Alma Mater A Sermon by Jeff Carlson St. Pauls UCC, Chicago April 17, 2016 Scripture: 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 compassion. 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. On the church calendar, we are in Eastertide. Eastertide is a season, like Advent or Lent, but for some reason we give this season short shrift. We really stress Lent - we ve got special Lenten devotional books from the UCC, and small groups, a time to be introspective and reflective, tilling the soil of our hearts, breaking up the hard ground. And all of that s good. Then Lent ends with this one, big blow- out worship service on Easter Sunday, and that s pretty much it for Easter. The Easter season is just not on our radar. I wonder what it says about us that we are more intenetional about Lent than Easter? Why don t we have Eastertide discussion groups? Where is the Eastertide Stillspeaking devotional book? The Anglican bishop, N.T. Wright remarks that Easter is our greatest festival. Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don t even have a New Testament; you don t have Christianity. If Lent is a time to give things up, then Easter ought to be a time to take things up. It s time to sow seeds, plant some cuttings, fill the garden with color, blossoms and fruit. This is the time to practice living the resurrection. i In our reading today we meet a woman who has been living the resurrection, but we meet her at her funeral. The name of the deceased is Dorcas, or, if you prefer, Tabitha. Dorcas never speaks in this story, and she does nothing; we only learn about her reputation after she s dead. Her obituary is just a few words, but they are a beautiful description of a beautiful life: She was devoted to good works and acts of compassion. Sermon by Jeff Carlson: Sunday, April 17, 2016 page 1 of 5 1
We don t know anything more about her life than that, except that she was apparently a good seamstress and she was deeply loved. When Peter arrives, widows are standing around her body, weeping and holding onto pieces of clothing, things she had made when she was with them. It s a familiar scene for anyone who has lost a loved one. You hold on to something that reminds you of her. On my walls at home hang several of my mother s cross- stitch embroideries. Joe s favorite quilt was made by his grandmother. Dorcas was clearly not a philanthropist who just sent a check in the mail, nor was she a volunteer who stopped in every now and then at the old widow s home to cook a meal. She wasn t the sort of person who dropped off used clothing in a bin, or did a walk- a- thon once a year for a good cause as great as all of those things are. Dorcas didn t serve from a distance. She had a relationship with the widows that she served. That s why they weep. They loved her. And they knew that she loved them. Behind the tears of those widows are conversations, laughter, sharing of stories, hopes, struggles, friendship. Dorcas shared her life with them. That s how she lived the resurrection, even before Peter raises her from the dead. She lived out her faith in the God we meet in Jesus: a God who comes to be with us - Emmanuel, God with us. Another Anglican, Sam Wells, distinguishes between working for someone and being with someone. ii Our national economy rests on professionalized systems of some people working for other people. The welfare recipient is the raw material for caseworkers, doctors, lawyers, mental health workers, drug counselors, police officers. This system defines our lives and societies as a series of technical problems to be solved. The sense of being a problem- solver is electric, he writes. And Christians can adopt that same mentality. You know what it s like. It s the volunteer s high: you get in there, identify the need, roll up your sleeves, solve the problem, clean up, go home and take a hot shower. It feels good! However, if you re the one who is the problem to be solved, it can be humiliating. Wells observes that God didn t come to us in Jesus as problems to be solved. God came to be with us. Jesus didn t eliminate hunger. He didn t institute a socially just society, with jobs and health care for all. Perhaps God could have solved our problems from a distance, but instead God came to be with us. God saves us through love. That s the resurrection life that you can see even in the brief description we get of Dorcas. But I want to know more about her life, don t you? I want to know more about how she came to follow Jesus. How she shared her life with those widows that were Sermon by Jeff Carlson: Sunday, April 17, 2016 page 2 of 5 2
weeping for her. But all we get is a short, though powerful, epitaph. Apostles like Peter and Paul, the great preachers and male leaders, get most of the attention in the New Testament. The story of Dorcas is just a brief backdrop to a story that s really about Peter. That s a tragic result of the patriarchal world of the Bible. I love the Bible, but it s still imbedded in its time. Peter might have been the mouth of the church, but Dorcas was the heart. There are many, many women whose memories need to be raised from the dead. I ve quoted historian Gerda Lerner before: Women have lived in a world in which they apparently had no history and in which their share in the building of society and civilizations was constantly marginalized. iii I would add: women s share in building the church has also been marginalized. One woman whose memory needs to be raised from the dead worked right here, at St. Pauls: Alma Atzel. Alma was not the mouth of St. Pauls. Very few of her words were recorded. But she was our heart. She had a ministry that spanned forty years and four senior pastors. Exactly one hundred years ago in 1916, Alma was a single, young woman. She was a member of the St. Pauls League, which was the young adult group at the time. There is no record of why she made the radical decision to go, but in December 1916 Alma hopped on a train heading to San Francisco. There she boarded a steam ship for Honolulu. And from there another ship to Yokohama. Then, on to China and inland