An anatomy class model in a dumpster
Acts 9:36-43
Now in Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha, which, translated, means Dorcas. She was full of good works and acts of charity. And it happened in those days that she became ill and died. They bathed her and put her in an upstairs room.
Since Lydda was near Joppa and they had heard that peter was there, the disciples sent to two men to him pleading, “Please come to us without delay.” So Peter rose up and went with them.
Upon arriving they led him into the upstairs room. All the widows approached him, crying and showing him garments and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was still with them. Peter sent all of them out, got down on his knees and prayed. He turned to the body and said, “Tabitha, rise up!”
She opened her eyes, looked at Peter, and sat up. He gave her his hand and raised her up. He called to the saints and the widows and present her alive.
Now this became known throughout the whole of Joppa and many came to believe in the Lord. Then he remained for some days in Joppa with a certain Simon, a tanner.
I’ve got a confession to make this morning and I know that some of you are going to be a little put-off by it. The confession is this: I have a pretty low tolerance for craft materials. Now I recognize that I have to keep that to myself most of the time. I live with some very crafty people and I know that there are some very crafty people in this church. You can do amazing things with craft supplies and it’s because I know this that I just kind of bite my tongue about this feeling of mine. But the truth is…I have a hard time seeing the potential in craft materials.
The first time I went into one of those big craft supply stores – Michael’s or some such place – I thought to myself, “The people who came up with this place are genius. They’re making money by just selling aisle after aisle of junk!” Suzanne, of course, fell in love with the place.
But that feeling has never really left me. So I have to check myself on those rare occasions when I get into clean-up mode. I’m liable to throw out some very valuable Styrofoam or knick-knacks that would otherwise make their way into a great creation.
I guess what I’m saying is: When I see something like this clump of yarn my first impulse is not to see a prayer shawl but a hairball. It takes the eye of someone who knows the potential of this yarn to help it become what it should be. Something beautiful is in here.
There’s a message in that for us today. You came in here today with a few hairballs on your mind. You came in here thinking that there are a few places in your life or a few places in the world that God just hasn’t quite sorted out. You came in here thinking that those places might best be left alone because as much as you profess to believe in life, you just don’t know how God can do anything with them.
“What’s God going to do with a car bombing in Iraq? What’s God going to do with the grief of a parent who lost a child on the Tech campus last week? What’s God going to do with this disease I’m fighting? What’s God going to do with this addiction I can’t control? What’s God going to do with this bad habit I can’t break? What’s God going to do with this deep longing in my heart? What’s God going to do with this fixation in my mind? What’s God going to do with this emptiness in my soul? What’s God going to do with my parents, my boyfriend, my girlfriend, my kids? What’s God going to do with all of that? It’s best not to show that here. It’s best not to pull that out because it’s just too messy, even for God. It’s best not to talk about it because I don’t know if I can trust God with it. I’ll just play it safe today. I’ll just be guarded today. I know it’s a healing service, but, hey, let’s be realistic. What’s going to change if I let God have this hairball to work with? I’ll just keep it to myself.” Oh, have I got a message for you today.
And it all begins at a seaside town on the Mediterranean. Joppa. The Hebrew word for beauty. Thirty-five miles west of Jerusalem, this is one of the oldest port cities in the world. Today it is a place of sidewalk cafes and boardwalks along the waterfront, but in ancient days it was the place through which Solomon brought the cedars of Lebanon to build his temple to the Lord. It was the place to which Jonah fled to catch a ship for Tarshish so that he wouldn’t have to follow God’s calling to be a prophet. Jonah had a whale of a time.
But there is another Bible story about Joppa. It seems that in this beautiful seaside town there was a disciple of Jesus by the name of Tabitha. We don’t know much about her. The book of Acts tells us that she was full of good works and acts of charity. Obviously something within her had been responding to Jesus’ call. Her life had been transformed. We know this much about her. We also know that she was a maker of garments.
So one day Tabitha became ill and died. The women who knew her and loved her followed the custom of the day. They bathed her body and placed it in an upstairs room. The body wouldn’t be there long. The custom was to bury the body as soon as possible. Probably by sundown they would lay her to rest.
But there were some other disciples living in Joppa who weren’t content to let the story end according to custom. That might be the way it had always happened before, but they were now living on this side of Jesus’ resurrection and they couldn’t shake the idea that maybe now things should be different. Word had started to spread through Joppa that Peter was in the area. He had just healed man up the road in Lydda – old Aeneas, who had been bedridden for eight years. He had just said to the man, “Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you! Get up and make your bed.” And just like that the man had done it. His bed was rolled up in the corner now.
