Mother's Day at Community Brookside with Guest Pastor Jeff Jaynes

Dorcas, a devoted disciple in the early church, was renowned for her charitable works, particularly making clothes for widows. Her story in Acts 9 demonstrates the profound impact of consistent service and faith in action. When she died, the apostle Peter was called to her side, where through God's power, she was miraculously restored to life. Her resurrection not only paralleled Jesus's miracles but also emphasized the importance of practical ministry and the lasting influence of faithful service in building God's kingdom.

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Transcript

Good morning, church. And for those online, good morning. Sorry about the technical difficulties, but I'm not sorry about that because usually that's a good sign for me. So thank you to the amazing women in the back who got us online today. Nicely done.

And Harry, too. And Harry, too.

I'm Jeff James. I'm not Matt Morgan. Matt is much better looking than me and is on the road, and so I'm glad to be. And I'm a little bit of a yeller, so. Harry, my mic is a little bit hot, I think, so.

I've been told I was loud since I was born. So, mom, happy Mother's Day. I'm still loud. I'm going to read a scripture for us today, and then we're going to talk about it. That's what a sermon is, right?

Hear now the word of God. This comes from Acts, chapter 9, and it is verses 36 to 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 charity. 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. This is the word of God for us, the people of God. Thanks be to God.

Amen. Y' all might be Methodist if you knew that. For those who didn't know that, that's something that we say often after we hear the scripture. And I'm not going to lie to y' all. I really wrestled with this passage for today.

I mean, Matt didn't tell me what passage that I had to preach on. So I didn't have to preach on this passage. I could have preached like a softball, like a lob sermon, like, who is my neighbor, right? I could have. I could have gone into Great detail on that.

Or I could have picked, you know, a sermon for Mother's Day, Proverbs 31, or. Or Lydia of Philippi. We could have talked about those amazing women. But this is the passage from the lectionary. The lectionary is a series of readings that.

That covers most of the Bible over three years. And I made a challenge to myself a long time ago that I would preach from the lecture for, you know, the academic challenge of it. But also, like, what does it say about our faith if we just pick the passages that. Like that, we just pick the ones that are easy for us to talk about if we never challenge ourselves because life is hard. Sometimes.

Sometimes things happen that we don't understand. Things like sickness and death, maybe even the death of a beloved disciple who was always doing good things. What happened in this passage? Right. And it happens today.

I went to a funeral on Friday for someone who fits this description. It was a man, but fit the description of a disciple who was habitually doing good works. Doing good things. Pope Francis. Right.

Another example of somebody who habitually doing good works. And yet they passed. So maybe we should thank the lectionary for giving us this amazing story of Dorcas. But before we go too far into the story of Dorcas, I think it's important to note that. That this story might be planted.

Now, I'm not saying it didn't happen. You didn't hear that from me. I did not say that. But let's just say that if you gonna. The first bishop of Rome.

The first. Right. It might be important his footsteps literally, to show that you're connected, to show that you have that same line of power. It's not that Peter didn't already have a good resume. He did.

Matt talked about that last week. Right. Peter walked on water. He was given the keys of heaven. He was called the rock on which Jesus would build the church.

And yet, as Matt talked about last week, he's also the one who started sinking when he got out on that water. He's the one who denied Jesus three times. And when the time came for Jesus to die, Peter was nowhere to be seen.

Women were there. Peter ran and hid. But as Matt talked about last week, Peter had been restored in that breakfast on the beach. He had been forgiven of those denials. And he was the one to lead the church.

So it was important to show that he was connected. And that's where our passage today might come in pretty handy for connecting those dots. But in order for us to connect those dots, maybe it's helpful for us to go back a little bit into the Gospel of mark. In Mark 5, interestingly, 43, Jesus tells, or the Gospel tells a story of Jesus who's out healing. He's out and about healing.

People are starting to follow him. And Jairus, who was the synagogue leader, has a problem. Jairus daughter is very sick and is dying. And so Jairus comes to Jesus and says, please come heal my daughter. And Jesus says, okay, let's go.

He's on his way to Jairus House, and a woman comes up to him. Now, the disciples tell the woman, please don't interrupt Jesus. He is on his way to an important meeting. Please get away. But this woman was persistent and she had her own illness for 12 years, and she needed to see Jesus.

So Jesus stops, much to the disciples chagrin. And to her great joy, Jesus stops and he heals her.

As it would be. Word comes from Jairus House that his daughter has died. Now, Mark doesn't tell us the reaction of the disciples, but, you know, they had I told you so looks on their faces. I told you we didn't. We shouldn't stop.

