now winning $1 million isn't enough -- now you can win $10 million. Well, let's pretend you're on a new game show called, What's Your Decision? You get a difficult situation and three possible answers, and you have to make the right decision.

Here's your situation: The President of the United States needs a boost in the polls. So, in order to show that he can connect to the average U.S. citizen, he decides to pick one household in the nation to visit. And you are flabbergasted to find out that he picked your house! But here's the catch -- you find this out as he calls you from his presidential escort that is now only 15 minutes from your house. You've got exactly 15 minutes before the President of the United States and dozens of cameras will be in your living room. What's Your Decision? You could:

A) Try to go back to sleep because this is obviously a nightmare

B) Furiously clean your house, quickly take a shower, and set out food and light refreshments

C) Read your Bible

What's Your Decision?

I'm sure all of us would choose B -- if this were a real-life situation, we'd try to get everything ready quickly. And that's not a bad thing to do. But Jesus wants us to know that C, reading your Bible and so getting into a closer relationship to your Savior, is a better answer, even though it might not seem to be. In fact, it might shock us sometimes how important God says your relationship to him is, and that we always need to keep that relationship strong and growing.

He illustrates that quite well in our reading this morning. Martha had a lot of things on her mind. So did Mary. Both served Jesus. But Mary chose what was better from Jesus' point of view.

You have a lot of things cluttering up your life also. Some things just have to get done. Or, do they -- at least when we think they need to get done? So this morning Jesus wants you to look at your life, with all the things you have to do or think you have to do, trying to juggle everything and keep all those balls in the air, and he says, "It's time to let some of them drop. It's time to let things go a little and get things prioritized. Basically, it's time to Drop the Clutter and do what's most important."

Cleanliness is next to godliness. There's validity to that statement. When your soul is clean before God, your life is going to reflect that, and part of that is performing your duties and chores in life. But for all of you out there whose house isn't always so tidy and picked up, ready for any visitor who might pop in, there's hope.

On December 21, 2006, The New York Times ran an article on cleanliness, and there were some very interesting observations. According to that article, home-organizing products keep going up, from $5.9 billion in 2005 to a projected $7.6 billion in 2009. That's a lot of plastic tubs and closet space-savers. Apparently, we don't like clutter. We want a place to put everything. According to Closets magazine, closet-organizing products pull in $3 billion a year. I'm not sure if I'm more amazed at how much money can be made manufacturing closet-organizing products, or that there actually is a magazine called Closets!

Are you the type who has a cluttered desk with papers piled high and some falling onto the floor and some covering a cheeseburger paperweight that actually used to be a cheeseburger back in 2005? Then you are not alone. But that same New York Times article says a new movement is afoot, one that encourages you to "say yes to mess." Recent studies show some startling trends:

People with messy desks have more creative minds and higher salaries.
People with messy closets are probably better parents.
Neat freaks are often humorless and inflexible, and don't have it as together as they make it look.

Now, I don't want all of you with clean houses to fall into despair, and I also don't want all the messy people to think that being messy is the best thing in the world either. And kids, this doesn't change the fact that you still have to clean your room. But it can tell us something about priorities. We might have a clean house, but at what cost?

When Jesus came to Bethany, think of the situation: There were Jesus and his entourage, his 12 Disciples, along with some women from Galilee who cared for his needs. What would you do if you had 15 guests show up at your house unexpectedly? It was Martha's house, so she saw it as her duty to make them feel comfortable, to get the meal ready, to make sure everything was just so. But Mary decided to forget about cleaning the house and setting the table and do something else. She "...sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said." Mary dropped all the clutter of household chores and responsibilities, really she dropped all the clutter of her life in general, and just wanted to sit at Jesus' feet as his disciple and listen to what he wanted to tell her.

Martha was, understandably, upset. You and I would have been as well if we were doing all the work while our brother or sister just sat down. But Martha didn't realize that Mary wasn't just sitting down; she was listening to Jesus. Mary was listening instead of laboring. She was worshiping instead of working. She chose devotion over duty. Both of the things the women chose to do pleased Jesus. But there was a problem. Martha was missing the big picture. Verse 40 says, "Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made." What was she distracted from? What was more important. She had God sitting in her living room. She had the Word incarnate speaking the Word of life just a few feet away. She had the Savior of the world who would soon give up his life as a ransom price for the world's sins talking about God's love for her and God's will for her, but she was focusing on baking bread and setting the table. Did Martha just not care about that? Not at all! In a few months Martha would give one of the greatest professions of faith recorded in Scripture about who Jesus is when she said, "I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who is come into the world." She was a woman of profound faith in Jesus. But on this day, she chose something that wasn't as important as listening to her Savior. Her problem was balance. She was living out her faith, but she wasn't feeding her faith. The Bible says she "...was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made." The word "distracted" literally means "to pull away from." In other words, Martha wanted to listen to Jesus, but she thought that her duties of common courtesy and service were more important. She was wrong. And it led to some sinful thoughts cluttering her mind as well: "She came to him and asked, 'Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!' " She was resentful of Mary for not helping her with the work. She was bitter. She was self-righteous. She was blaming Mary, and she was even blaming Jesus, to an extent, for not dealing with her sister as he should be doing, in her mind.

Can we have those things clutter up our thinking? "I'm doing all the work at home and my brother or sister, or my spouse, doesn't do anything." "I'm doing all the work on preparing for the church picnic or the VBS or the booth at the fair, and hardly anyone helps." "I'm telling my neighbors and friends about Jesus, but no one else seems to be doing that." Whoa! We need to slow down. Sit down -- at the feet of Jesus -- and listen. All the things we are doing for our Savior and his kingdom are important, some of them are vitally important. But we need 2 things:

Self-examination
Prioritization

Yes, we do some things, maybe many things, in serving our Savior. But there are times when we fail also. There are times when we don't use our gifts as we should. We need to see Jesus for the Savior he is. He came into our messed up world and looked at our messed up lives with our "better-than-others" attitude, our resentment of others, our blame of others, our bitterness, and he cleaned it up. He allowed himself to get "messed up" in the worst way, to be physically beaten and disgraced and murdered, and to take all our sins on himself and suffer the punishment they deserve, so that in God's eyes we would be clean of any sin before God. When we sit at the feet of Jesus who did all that for us -- gave us life now and forever -- all our bitterness and anger and blaming fades into nothing. Instead we are filled with his Spirit. We are filled with what we need. Now we serve our Savior gladly with the gifts and opportunities we have, not comparing ourselves to others, but simply sitting in the light of our forgiveness and rejoicing. That's why we need self-examination. Jesus described it as taking the plank of wood out of our own eyes before we take the sliver out of our neighbor's eye.

After we have done that self-examination, then we can prioritize our lives. We can see that serving Jesus is important. He wants service from us in all kinds of good works done out of love for him. But he tells us that first and foremost he wants us to have a stronger relationship with him, to listen to his Word. That won't be easy. It means that sometimes you won't be able to watch your favorite TV program because it's devotion time. It means you won't be able to go on vacation until noon on Sunday because you want to sit at the Lord's feet and hear his Word first. It means you'll want to do that every Sunday, not just when it's convenient and when the kids aren't crying or crabby. That's prioritization.

That's what Jesus was talking about when he said, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."

One thing is needed. We need to closer to Jesus and hear his message of salvation. Then our lives of service will follow. We'll be filled up the fuel that enables us to carry out our works of service to Jesus and to others.

We live in a Martha world. It's always hustle here and bustle there. Do we need all that as much as we think? What clutter is in your life that you can let Jesus get rid of? What clutter can you drop so you can sit and listen to your Savior when he is speaking to you?

Let's close in prayer with the verse of a hymn, asking God to work in us a desire to eagerly hear his Word and get to know Jesus better, as Mary did:

One thing's needful;
Lord, this treasure Teach me highly to regard.
All else, though it first give pleasure,
Is a yoke that presses hard.
This one thing is needful;
All others are vain --
I count all but loss that I Christ may obtain. Amen.