Old Yafo.
Watch this sermon on video here.
***
Yafo is one of the oldest cities in the world, an ancient port on the Mediterranean coast. Nowadays, Old Yafo is considered part of the larger city of Tel Aviv-Yafo. Yafo has a significant Arab population and has historically been an encouraging example of peaceful co-existence.
‘Yafo’ is the name in romanized Hebrew. Another pronunciation is ‘Jaffa’. When we hear today the story of Tabitha, one of our forebears in faith, Jaffa — Tabitha’s hometown — is translated into English as ‘Joppa’. The Israelites received the cedars of Lebanon at this port, for use in building their temples.
We also find ourselves in Joppa when we meet Jonah, that mercurial, reluctant prophet who tried to run from God and wound up inside the belly of the great fish. Jonah runs to Joppa and books passage on a boat bound for Tarshish, a city in modern-day Spain — that is, somewhere at the very edge of Jonah’s known world. God intercepts Jonah long before he makes it to Spain, as God does with all of us. We can’t escape the reach of God’s piercing but redemptive grace, no matter how desperately we run.
I have been to Joppa. When I was there, I visited the Shimon Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, south of Old Yafo. The Peres Center stands at the edge of the sea, built to honor the memory of 1994 Nobel laureate Shimon Peres, the eighth prime minister and ninth president of Israel. His memory is particularly worthy of our attention these days. Like every one of us, Peres was not perfect, but in the 1990s he emerged as an advocate for peace, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat.
Whatever your thoughts about imperfect politicians and their complicated human-rights records, if you go to Yafo, to Joppa, I encourage you to look at the sea. The Peres Center has a room with sweeping views. The waves break peacefully over the sand, rhythmically moving beneath dazzling azure skies. The waves just keep coming, and you can marvel at the fact that they have done this for eons — that these waves came ashore when Jesus lived a bit inland.
Joppa is one of our pilgrimage sites, one of our holy places.
When I was at the Peres Center, I was with a tour group that paired Christian clergy with Jewish rabbis. I bunked with my friend Seth Goldstein, the Rabbi at Temple Beth Hatfiloh in Olympia. Our tour group heard from Palestinian and Israeli activists who fought disillusionment and worked hard to build dialogue and understanding.
Joppa, a port city: a place of arrival and departure. Joppa, a human village: a place where people dwell and work, live and love, eat and give birth, grow old and die. Joppa, just up the coast north of Gaza, one of the most anguished and traumatized places in this anguished and traumatized world. Joppa, the location of Jonah’s personal crisis, and the mission base for Tabitha the skillful artisan.
We are currently dwelling in a far younger city, though the waves have been crashing ashore here for eons, too. I invite you to settle yourself, breathe, and become aware that you say your prayers just a little bit inland from another great sea. Like Jonah, like Tabitha, we are here only briefly, but we are here. And we can make choices here, choices that carry great consequences.
I suggest that we pay our respects to the prophet Jonah, but choose to follow Tabitha’s path instead. Poor Jonah inspires me greatly: I follow his story with interest, and I sometimes find myself alongside him in that claustrophobic fish belly. I even have tattooed on my left arm Jonah’s liberation from the grave of his own making. But given the choice, I would rather not be remembered for my resistance to grace, for my orneriness and self-centered rejection of God’s call. I would rather be remembered as Tabitha is remembered. I would rather that my friends remembered me with tender grief and fierce love.
For we are told that when Tabitha died, they “washed her:” this intimate detail is preserved. Tabitha’s body was sacred to the memory of her community. They took tender care of her and prepared her body for a dignified burial.
Then they held up her works of art, her tunics and other clothing. Tabitha probably created garments like the one I am wearing right now: carefully crafted, lovingly woven, flush with vivid color, garments that underscored the dignity of every body that wore them. If she was who I think she was, Tabitha probably thought about who would be wearing each garment, weaving prayers for the person into each stitch, each fold, each hem.
And so we learn Tabitha’s lesson: if you find yourself in a human community at the edge of a sea, reach out your hands in labor for that community. If you find yourself at a port where people come and go, stay there, dwell there, serve there. Our faith often inspires much grander ambitions than the simple life and witness of Tabitha, but I really think she understood the assignment.
