Love and tears

Easter 4C

Revelation 7:9-17

Acts 9:36-43

When I read our first lesson about Tabitha, I couldn’t help but sigh. Why does the only woman actually named in the bible as Jesus’ disciple have to be famous for her … sewing?! Not all women can sew, you know. The last time that I darned a sock, I proudly lifted up the finished product—only to find that I had sewn the sock to my bedspread. If I had to serve the Lord by sewing, we would all be in trouble. Women can do other things!

On the other hand, perhaps I’ve underestimated the power of sewing.

One hundred and fifty years ago, a little girl named Ashley was the property of a plantation owner in Charleston, South Carolina. The world was a frightening place for Ashley and her mother Rose. One day, when Ashley was nine years old, her master sold her, and she was forced to leave her home--alone, without her mother. There was no time for long goodbyes. Ashley’s mother, in desperation, looked around their cabin for something to give her daughter as a remembrance. She grabbed up an empty cloth flour sack and stuffed it with a few handfuls of pecans and a tattered, hand-sewn dress. She took a knife and cut through a few locks of her hair and tucked them into the sack, as well. Placing it into Ashley’s hands, Rose told her that this sack would always be filled with her love. 

A dress; a lock of hair; some nourishment; a mother’s love. There’s something else that Rose put in that sack, too. Something that the story doesn’t mention: A mother’s tears for her daughter. Tears of loss; tears of anger; tears of desperation; tears born of captivity. Living under the heavy burden of chattel slavery, Rose and her daughter had shared many tears.

Ashley was whisked away, never to see her mother again. Long after the pecans were eaten and the dress worn and outgrown, that sack became Ashley’s prized possession. Ashley cried her own tears into the sack—the worn cloth soaked with her own anger and loss, fear and love. But at the same time, Ashley would hold the sack close and hear her mother’s voice, feel her mother’s strength, even across the distance.  The sack of love and tears became her comfort. When Ashley was an old woman, she gave that sack to her daughter. And when Ashley’s daughter died, she gave it to her own daughter. In 1921, Ashley’s granddaughter took out her needle and thread. A free woman who could read and write, this granddaughter sewed the story of her great-grandmother’s love onto the sack filled with so much love and so many tears. Oddly, perhaps, she used cheerful, colorful letters in her embroidery. 

Only a few years ago, this sack turned up at a flea market in Tennessee. It now sits behind glass at the African American museum in Washington, DC, where I saw it last summer.[1] You can’t look at this sack without being shaken both by the evils of the world and the strength of a mother’s love, all at the same time. Even from our own privileged and relatively comfortable positions, we all know how it feels to cry. And we know how it feels for love to mingle with our tears and dry them. Mother’s Day is perhaps an appropriate time for us to ponder the strange mixture of love and loss in our lives. For many, this is not an easy day. It can be a day of weeping, mourning, and regret, as well as a day of joy and gratitude. Yet it is also the fourth Sunday of Easter, a day of Love resurrected, a day of mending.

Think back to a time when you were sad, and someone held you close and wiped away your tears. Perhaps you were a little child, and it was your mother or your father who rocked you and kissed away your pain. Maybe you were older, and it was a dear friend, or a spouse, or a nurse at the hospital? Or maybe even a stranger? Can you feel the strong arms around you? The calming whispers? The reassurance that everything will be OK? I still have the rocking chair where my mother used to rock me—even after I was much too big to fit easily in her arms. In that old rocker, I can remember clearly feeling safe from whatever pain was pursuing me at the time: the achy breathlessness of asthma; a bully at school; a cruel teacher; and especially my own failures, real or imagined.  On my mother’s lap, I can remember feeling the shadows pull back. I can remember flickers of hope and strength filling my body, as the tears dried to salt on my cheeks. It’s there that I found the courage to go back out into my world. It’s amazing, isn’t it, the transforming power that love has, when someone simply sits with you and absorbs your tears?

          "God will wipe away every tear from their eyes,” we hear in today's second lesson. The world-changing power of love in the midst of great evil is the message behind our reading from the Book of Revelation. It’s no surprise that the 19^th century “slave bibles” created by our Anglican forebears for enslaved Africans omitted the book of Revelation entirely.[2] Its poetry was too dangerous to the status quo. Revelation is less about the “end of the world,” than it is about the triumph of freedom over oppression. The author of this strange and dangerous book was likely a recent refugee to Asia Minor, fleeing the Roman-Jewish war in Palestine. Like Ashley and her mother Rose, John of Patmos and his fellow Jewish Christians struggled to survive in the midst of Roman oppression and violence. In their pain, they turned to God for salvation—and found it.

Their God was not a powerful Ruler dressed in the garb of a Roman Emperor. The God of their refuge was Jesus, who died on a Roman cross. Their God was the sacrificial Lamb, slain yet triumphant, bloody and yet risen from the dead. Their comforting shepherd was himself a bruised and battered sheep. In the image that John shares with us today, the enthroned Lamb has gathered us all around him in adoration. Ashley and Rose, their owners, Tabitha, the persecuted Christians, you and me, all sorts and conditions of human beings, we are all scooped up from our trials and tribulations and set down into the lap of God. Secure in God’s loving presence, we find the strength to wave the palm branches of divine victory. We who can cry, “Crucify him!” just as quickly as we can shout “Hosanna,” we are transformed by the sustaining love of our shepherd, the Lamb. Wiping away the tears of our captivity, God sets us free to love like he does.         
 A desperate mother gives her daughter a sack filled with love and tears. A granddaughter embroiders it in colorful thread. It ends up in a museum and sings out in hope and love to the descendants of the enslaved and to their owners alike. A Christian widow takes up her needle and thread day after day, faithfully sewing together scraps of cloth. “Clothe the naked,” her teacher Jesus told her, and so she does it. Only after her death is she acknowledged for her loving care. And her mundane generosity becomes the fertile ground of resurrection.

We too can take out our mending needles to sit and sew with the God who mends all things. We too can embroider God’s story of love onto the torn fabric of our world. That’s a kind of sewing that even I can attempt. I invite you to sit with the question: How can my life testify to the shepherding Love of the Lamb? What threads will I use to embroider love?

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[1] Vera Bergengruen, “This Scrap of Cloth is One of the Saddest Artifacts at New DC Museum.” McClatchy DC Bureau, September 23, 2016. Found at https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article103443792.html.

[2] See https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2018/february/freedom-in-christ-how-this-bible-was-used-to-manipulate