The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
April 25, 2010
Vol. 13 no. 17
To paraphrase a song, I know a girl named Tabetha. I have met her on a handful of occasions, but since she is only about 10 I do not believe she remembers me. She is part of a multi-cultural family: father is Palestinian-Californian, mother is Turkish and they live in New Jersey. She speaks English, Turkish and Syriac at home. Her name was chosen quite intentionally, as you may guess, the Aramaic word for “gazelle.”
For some reason, many a church has preferred the Greek version of that name in the Book of Acts, Dorcas. Plenty of “Dorcas Societies” in churches all around, often following their patroness’ avocation of sewing and knitting clothes for those who need them. This Dorcas or Tabetha was a lot older than 10 - and a lot harder to resurrect.
The Gospel according to Luke and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles were meant to be a two-part work, both written by the same author we call Luke. The structure of these two books is rather calculated - the Gospel is the Jesus book and Acts is the book of Jesus’ disciples. Parallelism runs amok in the two works: Jesus does something in the Gospel and an apostle performs pretty much the same thing later on. It is intended to encourage the reader that you too may literally follow in Jesus’ footsteps.
Tabetha’s healing closely parallels Jesus healing the son of the widow of Nain (Luke 7:11-17), a person who also had definitely died amidst great community anguish. Jesus and then Peter simply say to the dead people, “Get up!” Not that simply, however, for they both use verbs that have to do with resurrection. Resurrection is what we are always doing and what we are always about.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan