NOTICE TO ON-DEMAND WORSHIPPERS

In order to expedite posting the worship services here on our website, we are reducing the transcript to just the scriptures used and the message. Holy Communion is offered every Sunday. If you are worshipping with us online whether during the live-cast or through on-demand viewing, you are encouraged to have bread and juice or wine available as you watch the service and to participate in communion just as if you are present with us.

 

SCRIPTURE READINGS

God, open us to hear and receive your scriptures today as you would have us hear them, understand them as you would have us understand them, and to act upon them as you would have us act upon them.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.

*Scriptures this morning are from the NRSV.

Psalm 23

The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff– they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD my whole life long.

Revelation 7:9-17

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.

They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?”

I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.

They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Acts 9:36-43

Now in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was devoted to good works and acts of charity.

At that time she became ill and died. When they had washed her, they laid her in a room upstairs.

Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, who heard that Peter was there, sent two men to him with the request, “Please come to us without delay.”

So Peter got up and went with them; and when he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them.

Peter put all of them outside, and then he knelt down and prayed. He turned to the body and said, “Tabitha, get up.” Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up.

He gave her his hand and helped her up. Then calling the saints and widows, he showed her to be alive.

This became known throughout Joppa, and many believed in the Lord.

Meanwhile he stayed in Joppa for some time with a certain Simon, a tanner.

L:  The scriptures of God for the people of God.

A: Thanks be to God.       

Message – The Weaver*

Rev. Val

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing to you, O Lord, my rock, and my redeemer, and may you see fit to use me as a vessel from which you pour out your Divine Word.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.

I said I was going to avoid a “Mother’s Day” message, but then I read what Derek C. Weber of Discipleship Ministries wrote about today’s passage from Acts. I want to share the first part with you now. Dr. Weber wrote:

One day out of the blue, I got a phone call that startled me to my core. It came from Paris Health Care, the facility in Paris, Tennessee, where my mom resided. There had been an incident there; Mom wasn’t hurt, but they needed to let me know as her power of attorney that something had happened. They are investigating and would have to determine what would be next. It involved my dad and the care he provided my mom while she is there. They said it was hard to tell what had really happened that day in May many years ago. Happy Mother’s Day.

It was, in part, further evidence that dementia has a communal effect. The ripples circle out and wash over many of us. The threads that bind us together get tangled and twisted, sometimes broken or at least frayed to a breaking point. Sometimes we say and do things, even to those we love, that have nothing to do with them. But the threads have us so tangled up that we don’t know where the pain is coming from. All we know is that we hurt and wish it would stop. And every question feels like an accusation, every comment like a threat. It isn’t logical; it isn’t rational; it isn’t even right; but unless we are Vulcans like Mr. Spock, we rarely respond purely to logic. Those threads that bind us to others, family and friends and members of the body of Christ, get us so tangled up we don’t always think straight.

Take Mother’s Day, for example. You know that to ignore the holiday on a Sunday morning is to commit something akin to blasphemy in the minds of many people. You’ve had your ear bent by passionate souls on that score. Mothers are certainly due all the honor we can give them. I know I want to honor my mother, and I want to honor my wife as the mother of my children. And there are so many mothers who occupy our pews who deserve a little thank you, a little symbol that we know how important they are to us and to the community as a whole. What’s wrong with giving a little honor?

At the same time, I know that an emphasis on saintly mothers would grieve those who suffered with a mother who didn’t epitomize the kind of love that Hallmark sells to us on their cards. I know that calling motherhood the desire of God for every woman would wound those who have chosen to be childless or who suffer from infertility, or who lost their children in some heart-rending tragedy. And because within our community there are some from all those categories, a Mother’s Day celebration in worship is a tricky proposition. The threads that bind us together make us want to be sensitive to those to whom we are bound.

It’s hard to navigate among all these competing themes, hard to bring a word of hope in every situation. But there it is. And the more you wrestle with it, the more the only sensible response is the Monty Python Holy Grail response: “Run Away!” Cut loose those binding threads, shake off those relationships. “I am a rock, I am an island,” sang Simon and Garfunkel many years ago.

