Monday, April 26, 2010

Fourth Sunday of Easter Year C 2010

"Get Up"

04 Easter C 10

Acts 9:36-43

Psalm 23

Revelation 7:9-17

John 10:22-30

Happy Easter, church. Yes, it's still Easter. This is the fourth Sunday we're continuing the celebration and we have three more Sundays we're going to celebrate the resurrection. In Greek the word for resurrection is "anastasis." Remember that word because we're going to come back to it later this morning. It's a very important word. I might even argue that it's the most important Greek word you might ever want to know.

I've been led, I think by the Spirit, to preach this season of Easter on the book of the Acts of the Apostles. I'm kind of hoping that some of you, if not all, might read the book of Acts and ask yourselves, how much does our congregation look like or feel like this story? Can we see ourselves in these stories of many disciples and many congregations, of exorcism and healing and miraculous escape and dead folk coming back to life? Acts is the story of the church. Can we see our church today in this story?

Since Easter we've reflected on the stories of the people who were immediately affected by the resurrection, by the anastasis of Jesus. Last week we talked about a certain Pharisee named Saul who got knocked off his horse by the risen Christ. That was this same chapter, you know.

I noticed that this chapter, chapter 9 of the Book of Acts, keeps repeating a certain phrase. If you'd like to get out your bible and follow along, take a look at verse six of chapter 9. In it, the voice of Jesus says, "But get up and enter the city." Go a little farther to verse 11, and Jesus is speaking again here, this time to Ananias, and he says "Get up and go to the street called Straight." Now go to verse 18, when Saul is healed of his blindness and the scales fall from his eyes, and Luke says "he got up and was baptized." Now go on to verse 34, where Luke describes the healing of Aeneas by Peter, who says to him "get up and make your bed." Now go to verse 39 from the passage we read today, and Luke says that "Peter got up and went with them." And here finally in verse 40, we hear Peter say to Tabitha, "Tabitha, get up."

The phrase "get up" or "got up" appears many, many times in the book of Acts. There seems to be a whole lot of getting up going on.

In this particular case, we find ourselves at a funeral of a woman known as "Gazelle." Dorcas was the Greek name and Tabitha was the Aramaic name.

I suppose we have to travel a little distance to get to where this story is. We have to leave the world in which clothing can be bought for a dime at a thrift shop and cloth is cheap. We need to go to a world in which cloth and the dyes needed to color it were expensive. We need to go to the world where there were no clothing factories.

In such a world, a woman who had the time and money to make clothing for poor widows would have been a very wealthy woman. It's hard to tell from this brief story what readers of that day might have understood, but the idea of giving away clothes or even making clothes today is very different from the same idea then.

Tabitha is not a middle-class 21st century country girl with a Singer sewing machine and lots of cheap fabric at some nearby JC Penney. She is a powerful, wealthy 1st century woman, who uses a great deal of her own personal resources to directly support the poor around her. Not just lots of her time, not just lots of her talent, but lots of her money as well.

The widows gather around at her funeral and display the clothing she gave them. Now if this had been a matter of cast-off polyester pants suits or worn out jeans or sweaters with pills all over them, I don't think the widows would have bothered to take them to the funeral. No, I expect the reason the widows brought these things is because they were gorgeous. I suspect they were made of the finest materials and executed with the most thorough craftsmanship. How do we negotiate the distance between then and now? Maybe we could say they were the first century equivalent of first-run designer wear right out of a high-class Paris shop. This is what Tabitha was giving away to poor women. It wasn't just about helping out someone who was unfortunate. It was about making a statement.

Poverty then and now is feminized. The most at-risk of poverty, working or not, are women. A recent study shows that women are still paid less than men for the same work. An interesting discovery from former Wal-Mart execs is that Wal-Mart deliberately opened stores in rural America because they knew they could gather a workforce of cheap female labor from the less educated, more fundamentalist female population of such areas. The conservative church of course still teaches that women are somehow inferior to men and are supposed to be submissive slave labor to them.

In the cities, a poor woman doesn't bother with Wal-Mart. Once she figures out a waitress job won't feed her and her children or put a roof over their heads, once she and her kids have spent a little time living in a car, it's a no-brainer to get into the sex or drug trade. That or the welfare system, which is nearly a full-time job itself.

It wasn't much different then. At-risk women were a significant group among Jesus' disciples.Without a male protector or benefactor, many women had to turn to begging or prostitution. Some were lucky enough to come into some wealth, and these often were the disciples that offered up the first homes as places of worship of the underground Christian movement.

So when Peter says, "Get up" to this beautiful Gazelle, he is saying "Let this Spirit continue to move in the world; let this resistance continue; let this blessing to the poor go on. Let this testimony be made forever."

The reality of life is that we die. This Gazelle, this Tabitha, would go on to die herself. The point of this story is not about personal ongoing life. It's about a Spirit continuing to be present in flesh and blood action, here in this world. It's about that Spirit getting up again and again in someone's body, in many bodies, in all these who are clothed in white.

You remember that word for resurrection, anastasis? This phrase "get up" is the same word in Greek, just a different tense. In other words, when we say Jesus rose from the dead, the Greek really says, Jesus "got up" from the dead, that what we are celebrating in the season of Easter is "the getting up."

The church in the book of Acts is a ever-growing community in which people are getting up from out of their death, their blindness, their disease, their false beliefs. The church in the book of Acts is the getting-up people.

So let's ask ourselves today, church, is Paul getting up at Philippi? Is Tabitha getting up here in Deltaville? Is Peter, Aeneas, Ananias? Is the Spirit of God filling up the flesh and blood of the people here at Philippi?

Is Jesus getting up?

Amen.

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