Be the church. Protect the environment. Care for the poor. Embrace diversity. Reject racism. Forgive often. Love God. Fight for the powerless. Share earthly and spiritual resources. Enjoy this life.
This is one of the new “marketing efforts” from the national UCC offices. It’s on a banner in our narthex and on a rainbow banner in our fellowship hall. We now even have some bumper stickers with this “slogan”, which may really be more of a manifesto. It is a claim on the church…on the United Church of Christ…on this church. What, in this the 21st century of recorded western history…what, in this “advanced” age of technology and terrorism….what, in this age of postmodernism, post traumatic stress disorder, even post-christian terminology, does it mean to “be the church?”
The “Acts of the Apostles” comes right after the gospels in the Bible, and it is supposed to be the earliest history of the church, the events that occurred to the disciples right after Easter. The catch is that it was written at least a generation later, possibly by the same author that wrote the Gospel of Luke. In fact, we have many copies of Luke from antiquity in which Acts is attached…not like paper-clipped to it, but just follows it, like they were meant to be connected. At the very beginning of Acts, the author writes to someone named Theophilus, the same name that Luke’s gospel is dedicated to, saying:
In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught
from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven…
– Acts 1:1a
Then follows the book of Acts, which continues the tale, so to speak, and begins to lay out the “history” of the early church and tells what happens to Peter and John, disciples and apostles like James and Stephen, and even introduces us to a guy that Acts calls “Saul”, at least at first. He changes it to Paul. It is all part of this history. But history, they say, is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon. It is not necessarily what “actually” happened, but is, like our scripture, always subject to interpretation and point-of-view. Acts, for instance, tells the story of this Saul/Paul character very differently that Paul himself does in his own letters to various churches throughout the Roman empire, something we are studying a bit in the Bible study class right before worship – 9:30, in classroom one. What Acts really does instead of giving us some journalistic account of what we would call “actual” events, is that it tells us how one group of Jesus followers, some decades after the first Easter, saw the world and answered for themselves what it meant to “be the church.”
The passage today starts us off all the way in chapter 9. Maybe not the ideal spot to start, because we miss several key events in this “history”, like the startling conversions of an Ethiopian government official and the aforementioned Saul on the road to Damascus. We miss Pentecost, with tongues of fire and the coming of the Holy Spirit. And we miss out on Peter already healing people so that this miracle with Tabitha is not quite so surprising. But that’s the way it is with histories…sometimes you get plopped down right in the middle of them and you have to navigate the best you can. Hey, I’m not in charge of the Lectionary…or the calendar.
So, when we pick up Acts, we are told of a woman named Tabitha, which the text tells us in Greek is Dorcas. Both names mean “gazelle.” Names in the Bible are very important. This one in place, I think, because of who she is in the community, a community of men and women, Jews and Greeks, slaves and free that gathers now by her deathbed to care for and celebrate this woman who always welcomed them into her home. I imagine the women gathered reminding one another through their tears how Dorcas always been swift and graceful in welcoming someone new, someone recently widowed, into her home, always quiet and quick in bringing aid to anyone who needed it.
Tabitha was apparently good at sewing, too. She made clothes for people and they still wrap those clothes around themselves now, at her bedside…in mourning. But perhaps the most interesting feature of Tabitha is that she merits the only use of the feminine form of the Greek word for “disciple”, right at the start of this passage. It is a label used rather matter-of-factly right at the beginning of our introduction to her, you might easily skip over it. But since we’re dropped right in the middle of this church “history” we ought to acknowledge that such a claim…a female disciple…really bucks the system in the ancient world, and perhaps some systems still today. But that’s what’s happening while all these Jesus followers learn how to “be the church”. As Will Willimon writes in his commentary, “Common fishermen are preaching to the temple authorities, paralyzed old men are up and walking and changing lives, and a woman called Gazelle heads a welfare program among the poor at Joppa.”
There is a new configuration at work. Part of being the church means that we are working outside the box, where our claims about God’s incredible love without exceptions and God’s great care for all of creation pushes us to re-think things and this re-imagined world gets called the “kin-dom of God”, right here, right now. Somewhere, this story tells us, lies a subversive force that “transforms all structures and arrangements” (Willimon) and defies what we are all told, sometimes by the very churches that evoke this name, is the “divine order of things.” But who is in and who is out is turned upside-down by Christ, and the way of being the church to these Jesus followers in the first century Roman empire reflects it.
In Tabitha’s day widows languished on the very bottom rung of society’s ladder. They had no one to either protect or represent them since in a patriarchal culture, it is the men who control all of the resources. A widow, without attachment to a man, is among society’s most vulnerable citizens. And that is the very people to whom Jesus’ disciple Tabitha gives hope. In Joppa everyone knew and thanked God for this disciple of Jesus and now…now they have no idea what they will do. For this woman was the one cog in the machine of their lives that seemed to make something work.
So when Tabitha falls deathly ill, these widows and orphans gather to mourn and they call for Peter, but the text doesn’t say that they ask him for anything. They show off their clothes, perhaps tell him some stories about Tabitha, but they never say, “raise her” or ,“heal her” or anything like that. And Peter seems to have no idea what to do either. So he asks them to leave and he prays. And somewhere in the midst of that prayer, at some place while the words are echoing in his head or the familiar phrasing is slipping out of his lips he decides to do something. He decides to do what Jesus did. After all, Peter was there when he raised the young girl. Peter was there when he fed the five-thousand and healed the centurion’s son and stood before them glowing, with Moses and Elijah seeming to stand right next to him. So, why not? And Peter says, I think rather quietly, “Get up, Tabitha!”.
“Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up. He gave her his hand and helped her up. Then calling the saints and widows, he showed her to be alive. This became known throughout Joppa, and many trusted in the same way that Jesus trusted” ..starting first with Peter, who did nothing more than do what Jesus did.
Step one of “be the church” is forged in our trust. We are no less troubled than the community around Tabitha, no less concerned about our future, about what in the world will happen now. We are just as scared and worried, anxious and angry. And we probably make the same claims that they did – claims of a God who loves us all wastefully…of a God who cares about the sick and the poor…of a God who cares about our hearts far more than any doctrine. And the same question is before us – do you trust in that? Do we think that God is love? If so, do we trust enough in love to commit ourselves to it? Do we trust in the way that Jesus lived – welcoming the stranger, seeking love instead of giving in to fear, showing compassion and reserving judgment, healing and feeding and standing in solidarity – do we trust in this enough to actually live it, particularly when it is hard to do so, or when everything else in us says to strike back or to run away?
Being the church really has very little to do with this building, or a membership roll or any board meeting. Frankly, I’d say it’s really about far more than what we believe. It is about who we are. It’s about what we trust. It’s about what we do, particularly when no one is looking.
We’re on a journey over the next few weeks – a journey through Acts, but also a journey to discover what we really mean about “being church’, especially now in a day and age in which church is justifiably being questioned. Like the church depicted in Acts, we’re making this up as we go along, too…because God is still speaking. What is God saying? Is God saying it to the church? Does it matter anymore? I know what I think. How about you?