I told you we didn't have time.

That meeting was more important.

But Jesus says, hold up, hold up, hold up. She's just sleeping. Go to the house. They get to Jairus's house. And everybody there knows that morning, it's a.

I mean, that's a tragedy, right? This little girl has passed away. Jesus sends everybody out except for the parents. And he says, little girl, get up. But he says it in Aramaic.

That's what Mark tells us. The Aramaic words for little girl, get up is talitha kum.

And the girl gets up and she starts walking around. And it's amazing. It's an incredible story of Jesus power. And it's a foretelling of the resurrection, right? It's a foretelling of what would happen later with Jesus.

It's an incredible.

He was there and even told them to tell nobody. You know that story, right? I mean, clearly we know 2000 years later, between that story and ours today. I mean, the fact that a person has passed away and is no longer dead, right? That's a little bit obvious.

But there's another connection to that story. Did anybody catch the name of Jairus? Young daughter?

No, actually, don't learn it because teletha means little girl. All we know is little girl. But the author of Acts goes into great detail about the name of the woman in that story, right? What's her name? Tabitha or Dorcas.

Right. Dorcas is Greek, but they make sure Acts makes sure to tell us that her name in Aramaic is Tabitha. So if Peter said Tabitha, get up, he might have said something like Tabitha kum, which sounds a whole lot like Talitha.

Now, again, I am not saying that this didn't happen. I believe it did. It's here. But it's also important for us to connect these dots between what Jesus did with the little girl and what Peter did with Tabitha or Dorcas. It may be that Tabitha, Dorcas is the person who wins the prize for being lucky to have that name.

But she was dead and now is alive. And Peter was at the heart of that.

So clearly this passage in line with this story from the Gospel. But it also falls in line with what Peter was already doing in Acts chapter nine. Peter was just a town away in the town when he saw a man who was paralyzed for eight years. The man was paralyzed, couldn't move. And like Jesus did in his own healing ministries, Peter heals the man.

And we hear in that story earlier in acts, in Acts 9:34, it says that the man, it says immediately he got up.

It's amazing. It's incredible. And then, because hearing this story just down the street in Lydda, the disciples in Joppa who were sad about Dorcas, said, hey, Peter, come our way. And Peter got up and he went to Joppa. And he goes to Joppa and he sees Dorcas and what does he tell her?

Get up. Right. You seeing the trick, seeing the theme? The Greek for all of those is the same. It's Anesti.

That's the root word for get up. The man who was paralyzed got up. Peter got up. Just got up. It's all Anesti.

That might be different for us, but let's say we're Greek Orthodox. First of all, it would be a lot of fun. If you've ever been to Greek Fest in town, it's a good time. You should go if you haven't been. It's an amazing celebration.

But one thing commend is sometime go to a Greek Orthodox Easter vigil. Because between Saturday night and Sunday at midnight, in the middle of a dark, a tradition happens. Now, if I say Christ is risen, something for you. What do you think? Those of you who are those longtime Methodists who just know that in your heart Christ is risen, we say in English in Greek, at Midnight Park Church, when the priest lights that first candle to bring light into the dark, he says, christos anesti.

And the whole crowd doesn't say he is risen. Indeed. Because that's English. The whole crowd says, alithos anesti. Okay?

So let's try that. Christos Anesti. You're Greek now.

It's all Greek to him. Yes, it's all Greek. So Christos Anesti. Christ is risen. Alithos Anesti.

Truly, he is risen. So this word Anesti is the same word for he is risen. And so these stories about the man getting up, about Peter getting up, about Dorcas getting up, they're resurrection stories, they're Easter story. And it's an important reminder that what happened at Easter isn't just a story about what happened with Jesus. It's something that happened with us.

It's what we celebrate every single Sunday. We celebrate the resurrection, and we celebrate that the power of the resurrection is still here for us, just as it was for Jesus, just as it was for Peter, just as it was through that line. Jesus work didn't just continue with Peter, it continues with us. That power continues for us, too. But that's true about Dorcas's work, too, right?

I mean, Dorcas isn't just the unwitting, like, object in this story. Dorcas was an amazing woman. She was incredible. And it tells us that she was continually doing good works. Now think for, like, half a second.

Can you think of a woman in church who's continually doing good work? Yeah, look around, look around. Many of them are here today. And I'm sure that most of many of you are thinking about women in church. Who you can think of, who are people like Dorcas who are continually doing good works.

When we sang He Lives woman from the choir at Langley Baptist Church who had an awful voice. She could not sing, but she would belt out the lyrics strongly. It was a joyful noise to the Lord. And I can't hear. He lives with hearing that woman.

She was. She was amazing. But. And I'm not going to name all the women who, in my own life, who I can think of who have done this work, but I think about the women who put school lessons to make sure that the kids have lessons. I think about the women who make sure that the bread is baked and ready for communion.

I think about the women who knit scarves and shawls for people to bring them comfort in church. I think about the women who run the food pantries, who run vacation Bible school, who do the prayer card ministry, and on and on and on.

Friends, we spent a lot of time this week talking about papal Succession. Right. And it's not lost on me that the same that we're talking about Pope Peter following Jesus is the same week that we talk about Pope Leo XIV following Pope Francis, who followed Peter. Sorry, y' all. Who followed Jesus.

Right. But it's also true that while we celebrate those. Those holy fathers that have led us, most of the work, or a significant part at least, of the work of the Church that has gone from Peter to now has been done by women.

Women were the ones who paid for the early church, like Lydia, by the way, who I really kind of wanted to talk about.

But through the ages, it was women opening of the Church. It was women making sure that the lights were on that were guiding the church and not just helping people learn the faith at home. Women have led us in powerful ways from the very beginning, and they're leading us now still.

So maybe that's another reason the Spirit has this passage for us today. Today, because the reality is that we need disciples like Dorcas now more than ever. That's true in the Church. I see that all the time here. I see it all the time in the work that I do at Restore Hope.

And honestly, it's something that I know that I will see in my new work as district superintendent. The power of women who are keeping the church going, pushing the church forward. And I'll tell you, we do see it a lot at Restore Hope. Our numbers are increasing. We see a lot of new people who need help.

And we learned in this passage that Dorcas was somebody who was doing acts of charity. We also learned that the widows were showing the tunics Right. That she had made. She was probably doing a clothing ministry for people in. And that same kind of ministry, that same work for people in need is something that we need now every day, like I said, our numbers that Restore Hope go up.

We're seeing a lot of new people. We're seeing a lot of people returning who haven't been with us in a while. That same thing that's causing the price of your eggs to go up is causing the price of eggs for everybody. The tariff craziness, all of that is leading to people who are on the edges having a need, and we need help. And there are amazing women in this church who are.

Who are following in that line of succession from Dorcas, Valerie, Gloria, Molly are at Restore Hope every week. And they brought some helpers who are men, too. Alan and Frank. It's not just women, but they're leading us and helping people in need. Habit.

These Acts of good habitually. There's no way that a place like Restore Hope or any other nonprofit could do what we do without the amazing service of the volunteers who give their time habitually to do good works for others. And I'm afraid that work is going to be needed all the more, the days, weeks, months, years to come. So maybe it's time that the world needs people who will get up, get in that line of succession with Dorcas, and get to kingdom work.

I know in just saying that some of you are like, but I'm tired.

I'm tired. We're tired, the struggles of the day, tired from the constant crazy. And kind of all we want to do is curl up in a ball and say, wake me when it's over. I mean, what can one person really do when faced with this tidal wave of problems? But we're not talking about one person.

We're talking about one person after another after another after another after another in a line going back to a woman who was probably just an ordinary disciple. But now, 2,000 years later, millions of people have read or heard the story of Dorcas who was devoted to acts of kindness. Why?

Because she got up and she didn't get up on her own power. She didn't get up on her own. She got up with the power of the resurrected Jesus. She got up with the power of the Holy Spirit.

She got up. And I guarantee, I guarantee that after this story, she got back to work. Right? It doesn't tell us what happened with Dorcas after this story, but does anybody doubt that she started making tunics again?

I mean, this was somebody who was her habit to help people in need. Of course she got up and got to work, but she didn't do it alone. You don't have to, either.

I wish that I could have picked another passage to preach about, but maybe this lectionary passage on the fourth Sunday of Easter is here for a reason. After all, maybe it's a reminder that the problems that we face aren't all that new, but sickness, poverty, things that are all wrapped up in this passage. Maybe it's a reminder to celebrate these amazing people, especially women in this case, who led us. A reminder to celebrate the lines of succession that brought us to this place in this time. Maybe it's a reminder that the same power that drove them, that inspired them, that raised them up, is the power that's available to us today.

The power of the resurrected Jesus Christos anesthes our hope in the face of fear, our light in a time of darkness.

Maybe it's a reminder for us to pick up some charitable habits of our own.

Maybe it's time for us to get in line with Dorcas and get up and get to work. Of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Will you pray with me?