So these disciples decided to go up to Lydda and get Peter. If anybody represented the power of Jesus Christ it was Peter. Peter may have denied Jesus three times, but he was also the one whom Jesus had singled out and said, “Peter, you are my rock, and I will build my church on you.” Peter was the one who ran to the tomb on that Easter morning to see if the rumors were true. Peter was the one whom Jesus had taken aside and said, “Feed my sheep.”
“Peter,” the two men sent from Joppa said to him. “Peter, you have to come now. There’s no time to lose. Please.” And the three of them were off.
It was such a familiar scene. The prophets Elijah and Elisha had faced this one before. A dead body in an upper room awaiting resuscitation. Jesus had faced it before. Going into the room where a young girl lay dead, he had sent out everyone but the parents and commanded the girl to get up, which she did. You just know how this story is going to end when Peter shows up.
But it doesn’t make the scene any less poignant. A group of widows had gathered, a group familiar with death and used to the rituals of mourning. But Luke, the gospel writer who also wrote Acts, gives us a detail that is new. The widows are not just weeping, they are passing around garments and clothes that Tabitha had woven. “Here, Peter, look at this. See how skillful she was.” “Here, Peter, look at this. Look at the weave here, how much care she took to get it right.” “Here, Peter, look at this. Look at this beautiful cloth. Oh, Peter, it’s all that we have left.” You can see them running their fingers over the clothes…their fingers which are instruments of memory, recalling the life of the woman who wove and wore these clothes….they hold onto these garments as if for dear life.
You can hear the echo of the voices that spoke to the father of the little girl who came to Jesus for her healing. “The girl is dead…why trouble the teacher further?” Tabitha is dead. Why ask Peter for more that what we have? Why ask God? What we have is this cloth. What we have are these threads.
Peter is not content with the cloth, though. He doesn’t even seem to be interested. He sends the women out and he gets down on his knees beside the lifeless body. He prays. Maybe he prays loud prayers of deep anguish. Maybe he is silent, remembering other cloth. Those linen wrappings rolled up in the place where Jesus’ body lay. Aeneas’ bed rolled up in a corner. The curtain of the temple ripped in two to symbolize God’s holiness unleashed in a world of death, no longer contained in the expected places.
Whatever he prays, he finally turns to the body and says very simply, “Tabitha, get up.” And because the world is a different place now…because life is something that the disciples have come to expect now…because Jesus has walked out of the tomb…because the tomb is empty now…because when God desires it even death cannot be obeyed…because Tabitha has things yet to do and the world has wonders yet to see…because of all of these things, Tabitha opens her eyes, looks at Peter and sits up. No shouts. No fuss. The miracle is not for her. Tabitha had already been experiencing the eternal life Jesus promised. The miracle is for those in the next room. Peter takes her hand and helps her stand.
Then he calls in the others – the saints and the widows, Acts says – and presents her alive. Walter Brueggemann, the great biblical scholar, makes a great deal of who this audience is. “The wonder is witnessed and attested only by saints and widows,” he says. “What a pair! The saints are those who did not flee from the smell of death. The widows are those who live every day in their vulnerability, at the edge of death. They are the only witnesses. The non-saints, the ones who fear death, were gone and did not stay to see the miracle. The anti-widows, the ones who work death on the weak, were not there. It takes a certain kind of witness to see the newness! They stayed in the chamber of death and were there for the surprising gift of new life.”[i]
Do you see what’s going on here? New life is breaking out because the church – Peter – was not content to live out of the old ways…the expected ways. The church – Peter – was not going to hold back anything from God’s power for fear of looking foolish…for fear of being disappointed…for fear of being caught up short. Who does what he does here? Who goes into a room with a dead body and expects new life? Who looks at leftover clothes and expects that they might still have a purpose?
Nobody does this. Nobody who lives in the world you and I live in. But when the church has been at its best it has always believed that the rules of death and destruction and dissipation do not apply to God. And when the church has believed that it has been at the center of history, transforming the world, reconciling people to God, and bringing new life where there was none.
