4 Easter

May 11, 2025

There’s a lot going on this weekend. It’s Mother’s Day, of course. Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate! It’s also graduation weekend at UW, of course, as well. And as I was coming up the bike path, I noticed that since Friday, the lilacs are in full bloom. It’s also the 4^th Sunday of Easter, often called “Good Shepherd Sunday” because each year on this Sunday we hear readings from John 10—the great discourse of Jesus on “I am the Good Shepherd.” While the gospel reading changes from year to year, every year the Psalm is Psalm 23, the most familiar of all of them: “The Lord is my Shepherd.” 

This may be my least favorite Sunday of the liturgical year. After 20 years of preaching, I don’t think I have anything interesting left to say about sheep and shepherds. So I thought we might focus our attention on the reading from the Acts of the Apostles. When I read the story of Tabitha, I’m always reminded of the women I grew up with, my mother, sisters, aunts and grandmothers. That’s probably appropriate for Mother’s Day.

When I was a boy, one Wednesday a month, my mother and my sisters would go to what was called “Sewing.” The women of the church gathered together to work on quilts, comforters, and other sewing projects that would be donated to relief sales or sent to people in need—after natural disasters, for example. I’m not sure when or if the custom ended, if it died out like so many other customs did with our changing culture. But such activities weren’t limited to once a month. My grandmother and aunts crocheted bandages—I remember their hands were always busy if we went to visit on a Friday night. As women, there were few opportunities to express their faith and in addition to preparing meals for potlucks or visiting speakers, sewing quilts or comforters, or crocheting bandages, were one concrete way of sharing Christ’s love with the world. 

Some women, two of my dad’s sisters, for example, became nurses and worked in Mennonite hospitals in the US or overseas. Others became missionaries, some with their husbands but a few went on their own. For most, though, their lives were focused on the traditional roles that had been established and there were limited opportunities to do more. Whether as nurses or as housewives, they followed Jesus in ways permitted by their community and culture. Many of them, whether literally mothers or not, were spiritual mothers to those around them.

Of course, all that was largely true of the Episcopal Church as well. Like many other parishes, much of the volunteer labor at Grace over the decades was done by the women of the church—beginning with the purchase of the lots on which our buildings now stand. Organized into guilds—the altar guild, the rector’s guild, and other groupings; after WWI, a guild was organized that met in the evening to accommodate “working girls”—no, not that kind, but women who were employed outside the home. As the culture changed in the late 20^th century, and the Church with more women in the workplace and then the ordination of women after 1976, the church’s reliance on the unpaid work of women slowly waned.

            In this season, the season of Eastertide, our selection of readings changes. Instead of the usual, “Old Testament, Epistle, and Gospel, on these seven Sundays of Easter we here readings from the Acts of the Apostles and the Revelation of St. John the Divine. I want to say a few introductory words about the book of Acts. It’s the second part of a two part work that begins with the gospel of Luke. 

I’ve said this often before but it bears repeating. There’s a geographic and temporal structure to the combined Luke-Acts story. The geographic structure is derived in large part from the Gospel of Mark as the story of Luke goes from Bethlehem to Nazareth and Galilee, where Jesus begins his public ministry, then continues with the long journey to Jerusalem where Jesus is crucified and raised from the dead. Here is where Luke diverges from Matthew and Mark, because in those two gospels the angels or men at the empty tomb tell the disciples to go to Galilee where the risen Christ will meet them. In Luke, the disciples remain in Jerusalem, where the Risen Christ appears to them, and from which he ascends to heaven after 40 days. Acts begins with the disciples stilled gathered in Jerusalem and Acts tells the story of their travels into the world taking the gospel with them. Acts ends with Paul in Rome. 

A second important structural element is the Holy Spirit, which comes down on Jesus at his baptism and departs from him at his death. Jesus’ last words in Luke are “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” The Holy Spirit then comes down on the disciples at Pentecost, and it carries them into the world, sometimes quite literally picking them up and moving them. It’s a movement that is full of drama and some conflict as this little band of Jesus followers tries to make sense of growth and change and to welcome Gentiles, non-Jews into their fellowship.

The little story we heard as our reading from Acts is part of that great move of the good news of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth. We are introduced to Tabitha, or Dorcas. The fact that Luke names her in both the common Aramaic language of the first-century Palestinian community, and in the Greek of the wider Hellenistic roman world, suggests that Tabitha herself straddles those two communities, that she may be at home in both. So this may be a subtle hint of the gospel’s move into the world.

Luke provides another little detail that is easily overlooked and full of significance. He refers to her as a disciple. In fact, Tabitha is the only named woman in all of the New Testament who is called a disciple. Luke tells us what that meant for her: “she was devoted to good works and charity.” She fell ill and died. Her friends had heard that Peter was in a nearby town, where he had healed a paralytic man, so they sent for him. 

Many of us can imagine their grief. Tabitha was clearly someone who was a pillar of her community, someone whose passing left not just an empty space, but whose gifts and commitment would leave a large gap. Perhaps they were wondering how they would get by without her energy and commitment. In a poignant scene, when he arrives, the widows show him all of the clothes Tabitha had made—some of the good works and charity to which she had devoted herself. Peter raises her back to life, and through this miracle, many in the town come to faith.

In restoring her to life, Peter bears witness to the power of Jesus Christ and the power of resurrection. It is a miracle that brings home to that little group of people that Good News of Jesus Christ, the transforming power of his love, knows no bounds. No doubt Tabitha, raised to new life, would return to her good works and charity but the miracle also led to others in that city seeing and knowing the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. 

We often struggle to see that power for ourselves, in our lives and in our world. The problems that we face, as individuals, as a community, a nation, and the world, seem so complex and difficult. The forces of evil that are at work seem overwhelming—gun violence, greed, apathy, white supremacy, that it is easy to grow discouraged, to despair and lose hope.

But the power of resurrection lives on in the world. Our faith that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead is a faith that proclaims God’s justice and love are more powerful than death; a faith that proclaims that there will be no hunger or thirst, that God will wipe away every tear.

To live in that hope is to practice resurrection. To look for signs of God’s transforming power and love, to devote ourselves to sharing that power and love. When we despair, when we grow faint, when our faith becomes cold embers and lies on a bed, Jesus calls to us and holds out his hand and says, “Get up!” May our faith be renewed and our hope rekindled by the power of Christ’s resurrection.