Acts 9:36-43
May 9, 2004
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
My mother worked as a seamstress for a living. At B.F. Sportswear located on Boylston Street in Boston, she along with rows and rows of other Chinese women would “chair yee.” They competed over garment pieces that had easy straight stitches and paid top prices and resented having to sew the zippers. I can still remember how my mother would complain that such and such “girl” was liked by the foreman and got to sew the higher priced pieces. Whenever they could, they would take bundles of cloth pieces home to sew on second-hand black Singer machines so that they can add to their meager earnings.
When all the pieces have been completed, my mother would pile up her little white slips of paper for each garment sewn on top of the lighted sewing machine. Each slip of paper was worth so many cents. My job since I was going to elementary school, preparing for a high-paying job someday, was to add up her day’s earnings. I learned very early in life that “chair yee” was not a way to make a living.
We who are parents, guardians, care-givers, and even elders in our community want our children to be able to make a living. We want to see our children having enough, be comfortable, and independent. And if you are the children, you also want nothing less. You stay in school, plan to get a good job, dream about settling down with someone you love, think about buying a house and finally look forward to watching basketball on your 30 inch LCD TV! Someone once said that if there was any god that Chinese Americans universally worship, it is the god of money—to get rich.
Roman or Catholic
In Thomas Cahill’s book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, he points out that the entire world is divided into Romans and catholics. He wasn’t talking about the Roman Catholic Church or Christians who are Roman Catholics. Cahill was saying that the qualities of Romans are to be rich and powerful. Romans are people who run things their own way and must always accumulate more and more, because they believe in their guts that there will never be enough to go around.
The qualities of catholics, on the other hand, are compassionate and caring. Catholic people believe that all humanity makes one family and are convinced that every human being is an equal child of God, and that God will provide for our basic needs.
Which camp do you find yourself falling into? Are you more Roman or more catholic?
The truth is that there is some Roman in all of us as well as some catholic. Romans build roads and great information systems. They erect soaring skyscrapers, design beautiful clothing, engineer incredible computer networks, and keep jets in the air. Romans are the 200 companies that the Chronicle listed this past week that are pulling our sluggish economy out of recession.
Catholics, in contrast, are committed to loving the outcasts in an extraordinary way. They volunteer in soup kitchens, work with the homelessness problem in our city, visit the residents in the nursing homes, and devote a week a year to perform mission work.
Although the Roman approach to life is very different from the catholic approach, the two are not mutually exclusive. We find ourselves able to be both Roman and catholic. The reason why my mother sewed clothes in the factory or that we go to our jobs every day is to be able to accumulate enough resources to make a living. Caring for those who are less fortunate is usually an after thought.
But the question for us is: “What kind of focus does God want us to have? Although the world tends to reward Romans, the Lord has an incredible incentive package for the catholics of this earth.
Tabitha, the Seamstress
In our Scripture for this morning, we see that in the town of Joppa, a small Christian community founded by Philip the evangelist, was one of the disciples, a woman named Tabitha. In Aramaic, it means, “gazelle” and in the Greek, her named would be Dorcas. The first thing we learn about Tabitha is that she is “devoted to good works and acts of charity.” This makes her one of those good “catholic” persons that we just talked about.
But we also discover that she is well known for making tunics and other fine clothing. She’s a Joppa entrepreneur, a businesswoman who has accumulated some significant wealth through her stitching. Along with her “catholic” concern for the welfare of others, she’s got a “Roman” streak of making money in her as well.
We read that Tabitha becomes ill and dies. This loss of a Christian leader devastates the Christian community, and the church members send an urgent message to Peter, “Please come to us without delay.” When Peter arrives, the widows are in the upper room, gathered around the body of Tabitha, weeping and holding her fine tunics and other clothing. The widows were all there because if it wasn’t for Tabitha, they may have no one to care for them. Widows, by definition, are poor, on the bottom-rung of society, without anyone to represent them or protect them. These are the ones to whom Tabitha has given her life.
