“People to meet in heaven: Simon the tanner”
Acts 9:43
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
Not too many years ago, actor Mike Rowe starred in a television series called, Dirty Jobs. And for eight seasons and 169 episodes, he tried more than three hundred greasy, sooty, oily, dusty, grimy, dirty jobs, so we don’t have to.
So, in his opinion what are the dirtiest jobs out there?
First on his list, (though not in any real order), was a charcoal maker. While we might enjoy a relaxing weekend barbecue, somebody somewhere has to burn scrap wood in a huge bunker, then beat it into pieces till they come out, he said, looking like Al Jolson. That’s a dirty job.
Or how about a renderer? What’s a renderer, you ask? It’s someone who recycles dead animals into products like chicken feed and biodiesel. “It’s a bloodbath,” he said. “No one wants to see it or talk about it.” It took him years to convince his camera crew to even go inside a rendering operation. The smell, he said, is indescribable.
Ever heard of an animal bone charrer? Probably not! But next time you women put on makeup or change the filter on your aquarium, you could thank one. You couldn’t do it without him.
Or if that doesn’t suit you, you could help paint the Mackinac Bridge! It’s six hundred feet tall, and five times longer than the Golden Gate Bridge. Not only is it dangerous, you end up wearing a lot of bright green paint!
And last, but not least, there’s the lift pump replacement technician. Now replacing the pump isn’t so bad. In fact, that’s the easy part. What is bad is what you have to wade through to replace it. Some things I don’t even want to imagine!
Our text for today tells of a dirty job, certainly one of the dirtiest ever. It’s so dirty, this is the one and only place the Bible even mentions it. But before I tell you what it is, let’s read the story behind the story.
If you would, please turn in your Bible to page 1168 as I read the words of our text, Acts chapter 9, starting at verse 36: “Now there was in Joppa a disciple named Tabitha, which, translated, means Dorcas. In those days she became ill and died, and when they had washed her, they laid her in an upper room. Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, hearing that Peter was there, sent two men to him, urging him, ‘Please come to us without delay.’ So Peter rose and went with them. And when he arrived, they took him to the upper room. All the widows stood beside him weeping and showing tunics and other garments that Dorcas made while she was with them. But Peter put them all outside, and knelt down and prayed; and turning to the body he said, ‘Tabitha, arise.’ And she opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter she sat up. And he gave her his hand and raised her up. Then calling the saints and widows, he presented her alive. And it became known throughout all Joppa, and many believed in the Lord. And he stayed in Joppa for many days with one Simon, a tanner.”
To sum it up, a woman named Tabitha, loved by so many, suddenly grew sick and died. So friends asked Peter to help.
And just as soon as he came, he knelt down beside her bed, and prayed. Then, as it says in verse 41, God raised her from the dead.
Then what? Then the Bible moves on in Acts chapter 10 to tell the story of Cornelius, a Roman centurion, and of his prayer to God.
But wait just one second, because we just missed something very important! Look again at verse 43: “And he stayed in Joppa for many days with one Simon, a tanner.”
Now that might not seem like much, which is why we so often skip that verse and move on to chapter 10. But let’s pause for just a moment, to see what it means.
First let me say a little bit about Joppa, because it is an important part of the story.
What’s Joppa? It’s a town that lies some thirty miles northwest of Jerusalem and sits on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea.
And that’s important. You see, if you’re going to have a business, especially a tanning business, you better be by the sea.
What’s a tanning business? It’s not where you help people catch some rays and deepen the color of their skin. That’s a different kind of “tanning business.” The tanning business I’m talking about is the one that turns animal hides into leather.
And as you can guess, it’s a nasty business, a dirty business. To put it simply, it stinks.
Unger’s Bible Dictionary once described it as “a three-day treatment with salt and flour [that] cleansed the skins from foreign matter. Lime was used to remove the hair. The acrid juices of desert plants or oak bark were also used.” And it said, “The skin was dried for several days and treated with acid barks and leaves, like sumac.”
A book of Jewish law, The Babylonian Talmud, said, “The world cannot do without perfume makers and tanners; happy is he who prepares perfumes, but woe to him whose craft is tanning.”
Even more, if you’re a tanner, you’re constantly working with dead animals. And what does the Bible say about those who touch dead animals? Leviticus 11 says you’re unclean until evening. And since they worked with dead animals every day, they were unclean all the time.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, tanning was also a little hard on your marriage. Jewish rabbis said a tanner’s wife had every right to file for divorce any time she wanted—even if she knew her husband-to-be was a tanner. All she had to do was to explain that she couldn’t take the smell anymore.
Any way you looked at it, it was an all-around disgusting, dirty job.
But at the same time it was so disgusting, it was also very important. People in Bible times used leather for all kinds of things, like waterskins, wineskins, harnesses, quivers, sandals, boots and armor. You just couldn’t live without a tanner.
So now that you know a little bit about tanners, you should be rather surprised to read the words of Acts chapter 9: “And he stayed in Joppa for many days with one Simon, a tanner.”
Why would Peter stay there? I mean, think about it. Sure, he had made his mistakes. He said, three times, that he didn’t even know who Jesus was! And when he rebuked Jesus for speaking of the cross, Jesus rebuked him and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you do not have in mind the things of God.”
But think about. By this time, Peter was a celebrity, a rock star! On Pentecost, he had preached to a crowd of three thousand. He’s been arrested, tried, beaten, and jailed. The earth shook, prison doors broke open, and chains fell from his hands and feet. And now in chapter 9, he told a man paralyzed for eight years, “Rise up and make your bed.” And here in Joppa, he raised a woman from the dead!
He could have stayed anywhere, maybe the “Ritz Joppa,” or “The Waldorf by the Sea.” Why, of all places, would he stay at the home of Simon, the tanner?
Maybe he meant to show that the gospel wasn’t only for the rich, the powerful, and the elite. It was also for the unclean, the marginalized, the outcast. That is, after all, what Jesus said in John chapter 3: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever…”
Can I pause for just a moment on that word, “whosoever”?
Have you ever noticed that there’s a gold thread running all through the Bible? It’s the theme that God’s love is radically inclusive. Time after time, He seeks out the sick, the poor, and the powerless, those who many would call sinful and unclean.
One day, Jesus walked all the way to Tyre and Sidon to heal a girl possessed by a demon. In Samaria, He spoke to a woman at a well. He said: “Whoever drinks of the water that I give, will never be thirsty again.”
He called Matthew and Zacchaeus, both tax collectors. He told a woman, caught in the act of adultery, “Go and sin no more.” And when the Sadducees and Pharisees asked, “Why does this Man eat with sinners and tax collectors?” He answered, “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.”
He called a eunuch from Ethiopia, a centurion from Caesarea, a jailer in Philippi, even Simon, a tanner by the sea.
But best of all, He’s even called you and me.
Escape from Camp 14 tells the story of Shin Dong-Hyuk and his escape from a North Korean prison, the only one to have ever escaped from a North Korean prison.
Since his parents were both held captive for unspecified political crimes, he was born in prison. His first memory, at four years old, he said, was of an execution. As a boy, he learned the camp’s ten rules. The first was, “Anyone caught escaping will be shot immediately.” When he was fourteen, when his own mother and brother tried to escape, guards stripped him, tied ropes to his wrists and ankles, and suspended him from a hook in the ceiling. Then they lowered him over the fire. He passed out when his flesh began to burn.
Finally, early one morning, at the age of twenty-two, Shin and some twenty-five other prisoners were taken to gather firewood on a nearby mountain. And that, he knew, was his chance.
After working all day in bitterly cold, ten-degree weather, he and a friend ambled toward a ten-foot high, electrified, barbed-wire fence. “I don’t know if I can do this,” said his friend. Shin answered, “If we don’t do it now, there won’t be another chance.”
His friend was the first to make it to the fence. He fell to his knees, then shoved his arms, head and shoulders between the two lowest strands of wire. Seconds later, Shin saw sparks and smelled burning flesh.
Without even hesitating for a moment, Shin crawled over his friend, using him as an insulator. Though he didn’t know it at the time, he later came to understand that the only way he could have escaped was because of his friend’s body.
And the only way we can be saved is because of our Friend’s body, pierced with nails, crowned with thorns, died, yet risen again.
As Jesus Himself once said: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. And you are My friends, if you do what I command.”
Dear Jesus, You once called Simon, a tanner, to believe in You. Help even us to faithfully follow You. This we ask in Your name. Amen