Sermon Seeds: Few Things Are Needed

Sunday, July 20, 2025
Sixth Sunday after Pentecost| Year C
(Liturgical Color: Green)

Lectionary Citations
Amos 8:1-12 and Psalm 52 • Genesis 18:1-10a and Psalm 15 • Colossians 1:15-28 • Luke 10:38-42
https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts/?z=p&d=65&y=384

Focus Scripture: Luke 10:38-42
Focus Theme: Few Things Are Needed
Series: Raise Her Voice: Into the Deep (Click here for the series overview.)

Reflection
By Cheryl A. Lindsay

How do we distinguish between wants and needs? We might consider basic conditions to sustain life as needs: air, water, and food. In addition, most of us have become accustomed to shelter and clothing. There are the things or opportunities that provide the means to attain necessities, such as education, transportation, and information. Even with basic human needs there are variations. We may have air to breathe, but is it clean? Water may flow from our faucets, but is it safe to drink?

Companionship for communal beings, like humans, may be categorized as a need. Some may perceive their love language to be a need to fulfill. Identifying the significance of a person, place, thing, or even idea as a want or a need proves to be more complex than one might imagine. Further, in the moments when one makes choices, it may become even more challenging to discern. When Jesus shows up at mealtime and wants to talk, which action should garner the attention of the host? Which takes priority?

The story of Mary and Martha often emphasizes the tension between fulfilling one’s obligations and attending to the needs of one’s soul. Martha is the beleaguered sister, the responsible one who ensures that they offer an appropriate level of hospitality to Jesus. She makes sure that Jesus receives the honor that he is due based on the customs and norms of her culture. Her words of frustration indicate that what she has planned requires the effort of more than one person, or at the very least, she expects her sister to contribute to the work. At this moment, Martha seems consumed by the work. Yet, it is also entirely possible that the responsible one also wants time to rest at the feet of Jesus. She too may hunger to hear his words of affirmation, teaching, and revelation, but she cannot, for whatever reason, set aside what she believes to be expected of her in this encounter.

Often, when this story is told, interpreters pit Martha and Mary against each other. It’s worth noting that Jesus does not do that. While his comment affirms Mary’s choice in that moment, he never condemns Martha’s. Rather, he releases her from expectations that she has internalized but that have not emanated from Jesus rather than from the society in which she lives. This is not a rebuke, it’s more good news. It’s the teaching that Martha needs to receive; this level of hospitality is not a need. It does not even seem to be a want, so Martha should be free to let it go.

At the same time, if it is a want, she should feel free to pursue it but without the need to impose the burden of societal expectations upon her sister. Gender wars throughout history have often pitted those of the same gender against each other, especially but not exclusively women. In contemporary conversations that often permeates conversations about biblical manhood or womanhood (whatever that means). It also includes lessons long embedded in culture that prove to be impossible to fully eradicate. Men don’t cry. Women are solely responsible for the home, whether they work outside it or not. There are only two genders. None of these are true, or even biblically based, but societal norms often do not concern themselves with what the Bible actually says, what is true, or God’s creation and revelation.

Jesus, in the visit, deconstructs the expectations of hospitality and presents an opportunity for liberation: few things are needed. In this section of Luke’s account, Jesus illustrates the simplicity of the gospel and living in the kindom of God with lessons on love and freedom with marginalized characters moved firmly to the center.

To an expert in the interpretation of the Torah who is probing the limits of the command to love neighbor, Jesus offers a Samaritan as model of love that honors the Torah, and he closes the exchange by countering the man’s challenge to him with a challenge of his own: “Go and do likewise yourself.” Turning from an isolated stretch of (parabolic) road to the private space of a house, where hospitality is offered by two women, Jesus balances the call to compassionate action with affirmation of hearing the word, a privilege and priority for women just as for men.
John T. Carroll

As Jesus notes that few things are needed, he is not only reflecting on Martha’s actions, he indicates his own needs in this moment. Jesus lived simply with few comforts as mainstays. He was unhoused so all he possessed he would have to carry or leave in the care of family and friends. Yet, he built for himself a community–faithful companions to share life and ministry. Beyond the twelve, he assembled a close knit group of followers, which include Mary and Martha. This conversation is reminiscent of both his calling of the first disciples as well as the sending out of the seventy two.

