[Sermon] Exactly Where She Needs to Be

Pastor Aaron Scott + July 20, 2025

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost / Lectionary 16

Guest preacher Pastor Aaron Scott reflects on the story of Mary and Martha, offering a powerful reframe that honors both sisters. Martha’s anxious hospitality and Mary’s bold attentiveness are not opposites, but parts of the same calling: to lead with courage in times of crisis. Drawing from his ministry among poor and unhoused communities, Pastor Aaron highlights the ways leadership often emerges from those pushed to the margins. He tells the moving story of a young woman who first saw herself as a leader when someone else stepped aside to make room for her voice. Like Mary, she sat at the table not as a distraction—but as a disciple. Jesus still calls such leaders forward today.

Sermon Transcript

From YouTube's automatic captions, lightly edited by AI for readability.

DAVID HORTON: 

And I want to welcome Pastor Aaron Scott to come up forward.

So, just a little background. The Diversity and Inclusion Ministry—gosh, I want to say like six months ago—started reading this book in an effort to gain some different resources, especially on how to communicate with people who have opposite beliefs, opposite political spectrums from us. And in the midst of that, we came across Aaron's book. We read it. There was an idea—be like, I wonder, ’cause we found out he's local—would he come preach? And so I just sent him an email, and he said yes. So here he is. So I'll give it to you. Thank you so much. Oops. [Applause]

AARON SCOTT:

I come before you in the name of the one who creates, redeems, and sanctifies all of us. No exceptions. Amen.

Good morning. Thank you so much, uh, for having me with you all today. Um, my name is Aaron. I'm here with my son, Moses. I'm hoping the sound is okay—I'm going to do that a little bit.

Um, and I actually—in my day job—I work for the Episcopal Church. So, if I am like doing a little bit extra of this, please don't be alarmed. Um, I work for our presiding bishop's office. I'm our, uh, gender justice staff officer. So I support all of our LGBTQ, um, women's justice, reproductive justice ministries in the Episcopal Church.

Um, but by night, I am also an author, and I wrote the book Bring Back Your People: 10 Ways Regular Folks Can Put a Dent in White Christian Nationalism. Uh, it came out in January. Excited to talk about all of that, uh, in the forum after the service.

But maybe we should talk about this gospel reading first.

As I was reading the text in preparation for today, I—I found myself identifying more with Martha than I ever have before, because she is anxious and upset about many things. And I—I don't know about you—I too, though, am often these days pretty anxious and upset about many things. You really take your pick.

Um, and it just seemed a little unfair to be holding that against her. Um, especially when Martha is living through a period in history that's got a lot of parallels to our own, right? The Roman Empire that is colonizing Jesus’ community—um, all of Judea, the Mediterranean at this time—is really one of the most violent, repressive imperial powers that the world has ever seen, up until the rise of our own in this present moment.

I'm like, Martha's not just passively navigating all that, right? She's really trying to do her part. She's led these people into her home. Um, Jesus and his movement are deeply involved in her on-the-ground life. In this story, she's hosting them. She's trying to take care of business, just trying to make sure everybody's accounted for, uh, has what they need—and that's a lot of work, and that's really important work.

And she turns around, sees her sister Mary just sitting there, like in full view. Everybody can see her, probably just sitting there right at Jesus' feet.

I remember in my illustrated children's Bible growing up, um, the cartoon version of Martha—she was drawn as like very grumpy and frazzled and in the kitchen. Um, and Mary got to be like dewy-eyed, and she had very pretty eyelashes for some reason. Um, she was blonde—very ahistorical, probably—and just like serene. And she's looking at Jesus very much like she's in love with him.

And it didn’t—it just didn’t make sense to me, um, most of the time growing up, because I—I don't know about you all, but I grew up in a community and a church where like frazzled and grumpy and practical people really made the whole world run. Like made sure everybody was fed, made sure the, um, snow was plowed—all of that.

And so I just—it didn’t click for me for a long time, um, why Martha would be a little bit scolded in this story.

And it wasn’t—it wasn’t until many years later, um, I had an experience in my work that really shifted the way I saw this story and what I understood to be happening.

I worked, um, I worked for most of a decade in Grays Harbor County in Washington State—so out on the coast, um, mostly in Aberdeen and Westport, a few other places. Um, I had helped to plant a congregation—a non-traditional community of about 500 poor, unhoused, and incarcerated people.

Um, and we really—we really anchored ourselves in hospitality, in building community, and organizing for people's survival and human rights.

Um, we were—we were deeply involved in the Poor People's Campaign, and at one point Moses was about two—so this was maybe six years ago, maybe seven years ago—and we hosted a delegation of other leaders from the Poor People’s Campaign who were coming to Grays Harbor County, of all places. Right? Like a lot of people do not ever go to Grays Harbor County.

And we were hosting people from Philadelphia, from the Bronx, from Los Angeles, Portland, and, uh, other communities where grassroots, directly impacted people and faith leaders were doing similar work to ours.

And so we're sitting in our little—our little church where we ran our feeding programs and our emergency cold weather shelter. We had gotten a lot of pretty violent and scary blowback for our work that year, especially around sheltering folks in the winter.

Um, and we're in the middle of this discussion, um, with all these other people scattered across the country, about our common struggles, right? Our common adversaries really—as poor people across all these lines of geography and race and religion and language and gender.

And it's a very, very powerful, transformative conversation—to hear folks sharing their insights, their analysis from the bottom of society, right? To be able to look up and see all of these different systemic forces coming together that, across very different communities, were causing a lot of the same harms—and to hear folks speak with a lot of clarity about what needed to change and how we could make that change on the ground.