to Shanxi Province where she worked as a nurse. Back in 1916, there were two worship services at St. Pauls, just like today, one at 9:30 and one at 11. And like today, those two services served two different populations with different worship styles. The early service was full of young adults and services were held in English; the later service was in German, and was full of the old families of the church. The St. Pauls League even published its own separate hymnal. That s right. Long before the red hymnal and the black hymnal there was the Blaubuch, the Bluebook. A hundred years ago, the work of building St. Pauls House really brought both congregations together. But the young adults of the early service also had their own outreach project - they sent $10/month to Alma Atzel in China. She was one of their own. They called her Our nurse in China. I can t imagine what life was like for Alma the loneliness, the great distance from home, the slow communication. No Skype, no internet, no phones. She craved letters. One thing that connected Alma to her home church was the Bluebook. A letter that she wrote in 1917 was published in the St. Pauls newsletter: I cannot tell you how dear the good old Bluebook is to me now. I am sure you would smile could you see me attending the Chinese Church Services. There I sit with my Bluebook. They sing all our good old songs in Chinese, Nearer, my God to Thee, Rock of Ages, What a Friend We Have in Jesus, Abide With Me. Of course, I can t Sermon by Jeff Carlson: Sunday, April 17, 2016 page 3 of 5 3
sing them in Chinese, so I sing along in English. I am often very homesick in those services. But the Bluebook songs always make me happy again. Perhaps you d think it funny to hear about a hundred people singing in Chinese, Nearer, my God, to Thee, and your friend Alma Atzel sitting right in their midst and singing alone with all her might in English. By the time she returned home on leave, five years later, Alma had learned to sing right along with them in Chinese. Like Dorcas, she was living the resurrection. Her ministry wasn t just doing for others. She was being the presence of Christ with the ones she served. When Alma returned to Chicago in 1922, the Early Worship service had disbanded. I haven t found out a reason for that, but I suspect that part of it was that their congregation had been decimated literally hundreds of St. Pauls young adults had gone off to serve in the First World War and many, many others who stayed home died in the great flu pandemic of 1918. Whatever the reason, Alma needed a new source of income if she was going to return to China. This time the young women of the church rallied and they formed a new society to support Alma s work. And what did they call themselves? The Dorcas Society. Alma served in China until civil war made it necessary for her to leave. She came home, and in 1927 joined the St. Pauls staff as our Parish Visitor. She remained in that position off and on until her retirement in 1949, when she moved to St. Pauls House. She died a single woman in 1953, with no children, but Alma Atzel is one of our mothers. At the annual meeting of the congregation in 1940, Alma reports that in the previous year she made 1456 visits to the sick, to shut- ins, to the elderly, to widows. What Alma did in each of those 1456 visits is nothing different than what each of us is called to do as followers of Jesus be the presence of Christ, be with those who are lonely, isolated, suffering. There are many ways we can be for others - making financial grants, signing up for volunteer projects, advocating for social justice. Those things are all vitally important and necessary. But we most fully embody the life of the risen Christ, not by doing for others, but by being with others, just as God in Christ came to be with us. We have an opportunity coming up soon to be with it s in welcoming a refugee family to Chicago. Yes, we need to do stuff for them furnish their home, stock the pantry, buy bus passes but after that work is over, our role as St. Pauls Church is to just be with them, right where they re at visiting, befriending, showing them around their new city with neighborly love. Sermon by Jeff Carlson: Sunday, April 17, 2016 page 4 of 5 4
We don t have very much in our church records that was written by Alma Atzel. The church newsletter was mostly written by the pastors. But when she became the Parish Visitor, they gave her a small column to report on her work. Something she wrote in 1927 gives us a glimpse into her heart and her ministry. The work of the last month has given me great joy and satisfaction. When I think of some of the opportunities I have had to get real close and near to those in distress and who are so patient and sweet through trying hours of suffering and loneliness, it makes me the more grateful to our heavenly Father for returning strength and all the blessings he is showering upon me. To sit and listen to some of our mothers, who have grown too feeble and are unable to go out anymore, to sit and listen to them tell of their experiences of olden days it is a great privilege. What a beautiful, upside down, Easter understanding of the world she had. Alma understood the deep meaning of our faith that to just sit and listen to a feeble widow is a true privilege. To just be with someone is a privilege. Alma had the heart of the risen Christ. Did Alma Atzel solve the problems of the poor and sick in China? No. Did she solve the problems of the hundreds of shut- ins that she visited in her years at St. Pauls? No. She didn t solve their problems. She did something better she gave them herself. She got close enough, and she got near enough, to love. i N.T. Wright Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, Harper One: 2008. ii Samuel Wells, A Nazareth Manifesto: Being With God, Wiley Blackwell: 2015. iii Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought, Oxford University press: 1997. Rev. Jeff Carlson Associate Pastor, Saint Pauls UCC Office: 773.348.3829 www.spucc.org Sermon by Jeff Carlson: Sunday, April 17, 2016 page 5 of 5 5