Sunday Worship 11 May 2025
Today’s service is led by the Revd Dr Nick Jones
Introduction
Hello everybody. My name is Rev Nick Jones and I am minister of two United Reformed Churches in Mersey Synod – Chester Road URC in Ellesmere Port, and Heswall URC, where I am speaking to you from today. Thank you for joining me in worship. At Heswall URC we have adopted the mission statement ‘We believe God loves us all, so everyone is welcome here’ and you are all welcome today. In our service we’ll be thinking about how this hasn’t always been the case, and churches have sometimes excluded groups of people. We read the story of Dorcas from the book of Acts, and this gives a glimpse into life in the Early Church, and particularly the role of women within it. Was there a radical history to the Early Church that has often been overlooked? And what can we learn from how Dorcas is portrayed?
Call to Worship
‘Jesus said ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’’
Prayer for Illumination
God of knowledge, God of wisdom, God who is always with us,
we celebrate your presence today as we worship together,
as we read and reflect on your word in scripture,
as we pray for ourselves and our world.
Help us always to listen and learn,
so we can follow your commandment to love one another,
and share that love with our wider communities. Amen.
Hymn All People That on Earth Do Dwell
William Kethe (1561) public domain Courtesy of St Andrew’s Cathedral & Choir, Sydney, Australia
All people that on Earth do dwell,
sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
Him serve with fear, His praise forthtell;
come ye before him and rejoice.
The Lord, ye know, is God indeed;
without our aid He did us make;
we are His folk, he doth us feed,
and for his sheep he doth us take.
O enter then His gates with praise,
approach with joy his courts unto;
praise, laud, and bless His name always,
for it is seemly so to do.
For why? The Lord our God is good;
His mercy is forever sure;
His truth has always firmly stood,
and shall from age to age endure.
To Father, Son and Holy Ghost,
the God whom heaven and earth adore,
from all and from the angel host
be praise and glory evermore! Amen.
Prayers of Approach and Confession
Loving, gracious and compassionate God,
we come before today to worship you.
We come to just as we are:
when our hearts are full of joy, we praise you and thank you,
and when are hearts are sad, we look to you for comfort and support.
Loving God, we come before you as your people,
different and diverse but united through you.
We will sing your praises, hear your word in Scripture,
and give thanks for and respond to your love.
We thank you for the universe you created,
from the smallest particles to the planets and stars.
We give thanks for the beauty of our natural world,
for the hills, fields and beaches which bring joy to our souls
We give thanks for the abundance of the earth,
which we have been entrusted with
to pass on to those who will come after us.
We give thanks for our friend and families,
the people we love and who give our lives its depth and texture.
We pray for the church, for the fellowships we each belong to,
and we pray that our communities can truly be places of welcome
where your kingdom values of justice and kindness
are lived out day by day, week by week.
We ask that you help us as we try to live out your love
in our lives and in how we treat other people.
We pray for your transforming love to help us to be
the best versions of ourselves, using the various talents and gifts
we each have to serve you and each other.
Jesus, here we are: use us, reassure us,
and help us to love you more.
Yet, even when we try our best,
we are human and so we make mistakes.
If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves,
but if we confess our sins God who is faithful and just will forgive us.
We know and trust that you are indeed a God of forgiveness and second chances, always ready to show your unending compassion.
Therefore, confident in your grace
we think of things we have done which we regret;
times when we have been too busy to listen to your voice,
times we have judged other people,
or jumped to conclusions without knowing the whole story,
times we have been unkind and hurtful,
times when we have failed to act for justice
but remained complicit in unfair systems,
times when we have been a part
of making the Church exclusive and unwelcoming.
We admit all these things and more, and yet we celebrate the good news that through you our sins are forgiven. Thanks be to God, and we pray that we can do better with your help. Amen.
The Lord’s Prayer
Hymn Let Us Build a House Where Love Can Dwell
Marty Haugen © 1994, GIA Publications, Inc. OneLicence # A-734713. sung by the Frodsham Methodist Church Cloud Choir and used with their kind permission.
Let us build a house where love can dwell
and all can safely live,
a place where saints and children tell
how hearts learn to forgive.
Built of hopes and dreams and visions,
rock of faith and vault of grace;
here the love of Christ shall end divisions.
All are welcome, all are welcome,
all are welcome in this place.
Let us build a house where prophets speak,
and words are strong and true,
where all God’s children dare to seek
to dream God’s reign anew.
Here the cross shall stand as witness
and as symbol of God’s grace;
here as one we claim the faith of Jesus.
All are welcome, all are welcome,
all are welcome in this place.
