Abstract
So, it turns out that his name was John—which is fitting. Like John the Baptist, a voice crying out in the wilderness. As best I could tell, he lived up to that name—every Saturday. I only learned of his real name—John Gelpin Brown—after reading in the local newspaper that he had died. Like most folks from around here, I knew him as ‘the Jesus Man’. A street preacher.
I live in the southern United States—in Alabama—a place that has long been the beneficiary of great preaching. And, without a doubt, John numbered among those great preachers. To my ears, ‘the Jesus Man’ possessed most all of the attributes which James Weldon Johnson might have described of the great preacher nearly one hundred years beforehand in his classic recollection, God’s Trombones: ‘He was a master of all the modes of eloquence. He often possessed a voice that was a marvelous instrument, a voice he could modulate from a sepulchral whisper to a crashing thunder clap…. He had the power to sweep his hearers before him; and so himself was often swept away.’ ‘The Jesus Man’ fit Weldon’s description precisely.
Week after week; year after year. Rain or shine; blast-furnace, Alabama-hot or biting cold. There he’d be wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and a great big hat. It was astounding how one could always make out what ‘the Jesus Man’ was saying even over the noise of the traffic and despite the scratchy timbre of this old-fashioned megaphone. And I always did my best to listen. The sound of his voice alone—the pleading, poetic urgency of it—was enough to give you the chills.
And you couldn’t miss him. ‘The Jesus Man’ set up his roadside cathedral in the same spot every week along one of the busiest roadways in town. There he’d be, every Saturday, standing on folding chair with a megaphone and surrounded by some one-hundred white sandwich-board signs. ‘Go Make some noise for Jesus!’ one of his signs would read, or ‘You must be born again!’ or ‘Reach out and touch the Lord as you go by!’ In big, red or black letters, seemingly scrawled by hand, these signs served as something of tracts for our times. My favorite read: ‘Honk if you love Jesus; if you don’t, pull over.’ I’d always honk and wave as I drove by. But I never pulled over to talk with him. (I sure wish I had.)
News of John Gelpin Brown’s death provoked a reaction that would likely have surprised him were he around to have seen it. Between the touching tributes found on the local news and the reminiscences that populated social media, a community of commuters and passersby—at least for a moment—came together as one church. What’s more, they all remembered the signs—many rehearsing their texts verbatim. These meter-tall, cardstock monuments were physical evidence of the sun-drenched, unflagging ministry of God’s trombone, ‘the Jesus Man’.
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In today’s New Testament reading, we encounter the narrative telling of one of several Petrine healing miracles found in the Acts of the Apostles, the raising of Dorcas in Joppa. The story itself falls second in line amid two other Peter stories—the healing of Aeneas in Lydda and the baptism of Cornelius, the centurion. Biblical scholarship surrounding the Dorcas pericope does much to demonstrate the thematic and theological interconnectivity among these three stories, as well as to catalogue the shared narrative features of the Dorcas resuscitation with other reviving stories found within Holy Scripture—namely, Elijah’s raising of the widow’s son at Zarephath in I Kings, Elisha’s raising of the Shunamite woman’s son in II Kings, and Jesus’s raising of Jairus’s daughter in Mark 5 and in Luke 8—with the Markan telling being identified as the closer analogue. Some commentators, too, focus their interpretive lenses to uncover sociological nuances within this story—in which a (named) female ‘disciple’ provides necessary goods to sustain a group of widows—that have much to say about this nascent Christian community.
While I find these areas of thoroughgoing analysis fascinating and worthwhile, the heart of the country preacher in me is captured by a far simpler detail. I just can’t get past those tunics. You remember the ones; the tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made—the treasures that the weeping widows showed to Peter when he arrived in the upstairs room. Dorcas’s handiwork; her sewing.
To me, Luke’s inclusion of this tender detail makes all the difference in reading this story. Here you have it: Peter, the great disciple, is called upon and obliges to help other disciples in a nearby town. It’s not exactly clear in the telling of the story whether Peter knows what he is being asked (or will be asked) to do, but ostensibly when he does arrive, he’d by then doubtless be aware of the Joppa disciples’ extraordinary request: to bring Dorcas back to life again! In light of this gargantuan demand, what aggregate persuasive force could possibly have been had by showing Peter Dorcas’s sewing? The Joppa disciples asked Peter to bring someone back from the dead. Either it could happen or it couldn’t—so what matter in the world was it that the dead woman sewed pretty clothes?
Dorcas’s sewing was demonstrative of who she was. Her ‘thumbprints’ were all over those tunics and clothes. I’d bet that they were beautiful. Scripture is silent about it, but can’t you imagine that Dorcas did beautiful hand work? Can’t you image that the widows held those items so dearly because, to them, those clothes showed allcomers exactly who (and whose) their friend Dorcas really was? I doubt that Peter ever even heard of Dorcas of Joppa before that day, but when those grieving widows showed him her sewing, he got a sense of the loving scope of just who this woman really was! To me, Dorcas’s sewing was physical evidence of her love for others. To me, Dorcas’s sewing was physical evidence of her ministry to those unto whom she was called to serve. To me, Dorcas’s sewing was physical evidence of her saying an emphatic, beautiful yes to the call of Jesus Christ to follow him.
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So how does your sewing look these days? What physical evidence might others hold up to attest to your ministry to those whom you are called to serve? What evidence demonstrates your own love for others? What is it that articulates your own emphatic, beautiful yes to the call of Jesus Christ? If you’re anything like me, you’ve got far more tunics to sew in order to answer those holy questions. But until we can, we might well heed the loving advice proclaimed on that old Alabama sidewalk preacher’s sandwich-board sign: Go Make Some Noise for Jesus!