I do NOT know when I wrote this! Probably before 2008. Not before 2007. I think it was when the boys and I were visiting friends I had met online. Here is the unedited text:
The sermon was about the Martha and Mary story where Jesus tells Martha that Mary has chosen the better path… and the rector’s take on it was based in part on what society was like at THAT time (an approach that I know some people find odd) rather than on society as we know it. At the time the story was written (and purportedly took place), women were definitely second-class citizens. Like many arab societies today, women did not sit with men, nor speak with men who were not part of the immediate family. Taken in that perspective, the meaning shifts slightly — not to belittle the people who do the necessary work, but to remind us all that there are some times that it is good to sit and listen and talk… it was not a scold of Martha, but an affirmation that women also had the right to participate in the intellectual and spiritual life of the community.
This is how I have generally made sense of this passage and similar ones in the Christian New Testament.
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