Christians down the ages all too easily have fallen for grandiose and perverse visions of the faith: that we can convert the masses to our Way, that we can govern nations by the light of our faith, that we are history’s winners. And so we watch in dismay as the Gospel is distorted to support nationalism and xenophobia, racism and sexism, the erasure of trans persons, the separation of families, a “bully on the playground” approach to foreign affairs. All of this is the opposite of the Christian Gospel. Those who draw on our faith to espouse these values reveal that they have not received, let alone understood, the Good News of the Risen Christ at all.
No, the Good News is revealed by a weaver of clothing whose death inspired grief, storytelling, and tearful embraces. If Tabitha’s daily labor led to the liberation of the oppressed; if her tender death scene was recorded because her community brought peace and justice into the world — peace and justice arriving, like the cedars of Lebanon, via the port of Joppa — then it all began with the weaving of Tabitha’s tunics. Tabitha understood the assignment.
But she is not alone. This past week the world watched as nearly one and a half billion people welcomed their new spritual leader. Soon after Robert Cardinal Prevost (often called Father Bob) chose to be called Pope Leo the Fourteenth, Sister Helen Prejean wrote this on social media: “I’m very happy about our new Pope Leo!,” she gushed. “As soon as I heard the name Leo, I knew he’d be strong on social justice. Pope Leo XIII started the social justice movement in the Catholic Church by standing on the side of laborers and their right to belong to unions. I believe he’ll continue Pope Francis’ spirit of championing the rights of immigrants and poor people. And, dear to my heart, work zealously to abolish the death penalty worldwide.”
Sister Helen’s excitement is infectious, and though I will probably disagree with Leo the Fourteenth on many important topics, including the goodness in God’s sight of my own marriage, I pray with confidence that Father Bob will try to keep the main thing the main thing. Are you a person of faith? If so, “standing on the side of laborers and their right to belong to unions” is a good way to express that faith.
The Gospel teaches us nothing about how to conquer a country, how to secure our wealth, how to win a cultural conflict, how to win an election, or even how to win friends. The Gospel simply teaches us to learn from an ancient textile worker that the mission begins with ordinary work such as weaving clothing. We change the world by working together. That’s the assignment. That’s how we preach Christ Crucified. That’s how we proclaim the Resurrection.
Tabitha probably knew all of this at least partly because Jesus himself often drew upon the imagery of sheep and shepherds to teach his followers who he is, what he does, and where he wants to lead them. In the ancient world, there could hardly be a more humble and menial metaphor than that of sheep hearing their shepherd’s voice. I like to think that my dogs know my voice, that they know how deeply I love them, that they know how vital and central they are to me. But sheep and their shepherd — this is even more workaday, more humbling, more humiliating than the mild image of an upper-middle-class Seattleite who loves his dogs.
Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God incarnate in human flesh, the One who has come into the world, the one who trampled death by death and to those in the tombs bestowed life: he comes among us as a field worker on the night shift, mucking out stalls, driving flocks up and down the hills, counting wayward livestock, picking out the ticks embedded in their rough skin. His hands are filthy. He likely can’t live independently. There is no plumbing, no electric light. This is the One who teaches Tabitha, and teaches us, how to live.
But each day, each week, we have a choice. Here we are, not in Joppa but Seattle, yet still in the same house as Tabitha, the same predicament as Jonah. The waves of the sea are crashing over the shoreline. Here we are. What choice do we make, here in our city by the sea? We could bolt: get ourselves on board a boat heading out of here, duck the task God sets us in Holy Baptism, choose fear and our own small selves over the messy ministries of the Good Shepherd and his grungy flock.
Or we could stay, and serve. We could unroll bolts of fabric and begin our labor that puts clothes on the backs of our companions. It is not glamorous work, but we would proclaim Good News of great joy to a world crying out for it.
Here we are together in Joppa. What should we choose to do?
***
Preached on the Fourth Sunday of Easter (Year C), May 11, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Acts 9:36-43
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30