Sermons from
Mission Hills UCC
San Diego, California
Rev. Dr. David Bahr
david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org
March 16, 2025
“Active Faith and Faithful Action”
Luke 10: 38-42 – Common English Bible
While Jesus and his disciples were traveling, Jesus entered a village where a woman named Martha welcomed him as a guest. 39 She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his message. 40 By contrast, Martha was preoccupied with getting everything ready for their meal. So Martha came to him and said, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to prepare the table all by myself? Tell her to help me.”
41 The Lord answered, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things. 42 One thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the better part. It won’t be taken away from her.”
Only a few of you will recognize the name Antoinette Brown Blackwell. And even if you’ve heard her name before, you might be asking – now who was that again?
Antoinette was the first woman ordained as a minister in any Christian denomination in the United States – all the way back in 1853. She is among those we like to call our “UCC Firsts.”[1] In 1785, Lemuel Haynes was the first Black man in the US ordained by any Christian denomination. And the first openly gay man ordained in the US was Bill Johnson in 1972. Another thing we like to say in the UCC – “we’re not radical, we’re just early.”
Antoinette was born in 1825, the 7th of 10 children. Deeply religious as a child, she became a full member of the Congregational Church in Henrietta, New York, at the ripe old age of 9. Instead of the things she was expected to do, she preferred reading and writing over cooking and sewing. In 1846 she attended Oberlin, a Congregational school and the first co-educational college in the US to grant women bachelor’s degrees.
One day on a long walk, she shared with her sister-in-law, Lucy Stone, her plans to become a minister. Lucy listened and sympathized, but then told her, “You’ll never be allowed to stand in a pulpit or preach in a church, and you can certainly never be ordained.” Antoinette declared: “I am going to do it.”
And so, after she completed Oberlin’s Ladies Literary Course, she asked to study theology. But the faculty refused to admit her and even her family objected. Nevertheless, she persisted and insisted. The college compromised and allowed her to attend lectures but would not let her graduate with a degree or grant her a license to preach. She didn’t care and went around preaching in any church that would have her anyway. And in 1853, the Congregational Church of South Butler ordained her.
In addition, she was a prolific author and a tireless advocate for women’s rights. She held prominent positions in the women’s suffrage movement alongside her dear friends Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and was the last one still alive when the 19th amendment was finally passed in 1920. She won the long fight to vote at age 95.[2] We celebrate her ordination in 1853 even though no one outside the church in South Butler and only one male minister in the area recognized it. That’s another story.
A few other women were ordained in the 1880s but still, none were given a license to preach. Like Antoinette at Oberlin, Andover Seminary wouldn’t admit or grant theological degrees to women, but they did allow Emma Newman to sit in on classes as a guest. When she completed all the courses, they wouldn’t give her a degree but she was sent to western Kansas anyway because no men would take on churches like Dodge City with just 4 cowboys for members, that is until they all took another job and moved away. From there, she crossed the prairie in a horse and buggy and served a church in Dial, Kansas for six years – today a literal ghost town.
In 1883, the church in Dial requested her ordination. The local association agreed unanimously, but the denomination back East resisted and said they wouldn’t provide funds for a church with a woman pastor. She withdrew the request for ordination and sought to be licensed instead and thus, Emma Newman was the first woman in history granted a license to preach.[3]
Such were the indignities faced by countless women called to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, even though Jesus himself told Mary she had chosen the “better part.” But “better?” Really? As in, Jesus set Mary and Martha up as competitors and declared Mary the winner? “Martha, Martha, you’re too focused on other things.” Those words still sting women sitting in pews on Sunday mornings who identify their gifts with Martha. They rightly ask, “OK, so who’s going to feed everyone?”
It might help to recognize that the story of Mary and Martha immediately follows a parable in which the crowd would be shocked to hear Jesus praise a Samaritan. To them, there’s no such thing as a good Samaritan – an unlikely recipient of praise. Well, in the very next verses, Jesus praises Mary for sitting at his feet, clearly in the posture of a disciple. Given women’s conventional roles, she was an unlikely disciple. And so to anyone who would say, there’s no such thing as a woman disciple, just like there’s no good Samaritan, Jesus affirms Mary’s better part. Does Jesus mean to chastise Martha? I believe Jesus’ intent was to affirm Mary’s gifts and draw his circle wider.
