2025.05.11 | Freedom to Rise Again

Freedom to Rise Again
A sermon preached at Eden United Church of Christ

in Hayward, California,

on Sunday, May 11, 2025, 
by the Rev. Brenda Loreman.
Scripture:  Acts 9:32-42
Copyright © 2025 by Brenda Loreman

During the seven weeks of Eastertide, following Easter Sunday, the lectionary readings assigned for each Sunday omit the reading from the Hebrew Bible and instead offer a reading from the Acts of the Apostles, lifting up the stories of the early church.

I’ve always loved reading the book of Acts, because it’s a great narrative, with all these wonderful stories about the early church. What a dream those early Christians are living! Not only are they growing exponentially, they’re doing everything a congregation is supposed to do—they’re studying and learning together, they’re worshipping and sharing communion, they’re sharing their gifts with each other, they’re praising God, and they’re witnessing miracles. In last week’s passage from Chapter 9, we witnessed the miraculous conversion of Saul, and this week, we have both the healing of Aeneas and the restoration of Tabitha—all from just one chapter.

I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that the good old days of the apostolic church probably weren’t as rosy as they are portrayed here. I have a sneaking suspicion that the author of Acts wasn’t so much recording an accurate account of events as he was offering his own form of good-old-days nostalgia. I have a suspicion that this account of the early days of the apostolic church is more “ optimistic origin story” than “factual history document.”

I think skepticism is a healthy reaction to have to biblical narrative, as long as it’s not the only reaction. My goal in exploring scripture is usually not to decide if a text is factual—did it really happen that way?—but to decide if it offers spiritual truth for our lives in this time. Digging into the social-historical context of scripture can be revealing about what that spiritual truth is. 

The conventional wisdom of biblical scholarship is that the Acts of the Apostles was written by the same person as the Gospel According to Luke, and were intended to be read as one whole narrative, rather than two separate ones. Knowing that the two works were written together helps us put a date on where Acts fits into the chronology of early Christian history. 

Although many scholars date these two works—known collectively as Luke/Acts—to sometime late in the first century, perhaps in the 80s or 90s, more recently many scholars—including the late Marcus Borg—now think that Luke/Acts is actually a much later work, and probably dates from the first decade or two of the second century. So this means that Luke (or whatever the author’s name actually was) is writing about events to which he could not have been an eyewitness. If Luke is writing in the first two decades of the second century, about events in the life of Jesus and the immediate events following his crucifixion, he is recalling events that happened at least 80 or 90 years in the past. 

All this is to say that this passage from Acts is almost certainly an idealized portrait of the early Christian community. Luke is likely looking back, perhaps with some nostalgia, perhaps with some embellishment, painting a picture of the early church for those who were not alive to witness it. 

And in Chapter 9, Luke is painting a picture of a church that held resurrection and restoration as a core value, along with a belief in tending to the needs of those who are the most marginalized in society. All three of these stories of Paul, Aeneas, and Tabitha point to a revival, a restoration, and the promise of an overflowing cup of life.

Each of these “rising-ups” are subversive of the present order. They declare that the death and paralysis of our current social systems are not the story that God tells, and not the story that the church is supposed to live into. Instead, the church is called to encourage people to rise up and change the world. Luke reminds us that God is still working through the Holy Spirit in the lives of people and in human society to restore this broken world. By being restored to her community, Tabitha can rise up to continue her good work of lifting others out of despair and desperation.

I don't know if Tabitha was a mother, but it’s entirely possible that she was. And so it does seem fitting to read her story on the day we in the U.S. have set aside to honor mothers. I have to admit, though, that  I have conflicted feelings about Mother’s Day, and I’m guessing some of you might too. 

Don’t get me wrong. I loved my mother and I appreciated having an opportunity to tell her I love her and I acknowledge all she’s done for me. Now that she’s gone, I take a moment every Mother’s Day to give thanks for the best parts of myself that are my legacy from her. But I also know that Mother’s Day is a really hard day for a lot of people. It’s hard for those who are grieving their lost mothers, or mothers grieving their lost children. Or people whose relationships with their mothers or children have been difficult and fraught with anger or hurt or fear or despair. It’s a hard day for those who have longed to be mothers but can’t. It’s a hard day for those who have chosen not to be mothers and who feel left out of the celebrating. 