And one of our local members—uh, my friend Emily, a really good friend of mine—was, who's young, queer, had grown up in Grays Harbor County her entire life, um, had experienced homelessness on and off—um, she was half in the conversation, but she kept popping in and out, bouncing back and forth between this conversation about the kind of transformative love and justice that the whole world is so hungry for, and how we can be part of that—bouncing back and forth between that conversation and the kitchen.

And she really, like—obviously was fired up and wanted to engage—but was like a little bit unsure and unable about fully tearing herself out of her kitchen duty role.

And so her bouncing back and forth, um, from the conversation table to the kitchen, it like became more frenetic. And she kept cutting herself off mid-sentence to run back to the kitchen and stir something, check on something in the oven—like whatever—until finally an older, much more seasoned organizer, also working with poor, incarcerated, unhoused folks from Pennsylvania, um, followed Emily into the kitchen, physically turned her around, steered her back to her seat at the table, and then just took over the kitchen work as a clear gesture of: You, Emily, are the person who is actually supposed to be at this table right now. Um, and I will take over this other part, because you do belong here.

Um, because it's very important for you—from this community, this struggling community, with all that you have seen, all that you have experienced, all that you have lost, and all that you know—to be part of this exchange.

And describing that whole situation later on, Emily just said, “This was the first time in my life that anybody ever called me a leader.” That she hadn't ever experienced a space where people like us—right? Poor people, people who have been homeless, people from communities like ours that are really extracted from but not poured back into—were looked to for insights and wisdom and the work of love and justice.

And Emily knew that she cared about that work and wanted to be part of building this movement right in the here and now—eager, very eager, like Martha, to do her part—but just had never imagined herself in the role of somebody who other folks look to as a teacher or a thinker or a, like, big-picture kind of strategist, even though all of those things were qualities that came quite naturally to her.

And so, watching that story unfold in real time really changed my understanding of Mary and Martha.

Because despite what I saw in the cartoons in my children’s Bible, it’s—it’s unlikely that Mary was just sitting back very placid, serene, pious, kind of doughy at Jesus’ feet as though he's like the spiritual equivalent of a boy band lead singer.

Um, Mary taking that position so close to him—right in her own home, when she's expected to be performing other roles—is very bold. It's very bold.

She's asserting her own belonging and her own leadership in Jesus' movement. She's asserting her right to—to talk with him, to be in conversation with him, to probably discuss, maybe study, compare notes about what they're seeing in the world around them, in their different communities—and to build a vision for the kingdom right there in real time with him.

And no doubt—right?—no doubt there were expectations, certainly from her own sister, probably the rest of her community too, that she should have been playing a more behind-the-scenes role. That people like her, from homes like hers, families like hers—women from communities like theirs—were probably used to being pushed into those roles.

But Jesus—really in this whole chapter of Luke, right?—he’s focused on developing leaders and on teaching. Like before this scene, we know he sends out the 72. He's teaching the parables. And everything he’s doing in Luke 10 leading up to this point is about pulling other leaders into this work—for a vision for a world where the last are first and the first are last.

And he's always pulling those leaders specifically from the bottom—from the ranks of poor people, dispossessed people—across many lines of difference, right? Across geography, across age, across ethnicity, across disability status, across gender.

So this is what we're seeing happen with Mary. Jesus affirms her status and her belonging right where she is, as a co-leader in the work of building the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

And there's a lot of reasons that that might make Martha worried. And I want us to take those seriously—beyond just maybe she's jealous, maybe she wants help with the dishes, maybe she wanted to be sitting where Mary was sitting.

Stepping into this kind of leadership—really putting yourself out there with Jesus, with this movement—can put a price on your head. The early Jesus movement was often considered a threat—a political threat—to the authority of the Roman Empire, because it preached and taught and practiced a really different way of being society. Diametrically opposed values, right?

The hungry being filled with good things. The rich being sent away empty. And good news preached to the poor, by the poor, and for the poor.

So Martha is willing to welcome Jesus and his people into their home. But letting her sister get mixed up in that work in a dangerous time is—is a harder ask.

But it might also just be this—this piece again, where Martha isn't used to communities and families like hers being considered leaders. Maybe she hasn't heard anyone say that about them before. She might just be thinking, Oh my God, my sister is getting in the way of these people who are doing this important work. Let me yank her back in here with me—only to hear Jesus say, No. Your sister is exactly where she needs to be. We can’t do this without her.

[Music]

Beloved, in Christ, there is nobody coming to save us but us—and God working through us. There is no party, there's no politician who is here to fix the hell we are living through.

And this is as true today as it was during the lives of Mary and Martha and Jesus. And that means everything—ours and our children’s entire futures—rests on what we do with God on the ground, in our own communities and in relationship with other struggling communities:

To lift up the lowly,

To defend the poor,

To defend the earth,

To set the oppressed free,

To usher in the reign of God—

Which is incompatible with the reign of earthly empires that exploit and abuse people.

This has always been the crux of the Jesus movement. It is not about some ethereal magic man who is going to do the work for us. It is about the work he left us to carry on.

It is about how we live together.

How we hold out a clear vision of heaven even when we are surrounded by hell.

And how we call others deeply toward that vision.

How we roll up our sleeves and get to work building it together.

And I think we can hang on to the practicality of Martha while we do this—as long as we also are holding on to the boldness of Mary, committing ourselves to being leaders with Jesus, even in dangerous times.

Amen.