Let us build a house where love is found
in water, wine and wheat:
a banquet hall on holy ground
where peace and justice meet.
Here the love of God, through Jesus
is revealed in time and space;
as we share in Christ the feast that frees us.
All are welcome, all are welcome,
all are welcome in this place.
Let us build a house where hands will reach
beyond the wood and stone
to heal and strengthen, serve and teach,
and live the Word they’ve known.
Here the outcast and the stranger
bear the image of God’s face;
let us bring an end to fear and danger.
All are welcome, all are welcome,
all are welcome in this place.
Let us build a house where all are named,
their songs and visions heard
and loved and treasured, taught and claimed
as words within the Word.
Built of tears and cries and laughter,
prayers of faith and songs of grace,
let this house proclaim from floor to rafter.
All are welcome, all are welcome,
all are welcome in this place.
Affirmation of Faith
Loving God, we acknowledge our shared faith,
but also that we believe in different ways
because we are different people, all made by you.
We trust in you, God of life and love,
and we believe that through that love
our lives can be transformed,
so that we can be fully ourselves and live our lives in all fullness.
We believe in Jesus, who offers us hope and light,
and a model for how we can act in the world.
And we believe that our world too can be transformed,
and that we are called to help build your kingdom. Amen.
Reading Acts 9.36-43
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.
Sermon
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you O Lord our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
At the start of Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield the titular narrator wonders if he will be the hero of his own story or not, while in T. S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the title character is happy to say he is not Prince Hamlet, not the star of the show, but just a bit player with a few lines and a small part. Are we all the main characters in our own stories? You might have heard the phrase ‘main character energy.’ Sometimes this might be a good thing, seeing ourselves as the main character, taking control of your own lives and not being defined by other people. Or it might be more negative, describing a person who always has to be the main character, the centre of attention, and thinks the world revolves around them.
Through the Bible, there are a lot of stories and a lot of people. Some of these people, like David or Elijah, Peter or Paul, we get to know quite a lot about. But there others we only see once, in passing, and who then never turn up again. Characters we never even learn the names of and who are there only briefly, centre stage for just a moment.
Dorcas is one of these people – although we do know her name, and not in just one but two different languages. She isn’t even really the heroine of her own story. Yet, as in so many passages of scripture, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes; things which are hinted at but not quite spelled out. We’ll get back to that later! But first, what are we told about Dorcas, or Tabitha? Perhaps the name was common back then. It means ‘gazelle’, the animal – Tabitha is the Aramaic word and Dorcas the Greek translation. Dorcas lives in the city of Joppa, which today is Jaffa in modern day Israel, on the coast near Tel Aviv. And we’re told she is a good person – devoted to good works and charity and helping people. She falls ill and dies, and her friends in the church, hearing Peter is nearby, send for him in the hope he will somehow be able to help. Peter then arrives, and encounters a group of widows, the recipients of Dorcas’ charity, and they want to show him the clothes that she had made for them. Peter prays, tells her to get up, and she does so – apparently being raised from the dead.
Now, the miracle here – that she has died and been brought back – is not I think the most interesting part of the story. There’s a discussion to be had about how we understand miracle stories – do we understand them literally, as a metaphor, or a literary device – but I’m not going to do that today. Rather, there’s a simple but very important moral here. Dorcas devotes her life to acts of goodness, and charity. She sews clothes for people who need them, which are so prized their recipients want to show them off to Peter. It’s a very practical action fulfilling one of the most basic human needs, using her skills and gifts in service of God, the church, and those who need help. A good question to ask then is how can we be like Dorcas? I think today she’d be running a knitting group making hats for refugee children, or maybe volunteering at a warm hub or a foodbank. There are people like Dorcas in all of our churches, people dedicated to using their abilities to help people. That’s both ordinary and every day, and yet wonderful and extraordinary. Of course we have all have different skills and gifts to use. I wouldn’t know where to begin knitting a jumper, but I did enjoy helping to put together the equipment we use here for streaming our services online. What gifts do you have and how do you use them?
All of that is a simple message, but it’s absolutely enough to take from this story. But there’s some more, some background and subtext, partly revealed by a single word. In some translations Dorcas is described as a believer. Which is true, but actually the word in Greek is disciple. She is a μαθήτρια (mathatria) – which is the feminine form of the word μαθητής (mathatas), which is the word used throughout the New Testament for disciples of Jesus. It literally means a person who learns from a teacher. This is the only time this word, disciple, is used to describe a woman, which is surprising because she was far from only female follower of Jesus, as we know from the gospels. And this leads us to a wider point about the role of women in the early church.