It’s also a day that, like so many other holidays, seems tainted by crass consumerism. It seems less a day to celebrate mothering and is instead an excuse to line the pockets of companies that sell cards and candy and flowers and jewelry, and just about anything else they think we’ll buy for our mothers. This is a double-edged sword; most of us hate the shallow commercialism of Mother’s Day, but woe to us if we neglect to participate in it and ignore our mothers today.

Just as digging into the historical context of Acts helped me uncover spiritual truth for our time, digging into the history and context of Mother’s Day helped me reframe my understanding of this holiday.

There are at least two stories about the beginnings of Mother’s Day, and both of them are in direct opposition to the shallow commercialism that bothers me. In fact, Mother’s Day began not as a sentimental celebration of motherhood, but as a celebration of women’s public activism—the sort of activism that I imagine Tabitha would have taken on, had she lived in our century.

The first story begins in the 1850’s when a community activist named Ann Reeves Jarvis organized Mothers’ Work Days in West Virginia. Her goal was to improve sanitation and prevent childhood mortality by fighting disease and reducing milk contamination in the communities in her area.  Then, during the Civil War, Jarvis urged women to join her to care for the wounded on both sides of the conflict. Afterward she convened meetings that she called Mothers’ Friendship Days for both Union and Confederate loyalists to get together and to lay aside their hostilities. Everyone was afraid it would be a disaster. No one thought it would work. But it did.

In 1872, in another part of the country, Julia Ward Howe, author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and a lifelong advocate for reform movements, including abolition, women’s rights, prison reform, and education, proposed an annual Mother’s Day for Peace. Howe had been horrified by the carnage of the Civil War, and she urged all women to take an active role in working for peace.  In 1870, Howe had composed a Mother’s Day Proclamation, a manifesto calling all women to activism.

“Arise, then, women of this day!” Howe wrote. “Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’” (1)

Women like Ann Reeves Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe played a leading role in the social justice movements throughout the second half of the 19th century. They were radicals, striving against the dominant paradigms of their day in order to change society for the better. Women were prominent in the fight for the abolition of slavery, for improved working conditions for laborers, for the protection of children, in advocating for public health services and social welfare assistance to the poor. These women exemplified the sort of love we see in the practices of the early church as portrayed in Acts—the love of humanity, grounded in the abiding love of God, and sharing in the divine mission to bring abundant life to all. The women who first conceived of Mother’s Day would have been disconcerted by the rampant commercialism that has overtaken this day. They would have expected to see women marching in the streets, not having brunch with their families.

Julia Ward Howe’s annual Mother’s Day for Peace was celebrated for a few years in the Boston area, where Howe resided, but her celebration never caught on nationally. It wasn’t until 1914, after dedicated lobbying by Anna Jarvis, Ann Reeves Jarvis’s daughter, that Woodrow Wilson declared the second Sunday in May to be a national holiday to celebrate mothers.  But by then, our consumer culture had successfully redefined women as primary consumers for their families, and almost right from the start, advertisers saw it as an opportunity for exploitation. In fact, Anna Jarvis was so upset by the commercialism of the new holiday that she spent the rest of her life suing Hallmark and other companies to stop the commercialism of Mother’s Day.

What if we celebrated this Mother’s Day not by participating in consumer culture, but by reclaiming the sort of activism of Ann Reeves Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe? What if we put into practice the spiritual uprisings seen in the Acts of the Apostles in Peter and Paul and Tabitha, and used this day to not only thank our own mothers, but work for a world of peace and justice? What if we honored the gifts and humanity of our mothers by striving for a world where every person could live with dignity and integrity, where the promise of new life is offered to all? What a paradigm shift that would be. What a world of abundant new life we could create. So, all those who are mothers, or had mothers; all those who mother; rise up! Claim the freedom to rise again. Amen.

Reflection:
What does “freedom to rise again” mean to you? What holds you back from rising up?

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day_Proclamation