What Is Your Witness?

What Is Your Witness?
Acts 9:36-43;
Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30

Some days you can’t help but be a Presbyterian and celebrate the Reformed theology gathered and systematized by John Calvin. We are fortunate to believe in a God who not only has not abandoned the world but is active directly and indirectly in caring for the world. We live in a world where God has an infinite and ineffable purpose and has arranged things so that when we need comfort and embrace God is there in the details.

Paula and I were blessed Friday night to attend a performance of Johannes Brahms’ “Ein Deutsches Requiem” performed by the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. The Brahms’ work is not a traditional requiem following the texts of the Latin Mass which celebrate the departed. Rather Brahms carefully wedded texts from the Old and New Testaments of Luther’s German Bible to comfort and console the living. He begins with the wonderful words of Matthew 5:4: “Selig sint...” – “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” The concluding seventh movement uses the words of Revelation 14:13: “ ‘Blessed are the dead who from now on die in the Lord.’ ‘Yes,’ says the Spirit, ‘they will rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them.’ ”

The Requiem was introduced by one of the symphony’s bass players who is a marathon runner and who participated in the Boston Marathon. He had passed the finished line and his cheering family members had cleared the area some time before the bombing took place. He said it was fitting that the symphony’s performance was a could be a tribute to Boston, the runners, the first responders, the injured, and the families of those who died.

We have our instantaneous electronic media to thank for telling us about the Boston events. Most assuredly that same media is to be thanked for the follow up and subsequent capture of the alleged perpetrators, one dead and one alive.

We Americans are shocked when frightening and tragic events like this happen in our country in places like Oklahoma City, Aurora, Newtown, Columbine, New York City. We are often equally taken aback when natural disasters strike: torna-does in places like Joplin; hurricanes like Sandy and Katrina; earthquakes; snowstorms and blizzards; explosions like the one in West, Texas. We would like to think that we are immune to tragedy and suffering and death, that we are too big, too free, too prosperous to have it happen here, too good to succumb to the reality of the world.

And it is reality. Places like Syria, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Mali, Egypt, South Sudan, Bali, Caracas, North Korea know these kinds of evil events on an all too frequent basis.

The reality of Boston, West, Newtown, Damascus, and Baghdad and other places around the world is not really all that different from the reality of Joppa and its Christian community where Tabitha/Dorcas died. Joppa was a community that was battered by illness, disease, and loss. Those are the same things that affected us this week as we listened to the news from Boston and as we tried to make sense of the Senate’s refusal to consider additional measures for registration of legal firearms. These are the same things that affect us every week as we lose another friend or relative to cancer or another vicious disease. We unknowingly eat harmful foods, breathe noxious air, live with levels of stress, carelessness, depression, mental illness, and societal dysfunction that compound the deleterious effects of seemingly insignificant activities and decisions.

The church in Joppa lost a pillar of the church. Dorcas was a beloved saint. Her ministry was far reaching among the widows. She was renown for the scope of her work of caring and sewing. “She was devoted to good works and acts of charity.” Dorcas wasn’t a professional church person. She didn’t have an M.Div., or a D.Min. She wasn’t a commissioned ruling elder. She was herself, a devoted and caring seamstress whose daily activity reminded everyone of the love of God that embraces the world. The community was distraught. That we know her by both her Aramaic name – Tabitha – and her Greek name – Dorcas – suggests that she was known for her charity far beyond the community of Christ’s followers.

We can get caught up in the details of Peter’s raising Tabitha/Dorcas from death. To do so is to lose the more important miracle that happened. Yes, Tabitha was brought back to life. But more importantly the community was healed.

Healing is something that we all need. Healing is something that we all seek, whether it is through medical and pharmaceutical therapies; or through disciplines of diet, prayer, exercise, meditation, or martial arts; or through cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, or couture; or through trying to keep up with the Joneses or trying to make ourselves to be the Joneses that everyone else tries to keep up with. Walter Brueggemann said at the Presbytery’s Spring Fest last week that we live in a hostile culture that is committed to consumerism, militarism, self-indulgent narcissism, meanness, and endless productivity. All that adds up to an anti-human lifestyle which is anything but the good that God created.

The emphasis in the account isn’t on Peter. It is on the community that believed in the embracing compassion of God and joined in witnessing to power of God as they saw it in the everyday living ministry of Dorcas.

This was a community of resurrection hope, and Easter community. They had reason to believe in a God who transcends the categories of birth, life, and death, a God who is uniquely present – not absent – in the midst of tragedy, illness, unbearable pain and loss. None of us, nor all of us together, have the answers to the questions of life that are so often asked in sobs and tears, anger and anxiety, fear and frustration. None of us can know for absolute certainty the will of God – for Dorcas, for ourselves, for our loved ones, for our community, or for strangers in Boston or countless other localities.

C. S. Lewis said that humility is not thinking less of ourselves, but rather, thinking of ourselves less. The humble prayer does not ignore our needs and desires. It places those wants and wishes into the larger context of God’s creative dominion. There is a distinction between praying for a cure, which seems to dictate to God our desired outcome, and praying for healing, which can come in a hundred unexpected ways. God’s Spirit will intervene on behalf of our prayers, yet the healing that comes often surprises us and causes us to catch our collective breath.

Communal healing requires that we overcome the intense privacy and individualism that are the cultural icons of our day. As tension and fear mount, we all want to hide in bunkers that shut out the world rather than let it in. Jesus did not hide from sin and death, from evil and extremism, but faced it fully, even to the cross. God did not cure him of death, bur healed the sin of the world through the combination of his life, ministry, death, and resurrection.

Frederick Buechner has written,

When it comes to putting broken lives back together—when it comes, in religious terms, to the saving of souls—the human best tends to be at odds with the holy best. To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do—to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst—is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. (1)

The people at the Joppa Church witnessed God’s power in their midst and were enabled to become witnesses with Dorcas. It was not her day to die or to remain dead. That would be for another time. Right now God was in their midst transforming their lives. They were living in the present, they were opening themselves to the activity that God was creating in them and through them. They were engaging the world, not running from it. They witnessed God’s love just as all the people who ran towards the injured in the Boston blast. They are witnesses of healing not disease, witnesses of reconciliation not division, witnesses of love not hate, witnesses of God not the world.

What is your witness.

(1) Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 46; cited by Stephen D. Jones, “Homiletical Perspective: Acts 9:36-43,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), Year C, Volume 2, 427, 429, 431.
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.