Week 7 | Sunday, July 17, 2022
Luke 10:38-42 | Amos 8:1-12
Week 7 PDF version
1 | begin
Begin with a moment of silence. Then name the concerns, worries, and burdens that you have brought with you.
Take another moment of silence. Then name in a word or phrase what you most need from God right now.
Take another moment of silence. Conclude your prayer with “Amen” or the Lord’s Prayer.
2 | explore
Journal on your own about your experiences or share with a group:
Tell your story about a time when your hard work went unnoticed or unacknowledged by someone else. How did you feel? What did you do?
Have you ever not given someone’s hard work the value or appreciation it deserved (including yours)? What kept you from valuing that work rightly?
3 | read
Read Luke 10:38-42. Then read Amos 8:1-12 and the Luke story a second time.
4 | engage
Two months from now will be Black Women’s Equal Pay Day on September 21 (according to the American Association of University Women’s “Equal Pay Day Calendar”). On average, black women have to work 21 months to earn what white men earned in 12 in 2021. Just over two months later will be Native Women’s Equal Pay Day. December 8, almost a year after 2021, will be Latina Women’s Equal Pay Day. And as “Equal Pay Calendar” notes, these averages do not tell the whole story for LGBTQIA persons, who may experience a wider pay gap than cis and heterosexual women. [1]
The labor of women is not valued as much as white men’s in the U.S., and the labor of women of color is not valued as much as white women’s, for whom Equal Pay Day on average comes sooner. Women have to work a lot harder and longer. They often are required to bear extra responsibilities without additional pay, like “emotional labor” (to use sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s term). [2] For all their work, women, especially women of color, cannot gain equal footing, much less get ahead, when the scales are rigged against them.
If you are a cis or trans woman or nonbinary person who is overworked and undervalued, you are not alone. Martha gets it. So does Amos.
When Jesus meets Martha in Luke 10, she invites this out-of-town traveler into her home. She lives with her sister Mary, and they seem to have a household without any men (since no brothers, husbands, fathers, or sons are mentioned). These women would have had to work hard while subject to greater vulnerability to subsist as an all-female Jewish household in a rural imperial patriarchal setting. Even so, Martha takes the time and risk to show hospitality to a male stranger.
As Jesus visits them, Martha gets to work, but Mary does not assist her. Instead, Luke says, Mary “sat […] and listened to [Jesus]” (10:39, NRSVUE). After doing so much all by herself while her sister does not lift a finger, Martha has had it. She appeals to her male guest: “Tell her […] to help me” (10:40). Martha’s words lay bare the frustration of a person who is tired of being overworked and undervalued.
She targets her sister as if the solution to her problem is an equal application of sexist, imperial expectations to them both. But Amos 8 suggests a different solution is needed: an end to using “false balances” (8:5) that exploit “the poor” and “the needy” (8:6)—a disproportionate number of whom tend to be women in patriarchal societies. What would actually make a difference for Martha and Mary is justice: gender justice, economic justice, empire-dismantling justice, divine justice.
The narrator doesn’t show us Martha’s reaction to Jesus’s reply. But his words meet Martha’s hospitality with his own by inviting her into a space free of overwork. It’s not a space made free for Mary by overworking Martha. Both sisters can sit and talk with Jesus and hear what he has to say about the kingdom of God, a kingdom ordered by God’s justice, a kingdom for the poor and needy, a kingdom for the overworked and undervalued.
This moment of “release” (see Lk 4:18) may not last long for Martha and Mary. But maybe it is the “one [thing needed],” as Jesus says (10:42), to taste what the divine justice that Amos announces could look like, then and now.
What if we cultivated and entered spaces free of oppressive expectations for Marys and Marthas in our world? What if these spaces did not liberate Marys by overworking Marthas but ended the false scales used against both? Even a taste of this justice can be all we need to seek it, to speak it, and to struggle for it with all the overworked and undervalued for whom God’s kingdom is coming.
5 | respond
Journal on your own or talk with a group about these questions:
1. What kinds of false scales do people who identify as women or as nonbinary face today?
2. How do false scales and oppressive gender, economic, and racial expectations affect your life?
3. What stands out to you in Luke 10:38–42 and Amos 8:1–12? What resonates most with you?
4. Where do you find spaces of release from overwork? How might you enter and create such a space for all the overworked and undervalued where you are?
6 | practice
Take a few minutes this week to do one of these activities:
Mutual Sabbath
Like mutual aid, partner with someone to help each other practice Sabbath. Take turns providing childcare, meal prep, or yardwork for one another so you can both enjoy time to rest.
Imagine Justice
Like the call from Black Lives Matter to “defund the police” and “reimagine public safety,” [3] imagine just economic and social practices, especially for women and nonbinary persons, in your community or city. What would it take to get there?
Last updated July 17, 2022
References & Credits
1. “Equal Pay Day Calendar,” American Association of University Women website, https://www.aauw.org/resources/article/equal-pay-day-calendar/.
2. The term appears in Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). For more on “emotional labor,” see “Emotional Labor in the Workplace: The Disproportionate Burden on Women,” St. Catherine University website, Feb. 9, 2022, https://www.stkate.edu/academics/women-in-leadership-degrees/empowering-women/emotional-labor-in-the-workplace.
3. “Defund the Police. Reimagine Public Safety. Center Care and Humanity,” Black Lives Matter website, Oct. 1, 2021, https://blacklivesmatter.com/defund-the-police-reimagine-public-safety-center-care-and-humanity/.
Header image of “Wheat” is by Bruno Kelzer on Unsplash at this link
Image of “Cutting Board” is by Katie Smith on Unsplash at this link
image of “Dream Big” is by Randy Tarampi on Unsplash at this link
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition
The scripture readings come from the Revised Common Lectionary lessons for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost in Year C, which can be found at the Episcopal Church Lectionary Page here
