{"id":1104,"date":"2011-02-06T15:19:33","date_gmt":"2011-02-06T20:19:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/?p=1104"},"modified":"2020-03-14T10:34:15","modified_gmt":"2020-03-14T14:34:15","slug":"soul-service-and-social-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/?p=1104","title":{"rendered":"Soul Service and Social Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Texts on Sunday, February 6, 2011
\nIsaiah 1:10, 12-17; Luke 10:25-42<\/p>\n

Can a person turn a bad situation to a good one? Can we be of help? When we\u2019ve just heard the good Samaritan story; when we\u2019ve heard the prophet\u2019s demand that we cease to do evil and learn to do good, an affirmative answer may seem the obvious, even the necessary, choice. But slow the boat! The stories of the good neighbor and of Martha\u2019s mumbling against her sister Mary number among the best remembered\u2014but did you know these stories are themselves neighbors? This isn\u2019t just journalism, as if one day Jesus told a good story, and the next he visited Martha Stewart in a dither over a dinner setting, and we\u2019ve got the record of these things. Luke made these stories neighbors to help the church work out a puzzle. We usually read the good Samaritan story all alone, ending with Jesus\u2019 \u201cGo and do likewise\u201d as the answer to the lawyer\u2019s question, How shall I inherit eternal life? But the lawyer\u2019s first answer, which Jesus affirmed, had two parts. First, love God; second, love your neighbor as yourself. Luke has not left us without the master\u2019s guidance on how to love God with your whole heart. That is why we read on this morning.<\/p>\n

\u201cMartha, Martha!\u201d We must hear ourselves addressed. \u201cYou are worried and distracted by many things\u2014but only one thing is needful, and Mary has chosen it. It will not be taken from her.\u201d There is a priority in the two great loves. You might call it \u201csoul service before social service.\u201d Not: soul service more important than social service; just, soul service first, then social service, in a virtuous cycle, every round going higher, higher. Return to learn to love God with your all in all, and you will see your neighbor in ways ever-renewed, and act with God\u2019s will. Putting the Mary and Martha story right after \u201cthe good Samaritan,\u201d Luke aims to wake us up from our headstrong assumption that we already know how to love, already know what to do to turn a bad situation. Oh no! says the Lord. Oh no! says all the perennial wisdom of the world\u2019s traditions. Uncleansed by soul service, our table service and all our other attempts to right wrongs make the world worse.<\/p>\n

Leo Tolstoy wrote often on this theme. I had almost rather read you the entirety of one story, \u201cThe Godson,\u201d than preach today. But time presses. The story tells of a young man sent on a quest to understand his own motivations, for in a moment of desire to do good swiftly, he had brought down a chain of awful crimes. His quest begins this way.<\/p>\n

The godson entered [an inn], and taking his seat upon the brick oven he watched the woman scrubbing the room. Having done this, she began wiping the table with a dirty cloth. She wiped it from side to side\u2014but it did not come clean. Then she wiped it the other way. The first streaks disappeared, but others came in their place. She wiped it from one end to the other, but again, the same thing. When one streak was wiped off, another was left on. The godson watched for awhile in silence, and then said: \u2018What are you doing, madam?\u2019 \u2018Don\u2019t you see I\u2019m cleaning up for the holiday? Only I can\u2019t manage this table, it won\u2019t come clean. I\u2019m quite tired out.\u2019 \u2018Rinse your cloth,\u2019 said the godson, \u2018before you wipe the table with it.\u2019<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Martha, Martha, rinse your cloth. Soul service before social service. When we do not rinse the cloth, spiritually speaking, we are what I call a functional atheist. We may identify with God\u2019s Christ and God\u2019s church socially, emotionally or aesthetically. But when opposition comes, if we go straightway to right the wrong, bringing with us all unawares our habits of thought and fear and need, we are functioning as atheists, as people for whom God is no good at the needed time. All Christians are sometimes functional atheists. For a lot of us churchgoers, functional atheism is the default setting. By contrast, plain atheism is so much healthier than functional atheism. Somewhere, the great Christian contemplative of the last century, Simone Weil, wrote: \u201cAs between a Christian with no experience of the supernatural and an atheist, the atheist is closer to the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n
When are we functioning as atheists? When we learn of someone\u2019s bad opinion of us\u2014and we set out to settle the score, then we are godless. When we drown our feelings of self-doubt in our addictions\u2014drink or t.v. or Facebook or shopping; you name yours\u2014we are functional atheists. When what we call our spiritual journey\u2014Tom Bandy\u2019s observation\u2014consists only of the roster of church committees we sat on through the years, planning and working, thinking and doing, pillars of the church who, like real pillars, have gone so stiff in the belief that everything above depends on us, then we are functioning as if God is not. If only you might hear within how the duty of your presence must give way for the beauty of your presence! When we blame politicians, and not ourselves, for the evils we deplore, we are godless.<\/p>\n
