Grace Presbyterian Church
April 17, 2016, Easter 4C
Acts 9:36-43
Get Up
I don’t like to
refer to them as ‘minor’ characters. It might be that they only appear in these
biblical stories briefly, and sometimes they don’t even get names, but they
aren’t ‘minor’ or else their stories probably wouldn’t have been included in
these gospel and early-church narratives; as John puts it towards the end of
his gospel, what they left out about Jesus and his deeds and his followers
could fill a whole library to overflowing. So, for now, I’ll call them ‘brief’
characters, to acknowledge that they aren’t characters who appear frequently or
for a long stretch of the story, but only appear once, are part of the story
briefly, and do not appear again. Still, their stories are important to tell.
For such a ‘brief’
character, we do get an awful lot about Dorcas. Among other things we get two
names for her – Dorcas is the name by which she is known in Greek, while
Tabitha is the Aramaic version of her name. We also find out that whichever
name you use for her, it would translate into English as “gazelle.” That’s a
lot already about a person who never speaks in Luke’s two-part narrative of the
earthly life of Christ (what we call Luke) and the story of the early church
(the “Acts of the Apostles” from which we read today.
But that’s only
the beginning of what we learn about Tabitha, or Dorcas. We are also told, in
passing, that she was a disciple. If you’re thinking that might be unusual,
you’re right; Tabitha is the only woman for whom Luke uses the word μαθήτρια,
the feminine form of the Greek for “disciple.” None of the women who traveled
with Jesus and the twelve, nor any other woman in Acts, gets this designation
from Luke. Furthermore, we find out just how hard Dorcas worked to minister to
the poor of Joppa. We see this in a particularly poignant scene where many of
the people of Joppa had gathered where Tabitha’s body was laid to grieve,
showing each other the tunics and cloaks and shawls and scarves that she had
created for them. Can you, in your wildest imaginings, conceive of a more
powerful witness to the influence of a single life than this? Dorcas was
nothing less than a one-woman faith-based anti-poverty initiative, using her
relative position of privilege to work tirelessly for those less fortunate in
her town.
And now she was
gone, and the poor of Joppa literally did not know what become of them.
Notice I didn’t
say “poor citizens of Joppa,” and for good reason; quite likely no one in the
room was a “citizen” of the governing authority of that time, namely the Roman
Empire. In a place like Joppa the main concern for the poor that Rome was
likely to show was that those poor stay the heck out of the way of Rome. It is
entirely possible, maybe even likely, that Dorcas (and maybe some of her fellow
believers, possibly) was the only one standing between them and complete
destitution.
And now she was
gone.
How much of this
was made clear to Peter when he was begged to come over from Lydda, where he
was at the time, Luke does not tell us; all he indicates was that the two men
were sent to say “please come immediately,” and maybe that was enough to get
Peter to go. Maybe he remembered the time when Jesus had been begged to go to
the home of a little girl, daughter of a man named Jairus, ultimately to raise
that little girl up from the dead. At any rate Peter goes with the two men and
is led immediately up to that room were Tabitha had been laid, with the scene
of grieving poor widows around them, showing her handiwork to all who came.
Not unlike Jesus
before him, Peter had everybody else leave the room, and then knelt to pray.
It’s not hard believe that Peter’s prayer might have gone something like this:
OK, Lord, what have you gotten me into here? I mean, preaching is one
thing, getting thrown into jail is one thing, but this? Just because I saw you
raise people like that little girl from the dead…I can’t do this. You know
that. If anything is going to happen here, Lord, you’re going to have to do it.
On the other hand,
I would not presume to guess how the Lord responded to such a prayer, if indeed
Peter prayed it. But we do know what happened next: Peter told Dorcas to get
up, and she did.
Peter then called
the others back into the room to see the very much alive Tabitha, and we are
then told that “many believed in the
Lord,” presumably because of what happened there. Clearly one can imagine
many being impressed by the miracle of a woman who was dead being raised to
life. We see in other places in scripture how some will respond to this kind of
miracle with an immediate response of belief, so that wouldn’t be a shock.
I suspect, though,
that there’s also another level of “belief response” at work here. Remember who
Dorcas is; our one-woman faith-based anti-poverty initiative, a woman of
resources who gave of those resources for others who did not have them, maybe
even at the expense of her own health or well-being. Were there other women
like her in Joppa, or was she really the one, the only one, standing in the gap between the poor and oblivion? Was
she really a one-woman initiative?
Whatever was the
case, the raising of Tabitha, or Dorcas, maybe meant something different to
those whose lives had been salvaged by her generosity and tireless work. A
miracle, yes, but maybe it was a miracle with a particular meaning, one in
which Tabitha was not the only one being saved. In the words of Presbyterian
pastor Heidi Peterson,
Many who heard about Tabitha’s
venture to and return from the other side believed, perhaps because it was a miraculous
event. Or perhaps because of what the event revealed about God. The widows
would not be abandoned. God would not allow it.[i]
Notice
that Dorcas never speaks in this passage, and as this is the only place in
scripture where she is mentioned, we can say we never see or hear her say a
word. She was no preacher, not a prophet, and doesn’t get the label “full of the Holy Spirit” that Luke
applies to others in his gospel and history, like the martyr Stephen. And yet
the witness of her work was such that her death was sufficient reason to yank
the foremost of the apostles off his given journey to be there to do…whatever
God would allow or enable him to do. She mattered that much, because her work
mattered that much.
Her
work was to extend herself for those who were the most marginalized of society
at the time, those who were routinely crushed by the machine of the Roman
Empire and the patriarchal structures of both that empire and the religious and
societal structures in which they made the mistake of losing their husbands to
death. And for this she mattered, not necessarily to the Roman governor of the
region or the important leaders of the city, but to the poor widows, and to the
fledgling congregation of which she was a part.
And
she mattered enough to God.
What
then does this mean for us?
We
have Tabithas or Dorcases in our congregation; you know who they are. Do we
leave them on their own to do the work? Do we support them in a way that
recognizes the absolutely indispensible work they do in the face of crushing
need?
Is
there more we can do? Are there more Tabithas among us, who simply need our
support to in turn be there for those in need?
What
do we want our witness to be in this place? Are we merely about the business of
survival, or are there avenues of service we need to be exploring and opening
up on this stretch of US-441 where we stand?
Are
we going merely to talk the talk, or will we walk the walk?
Dorcas
did the latter. Dare we?
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Heidi A.
Peterson, “Clothed With Compassion” (Acts 9:36-43), Christian Century (April 18-25, 2001), 11.
Hymns:
“Christ Is
Risen! Shout Hosanna!” (PH 105); “The
Lord’s My Shepherd, I’ll Not Want” (PH
170); “For All the Faithful Women” (GtG
324); “There Is a Balm In Gilead” (PH
394)
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