The group of women who mourn for Dorcas are described as widows. A widow of course is someone whose husband has died. As a group they were considered vulnerable, because it was hard for a woman, especially an older woman, to support herself in that particular patriarchal society. Back in the Hebrew scriptures widows are specifically mentioned in the Mosaic law as a group of people who need to be looked after, so by caring for them Dorcas is fulfilling the spirit of the Jewish law, as well as Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbour. There is of course a danger in assuming widows are automatically helpless and need help. There were no doubt some wealthy widows, or widows of wealthy husbands, who were very well off, and dispensers of charity rather than recipients – and this may well be the case with Dorcas. But the word has a slightly different meaning, and it’s now that we get into some historical speculation. There’s evidence to suggest there were women called ‘widows’ were not really widows in that literal sense, but rather they had left their previous life to serve the church and dedicate themselves to being disciples. Choosing God over family life – just as many male disciples did, including Peter. This shouldn’t surprise us – Jesus talks about his followers being his true family, he encourages people to leave everything behind and follow him. So being on their own, with no income, these women needed the practical things of life – food, clothing, shelter. They may also have had a liturgical role, and a position in the formal structures of the church. So Dorcas, or people like her, were not just kind people, but true disciples, and also church leaders in some form.
It’s easy to think that the church was male-dominated from the very beginning, and that this only really changed in the twentieth century. In the traditions which came together to form the URC, the first ordained female minister, Constance Coltman, was ordained in 1916, so over a century ago. But there have always been women in ministry, but maybe those roles of involvement of women in the early church got written out later in. But there are traces of it in the New Testament. The scholar Stevan L. Davies argues that the Acts of the Apostles itself was likely written by a woman. Other scholars would disagree, but it’s a fascinating idea, and reminds us that we shouldn’t make assumptions. After all, Dorcas is not the only female disciple. There’s also Junia (Romans 16.7) who is described as an apostle – although Bible translations, for their own ideological reasons, often change her name to a male name. There’s Mary Magdalene, and the women who go to Jesus’ tomb to find it empty. And of course there is Dorcas. It’s also there in what are known as the apocryphal books – that is the books that didn’t make it into the canon of scripture, that were not selected to be in the Bible. There’s a whole set of books about Paul, which I am sure have no historical basis, but do reflect something of the church communities which created them. Some of them are fascinating – like the story of Thecla. Thecla becomes obsessed with Paul after seeing him speak (in a way which mirrors Greek romance novels but is decidedly unromantic). But Paul pays her no attention in return. She dresses as a man, ends up in a Roman arena about to be killed when she is saved by a female lion, who takes pity on her, and then eventually she baptises herself because no one will do it for her. Now I’m not saying these stories have any historical basis at all, but they do convey important things about what was important in the early church. And one of those is that women had an important role from the very beginning. And there’s a sense that, as we acknowledge mistakes that the church may have made in the past and today work hard to create a church where we can make all people truly welcome, we are some recovering aspects of the early church rather than creating something new.
Perhaps the turning point is when Christianity became respectable, became the religion of the rich and powerful, became the official religion of the empire, and some of its early, disreputable history was considered embarrassing and was re-interpreted, or re-written. But we that from the very beginning, from the time the first witnesses to the resurrection went in separate ways, the church was split, the church was divided. There was no single ‘early church’ and no single way of doing things, but multiple congregations in different cities who organised themselves and worshipped in different ways, even as they were united in being followers of Jesus. Some of these were clearly what we might think of now as more radical, challenging the power of empire and patriarchy. But because a particular group became most powerful much of this earlier history was re-written.
So we can learn two things from Dorcas. She is a wonderful example of someone dedicated to God and to good works, and therefore a fine example for us to try to emulate. But we only know who she is because her path happened to coincide with that of Peter. So is she the main character of her own story? Or is she simply a minor footnote in the story of Peter? Perhaps she has been seen in that way, but we should remember she is a heroine in and of herself. We would think too there must have been unnumbered, unknown, unamed Dorcases throughout history. And we know even today there are people in all of our churches who are busy doing their bit. Maybe you are one of those people.
And so stories about the early church have sometimes been neglected and forgotten. When we talk about the church today what stories do we miss? What groups of people have sometimes been excluded from how we understand church? What stories have been lost and how can we recover them today. These are good questions we always need to grapple with – and the story of Dorcas can help us. Amen.
Hymn The Love of God is Broad Like Beach and Meadow
Fred Kaan © 1974 Hope Publishing Company OneLicence # A-734713 sung by Paul Robinson
The love of God is broad like beach and meadow,
wide as the wind, and an eternal home.