Martha, Martha! We cannot fix anything, we cannot right any wrong when are importing our neediness and our old thoughts into each plan of action that swims into view. Somewhere Wendell Berry defines violence as taking the shortest route to an objective while ignoring the consequences. When our soul has not the habit of making space within where God Holy Spirit may come to give peace not like the world gives peace, and reveal a thought not like our thoughts, then we are violent, functional atheists. We need soul service to render social service rightly. It\u2019s a little like the priority that flight attendants insist on: If there\u2019s trouble in the air, do not try to help others first; first get your own oxygen mask, then turn to others. It\u2019s the same with the gift of God\u2019s Spirit. Do not assume you can think well or serve well in extremity, but make sure your own soul has service.<\/p>\n
So what was Mary doing in the living room with Jesus? Of course no one knows, but this much is sure. Jesus cannot have been talking all the while. Good teachers are eager for good learning; they know people don\u2019t learn much from much talking. So what was Jesus teaching? What did he want us to learn? New rules? That we must work the tables of a hungry society really hard? That the poor should receive lots of services? Not exactly. The gospel portraits are very clear in this matter. Jesus intends that his disciples learn the discipline of self-knowledge; of inward attention to the power of God to be present; to the beauty of your presence with the Lord. By God\u2019s power, this inner attention frees us up from ordinary habits of thought and feeling. It is the main work of prayer and mediation. Jesus was teaching Mary the practice of the presence God within\u2014the beauty of her presence, not the duty of her presence to God. If he commanded disciples to love one another even as he loved them, but did not help them to see why they didn\u2019t and how they could grow, then he would be a lousy teacher. But we call him the good teacher. Be assured, he taught soul service before social service.<\/p>\n
In the Sabbath day assembly of God\u2019s people, you cannot get all the soul service you need. We need much more practice in the presence of God than comes from listening to the preacher and the prayers and singing the songs. Our worship together falls under the rubric, Necessary but not sufficient. What is the evidence for this assertion? Isaiah has it from long ago: the nation\u2019s evils are all but untouched and unswayed by all the services and all the people offering sacrifices in God\u2019s name. The priority of soul service to social service is not only about our need for practice and prayer and meditation. It is also a strong diagnosis, for where God\u2019s mercy and God\u2019s justice and God\u2019s will is not done on earth as it is done in heaven, there God\u2019s people are by definition not God-connected, not soul servants. This is why the Lord says through Isaiah, I hate your worship services. Your offerings are futile. I cannot endure solemn assemblies with such wickedness going on in the land.<\/p>\n
These words are almost too hard to bear. We could defend ourselves against them with the claim that God cannot feel that way about our worship service. But self-defense is not the way of the children of Abraham. It is not Jesus\u2019 way. Rather: Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean! Martha, Martha, rinse your cloth. Find your way to the Lord\u2019s feet, into the practices of attention to your streaked and muddied inner world, practices of prayer and meditation and fellowship that will render peace in this world, not just within yourself but through all you do. At the very end of The Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung asks, Do you know that you, the individual, are the make weight that tips the scales . . . that infinitesimal unit on whom the world depends, and in whom, if we read the Christian message aright, even God seeks God\u2019s goal? Do you know who you are? Take up your cross. Lose your life for my sake, don\u2019t save it. Seek first the kingdom. Love your enemy. All these powers God will freely give to one who lets her soul service feed her social service. Then with our whole life we will be singing that last stanza of our first hymn of the day,<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd so the yearning strong
\nWith which the soul will long
\nShall far outpass the power of human telling;
\nFor none can guess God\u2019s grace
\nTill Love creates a place
\nWherein the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Rev. Stephen H. Phelps
\nThe Riverside Church
\nNew York, New York<\/i><\/p>\n
\u00a9Stephen H. Phelps 2011<\/span>[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column]
