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For the Presbytery of Tropical
Florida
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This morning, as we gather in worship, we remember. |
This morning, as we gather in worship, we remember. A year ago, we were gathered on the morn of the shuttle Columbia's last flight, praying together while it crossed the heavens like a star. We began our life together last year in shock and mourning, acknowledging the fragility of life, and its blessing. This morning, we are again shocked: this time, by the deaths of two children: young Jaime Hough, who attended middle school with some of our own in Miami; and 11 year old Carlie Brucia, abducted and killed in Sarasota. Stunned, we grieve for the lives of these children we have never met, lives cut off violently and too soon; and also, we mourn our own losses, naming in thanksgiving those saints who were among us just yesterday, it seems, who graced our lives and enriched our ministries. And how strange it seems, how strange and wrong that these small saints, children and elders, who mattered so much to some of us, should pass away almost unremarked, their work and their spirits unknown by the world, or soon forgotten. It gives me hope, then, to read in the bible this morning- To read how Luke interrupts his headlong dash through the explosive expansion of the early church in the book of Acts long enough to notice the death of one otherwise unremarked widow, The woman Tabitha. Why do our lives matter? The evangelist Luke has a tendency to be dismissive about the women in his church. Even in this story, this story about the woman Tabitha, called Dorcas. It was our own Ellie Cole, by the way, who died last Ascension Day, who first brought to my attention how Luke calls the men "saints" and "disciples," but the women, merely "widows." As if women who had the misfortune of being left behind mattered too little to name-- Even to name "saint." |
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We all have Saints in our lives; and we all have Others we don't, or won't notice |
We know the world is like this. Full of people too important, too busy, too distracted to notice the little lives around them. People who value the lives of others little, or who, more sadly, regard their own lives as being of little consequence. In their own minds, as in the world that disregards them, they are not "saints," merely something else, beneath Naming- Existing in the category "Other." We all have Saints in our lives; and we all have Others we don't, or won't notice. My "Others" may be different from yours.and yours, from mine. And sometimes in our church-too often these days-to our shame, we are making Others of one another, brothers and sisters bound together in Christ. "Others" whose faith, or habits, whose Covenants or Coalitions don't matter to us.or perhaps matter too much. Whose Christology is different from ours. Whose ways of believing, or living, are offensive to us. Who sit beside us on the airplane, on the bus, in the pew; but whom we have not acknowledged. They are not saints like us. They are "widows," Others.and most days, that is the end of it. But some days, God slips by our defenses, and it's not the end. One day, there was something about that woman--about Tabitha that Luke couldn't dismiss. Something that forced him to call her a title reserved, in his lexicon, exclusively for the most significant of men: he calls her Disciple. She was a leader in her community-extremely generous, Luke says. A woman
of wealth and influence, a woman who provided for her whole community
not just alms-but clothing in abundance, crafted with love and skill Tabitha, Dorcas, was known in the language of two cultures, a woman at
home in a cosmopolitan city, gracefully spanning the Greek and Hebrew
worlds making a home and a haven for all, in both worlds. No wonder the
women wept, and the men sent for Peter. No wonder Luke had no other name
for such a woman except Disciple. No wonder the women stood, when Peter
came, tears streaming down their faces, spilling from their hands garments
of linen, of wool, embroidered, plain- Their abundance and craftsmanship
mute testimony to the value |
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How do you measure the meaning of a life? How do you count its loss? |
Of the life that had been lost. Peter, seeing it all, was, Luke implies, himself overcome- How do you measure the meaning of a life? How do you count its loss? Peter sent the women from the room-not, I think, because he expected a miracle but because he had nothing to offer in the face of their pain. Collapsing at her bedside.he allowed himself to think- He sought a word, a spirit of comfort from God. Images flashed-Tabitha,
welcoming the disciples to her home. A child, dressed in a gown Tabitha had made, glowing with pride as she lifted her face for the water of baptism. A poor man, rags discarded, clothed in sturdy homespun, standing straighter, his dignity restored. Extra food, slipped onto the church's common table-always without a word. Packets made up and slipped into the bundles of the widows who were too proud to beg, but whom, everyone knew, had too little to live on. Only Tabitha noticed enough to care. Some of them, Peter realized, He had just herded from the room without a thought for their own grief. With shame he thought I don't even know their names. But she did, every one. Head bowed, he vowed to change his life. To honor their lost friend as the widows-rather, as the women, the disciples downstairs did. To open himself to the poor, the Other To live less provincially, more generously, more openly. To offer less of words and more of himself. Determined now, his sense of despair and loss began to lift, And a new hope, a bigger world, different than before, rose within him. Yes, he would honor Tabitha's life by letting the Christ presence So evident in her Break him open, spill out as he knew it longed to
do, Setting aside like old rags the limits and the lessons of prudence
and law. So that no one would ever be dismissed, disregarded by him ever
again. He thought about the invitation he had just received from that
tanner- |
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Who was it? |
Who was it? Yes, Simon was his name, too- Simon the tanner, whom he had resolved for the sake of ritual purity to shun- He thought of him and determined in a moment of reckless daring that he, That he, Simon Peter, would for Christ's sake, for Tabitha's, Open up his world, push boundaries aside. He would go gladly and stay at the tanner's home, and gladly anywhere he might be invited in Christ's name. Even, he thought grandly, even to the gentiles, if it came to that. Peter moved to stand, eager to tell the women that he understood now What they had been trying to say. She would live on in them, and in him, too. He rose to go, and in the bed before him the dead woman stirred. Tabitha, get up, he said, and his voice shook with joy And hand in hand, they descended the stair Two disciples, a widow and a man Descending like the Spirit of God, incarnate Rising like the Christ spirit out of their separate tombs of indifference, of death. Making, like the God who once and always is creating, the beginning of a new world out of the dead chaos of their thoughtless Otherness. Making our world. May the Christ Presence, In whose name we this day come to keep the faith--
rise in us for good, |
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The Covenant Network2515 Fillmore St - San Francisco - CA - 94115 |
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