The narrator earlier gave notice that women were among Jesus’ close followers and that some of them lent generous support to him and his itinerant band (8:1–3). Two women figure prominently in this scene, sisters who split between them the dual roles of host who extends hospitality (Martha) and disciple attending to the teaching of Jesus (Mary). It is not clear what, if any, contact these women have had with Jesus, although Martha does address him as “Lord”; they appear for the first time in the narrative and are placed in a (generic) village. Verse 38 identifies Martha as the one who welcomed Jesus, her role as host reinforced by the narrator’s description of her preoccupation with the needs of her guest and then by her complaint (v. 40). Verse 39, by contrast, puts Mary in the posture of disciple who listens, who welcomes Jesus’ words. The distinct roles of the two sisters seem almost a caricature, dividing labors that belong together in the disciple: receiving the Lord’s teaching and serving, or hearing and doing. The noun that characterizes Martha’s labors, diakonia (service or ministry), recalls the service of hospitality rendered to Jesus by Simon Peter’s mother-in-law after he had healed her. This juxtaposition of Martha’s conventional service of household management with Mary’s receptivity to the word of Jesus recalls his own redefinition of family in the company he is gathering around him, composed of all who hear and do God’s purpose (8:19–21). Mary shows herself to belong to this new family: this is the one necessary thing, the good share that will not be taken from her (10:42).
John T. Carroll

Still, for Jesus, Martha also belongs, and his invitation to her is direct and corrective, not chastising. He extends his teaching to her so that she prepares to meet his needs, Jesus ensures he meets hers.

Martha is busy with doing, but the pairing of hearing and action that Luke’s narrative commends requires more than action, more than the provision of hospitality, though Martha shows herself to be the kind of host that Jesus has instructed his followers to seek out in their mission journeys. Receptive attention to the word must keep company with faithful action in the world; that is Mary’s eloquent though silent witness, following the preceding episode’s accent on “doing” (vv. 25, 28, 37). The same pairing of hearing and doing (keeping, guarding) resurfaces in 11:28 (cf. 6:46–49). This rhythm of listening quietly and acting decisively is the very rhythm Jesus has displayed in his own working.
John T. Carroll

In the pairing of Mary and Martha, Jesus affirms positive action and abiding presence while also clearly conveying that busyness is not a spiritual discipline. Rather than rejecting her efforts, he encourages her to temper them so that her needs are met rather than sacrificed. Jesus affirms Martha with a few simple words, “Few things are needed.” Her presence is one of them.

Reflection from Voices of People of African Descent
The 33rd General Synod adopted a Resolution to Recognize the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024). As part of its implementation, Sermon and Weekly Seeds offers Reflection from Voices of People of African Descent related to the season or overall theme for additional consideration in sermon preparation and for individual and congregational study.
“Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.”
― Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

For Further Reflection
“We hunger in earnest for that which we cannot consume.” ― Nenia Campbell
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” ― Philip Pullman
“Action expresses priorities.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

Works Cited
Carroll, John T. Luke. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012.

Suggested Congregational Response to the Reflection
During this series, Raise Her Voice: Into the Deep, in the season after Pentecost, we invite the local church to listen to Spirit speaking among us by developing the practices of testimony and exhortation. In testimony, one recounts how the Holy One has been present, moved, and guided in the past. In exhortation, one shares discernment based on what Spirit is still speaking to the church today. This may be done during worship as an immediate response to proclamation or in another format (i.e. blog posts, short videos on social media).

Worship Ways Liturgical Resources
https://www.ucc.org/worship-way/after-pentecost-6c-july-20/

The Rev. Dr. Cheryl A. Lindsay, Minister for Worship and Theology (lindsayc@ucc.org), also serves a local church pastor, public theologian, and worship scholar-practitioner with a particular interest in the proclamation of the word in gathered communities. You’re invited to share your reflections on this text in the comments on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SermonSeeds.

A Bible study version of this reflection is at Weekly Seeds.