Tabitha Arise

Sermon:"Tabitha Arise"
Text: Acts 9: 36-43
Date: April 25, 2010
By: Kendall Brown

A while ago, Emory College hosted a speaker who was an expert on Russian religion and culture. He told about attending worship in a Russian Orthodox Cathedral. This cathedral is beautifully decorated with icons – pictures of saints, apostles, Biblical heroes, Mary the Mother of Jesus and of course of Jesus, himself. The icons cover the walls and ceiling and are awe inspiring. In that sacred space, the worshipers remained standing for the entire service. The professor became entranced by the icons and was admiring their beauty. As he, told the story, suddenly a man behind him whacked him on the shoulder. The man said, “you are disturbing our worship, this is not a museum!” The professor's admiration of the icons was disturbing the worship of others around him. Why? You see, in Orthodox worship, the icons are windows to the divine. The intent is to see God through them and that is worship. In my language, the icons create a worshipful thin place where one can draw near to God. They are intended to be seen through, but not stared at as the professor was doing. His staring at the icons in that setting was about as obnoxious as someone's cell phone going off in the middle of a public prayer, a movie, or an opera.

(Story told by Scott Hoezee and accessed via www.textweek for this Sunday.)

This story has some guidance to give us as we approach today's lesson from Acts. Think of the story about Tabitha and Peter as an icon – a window to look through and see the power of God to which the window gives us access. It is easy to get caught up on the details, especially those that jar our rationalistic sensibilities. What is important for us is to see through the window to the truth and the power that is there for us to find in and through the story. We can get all hung up on the questions that come to our mind. Questions like: did this mini resurrection really happen? What happened to Tabitha after this event? How long did she live? Did she go back to her life of service in the community? Or we can try to make the story fit into our frames of mental reference points by explaining it as symbolic. I doubt that the author, Luke, intended for this story to be heard as having only a symbolic meaning. On the other hand, I doubt that Luke was all that concerned about rationally explaining exactly what happened to people who would be reading the story two thousand years later. I do believe that Luke is relating a story that came out of the early life of the church in Joppa. I also believe that Luke's purpose in telling the story was that the story served in the same way as an icon. The difference being that icons are viewed and stories are heard.

For Luke, the central theme of Acts is that the church was the Body of Christ in the world after Jesus was gone. Being the Body of Christ, the church had the same power and authority that Jesus had when he was with Peter and the other disciples. Among those powers, was the power to conquer death even as Jesus had done in the resurrection and in his ministry when he raised the sick young girl and Lazarus.

Sometimes I am amazed by the way events in my own life end up running in parallel with the Scripture lessons that I am reading. That happened this week. As I was reading and studying this story from Acts this week, I was also in touch with some former parishioners in Massachusetts. They are upset and knew that we would be too because of the death of Ann. Ann was a modern day Tabitha or Dorcas. Every church has at least one. There are often many more, but you need at least one to have a church at all. Ann was legally blind and had received her elementary and high school education at the Boston School for the Blind. Although her eyes didn't see very well, Ann saw things that everyone else missed. She could read a person like you and I can read a comic strip. She could spot a phony a mile off, I guess by the sound of their footsteps. No one wanted to try to pull the wool over her eyes because it couldn't be done. She was as sharp as a tack, had a great sense of humor and made the best pizzelles (an Italian cookie) that I will ever eat. She hadn't been feeling all that well since October. This past week, she was hospitalized and operated on for cancer. She died a couple days after the surgery. The cancer was too far advanced. That was the news I was getting as I was reading about Tabitha.

Ann was a good friend of ours. We would have loved it if her minister could have gone to her room this past week, like Peter of old, said to her, “Maiden, arise,” to translate today's word a little more specifically, and to have her cancer cured and her life restored.

But I know better and I don't expect that type of miracle. Still we prayed for Ann. The church community, a community of love of which Ann has been a part, prayed fervently for her. I believe those prayers provided a spiritual environment and surrounded Ann with an embrace of love, strength and wholeness that she herself told another friend that she felt and was helped by. If I were still her minister, I would have gone to her bedside. I might have gotten there a few minutes before she drew her last breath. I might have arrived after she died. In either case, it doesn't matter which, I still would have very well said a prayer – that prayer would have been the same as Peter's at Tabitha's bedside, “Maiden, arise.” “Ann, arise.”

You see, in Acts, the word, “arise,” used here is also found in a few other places in the New Testament. It is the same word that is used as a verb in reference to Jesus' resurrection. It has a very specific use. It doesn't mean to be revived or resuscitated, nor simply to awake and get out of bed. It means in this New Testament usage, to enter into the resurrected life of Jesus. It means for Tabitha and for Ann and for you and me to be in that same life as Jesus has entered. I also believe that live people don't have to stop breathing and dead people don't have to start breathing to enter into that life. It is the gift of eternal life that God has given us. That is a portion of the truth to which this iconic story points us. It is a truth, that like the icons in the Russian cathedral, deserve standing worshipfully in awe of and giving thanks to God for all the gifts of this life and of life eternal.