God leaves us free to seek him or reject him,
he gives us room to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’
The love of God is broad like beach and meadow,
wide as the wind, and an eternal home.
We long for freedom where our truest being
is given hope and courage to unfold.
We seek in freedom space and scope for dreaming,
and look for ground where trees and plants can grow.
The love of God is broad like beach and meadow,
wide as the wind, and an eternal home.
But there are walls that keep us all divided;
we fence each other in with hate and war.
Fear is the bricks-and-mortar of our prison,
our pride of self the prison coat we wear.
The love of God is broad like beach and meadow,
wide as the wind, and an eternal home.
O, judge us, Lord, and in your judgment free us,
and set our feet in freedom’s open space;
take us as far as your compassion wanders
among the children of the human race.
The love of God is broad like beach and meadow,
wide as the wind, and an eternal home.
Prayers of Intercession
Loving God,
we celebrate today Dorcas and all those who are like her,
helping others in both spiritual and practical ways.
We know that there is much love and kindness in our world,
but we also know that in many places people are suffering,
and need help.
We pray for those places where is war, or people are living with the long-terms effects of conflict. We hold before those in Palestine, in Gaza and the West Bank, living every day under occupation.
We pray for Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and others; wherever people are living in fear, wherever they have been forced out of their homes.
We pray for refugees and asylum seekers, and that they might find welcome and kindness rather than suspicion.
Above all, we pray for your peace, and for peacemakers trying to change situations which may seem hopeless.
Spirit of love, bring comfort and hope.
We pray for those people with power to make a difference, presidents and prime ministers and other leaders. We pray they will act with justice and with compassion, for the good of all rather than in narrow sectarian interests.
We pray too for those without power, who feel that they cannot escape from situations in which they feel trapped.
We pray for people living in poverty, and that there might be a fair sharing of the abundant resources you have given to us, creating a world of justice and equality for all.
We pray for people excluded due to prejudice and racism. We pray for LGBTQIA+ people, particularly our trans siblings who may feel under attack and unable to freely express themselves.
Spirit of love, bring comfort and hope.
We pray for the Church, and we think of the different fellowships we belong to. Help us to continue worshipping and reaching out into our wider communities. Help us to make difficult decisions and to be ready to change what we do in order to best follow your call. Help us to make our churches true places of welcome and inclusion, where we use the talents and skills of all in your service, not allowing gender identity, disability or other issues to be reasons why people are made to feel they do not belong.
We pray for the people we know and love, thinking of those struggling with mental or physical health issues. We pray for those in hospital or recovering from treatment, and those who need long-term care, and for those who care for others, either professionally, or looking after loved ones. We pray for practical and spiritual support for those in need.
We remember too that Jesus said we should love our neighbour as ourselves, and so we must love ourselves. Help each one of us to remember that we are your precious children, each one of us was made in your image, and that you love each one of us unconditionally. Help us to forgive ourselves when we feel we have let you or others down, and help us to have the confidence to continue to follow you.
We bring all of our prayers before you in the name of Jesus Christ, our redeemer, sibling and friend. Amen.
Hymn O Lord My God, When I In Awesome Wonder
Carl Boberg; Translator: Stuart K. Hine (1949) Hope Publishing Company, OneLicence # A-734713 Acapeldridge Music
O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder
consider all the works thy hands hath made,
I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder,
thy pow’r throughout the universe displayed;
Then sings my soul, my Saviour-God, to thee:
how great thou art! How great thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Saviour-God, to thee:
how great thou art! How great thou art!
When through the woods and forest glades I wander,
and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees;
when I look down from lofty mountain grandeur
and hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze;
Then sings my soul, my Saviour-God, to thee:
how great thou art! How great thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Saviour-God, to thee:
how great thou art! How great thou art!
And when I think that God, his Son not sparing,
sent him to die, I scarce can take it in,
that on the cross my burden gladly bearing
he bled and died to take away my sin;
Then sings my soul, my Saviour-God, to thee:
how great thou art! How great thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Saviour-God, to thee:
how great thou art! How great thou art!
When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation
and take me home, what joy shall fill my heart!
Then I shall bow in humble adoration
and there proclaim: “My God, how great thou art!”
Then sings my soul, my Saviour-God, to thee:
how great thou art! How great thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Saviour-God, to thee:
how great thou art! How great thou art!
Blessing
Gracious God,
whatever the week may hold, help us to be compassionate
and the grace to receive compassion from others.
May the grace of God almighty Creator, Son and Spirit
be with us all and those whom we love now and for ever. Amen.