Except . . . I don’t want to live as an island. And rocks are just too . . . hard. I don’t want to cut the threads that tangle me into the lives of those I love. If anything, I want them to be stronger, tighter, more binding. I know it doesn’t make sense; it is potentially too painful. But oh, how I want those threads to stay connected. The threads from my mother that were growing so thin they were almost transparent—how I wish they were strong and vibrantly colored with her love and her teaching and her reproof and her forgiveness. The threads from my kids that are stretching longer and farther with each passing day it seems, how I wish they were shorter and younger and so full of the life we used to share. The threads that bind me to a congregation and are strained to the breaking point, how I wish they were like it was before so many mistakes, so many decisions, so many choices were made putting us in different places. How I wish we could hold on to what was.”

A few days ago, Adam Tyler, senior pastor at Farmville Baptist Church in Farmville, VA, wrote: “So yesterday and today, I’ve been working on the text for Sunday’s sermon (Acts 9:36-43).  And here’s something that stands out to me that I’ve never thought about before:

In the book of Acts, there are some big-name people who did good work for the kingdom.  Peter, Paul, James, etc.  Men and women who innovated, who preached before kings and councils, who spread the Gospel to new lands, and who lived out the fiery faith of Pentecost in incredible ways.  Absolutely vital leaders of the early church.

None of them were deemed so vital to the work of the Spirit that God raised them to life after they died to keep going.

You know who was?

Tabitha – who worked humbly and in a dedicated fashion in Joppa, making clothes for needy widows and tending to their needs.

That was so very important that God was like, “You know what?  I’m not ready for Tabitha to be done yet.”

That’s what I’m chewing on today.”

Tabitha’s threads, used to stitch clothing for those who needed it, wove together more than shirts and tunics and dresses and shawls. The way she worked with those threads provided a loving, nurturing example that wove and then held together her community so completely and so tightly that they could feel the void when she died. They were heart broken and I think they were also frightened … so frightened of going forward without her that they ignored the traditional religious laws for preparing a body for burial and sent for Peter.

They didn’t want to bury her. They wanted her back. They wanted a miracle! And they got one, didn’t they? But how? How did that miracle come about?

You may think that the miracle came through Peter and his prayers, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Indeed, both played a part in the miracle. Peter’s willingness to come when called, humbling himself before God, praying that God’s will be done, praying for her, praying for those who were grieving her death, praying that the threads she’d sewn into the lives of this community would continue to bind them all together. The prayers were very important.

You may think that the miracle came after he remembered what Jesus did that time he raised the little girl up from death, and that being a witness to that incident then was what gave him the ability to carry out a similar miracle here … and you wouldn’t be wrong. After all, Peter had greater faith than he realized, and Jesus had given him and the other disciples authority for works they did in his name.

But there was another part of the miracle that’s easy to overlook or miss completely. The people Tabitha cared for weren’t just desperate for a miracle. They didn’t prepare Tabitha for burial because they had faith that the miracle could happen. They sent for Peter not because they’d witnessed a miracle he’d done, but because they had heard about him, had heard about who he followed, and they trusted that he could help them. They were walking by faith, not by sight.

When we started, I told you the first part of Dr. Weber’s commentary on today’s passage. I’m going to close this message with the other part. Again, Dr. Weber wrote:

Like the members of a little church on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, Joppa First UMC lost one of the pillars of the church; no, of the whole community. And they decided to grab a desperate hope. You know their story.

The threads that bound Tabitha to the community were many and they were strong. And when the illness and death came to sever those threads, the community was bereft. Their hearts were broken, so they reached out to one who might be able to retie those threads, to reweave the tear in the tapestry of their community. They sent runners to Peter the apostle, who had just performed a miracle. And they thought maybe . . . possibly . . . But you notice they didn’t ask for anything in particular—just that he come, quickly. It wasn’t like that father who hoped Jesus could get there before his little girl died. No, Tabitha was dead. They washed her and laid her out in the upper room. They just wanted Peter to come.

