Let’s get right to the most important thing today: Happy Mother’s Day! No, it’s not a church holiday, but it should be. Mothers, thank you for all you do to get your kids here, to organize their schedules for acolyting, or reading, confirmation classes -- that’s to the mothers currently in the throes of it, and those who are on the other side. It’s the reality in many households that mothers do a lot of the planning and organizing of schedules, including for church. (You probably made sure your families got here today!)
We’re grateful for all you do.(I’m gonna extend some of that to myself this morning.)
This isn’t a church holiday, but there were a few nice coincidences this week with the church calendar and Mother’s Day. On Thursday we remembered one of the great saints of our church, Julian of Norwich. She was a mystic, a writer (she wrote the first work in the English language by a woman, in which she detailed and interpreted a series of revelations she had when she was 30. That was in the 1400s). She was probably also a wife and a mother. One of the things she’s best known for in her writing was her use of the feminine for God. She liked to call God Mother. Her sense of the Divine couldn’t be contained within a single pronoun, or title, or image. It’s a lesson I try to teach my own kids. In our grace at dinner I always make sure we use “she” as well as “he” for God, and was very pleased just the other week when Naomi said, unprompted, “God is great, God is good, let us thank her for this food.”
So it’s a good week to have remembered St. Julian.
By sheer coincidence, today we remember, in the church, some important women of the Bible. Or rather, one important woman, but who’s often grouped together with a couple others who deserve our attention, as well.
Tabitha, in our reading from Acts, also known as Dorcas her Greek name, lived in Joppa, modern-day Tel Aviv-Jaffa, on the Israeli coast. She was a seamstress. Her life was devoted to sewing clothes for the widows and the vulnerable in her community. There are fewer of them than there once were, but even today you can still find “Dorcas Societies,” groups of women who make clothing for the needy, of course named after this great woman of the Bible.
Until very recently in the church calendar of saints, Tabitha (or Dorcas’s) saint day was shared with two other notable women from the book of Acts: Lydia, and Priscilla.
Lydia was a dyer of purple cloth--probably a merchant, and well off (purple cloth being hard to make and expensive to buy). The apostle Paul met Lydia when he first ventured across the Mediterranean sea and landed in Greece. She was the very first convert to Christianity in Europe, and came to finance Paul’s work and travels as a missionary. Her home also became a meeting place for Christians before they were safe or of means enough to worship in public spaces. Christians in those earliest days gathered in homes, like Lydia’s.
Priscilla, whose story is also told in the book of Acts, was a travel companion of Paul’s. She delivered some of his letters, was a trusted adviser, and seems herself to have been a prominent Christian preacher and maybe even writer. There’s a theory that Priscilla wrote the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews, one of the most complex books of our Bible theologically.
Together these three remind us that women often had robust roles in the early church, as teachers, church planters, writers. Only recently have women been included again to the degree that we were in the very beginning. Tabitha (or Dorcas) even has the unique distinction of being the only woman in the New Testament for whom the feminized version of the word “disciple” is used.
So, getting back to Tabitha … in our reading today we learn that this great woman of good works and charity has died. Her friends gather around to remember her by washing her body, and showing each other all the incredible things she made. It’s a moving scene.
In my first year here at St. James, we lost Ethel Magnell, one of our most talented seamstresses. She was in her late 80s or early 90s. There’s a closet you walk by when you make your way to the Great Hall that used to be called “Ethel’s closet” and it once contained all sorts of her things: vases (she was also a talented flower arranger), sewing supplies, linens, and the like.
After Ethel died her son chose not to have a service here at St. James, so those who attend the weekly Eucharist on Wednesdays decided to do something small in memory of her on our own. By sheer coincidence THIS was the reading appointed for that very day: the story of Tabitha. We read it aloud, and then one by one people came forward to share their recollections of Ethel. Some even brought with them works of needlepoint and altar linens she had sewn or mended. It wasn’t at all planned this way, but it was as if WE were those very women in the story who 2000 years ago, yet in almost the exact same way, remembered their friend Tabitha.
I have to confess to feeling ambivalent about what happens next in the story from the book of Acts. Just as these women are remembering their friend in this beautiful way, the apostle Peter comes into the room, sends them all out, and proceeds to bring Tabitha back to life.
Hardly something to complain about, right?! We don’t know how young or old she was, whether her death was sudden and unexpected or came as a mercy, following years of painful decline. Whatever the circumstances, nobody wants anything more than that their loved one to be brought back to life. So kudos to Peter.
But what’s always impressed me most about this story, which Peter’s heroic, miraculous act makes it easy to overlook, is the quieter miracle here, one we witness (all the time) in the church still today: the love of dear friends gathering together remember, to memorialize, to honor a life lived especially selflessly and to God’s glory.
I’ve witnessed this miracle at St. James the Less, at the memorial services of many women (and men), but today (on Mother’s Day) I’m thinking of the women: Ethell Magnell, Edith Hart, Louise Clark, Patty Wessell, Ann Cashen, Marjorie DeLewis.
What we do here is exactly what those women did all those centuries ago around the lovingly washed body of their friend Tabitha. We celebrate lives lived in service to others. We promise to honor their memory. We remind ourselves, and the world, that a good life isn’t built around success or wealth or status, but around service.
A lesson for all of us on this Mother’s Day, and every day. Amen.