Five hundred years ago today, Martin Luther is supposed to have nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenburg Castle Church, an act which helped catalyse the Reformation. Thinking about Martin and his wife, Kate, I wrote the following piece for Zadok Perspectives No. 134 during a very busy summer!
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So I got an email asking if I could whip up a column on Martin Luther or maybe his wife Kate sometime in the next week, and I’d love to. I’d love to tell you about the time we went to Lutherstadt-Wittenburg and toured the church and their home. I’d love to tell you about how Martin spent the first three hours of every day in his study wrestling with God and praying before he got down to work—but the washing machine is trilling to say that the next load is ready to be hung on the line, a kid has just come into the study needing her mum, and I don’t have the time.
For I am Kate: the household manager. The Luther household was large, overflowing with children and visitors and servants and paying guests. And Kate made sure that the bread was baked and the meals were cooked and the beds were made and the children were taught and the vegetables were harvested and the beer was brewed. I’d love to tell you more about her, but it’s summer holidays, I live near the ocean, and I’ve had a constant stream of guests. In the last four weeks I’ve cooked over 300 dinners, and made breakfasts and lunches too. I’ve washed countless dishes and sheets and towels, swept and mopped the floors, talked to the plumber and other tradies, and paid the bills, even as I’ve spent time with visiting family and friends. But unlike Kate, I don’t have servants: no cook, no laundress, no maid, no farmhand, no gardener. Instead, I have my husband and me, and what I can wheedle, bully and cajole out of the kids. Yet my husband works in Melbourne and is away three days a week; the kids sometimes refuse their chores: much of the work is done by me.
Because it’s summer, I’ve also spent hours with the kids at the beach. And because I am not just a household manager, but also the sole pastor of a new congregation in a smallish city, I keep bumping into parishioners and others who access me in my role, and so, while standing around in my bathing suit, I’ve had conversations about grace and judgement and calling and forgiveness, and Jesus’ teaching on possessions. And then after I’ve listened and maybe spoken a word of hope or comfort or truth, they say to me, “Are you having a nice holiday?” and it’s true I’m in my bathers but I wonder what on earth they think I’m doing as I take what I hear, pray, read the Word, and prepare the next sermon that will shake them out of their complacency, or make them weep with gratitude and relief. For I’m also Martin: called to wrestle with God and preach and write, and proclaim God’s hospitality in word and deed. Unlike him, however, I don’t have a wife or three hours of solitude every day. Instead, I pray on foot as I slip out alone to the shops and plan the next round of meals. I’d tell you more about it, only I don’t have the time.
The Luthers paved the way for churches like ours, which keep an open table and have visitors every week; people who ask “What is prayer?” and “Who is Jesus?” and “Why do you do this weird ritual meal anyway?” even as they eat the bread and drink the wine and proclaim the mystery of our faith. They come, I think, because I am both Martin and Kate: the professional and the home maker: the writer and the cook. They read the sermons and eat the dinners because they are hungry: hungry for a people to eat with, hungry for a people to belong to, hungry for a shared narrative that is bigger and more generous than any other way of life. And this hunger is so great, and the eating is so central, that I’d love to find where Martin said, “If the good Lord sees fit to provide a nice, fat pike and a dry Rhine Riesling, then I see fit to eat and drink,” only it’s getting on to five and there are guests in the house. It’s time to turn on the oven, open a bottle of wine, put out crackers and dips, and cook dinner, so that this evening the people I love—the man I married, the children I birthed, the friends and parishioners and acquaintances I listen to, pray for, and talk, laugh and weep with—may, through the hospitality we provide in the name of Christ, come to the table and be fed.
Jesus promised that, when we follow him, we will find life in abundance; and life is certainly abundant in this wonderful, overflowing, crazy season of summer. In a couple of weeks, the visitors will go home, the kids will be back at school, my husband will be in Melbourne, and the house will be quiet. Then, I will sit in my study in solitude and silence, and then, I will find time to write.