Because let’s look at another story involving Martha, one that does not center her in a traditional role. Throughout the gospels, Jesus honored women by revealing or confirming his identity to them before men. For example, in the Gospel of John, it was the unlikely Samaritan woman at the well who had 5 husbands to whom Jesus first revealed he is the Messiah. In the same way, Jesus revealed to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life.” She replied, “I believe you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”[4] That makes Martha the first person to make such a deeply theological and affirmative declaration of faith. You are the Christ. Clearly, she had been listening while she was baking bread. And isn’t that the way some of us prefer? Thinking about faith while doing some faith?
Just for fun, there’s a little-known tradition of Mary and Martha from the Middle Ages. After the death and resurrection of Jesus, they set off to proclaim the good news and sailed on the Mediterranean Sea until they reached the South of France. Mary found retreat near Marseille in a cave 2,800 feet up the side of a mountain. She spent the next 30 years in prayer and contemplation, occasionally leaving her place of solitude to “pour the honey of the words flowing from her heart into the souls of listeners.” Sounds like Mary.
Martha, on the other hand, spent her time “cleansing lepers, restoring persons who were paralytic, raising the dead, giving sight to the blind, strength to the feeble, and health to the sick.” Sounds like Martha. She ate only once a day, and then, only roots and the fruit of trees. At night she slept on a bed of branches with vines for her pillow.
The most remarkable story of Martha is about how she once tamed a dragon – a terrible dragon of incredible length and extraordinary size whose mouth exhaled deadly smoke and whose eyes shot flames. It tore everything it encountered into pieces with its teeth and claws. The terrified people challenged Martha to prove the power of the Messiah she preached about. Undaunted, Martha walked right up to the den of the dragon and made the sign of the cross. It immediately calmed down. Then she tied her belt around the neck of the dragon and said, “Don’t hurt anyone ever again!” Afterward it followed her around like a massive dog on a leash.[5] Oh, and she also reportedly saved a village from a pirate attack.
Martha – the theologian and chef with the gift of extraordinary hospitality and mythical tamer of dragons. And Mary – the disciple who sat at the feet of Jesus and listened to him speak. And while the other disciples remained clueless, she understood what Jesus was saying. Here’s an example:
According to the Gospel of John, six days before Passover, Jesus came to Bethany for dinner at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Martha served, naturally, and Lazarus sat at the table. Mary came into the room carrying a bottle of very expensive perfume. When she opened it, the room was overwhelmed with fragrance. She anointed Jesus’ feet and wiped them dry with her hair. Judas Iscariot complained, “Why wasn’t it sold and the money given to the poor?” Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She brought this perfume to prepare my body for burial.”[6]
He might as well have looked over at the disciples and added, “because she was listening and actually understood my teachings while the rest of you argued about who would be the greatest in my kingdom.” Mic drop.
The truth is, of course, we need both Mary and Martha – both Active Faith and Faithful Action. If you’re a Mary, your active faith may be listening, then doing, and listening again. Or if you prefer Martha, faithful action is doing, then listening, then doing again. As Sarah Speed’s poem says, “Both, please.”
As I’ve been saying, the impact we want to have upon our neighborhood and city and world begins with and is sustained by a deepening faith. We manifest our greatest impact like breathing in and out. For example,
- Worship, then building a house in Tijuana or senior affordable housing down the street, and back to worship.
- Reading the Bible from which we know to stand up for the rights of the LGBTQ community when they are threatened and then read the Bible again.
- Breathing faith in and breathing faith out, reading the Bible which leads us to protest the growing influence of white supremacy because we have read the Bible and stand up for immigrants because we understand the Bible and then taking legislative action – which by the way is very easy with the UCC Action Center using the link in our emails every Friday.
- And return to worship and then feed our neighbors with bags of fresh fruit and vegetables (by the way, you can show up on Tuesday morning and do just that), and then worship again. Breathing in, breathing out.
- Faithful action is teaching kids how to make red velvet cupcakes while educating them about Jesus.
- And because we read stories in the Bible like Mary and Martha, we understand that we must uphold the rights of women to control their own destiny. And once again, return to worship. In and out. Faithful action and active faith.
We are grateful for such women as Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Emma Newman and countless other women who, like Mary, preached the gospel whether they had a “license” to do so or not. And the countless Martha’s in the pews who can set a nice table and after dinner, fight off pirates and tame a dragon. Let’s take a breath. And another. Now what’s your next faithful action?
[1] https://www.ucc.org/ucc-firsts/
[2] https://antoinettebrownblackwell.org/herstory/about-antoinette-brown-blackwell/
[3] https://www.ucc.org/ucc_roots_april_2016/
[4] John 11: 27
[5] https://anunslife.org/blog/nun-talk/of-cooks-pirates-and-dragons-saint-martha
[6] John 12: 1-11