They washed the body but didn’t prepare it for burial. They didn’t anoint it, didn’t wrap it. Maybe they did hope, a wild desperate hope. Maybe they hoped for something they couldn’t even bring themselves to speak out loud, or the sheer ridiculousness of it would ring in their ears and cause them to lose heart. Just come quickly, they asked. And, well, just come.

He did. Drawn by their threads, Peter came, quickly. And they fell all over themselves trying to tie him to her. She was a servant, they said, a devoted servant, lived in two communities, didn’t just care for us in the church, but for folks in the wider community. They called her Dorcas, ‘cause that means “gazelle” in Greek, just like Tabitha does in Aramaic. They called her gazelle, the folks out there, the ones she clothed. “Like this,” they pointed to the clothes that they wore, proudly pointing out the straightness of the stitch and the line of the seam and the perfection of the fit. They did a twirl like they were on a Paris catwalk. Peter smiled at their love for their sister and friend.

But then they stopped twirling as they caught sight of the body lying on the table in the middle of the room. How dare they smile; how dare they take pleasure in anything, even the work of her hands, in a moment like this. Peter felt the mood change, and he sighed, then shooed them out of the room and got to work—on his knees.

He prayed. What did he pray for? Who knows? He prayed for the threads to be binding. He prayed for the sake of the community who loved her so much. He prayed for her lying there washed and cold and ready for what might be next. He prayed for the will of his Lord to be done. Then he stood up and remembered another room with a body laid out. He was there with Jesus that day, saw him reach out his hand to the dead girl and whisper, “talitha coum – little girl rise.” So, Peter reached out his hand and said, “Tabitha rise.” And her eyes opened and locked with his, and the smile on his ruddy fisherman’s face caused her to sit up at once.

He opened the door to their joy and disbelief and thought to himself with a wry smile, “Now where have I felt that before?” Nobody seemed to notice when he left. He just passed by them, hugging and crying and laughing; and he smiled when he heard Tabitha say, “That seam is coming undone; where is my needle?” And he walked down to the seaside and knocked on the door of a man he hadn’t seen since they were boys. He never would have made this re-connection before, against the law, you know, because of the business that took place in this house. But he shrugged and thought, “Things are changing everywhere,” and he made himself at home with Simon the Tanner. And somewhere a face familiar to Peter lit up with a massive smile and then thought, “He has no idea. No earthly idea. Yet.”

Sometimes miracles happen, and those we thought gone are returned to us. More often, the miracle is that the threads remain, but they grow and change and become something new, something holy. And we find we can continue on after all. I am who I am because of my mother a disease can’t take that away, can’t undo the threads of my being. And whatever the future holds, I will honor her for what she has stitched for me, stitched into me. We are the lives we touch and that touch us. We are the threads we wear. Thanks be to God.

Credits:

  • Unless listed below, all works cited within the text above.
  • *Adapted in part or full from Preaching Notes, Discipleship Ministries Worship Planning Series.

Copyright Disclaimer: Under §107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for educational purposes. No copyright infringement is intended. All rights belong to their respective owners.

If you are able, please consider making an offering or paying your tithes through our secure online service provided by Tithe.ly. It’s safe. It’s free. It will help us continue ministry at Union Grove. Just visit https://give.tithe.ly/?formId=65149a30-5d42-11ee-90fc-1260ab546d11 and follow the instruction for making your offering. You may be prompted to create an account with them. There is no fee for the account or for making your offering through Tithe.ly. 

If you are not comfortable using a debit or credit card online, you can mail your offerings/tithes to:

Union Grove UMC
1151 Lane Drive
Friendsville, TN 37737

Please be sure to make your checks payable to "Union Grove UMC Friendsville".

Please note that 100% of offerings received during or from Second Sunday Community of Faith gatherings are redistributed to relevant community and national organizations. If you are making an offering after viewing a Second Sunday gathering, please designate "Second Sunday" (from the drop down menu on Tithe.ly or on the Memo line of your check) so we can ensure your offering is distributed accordingly.

For more information on how our offering receipts are used and our designated funds, please visit "For Those Who Are Able" on the menu bar at the top or bottom of this page.