Peter asks them to go outside, kneels to pray, and then says to the body, “Tabitha, get up.” Miraculously, she opens her hers, sees Peter, and sits up. You can just imagine the excitement that ran through the house on that day.
Tabitha is restored to life as a sign of the death-defeating power of God, and the news of this miracle races through Joppa, causing many to believe in the Lord. But Tabitha is raised for another reason as well. This reason hits close to home to us today. The Lord needs people who are entrepreneurs like Romans, ready to achieve great things to behave like care-giving catholics who believe that good works and acts of charity are what Christians are made for.
The significance of Tabitha’s life was that she blended together her Roman ambition and catholic compassion. She didn’t keep the two apart, toiling over tunics 50 hours a week, and then performing an isolated act of charity with whatever time she had left over. No, the text reports that she was “devoted to good works and acts of charity,” meaning that these activities played a central role in her day-to-day life. She may even have turned her sewing factory into a mission factory, creating tunics and clothing for the widows and orphans of the community. She kept the Roman ambition and the catholic compassion sides of herself together, united in a single, seamless existence.
The Good Life
What is it like for us today? Are we more like “Romans” worrying that there isn’t enough for everyone so we work hard to get ahead, accumulating more and more or are we more like the “catholic” believing that ultimately everything that we really need to have in a good life always comes from God and is shared with everyone?
Peter Gomes has served as the chaplain at Harvard University for the past 30 years. He hears the expectations from his students and their parents about what they are going to do with their lives. While most graduates of Harvard are not going to have too many problems finding work in the world, Gomes has discovered that many of them are still asking the basic question: “What will it take for me to make a good life and not merely a good living?”
A good life is above and beyond a good living. Romans know all about what it takes to make a good living, and most of them achieve this goal through long hours, hard work and focused determination. But does that make it a good life? Living a good life takes catholic compassion.
What Peter Gomes writes about is that young people today are discovering that true happiness cannot be found in the culture of materialism. Getting all of the gadgets and comfortable living styles is not enough. Young people want and deserve something better, says Gomes. They want a good life, real happiness and an opportunity to do something worth doing. They want to be able to live their lives and even offer up their lives, if required, for something worthy of sacrifice.
Knitting Women
We have many Tabithas in our church today—women who have taken up the art and hobby of knitting. Many of you knew how to knit years ago but haven’t knitted for a long time. Others have never knitted before and are learning from others. And although you are not knitting for a living, you are knitting for a good life.
I know that many of you are knitting soft hats for women who recently completed cancer therapies. Some of you are knitting blankets and afghans for children in the hospital. And others are knitting sweaters or blankets for grandchildren and maybe there are even some who are knitting with the hope and prayer for children and grandchildren to come. Your act of knitting has inspired me to compare you with Tabitha, a disciple of Christ who was known for her devotion to good works and acts of charity.
As Tabitha’s sewing work was turned into mission work and had a powerful positive effect on the city around her, I wonder what your impact will be as the Tabithas of our church. How will you and all of us serve as a positive force in the city around us?
“Dropping a Stitch”—seeing Joy knit in the evenings, I know that there’s something call “dropping a stitch.” This is when you forgot one loop or stitch on the row you are working on. When this happens, you would go back to add it back on. There are people in our workplaces who remind us of a “dropped stitch.” They seem to always drop the ball on assignments and let you down. They don’t easily conform to others like how all the other stitches look in the same row. If we are only focused on the “Roman” aspects of work, this person would be easily dropped from the staff. But when we are committed to the “catholic” part of who we are, we would act with compassion and understanding. We would search for ways to affirm and help this person to succeed.
