Sermon for April 29, 2007, Dorcas, Who Made Clothes

Easter 4 C, Acts 9:36-43, Psalm 23, Revelation 7:9-17, John 10:22-30

The gospel of John reports a conversation of Jesus in the Temple during the Festival of the Dedication. That would be Hanukkah.

Let me remind you that Hanukkah commemorates the military victory of the Maccabees a century and a half beforehand. The Maccabees led the war of liberation from the Hellenistic empire of the Seleucids. The Maccabees were a family of Jewish priests who became heroic warrior priests. They rallied the Jews against an enemy far more powerful, and they liberated Jerusalem against overwhelming odds. They chased out the Gentile soldiers, they cleaned out the Temple from its Hellenistic profanations, and they made Judea an independent state. This miraculous victory is commemorated by Hanukkah.

But the victory was not a permanent solution because the Maccabees were not the house and lineage of David. And the independent state did not last long. The Romans came and took it over. The Romans were pragmatic, and let the Temple be, and most of the Jews in Jesus’ day were content to suffer what they knew, but everyone believed that if the Messiah came, his job was to double the victory of the Maccabees, this time permanently, this time initiating "eternal life", which they understood as the dawn of the new age of the world without end, Amen.

So of course the people want to know if Jesus claims to be the Messiah. If so, they have to consider if they will follow him, at some risk to themselves. The battles of the Maccabees cost many Jewish casualties before they turned the tide. It’s only fair that he declare himself. If he is the Messiah, then everybody’s in for it, for better or worse.

Jesus moves to Shepherd language. Of course it was theological language, pointing to God, as in Psalm 23. But it was also political language, royal language. King David himself had been a shepherd of the sheep and then the Shepherd of his people. When Jesus uses this language, especially at Hanukkah, he is talking like the Messiah.

But as the Messiah, Jesus was a failure — at least according to the Messianic expectations of his day. He failed to accomplish anything expected of him. He made absolutely no difference in the political realities of Jerusalem. From this point of view even his resurrection wouldn’t help. What did that have to do with being the Messiah? He got something for himself, perhaps, but what did he get for his people? What difference did he make for the rest of us? He escaped, but left us here.

This critique of Jesus is one particularization of the critique of the God of Israel. Where was God in the Holocaust? It is one particularization of the critique of God in general. Where is God when innocent people are slaughtered? Where was God in the life of this unfortunate boy with the guns who seems to have been miserable his whole life long?

We may well be disappointed in the power of the resurrection if we are looking for certain kinds of victories. We will be disappointed if we do not learn to surrender our expectations, and open ourselves to different expectations. We have to learn a different set of standards of success and values of victory, what kinds of things God does for us and where God is to be found.

I want to move the story of Dorcas. Her name means Gazelle. It is remarkable that she should have been raised from the dead, and not somebody else.

You notice that Peter was living in Lydda, not Jerusalem. That’s because he was in exile. The Christians had effectively been kicked out of Jerusalem. They had been living joyfully in Jerusalem for the first few months after Jesus’ resurrection, their numbers growing. As pilgrims came into Jerusalem for the various feasts, they got converted to the new movement, and when they went home they took the good news with them, and the movement spread, with Jerusalem at the center.

Then Stephen was killed. He was the first martyr. The opposition boiled over, and the Christians had to flee Jerusalem. We saw last week how Saul went chasing them as far as Damascus.

And yet they kept believing. They did not act disappointed. They must have had a powerful experience of a new kind of life. Even in exile and persecution they still felt a part of something new and different in the world, which gave them joy and did not disappoint their hope.

I expect that Dorcas was one of those who expressed the hope and contributed to the joy. She will have made her living as a seamstress, and she made extra clothes for the widows, who by definition tended toward poverty. Most people then had only one set of clothes to wear, and the poor did not have cash. She dressed them in clothing they delighted in. You can tell by her two names, Hebrew and Greek, that she crossed the ethnic and religious boundaries in doing this. She expressed the values and victories of the new kingdom of the Messiah. Notice, the Messiah is more interested in the approval of widows in poverty than of the elite.

They valued Dorcas so much that when she died they asked the Apostle Peter to come and do the service. She deserved the honor. They show off to him the clothes that made them proud. When Peter sees what she did, he takes a leap of faith, and asks God to resurrect her.

Why hadn’t he done this for Stephen, the mighty preacher? Why ask God to raise Dorcas and let Stephen stay dead? The raising of Stephen right there in the middle of Jerusalem would have been a powerful vindication of the movement, compared to this very private raising of this unknown woman upstairs in a house in a half-pagan town.

It’s not just because she made clothes. But custom clothing for the poor. That Dorcas will have taken each widow seriously, as an individual, measured her body, chose the fabric, selected the color, cut the cloth, stitched it, and dignified and honored this widow with a tunic to be proud of and rejoice in demonstrates the trophies of this kingdom. Loveliness for elderly women. Such are the triumphs of his Messianic rule.

I expect that Peter sensed a defining moment here. Oh yes, this is what we are about. These are the victories we’re after. This is why Jesus rose from the dead, and how we can express it in the world.

Beloved, this is to encourage you. This is to encourage you double. First, in modeling what kind of expression God wants from us, the kind of miracles we are expected to do as disciples of Jesus. Raising people up, by custom clothing for the poor, if you know what I mean. I am not worried about convincing Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens and other brilliant intellectuals of the kingdom of Jesus, while the people whom Christ cares to be convinced are the widows and the poor.

And second is to encourage us in looking at our own lives. Learning to recognize the power of God in our own lives. I know that we are often led to look for it in the wrong places, in very worldly standards of success and victory. Can you recognize the power of God in much more mundane things, but mundane things that break the usual patterns of who is in and who is out and who gets honored and who is lovely and what gets prized? You can look in your own life and see the signs of God in small clear victories of generosity and love, and be encouraged.

The vision of in the reading from the Revelation is not of the future, but of right now. It’s how we look right now from a heavenly perspective. From an earthly point of view, we look like a rag tag little bunch of half-believing semi-Protestants in a dark and dingy building not sure about forgiveness and afraid to make too many sacrifices. But the way the way you look to heaven right now is a multitude of saints and martyrs who have done great things and are all decked out in shining robes so lovely I can hardly look at them and when you sing you sound like a hundred philharmonic choruses. That’s what God can hear in your voices. That’s how you look to heaven right now.

Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.