Who would have believed that a motley group of disciples who scattered at the death of their teacher, and huddled in fear behind locked doors as he lay in the tomb would, in the space of a generation, rock the foundations of the Roman Empire? Who would have believed that Irish monks living on the edge of the world would climb into boats made out of animal hide and sticks and cross the waters to bring the message of Jesus Christ back to Europe when the Dark Ages fell across the land? Who would have believed that the strong walls of racial prejudice would fall across the United States because of white and black people riding buses together and sitting at lunch counters many of them because they had heard a different message in their Bibles than that being professed by the enforcers of segregation? Who would have believed that Methodists, traveling on horseback and meeting in small groups would transform the wilderness regions of this country, even places like the Eastern Shore, into places where God’s word would be heard? Who would have believed that farmers at Franktown Church would hear a challenge from a visiting preacher and challenge him back so that the Potato Project of the Society of St. Andrews would be started and feed hungry people throughout the country? Who would have believed that we’d be sending people to Russia, mosquito nets to Africa, money to cancer research, prayer shawls to the sick, and baby supplies for Hispanic migrant families all at the same time? Who does these sorts of things? We do, brothers and sisters! When Christians see an empty tomb they have to stop believing that there are places that are off-limits to God. When Christians see a Risen Lord they have to stop thinking that there are places God won’t go. When Christians see that dead people are walking around they have to believe that maybe they can to.
Someone was reminding me this week of the story of a church in a small town that was very upset when a bar opened up right next door to the church. Right away the church began to pray that God would do something about this problem – that a place that could lead people astray would be taken away. Every week they prayed that God would burn the place down.
Then one night, the bar burned down. Everybody in the church was joyful. But the owner of the bar sued the church. Took them to court. The judge thought it was an unusual case, but he accepted it. The judge asked the bar owner why he had brought suit and he said, “Well, they prayed that my business would burn down and then it did.”
The judge called the representatives of the church up and they said, “Judge, you can’t hold us liable for this. All we did was pray. We didn’t set a match to the place.”
The judge finally threw out the case but when she did she chastised the church. “Seems to me,” she said, “that the bar owner believed in the power of prayer more than the church did.”
That’s who we are at our worst. When the church holds back because it is afraid of being fully implicated….when we live our lives as if God can only be trusted with what we can’t handle by our own reason and our own abilities…when we see parts of the world or parts of our lives that seem broken beyond repair and we hide them away and do not offer them to God…when we think, despite our best words to the contrary, that there is no ultimate hope, no ultimate redemption, no ultimate transformation…when we doubt that love is truly the engine at the center of the universe…when we go through the motions of faith…when we ask for God’s blessing but don’t really expect it…when we look at our wounds full on and decide that they’re just too deep for even God to handle…when we sit with the mourners and handle the clothes and admire the weave but notice all those holes…well, then we are holding out on God and denying the victory that Christ has won.
I will admit, because it happens to me, that there are times when I keep saying the words because I don’t know what else to say. There are times when I say, with the man who spoke to Jesus, “Yes, of course, I believe, but God, help my unbelief.” There are times when I doubt and times when I hold out and times when I shrink from the promise and fall back on the reasonable way that the world works. It seems much safer that way. Why risk being disappointed? Why risk putting myself on the line? Why risk appearing foolish or naïve or Pollyanna or weak or any of those things we sometimes wonder about?
I admit to all of that just like I admit to looking at craft supplies and seeing junk. Like I admit to looking a ball of yarn and seeing only a jumbled bunch of thread. But God does not look at us or the world that way. God looks at us and the world and says, “I can do something with that.” God looks at us and the world and says, “I can redeem that.” God looks at us and the world and says, “Yes, it’s a mess but I can’t make it beautiful. Yes, it’s vast and devastating and heartbreaking, but it is also rich, and amazing and fearfully and wonderfully made. There is no part of that person or that earth that I did not create. There is no wasted spot and there are no spare, leftover pieces. There is no gift that will not be used and there is no hurt that will not go unhealed. There is no being or person on the face of that planet that I do not love and value with all of my heart. I have given them everything I have. I have given them life and breath and I have given them a future by giving them myself, but giving them Jesus Christ.”
We have been given the gift of Jesus. We have been given the gift of Jesus! We have been given the gift of a God who did not withhold from us anything – including God’s own self. Did you know that you were loved like that? Did you know that the ruler of the whole universe came into the world for you? Did you know that Jesus didn’t hold anything back? That he wasn’t afraid to look weak or foolish or naïve? That he believed that whatever we ask for in prayer God will receive? That he heals? Still.
So why are we holding back? Don’t you know that you are loved and gifted beyond all measure and reason? Give those hairballs to God. I can’t say what God will do with them. But I know that there is potential even there. Thanks be to God.
[i] Walter Brueggemann, “Blogging toward Sunday,” The Christian Century 4/24/2007, http://www.theolog.org/blog/2007/04/blogging_toward_1.html
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment