A sermon on Acts 9:36-43 & Revelation 7: 9-17 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

Yesterday morning, as I took my dogs for a walk around Royal Park, I witnessed a large spaceship land in the middle of the park. A couple of little green creatures with eyes on stalks got out, took some photographs and then flew back off into the galaxy.

You don’t believe me, do you? You think that I’m making a joke of some sort, or possibly that I’ve been overworking and I’ve lost the plot. There is probably nothing I could say that would convince you that it had happened, even if it had. And that’s okay because it didn’t.

But it is interesting that you couldn’t bring yourself to believe that, and yet if I stand up here and say that a bloke was dead and buried for a few days, but then he came back to life again, nobody says I’ve lost the plot. For some reason you’ll believe that one, or at least you’ll figure that it is my job to believe that one so I’m not only allowed to say it, I’m expected to say it. 

It is fascinating to think about what we will and won’t believe,  can and can’t believe, and to ponder how we deal with the stories in the Bible that, if they were anywhere else but the Bible, we wouldn’t believe because they have little or no connection with anything we have ever experienced.

I had two different ideas for tonight’s sermon, and I think there might be just enough connection between them to take the risk of trying to combine them into one sermon. The link is to do with the challenge of trying to believe and hope in situations where it seems impossible to believe or maintain hope.

The story of the raising of Tabitha is one of those stories that we wouldn’t believe if it wasn’t in the Bible. Perhaps even being in the Bible doesn’t rescue its believability for many of us. We’ve never known anyone to be seriously dead and then come back to life, and we would never expect it to happen. When that whacko religious sect insisted that they would soon see the resurrection of that little girl who had died because they had denied her her diabetes medication, most of us thought they was a bit deluded. Or massively deluded. Most of us would not seriously think it was worth praying for a dead person to be raised back to life. And so we find a story like this rather implausible. It can’t happen now because, in our experience, it has never happened before.

But plausibility is not necessarily a good criteria on which to judge the possibility of things. There are lots of things that sound implausible until they happen and we get used to them. Artificial Intelligence seemed implausible only a couple of years ago, and to many of us, it probably still does. Maybe you read Julia Baird’s article on the ABC this morning, where she described what happened when she experimented with AI by confiding in it about a genuine emotional issue as she might a therapist. At the end of the article, describing her shock at the results, she said, “I know every second it is growing almost infinitely in capacity and intelligence. I know its potential is immense, so immense I can barely fathom it. But what I wasn’t expecting was that … it could be sophisticated and disarming when it came to intimacy. Honestly, this terrifies me.”

So what we find plausible at any given time is not a reliable guide to what is actually possible. And sometimes that’s terrifying. We need to be careful not to write off this story about Tabitha too quickly just because it has never happened before. Lots of wonderful things that happen have never happened before. Maybe God is doing a new thing. Maybe too, the importance of this passage is not just as a piece of history. Maybe it isn’t even history but it is true in some other way.

Let me briefly show you something about it. One of the things that Luke, the author of this story, does consistently is to shape stories so that they call up the memory of older stories. So here in the book of Acts we get a number of stories that cry out to be compared to stories in his earlier gospel, and a number of those stories echo back further to stories from the Hebrew Scriptures of ancient Israel. This story of the raising of Tabitha by Peter begs us to compare it to the raising of Jairus’ daughter by Jesus. And not just because they are both stories of raising the dead. Let’s have a look at the details. 

Luke writes in Greek, but in this story he takes the unusual step of giving a translation. We are told that this disciple who died at Joppa was named Dorcas in Greek or Tabitha in Aramaic. When any of us talk about Rita and Frank, and we’re speaking English, we use their English names. Many of you probably don’t even know their Chinese names. The only reason we would go to the trouble of mentioning both versions of their names would be if we were making some point about their names. So given that Luke was writing in Greek, why did he need to include Dorcas’ Aramaic name as well? What point was he making?

Well, back in the story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter, Jesus said “Little girl, get up” which in Aramaic, Jesus’s native language, was “Talitha Cum.” Luke didn’t actually mention that translation in his telling of the Jarius story, but he was certainly familiar with it because it was spelled out in Mark’s gospel, and Luke appears to have written his gospel by editing and expanding Mark’s. So now in this story, Peter, whose native language was also Aramaic, says “Tabitha, get up,” which in Aramaic is “Tabitha Cum.” Talitha Cum, Tabitha Cum. Almost the same. And almost certainly a deliberate connection. By adding the otherwise unnecessary translation, Luke is ensuring that his original readers, being familiar with the language and stories, would have recognised the echo of one story in the other.

What Luke wants us to know is that the Jesus story is not over. Jesus might not be physically present anymore, but his influence in the world is undiminished. What he did in body before is done by his Spirit through his disciples now. The power of Christ to bring new life is undiminished from one story to the next. Luke is highlighting a pattern in the actions of God, a pattern of acting to bring life out of death, a pattern that continues.

I know I struggle to believe that life can come from death. Death always looks so powerful, so final, so complete. And the forces that produce it seem so inevitable and so unchangeable. Its approach makes me feel weak and helpless and depressed. And as often as not, words of resurrection and hope have a hard time getting through to me through that. There is this whole build up of experiences that tell me that the powers of death win, that tragedy is the end. That pattern is more familiar and therefore often more persuasive to me than any pattern of God breaking it to bring new life out of death. 

One of the areas where I struggle with those feelings, and with a struggle to believe, is around the exercise of power in the world. This was my second sermon idea for tonight, and it brings me to our earlier bible reading from the book of Revelation.

The exercise of power and political leadership have been all over the news lately. I guess it is always a big theme in the news, but it has been much bigger than usual in recent times. We’ve had the wild ride of Donald Trump’s second presidency, and his constant willingness to push and test the limits of his power. In today’s news he is seeking to suspend people’s constitutional right to legally challenge their detention by the government.

Then we’ve had elections in numerous countries including Germany, Singapore, Canada, and now Australia, and in all of them, public perceptions of how much the politics and leadership styles of the candidates were or were not like Donald Trump have played an unusually large role. And then, of course, we’ve had the highest profile and most theatrical election of them all, the election of the new pope.

I think there are two layers to what depresses me most as I watch all this. The first is that the public is so often drawn to ego-driven leaders who project a muscular, strongman image, and who accumulate and wield power with ruthless but theatrical efficiency. Anthony Albanese may have just ridden to power in this country by downplaying that in the current climate, and emphasising his “kindness is not weakness” message, but away from the public eye, the machinations taking place in the Labor party backrooms over the divvying up of the electoral spoils of cabinet positions show very little sign of kindness.

The second thing that depresses me is that I’m not really any different from the general public on this. For the most part, I get sucked in by the same things. I too feel myself gravitating towards leaders whose apparent strength and power reassure me that they’ve got things under control and that the world’s chaos can be held at bay.

And yet I long to be a wholehearted and true follower of Jesus who is depicted in the Revelation as a slaughtered lamb seated on a throne. It is a deeply paradoxical image, and one that couldn’t be more at odds with the mainstream images of power in our world. John’s gospel too does this quirky thing of repeatedly looking forward to the day when Jesus will be lifted up in glory, and then at the end it subverts those expectations by revealing that the moment when Jesus is lifted up in glory is the moment that he is lifted up on the cross to be executed – helpless, rejected, fragile, vulnerable; to all our usual ways of thinking, utterly powerless and devoid of glory.

The vision in the Revelation says, as we heard tonight, that there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing with all the angels and the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the slaughtered Lamb on the throne, singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

I so want to believe wholeheartedly in that radically different vision of power – power and leadership that is made perfect in vulnerability, in service, even in apparent weakness. I long to be able to trust unwaveringly in the capacity for that kind of slaughtered-lamb-power to prevail and transform the world in its own image. I want to believe, but even in the Church I seldom get to witness it being practiced. I hope that the new Pope can lead in that way, but I know something of how hostile and ruthless the internal ecclesial powers arrayed against him are, and how difficult it is for even the best to avoid being compromised and defeated by that.

I desperately want to believe, but there are some powerful forces at work against the possibility of us believing like that. We have been strongly conditioned to believe only what we have seen with our eyes and touched with our hands, and I haven’t seen anyone like Tabitha raised from the dead and I’ve only ever fleetingly seen anybody effectively exercise political power from a stance of voluntary vulnerability.

We say we believe in these things, and trust in these things, but if we are honest, it is a huge struggle. Even those of us who have been in church for a long time are often used to a sort of divided mindset where we choose to suspend our disbelief rather than actively trust. Can we go further than that? Can we trust in the way of Jesus, however falteringly, beyond the limits of our own experience?”

Part of the good news is that God does not require us to have a 100% unshakeable faith before we can be accepted as God’s children. Jesus does not require that we have it all together and feel confident about everything before he will do anything good in our lives. Resurrection is happening. The Holy Spirit is active in the most deathly situations to bring about hope and life. 

That’s what our gathering at the Lord’s table is about. We come here and remember a horrible death, an apparent failure, and we find here the makings of resurrection and a whole new world. As you receive this bread and wine you are receiving the broken and vulnerable life of Christ so that resurrection can take place in you. 

And it doesn’t matter if your faith is weak or strong, Christ will be here, offering his life so that you may be freed from the power of death. It’s almost like a vaccination, although please don’t take me too literally here, it’s not a magic formula. In this bread and wine, God is present to make you increasingly immune to the powers of death. God is here giving you life. Wherever death still threatens you or holds you captive, God is present for you, saying “Little child, get up, take my body, take my blood, and know resurrection and new life.”

So accept Jesus at his table, all of you. Especially if the powers of death and despair seem to be overpowering you at present. We all have doubts and fears within that cry out in need for the life of Jesus. The life of Jesus is about to be put into your hands. Take eat, and know life.