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\u201cMartha, Martha!\u201d We must hear ourselves addressed. \u201cYou are worried and distracted by many things\u2014but only one thing is needful, and Mary has chosen it. It will not be taken from her.\u201d There is a priority in the two great loves. You might call it \u201csoul service before social service.\u201d Not: soul service more important than social service; just, soul service first, then social service, in a virtuous cycle, every round going higher, higher. Return to learn to love God with your all in all, and you will see your neighbor in ways ever-renewed . . . <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"[audio mp3=\"http:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Soul.Service.and_.Social.Service.mp3\"][\/audio]\r\n
Download PDF<\/a><\/p>\r\nTexts on Sunday, February 6, 2011\r\nIsaiah 1:10, 12-17; Luke 10:25-42\r\n
Can a person turn a bad situation to a good one? Can we be of help? When we\u2019ve just heard the good Samaritan story; when we\u2019ve heard the prophet\u2019s demand that we cease to do evil and learn to do good, an affirmative answer may seem the obvious, even the necessary, choice. But slow the boat! The stories of the good neighbor and of Martha\u2019s mumbling against her sister Mary number among the best remembered\u2014but did you know these stories are themselves neighbors? This isn\u2019t just journalism, as if one day Jesus told a good story, and the next he visited Martha Stewart in a dither over a dinner setting, and we\u2019ve got the record of these things. Luke made these stories neighbors to help the church work out a puzzle. We usually read the good Samaritan story all alone, ending with Jesus\u2019 \u201cGo and do likewise\u201d as the answer to the lawyer\u2019s question, How shall I inherit eternal life? But the lawyer\u2019s first answer, which Jesus affirmed, had two parts. First, love God; second, love your neighbor as yourself. Luke has not left us without the master\u2019s guidance on how to love God with your whole heart. That is why we read on this morning.<\/p>\r\n\u201cMartha, Martha!\u201d We must hear ourselves addressed. \u201cYou are worried and distracted by many things\u2014but only one thing is needful, and Mary has chosen it. It will not be taken from her.\u201d There is a priority in the two great loves. You might call it \u201csoul service before social service.\u201d Not: soul service more important than social service; just, soul service first, then social service, in a virtuous cycle, every round going higher, higher. Return to learn to love God with your all in all, and you will see your neighbor in ways ever-renewed, and act with God\u2019s will. Putting the Mary and Martha story right after \u201cthe good Samaritan,\u201d Luke aims to wake us up from our headstrong assumption that we already know how to love, already know what to do to turn a bad situation. Oh no! says the Lord. Oh no! says all the perennial wisdom of the world\u2019s traditions. Uncleansed by soul service, our table service and all our other attempts to right wrongs make the world worse.\r\n\r\nLeo Tolstoy wrote often on this theme. I had almost rather read you the entirety of one story, \"The Godson,\" than preach today. But time presses. The story tells of a young man sent on a quest to understand his own motivations, for in a moment of desire to do good swiftly, he had brought down a chain of awful crimes. His quest begins this way.\r\n
The godson entered [an inn], and taking his seat upon the brick oven he watched the woman scrubbing the room. Having done this, she began wiping the table with a dirty cloth. She wiped it from side to side\u2014but it did not come clean. Then she wiped it the other way. The first streaks disappeared, but others came in their place. She wiped it from one end to the other, but again, the same thing. When one streak was wiped off, another was left on. The godson watched for awhile in silence, and then said: 'What are you doing, madam?' 'Don't you see I'm cleaning up for the holiday? Only I can't manage this table, it won't come clean. I'm quite tired out.' 'Rinse your cloth,' said the godson, 'before you wipe the table with it.'<\/span><\/blockquote>\r\nMartha, Martha, rinse your cloth. Soul service before social service. When we do not rinse the cloth, spiritually speaking, we are what I call a functional atheist. We may identify with God\u2019s Christ and God\u2019s church socially, emotionally or aesthetically. But when opposition comes, if we go straightway to right the wrong, bringing with us all unawares our habits of thought and fear and need, we are functioning as atheists, as people for whom God is no good at the needed time. All Christians are sometimes functional atheists. For a lot of us churchgoers, functional atheism is the default setting. By contrast, plain atheism is so much healthier than functional atheism. Somewhere, the great Christian contemplative of the last century, Simone Weil, wrote: \u201cAs between a Christian with no experience of the supernatural and an atheist, the atheist is closer to the truth.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen are we functioning as atheists? When we learn of someone\u2019s bad opinion of us\u2014and we set out to settle the score, then we are godless. When we drown our feelings of self-doubt in our addictions\u2014drink or t.v. or Facebook or shopping; you name yours\u2014we are functional atheists. When what we call our spiritual journey\u2014Tom Bandy\u2019s observation\u2014consists only of the roster of church committees we sat on through the years, planning and working, thinking and doing, pillars of the church who, like real pillars, have gone so stiff in the belief that everything above depends on us, then we are functioning as if God is not. If only you might hear within how the duty of your presence must give way for the beauty of your presence! When we blame politicians, and not ourselves, for the evils we deplore, we are godless.\r\n\r\nMartha, Martha! We cannot fix anything, we cannot right any wrong when are importing our neediness and our old thoughts into each plan of action that swims into view. Somewhere Wendell Berry defines violence as taking the shortest route to an objective while ignoring the consequences. When our soul has not the habit of making space within where God Holy Spirit may come to give peace not like the world gives peace, and reveal a thought not like our thoughts, then we are violent, functional atheists. We need soul service to render social service rightly. It\u2019s a little like the priority that flight attendants insist on: If there\u2019s trouble in the air, do not try to help others first; first get your own oxygen mask, then turn to others. It\u2019s the same with the gift of God\u2019s Spirit. Do not assume you can think well or serve well in extremity, but make sure your own soul has service.\r\n\r\nSo what was Mary doing in the living room with Jesus? Of course no one knows, but this much is sure. Jesus cannot have been talking all the while. Good teachers are eager for good learning; they know people don\u2019t learn much from much talking. So what was Jesus teaching? What did he want us to learn? New rules? That we must work the tables of a hungry society really hard? That the poor should receive lots of services? Not exactly. The gospel portraits are very clear in this matter. Jesus intends that his disciples learn the discipline of self-knowledge; of inward attention to the power of God to be present; to the beauty of your presence with the Lord. By God\u2019s power, this inner attention frees us up from ordinary habits of thought and feeling. It is the main work of prayer and mediation. Jesus was teaching Mary the practice of the presence God within\u2014the beauty of her presence, not the duty of her presence to God. If he commanded disciples to love one another even as he loved them, but did not help them to see why they didn\u2019t and how they could grow, then he would be a lousy teacher. But we call him the good teacher. Be assured, he taught soul service before social service.\r\n\r\nIn the Sabbath day assembly of God\u2019s people, you cannot get all the soul service you need. We need much more practice in the presence of God than comes from listening to the preacher and the prayers and singing the songs. Our worship together falls under the rubric, Necessary but not sufficient. What is the evidence for this assertion? Isaiah has it from long ago: the nation\u2019s evils are all but untouched and unswayed by all the services and all the people offering sacrifices in God\u2019s name. The priority of soul service to social service is not only about our need for practice and prayer and meditation. It is also a strong diagnosis, for where God\u2019s mercy and God\u2019s justice and God\u2019s will is not done on earth as it is done in heaven, there God\u2019s people are by definition not God-connected, not soul servants. This is why the Lord says through Isaiah, I hate your worship services. Your offerings are futile. I cannot endure solemn assemblies with such wickedness going on in the land.\r\n\r\nThese words are almost too hard to bear. We could defend ourselves against them with the claim that God cannot feel that way about our worship service. But self-defense is not the way of the children of Abraham. It is not Jesus\u2019 way. Rather: Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean! Martha, Martha, rinse your cloth. Find your way to the Lord\u2019s feet, into the practices of attention to your streaked and muddied inner world, practices of prayer and meditation and fellowship that will render peace in this world, not just within yourself but through all you do. At the very end of The Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung asks, Do you know that you, the individual, are the make weight that tips the scales . . . that infinitesimal unit on whom the world depends, and in whom, if we read the Christian message aright, even God seeks God\u2019s goal? Do you know who you are? Take up your cross. Lose your life for my sake, don\u2019t save it. Seek first the kingdom. Love your enemy. All these powers God will freely give to one who lets her soul service feed her social service. Then with our whole life we will be singing that last stanza of our first hymn of the day,\r\n
\u201cAnd so the yearning strong\r\nWith which the soul will long\r\nShall far outpass the power of human telling;\r\nFor none can guess God\u2019s grace\r\nTill Love creates a place\r\nWherein the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling.\u201d<\/blockquote>\r\nRev. Stephen H. Phelps\r\nThe Riverside Church\r\nNew York, New York<\/i>\r\n\r\n\u00a9Stephen H. Phelps 2011<\/span>","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[87,9,28,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-love","category-sermon-2011","category-spiritual-community","category-spiritual-practice"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1104"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1415,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104\/revisions\/1415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}