“Counting the Stitches”—when the women are knitting, you can’t talk to them. They are mentally counting each stitch and if you distract them, they get irritated because they might lose their count. If we are entirely focused on counting how much money we are making and forgetting how much love and care we can provide, we will not see that every person is an equal and a precious child of God. Keeping score or counting up all of the favors that others owe you would only oppress those who are already downtrodden and are in need of encouragement. Romans keep count but catholics are always calling it even.
“Tight Knitter”—as a knitter, you can knit and purl too tightly and what you have are too tightly knits. It’s called a “tight knitter.” We can be so tightly focused on what we may think is right that we unable to see that there are always different ways of seeing the same reality. When we are stubborn and rigid with our positions, we dehumanize others and deny ourselves from learning new things. Being a tight knitter eventually distorts what you are trying to create—it would be lopsided or uneven instead of it being beautiful.
“Leftover Yarn”—after you have completed that scarf or sweater, you may have all of these little balls of leftover yarn. I think about all those who are in our world and in our communities who are seen as leftovers—not needed anymore and left out and without any worthwhile purpose. These are the children in poor neighborhoods, the residents in nursing homes, the youth who dropped out of school, the homeless in our city. If we are only acting on the Roman side of who we are, we would have no need for them. But we also have the “catholic” side of who we are. Our compassion would call us, knitting women, knitting people to begin knitting to include these leftover people to become an important and vital part of our communities.
Maybe this metaphor of knitting doesn’t make sense for us who are men. Martin Luther used the illustration of a saw. A saw is unable to do any work on its own. It just sits there. But in the hands of a carpenter this saw can do work. When the carpenter moves the saw back and forth the teeth bite into the wood, and with each draw back and forth the wood is cut. The saw does not move itself back and forth in order to cut the wood, but in the hands of the carpenter who uses the tool the work is completed. It may appear that the saw is doing the work, but it is the carpenter in the end who is the source of the work.
The knitting needles are not doing the work to knit a scarf. But rather, it’s the hands that are moving the needles around the yarn that is creating the scarf. When God works through us, we are the hands holding the knitting needles or on the handle of the saw to do good works for a good life.
Mother’s Day
The celebration of Mother’s Day began nearly 150 years ago when Anna Jarvis, an Appalachian homemaker, organized a day to raise awareness of poor health conditions in her community, a cause she believed would be best advocated by mothers. She called it “Mother’s Work Day.” It’s the catholic side of women that we see. Today we take a moment to recognize and celebrate how daughters, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and mothers have shown us the meaning of compassion in our lives.
Women throughout history have served to remind us that when it is necessary for us to work to make a living, we must not entirely focus on making money and accumulating more and more. If we want the new life that Tabitha enjoyed, we will need to be a Roman who can act like a catholic, and love the outcasts of this world in an extraordinary way.
When it seemed like death has taken away the protector and care-giver of the widows, Tabitha is restored to them by Peter’s bold word of faith. In the name of Jesus Christ who bears the same life-and-death-giving power as God who created the universe, Tabitha is raised from the dead.
Every community, every family, every congregation exists within certain settled, fixed arrangements of expectations and roles. We are often told that we are to work hard for a living and the world will reward us for our accomplishments. Tabitha is to stay home and let the men devise an affordable welfare system. Peter is to stay with his fishing nets and leave theology to the religious authorities. Paul is to remain blind for how terribly he persecuted the Christians. Our women knitters are only to knit scarves for themselves and not worry about cancer patients and hospitalized children.
But the word of God comes to people like us and stands beside us. And we like Peter need to hurry without delay to see Tabitha for the widows need her. We may be trying to make a living but God is showing us that when we devote our lives to good works and acts of charity, we too will be blessed with the good and new life that Tabitha enjoyed.
Let us pray.
Dear Lord, lead us to understand in the midst of making a living that what we are called to do is to live a good life. Forgive us when we have overlooked those who are in need of compassion and love that we can give. And Lord, we give thanks for all those who have loved us like a mother in order that we may go out into the world today that desperately needs your love and peace. Amen.