April 29, 2007: ACTION
Acts 9:36-43, Revelation 7:9-17, Palm 23
Eileen Parfrey     Springwater Presbyterian Church

Do you remember that character on Saturday Night Live, a little old lady who would get fired up about a word, ranting until someone would whisper to her that she had the wrong word? After all her righteous indignation she'd pause and say, "Never mind." That's what happened to me with today's text. Before going to Shalom for a day of prayer, I rolled out a pretty good first draft of a sermon, based on Dorcas' beautiful epitaph. The people she had benefited in her lifetime said of her, "She was full of good work and acts of humility." I did a fabulous word study on humility, unpacking humility as a motivation for action. Problem was I had transcribed my notes incorrectly. Dorcas' epitaph wasn't "acts of humility," it was "acts of charity." Never mind.

But it's worth considering, isn't it? I mean, what kind of epitaph we'd like. Somewhere I read a story-urban legend or true, I don't know-of a man who pretended to have died and then arranged his funeral. He eavesdropped on what his friends said about him, but he was so disappointed, that he told them he had expected better of them. That's a dirty trick, but I guess the kind of person who would pull that stunt would also be the kind of person whose friends wouldn't have glorious things to say about him.

This Eastertide season, we're taking some of the preaching theme material from last summer's Vacation Church School curriculum. We toured the USA by boat as we heard Bible stories and learned about mission in order to illustrate the words evangelism, prayer, hospitality, generosity, and action. It was a powerful week, and we knew we wanted to keep using what we'd learned. Today's word is "action." Dorcas was a woman of faith, and this required her to act, for which she earned an epitaph about good works and acts of charity. Now, I'm not saying a good epitaph is why Christians act their faith. But, you might know, I am saying faith requires us to act.

Rob Bell, in his book Velvet Elvis, talks about Christians acting their faith. He calls it, "the Christian life." Bell is the founding pastor of a church called Mars Hill, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Mars Hill is the mega-est of mega-churches, and Bell is the sort of person who writes a book about who God is and what it means to be church and Christian-and actually encourages his readers to question what he writes. So many insights, and the way he states them, make me think, "Oh, now I get it!"

For instance, he says that the meaning of the Christian life-what motivates how Christians live-is identity. "Christians are people," he writes, "learning who they are in Christ." Well, duh. But still learning. Learning who we are. In Christ. So, of course, learning what Christ is about and who Christ is, is absolutely critical to who we are. Being a Christian isn't about lists of "thou shalt nots" and "to do." Being a Christian isn't about what we gotta do. It's about being. Bell quotes one teacher who says that, "if people were taught more about who they are [my italics], they wouldn't have to be told what to do. It would come naturally. . . . The point isn't sin management. The point is who we are now." [my italics]

Let that sink in for a moment. Who Christ is proves that there is nothing we can do to earn God's love. "We can't earn what we have always had." A lot of people become Christians because they want to go to heaven. Bell points out that there is nothing we can do to get into heaven. In fact (I love this theology!), he claims that Jesus' mission was not to get us into heaven. Jesus came to make the here-and-now a better place. In other words, Jesus' goal is to get heaven here. Not to get us "there," but to get "there," here. Which ought to give you a totally different "to do" list for today.

Is heaven supposed to be like that scene in Revelation today? Is that what we're trying to get here? There's a joke about the man who woke up in the afterlife with everything he ever wanted or needed. Things went well for a time, but after awhile he began to find all this ease and wealth just a little boring. He called over one of the angels to say that, if this was what heaven was like, he'd rather go to hell. The angel replied, "What do you mean? This is hell!" While it's true that everything of importance starts in worship, the point of worship is always who God is and who we are in relation to God. And that's heaven.

When I was a little girl, I attended Dorcas club after school at a nearby Methodist church. We mostly learned Bible stories, heard about missionaries, and made crafts. We heard about Dorcas a lot, but I don't recall ever making anyone a little coat. That club has kind of puzzled me, but I've finally decided that its purpose was to teach me my identity. It taught me how to be a Christian by giving me stories with which to identify-both real-life and Biblical stories. Maybe we could benefit from a Dorcas club. Maybe if we heard more about what it's like to be a single, white Christian woman in a Muslim country. Maybe if we compared the way we stake our claim to the meaning of life with that of a person given ten days to clear out and abandon four years of work. Maybe if we learned about recent grads working for justice in slums for two years. Maybe if we knew about the man who holds critically ill newborns for a couple of hours every week. Maybe if we put those stories next to our own. I'm just saying that, when we know who we are and whose we are, we'll know what action to take. Take your announcements home this week and ponder what Father Keating says, just for encouragement. "From God's point of view, it is not accomplishments but efforts that count. If we accept our poverty and limitations, but still go on trying, we will rate higher than everybody else in God's book, just as the poor widow did . . . If we make the effort and receive that one precious point for trying, God can take his pencil and start adding zeros after it. But if that one crucial point is missing, no amount of zeros can help. Our score will be just plain 'zero.'"

We've just got to act. Father Keating is saying that acting on our faith isn't about accomplishing or success, but that we acted, and that action came out of the integrity of our relationship with God. I'm afraid that, if I keep up the good work, my epitaph will read, "She had a full calendar and got most of it done." Other people might get stuck with an epitaph that reads, "With a little more effort he would have been perfect." Or, "She didn't get in the way much." Or, "He had a platinum Master Card." Pitiful, isn't it? After Peter raised Dorcas, the reaction wasn't "That Peter is the greatest." The response to his action was "many believed in the Lord." Because what he did wasn't about him. Peter knew who he was and acted on that. If who we are is "already forgiven, always loved," there's nothing to prove. If all God is asking us to do is be who we were created to be (which is what's up with that salvation thing), there's no "success" riding on what we do. We just have to act on it. Whether we intend it or not, our actions always reveal who we think are. What if "who we are" was "to get heaven here"-would we act differently? Maybe our calendars would be filled with other things. Maybe the evening news would sound different to us. Maybe the things we put in the grocery cart would reflect our care for God's creation. Maybe we wouldn't worry so much about getting more stuff done. Maybe we'd just take action.