This scene from the Book of Acts is faithfully familiar yet also a bit frustrating. Both aspects of it are because of the specific details Luke, the writer of both his Gospel and the Book of Acts, chooses to tell us.
He tells us about a woman known by two names, someone comfortable being herself in two cultures. She is Tabitha, a Jewish convert to Christ. She is also Dorcas, a citizen of the wider Greco-Roman world. Both names have the same meaning – she is a “gazelle.” Such a gracious, gentle name reflects the details shared about her character. Luke insists we know she is faithful to her Lord, a good and truly charitable person, a maker of clothing for economically and socially vulnerable widows and other marginalized neighbors. We like her. We admire her. We immediately appreciate how she is a gift to her faith community and beyond. We therefore also feel the heavy weight of the news about her falling ill and dying. When her friends display examples of her charitable handiwork while standing, weeping in the room where her body rested from its life labors … it has a familiar feeling to our own way of grieving and honoring the deceased.
And even more than this funeral home-like scene, we are also quite familiar with how her friends pleaded for help, desperate to have the reality of death somehow reversed so their gazelle could leap back to living and giving and loving them and others. We can hear their soft, sobbing laments over why such a kind soul and gifted spiritual leader had to suffer and die.
Along with the entire Book of Acts, it’s widely believed Luke wrote his account of this sorrowful scene that took place in the coastal town of Joppa (some 30 miles northwest of Jerusalem) about sixty to seventy years after Jesus was born. It is therefore part of Luke’s continued witness to the amazing resurrection of Jesus after he was crucified, dead and buried around the age of 33. Doing a little math, we can conclude that this scene from chapter 9 thus happened within the first thirty or so years of the church. Why is this detail important to understand? Because it means Jesus and his resurrection and all of his holy words and miraculous deeds wern’t all just some ancient, curiously compelling, future-hope oriented story. To that small but swiftly growing early church community it was all very fresh and relevant and absolutely relied upon. It all lived on through the Holy Spirit empowered ministry of Jesus’ first disciples, particularly exhibited in the person of Peter, whom Jesus had chosen to be the rock upon which to build the church (Matthew 16:18).
So when Tabitha’s women’s circle from church called for Peter to “Please come to us without delay” they did so with tremendously real hope that he would quickly bring God’s resurrection power. And this is exactly what he did, traveling straightaway from nearby Lydda to the upper room where Tabitha’s body had been washed and laid to rest. Then, after asking the widows to step outside, he knelt down to pray. In sanctuary-like solitude, a pathway was opened up for the Holy Spirit to bring resurrection power into the room. This woke Tabitha from the sleep of death. Peter next gives her his hand and helps her up (Luke’s details are really quite lovely). From that moment on, she showed herself to her faithful friends and went on to bear witness and help build up the body of Christ believers.
When I read all this, I realize something that frustrates my faith. Perhaps it causes the same for you. It’s the realization of how desperately I want to be able to be an agent of resurrection power in this world. If called upon like Peter, and like Elijah long before him, any one of us would respond without delay. We’d be humble and prayerful as the Holy Spirit worked through us to bring back from death any child of God from any circumstance.
But I’ve never had this direct experience of helping God resurrect someone here on earth. I don’t know of anyone who truly has. And yet every day there is at least one human story when I desperately want to help make this happen. I especially want to help bring back to life precious lives viciously cut short by people who execute violent evils. I’d leave town immediately and be in Boston, in Newtown, and in so many places around the world painfully etched in my heart and mind. I trust you’d do the same.
Rather than just sit around feeling frustrated, I instead choose to ask questions that help shift my faithful perception and invite me to accept what God would have me do to help those in shock and sorrow. Is the holy resurrection power that flowed immediately through Elijah and Jesus and Peter and Paul still at work today on earth as it is in heaven, but in a different way? A way that may seem less miraculous but nonetheless demonstrates God’s redeeming love?
To this question I offer a faithfully emphatic “Yes.” One reason I come to this conclusion is summed up well through a colleague in ministry who has preached these words about resurrection – “We do not know what resurrection will mean for us in the end. We cannot know how it will feel or work or look. But we do have evidence it is so. God has woven resurrection into our daily lives so that we can learn the shape of it and perhaps learn to trust the strength of it when our own times come.” (Barbara Brown Taylor)
Easter friends, where are we seeing and helping to weave God’s resurrection power? How are we learning the shape of it? To trust in its strength so as not to be overcome by death and evil while devoutly waiting for ourselves and others to experience it?
I’ve found the shaping and strengthening of it is always amazingly and inspirationally present when individuals and communities of all sizes respond to death … especially when it’s a sudden and great tragedy. I’m thanking God that I’ve been finding abundant evidence of it well at work in so many responses to last week’s bombing in Boston.
One particular response points to the absolute breadth and potency of its strength. It happened three days after that killing and maiming horror struck down the innocent. Does three days later sound symbolically familiar? I’m speaking of the resurrection weaving, shaping and strengthening that happened at an interfaith prayer gathering at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. This served as a focal point for Bostonians … and by extension all of us … struggling to find comfort, renew their spirits, and express their care for one another.[i] Genuine prayers and other words of much needed comfort and encouragement were shared by various clergy and civil leaders. I felt especially empowered by these faithful words offered by President Obama -- “You’ve shown us, Boston, that in the face of evil, Americans will lift up what’s good. In the face of cruelty, we will choose compassion. In the face of those who would visit death upon innocents, we will choose to save and to comfort and to heal. We’ll choose friendship. We’ll choose love.”
Beyond the eloquent words and big gatherings that get a lot of press, resurrection power has also been spread through all kinds of direct care to victims as well as through all kinds of acts of kindness. If you look for them, you’ll find story upon story upon story.
I saw one particularly moving image of it online. It is two young boys in Iraq standing close together while holding a sign that says in English and in Arabic, “We mourn with Boston.” I wonder if they are brothers. Whether they are or not, I will choose to hold this hope-filled, unifying image of them in my heart as I pray to understand why two other brothers chose to terrorize us.
Praise God, such restorative responses of peaceful, loving solidarity are familiar. They are also frustrating because it so often seems it takes great tragedy for us to offer and to take notice of them. Yet there is never a time when one child and many children of God aren’t in need of it. I think we need to strive toward more consistently believing in and calling for and becoming agents of God’s resurrection power. We need to more intimately and immediately trust that Jesus and his resurrection and all of his holy words and miraculous deeds aren’t all just some ancient, curiously compelling, future-hope oriented story. For every Christian and every church community, I pray it will stay very fresh and relevant and absolutely relied upon. Christ is Risen … by God’s grace may we with deep faith keep seeing where He’s gone and keeps going. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment