Acts 9:36-42 Living For Him Who Died For Me
In Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was always doing good deeds and acts of charity. At that time she became sick and died. After they had washed her, they laid her in an upstairs room. Since Lydda is near Joppa, when the disciples heard that Peter was there, they sent two men to him, who urged him, “Come to us without delay!” Peter got up and went with them. When he arrived, they led him to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing him the robes and clothing that Dorcas made while she was still with them. After Peter sent them all outside, he got down on his knees and prayed. Then he turned toward the body and said, “Tabitha, get up!” She opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter, she sat up. He gave her his hand and helped her stand up. After he called the saints and the widows, he presented her to them alive. This became known all over Joppa, and many believed in the Lord.
Every time I hear the story of Tabitha, I can’t help it; I think of the old TV show Bewitched. I mean, the little daughter of Samantha the witch on that show is the only other person I’ve ever heard of named Tabitha. I looked up a list of famous Tabitha’s, and not one was really famous. One was the inventor of the circular saw. One was the first woman lawyer in North Carolina. There’s the wife of Stephen King. That’s as good as it gets. And don’t even bother trying to look up famous women named Dorcas, Tabitha’s name in Greek; there aren’t any.
So I think of Tabitha, and I imagine a little girl who couldn’t quite do magic like her mother, by twitching her nose; Tabitha had to put her finger on her nose and push it around to make the magic happen, but then she could do anything she wanted. And a little child with that kind of power is going to use her magic in ways made for a tv sitcom. But we don’t believe in magic.
So we turn to the original Tabitha, and she couldn’t really do anything special at all. The women who mourned her death held up her life’s work, a pile of shirts and tunics. Tabitha could sew clothing, nothing magical or special about that. Her entire life’s work was a pile of laundry on the floor. Yet to those who knew her, this really was what made her special, not her talent for sewing, but why she sewed. Luke tells us Tabitha was a woman who was always doing good deeds and acts of charity, and here was the evidence.
Now, if I asked somebody to describe you, and I told them they had to use the word “always,” what would they say? “He (or she) is somebody who always... is doing acts of charity and good deeds”? That’s Tabitha. So it’s not surprising when Tabitha’s friends heard that the Apostle Peter was staying in the next town over, just a few miles away, they sent for him, urgently. But it wasn’t for Tabitha’s funeral. They wanted magic. They wanted somebody who could twitch his nose and make the dead come back to life. Was that silly? Childish? We don’t believe in magic.
And we don’t believe Peter was a magician, a wizard or warlock. But we believe in Jesus, God’s own Son and God himself. He had and has all the same power that God has. If we believe that God created us and gave us life, then we must believe that God has the power to raise the dead, though we’ve never seen it for ourselves. We believe God raised Jesus from the dead, or we can say that Jesus rose from the dead by his own power—it’s the same thing. And that incredible miracle is the grounds, the whole basis, for our hope and our confidence that we, too, will rise and live eternally.
People back then weren’t naive; they weren’t all children who believed in magic and fairytales. The disciples themselves had a hard time believing Jesus really had come back from the grave. Thomas said, “I won’t believe it unless I see it with my own eyes. And even then I’m still going to need to touch him to make sure my eyes aren’t deceiving me.” And that was the whole point of Paul’s great resurrection chapter in 1 Corinthians, that people were saying the dead stay dead; they do not rise. All of human history, all of our earthly experience tells us the dead stay dead.
But if there is a God, and there must be a God or nothing in this world makes sense or is even possible—why does this world even exist if God does not—then life is possible, even after death. Jesus proved it, before his death and his own resurrection, by raising at least three people from the dead. And after his resurrection, when he sent his disciples out into the world to preach the good news of salvation, he sent them with the power and authority to prove he sent them. Peter confessed that, the first time he did a miracle, raising a lame man at the Temple: “I’m not a magician. I’m no one special, and I have nothing of value to give. But I have the name of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, the only name given under heaven by which we must be saved. In his name, stand up and walk.”
So the people of Joppa, friends of Tabitha, sent for Peter, not to conduct a funeral, but because they believed in the one who sent Peter. And when Peter arrived at the house in Joppa, they showed him what Tabitha meant to them. They held up a shirt. It was a really nice shirt. I imagine Peter gave it a careful inspection; the seams were straight, and all the stitches were even. Yep, it really was a nice shirt, but clearly it meant so much more to them. To the women this simple shirt summed up the entire life of Tabitha. This shirt said it all better than they could put into words. This here is why we loved her. This is why we miss her. This shirt is what she means to us.
Can you imagine Peter looking at the shirt, looking back up at the women, and saying, “It’s just a shirt”? I wonder what Tabitha would have thought if she had been told, after you die your entire existence, the significance of your whole life comes down to a shirt, maybe a tunic and a couple robes, a pile of laundry.
Peter didn’t tell them, it’s just a shirt. He understood, they weren’t showing him Joppa’s new spring fashion line. They were trying to show him Tabitha and her love: a woman who was always doing good and helping the poor. She made shirts for people who didn’t have any. She made clothing because this is what she could do, this is what she was good at, maybe nothing special, but she could make someone’s life a little easier.
Jesus could have been talking about Tabitha when he told his disciples that, on the last day the King will say to those on his right, “I needed clothes and you clothed me.” He said, “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me... For whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”
There were no great monuments built to Tabitha; very few people are named after her. Her life’s work wouldn’t mean anything of greatness to the world, just a pile of shirts. And when her friends were trying, somehow, to let Peter know how much she meant to them, they showed him a shirt, and he understood.
Now this should have been Tabitha’s funeral. As a good Lutheran preacher, I can’t go to a funeral and just give a eulogy. When mourners want the entire funeral sermon to be a eulogy, for me to talk about what a wonderful person the dear departed had been, I need to say, “You’re forgetting something: the coffin, the grave.” Their wonderful, saintly, dearly departed has died, and death is the wages of sin. The sinless don’t need coffins. And that was true of Tabitha, as well. I can’t list her sins, but I know she was a sinner. I can’t name one single sin that she ever committed–well, yes I can; I can name ten of them, the Ten Commandments, because, like every one of us she broke all of God’s law during her life.
And the one thing that mourners at her funeral need to hear, much more than they need to hear about all the good things she did, is that she sinned, but she had a Savior who died for her sins. Tabitha put her faith in the same Savior we believe in and trust, the sinless Son of God who died on a cross for us. The sinless don’t need coffins, but the sinless Son of God needed a tomb, because he took all our sins upon himself. Christ, who had no sins, became sin for us, so that, in him, we might become the righteousness of God, by faith in his blood.
This was Tabitha’s funeral. But, of course, this isn’t a funeral sermon. We’re really not here to talk about her sewing; we need to talk about what happened in that upstairs room, when Peter got down on his knees and prayed, and Tabitha opened her eyes.
A few months ago there was a story about a woman in Detroit who was pronounced dead. The family mourned and sent her body to the mortuary, where a worker saw her move, and the funeral home called 911. Her funeral turned into a celebration, just like Tabitha’s. There’s just one big difference between that one and the story we read this morning, that woman was still alive. They celebrated because it was all a mistake—she didn’t die after all.
Tabitha died; there was no mistake. The reason we’re celebrating is because she was made alive again. But then she died, again, at some point, probably many years later. I don’t know when, but I know eventually Tabitha needed a funeral, and mourners wept and showed people the clothing she had made, again, and then her body was laid in a tomb where it remains to this day. She died. Again. But we’re still celebrating, because this story really isn’t about Tabitha. It’s about the Savior who died and rose again, who lives, still, to give us the joy of Easter and the hope of resurrection.
Tabitha wasn’t raised because she was a good person, she was raised to demonstrate that Christ has overcome death. And he sent his disciples out into the world with that message, the good news, and with the power to do miracles, even raise the dead, to prove that this was a message from God. That’s a message to pay attention to. That’s a message that both gives hope and comfort to our funerals and encouragement and purpose to our daily lives of love and faith.
This Thursday is Ascension Day, forty days after Easter. Jesus returned to his Father, and our Father, to a throne of glory at God’s right hand, where he continues to use his power for us and for his church. We wait for his return, and while we wait, we want to live like Tabitha lived, always doing good, helping anyone in need, using our time and talents the best we can to serve and glorify God.
Now, I should tell you, I didn’t pick this sermon text because I thought it would make a good Mothers’ Day message. It didn’t even occur to me; this text was simply one of the readings assigned to the Sixth Sunday of Easter. As far as I know, Tabitha wasn’t even a mother. But in the shirts and garments her friends showed to Peter, which showed what she meant to them, we find a lesson for mothers, and for their children, that it’s not great accomplishments that we need to or want to be remembered for. It’s not what will impress the world that our families will point to as the reason we mean so much to them. It’s the love we show and the good we do for others. And it’s the lesson Jesus taught, whatever we do for one of the least of these, whatever we do for our children, our families, for our mothers, we do for our Savior who died for us and lives for us, that we might live for each other and for him who gives us the hope of eternal life. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
In Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was always doing good deeds and acts of charity. At that time she became sick and died. After they had washed her, they laid her in an upstairs room. Since Lydda is near Joppa, when the disciples heard that Peter was there, they sent two men to him, who urged him, “Come to us without delay!” Peter got up and went with them. When he arrived, they led him to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing him the robes and clothing that Dorcas made while she was still with them. After Peter sent them all outside, he got down on his knees and prayed. Then he turned toward the body and said, “Tabitha, get up!” She opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter, she sat up. He gave her his hand and helped her stand up. After he called the saints and the widows, he presented her to them alive. This became known all over Joppa, and many believed in the Lord.
Every time I hear the story of Tabitha, I can’t help it; I think of the old TV show Bewitched. I mean, the little daughter of Samantha the witch on that show is the only other person I’ve ever heard of named Tabitha. I looked up a list of famous Tabitha’s, and not one was really famous. One was the inventor of the circular saw. One was the first woman lawyer in North Carolina. There’s the wife of Stephen King. That’s as good as it gets. And don’t even bother trying to look up famous women named Dorcas, Tabitha’s name in Greek; there aren’t any.
So I think of Tabitha, and I imagine a little girl who couldn’t quite do magic like her mother, by twitching her nose; Tabitha had to put her finger on her nose and push it around to make the magic happen, but then she could do anything she wanted. And a little child with that kind of power is going to use her magic in ways made for a tv sitcom. But we don’t believe in magic.
So we turn to the original Tabitha, and she couldn’t really do anything special at all. The women who mourned her death held up her life’s work, a pile of shirts and tunics. Tabitha could sew clothing, nothing magical or special about that. Her entire life’s work was a pile of laundry on the floor. Yet to those who knew her, this really was what made her special, not her talent for sewing, but why she sewed. Luke tells us Tabitha was a woman who was always doing good deeds and acts of charity, and here was the evidence.
Now, if I asked somebody to describe you, and I told them they had to use the word “always,” what would they say? “He (or she) is somebody who always... is doing acts of charity and good deeds”? That’s Tabitha. So it’s not surprising when Tabitha’s friends heard that the Apostle Peter was staying in the next town over, just a few miles away, they sent for him, urgently. But it wasn’t for Tabitha’s funeral. They wanted magic. They wanted somebody who could twitch his nose and make the dead come back to life. Was that silly? Childish? We don’t believe in magic.
And we don’t believe Peter was a magician, a wizard or warlock. But we believe in Jesus, God’s own Son and God himself. He had and has all the same power that God has. If we believe that God created us and gave us life, then we must believe that God has the power to raise the dead, though we’ve never seen it for ourselves. We believe God raised Jesus from the dead, or we can say that Jesus rose from the dead by his own power—it’s the same thing. And that incredible miracle is the grounds, the whole basis, for our hope and our confidence that we, too, will rise and live eternally.
People back then weren’t naive; they weren’t all children who believed in magic and fairytales. The disciples themselves had a hard time believing Jesus really had come back from the grave. Thomas said, “I won’t believe it unless I see it with my own eyes. And even then I’m still going to need to touch him to make sure my eyes aren’t deceiving me.” And that was the whole point of Paul’s great resurrection chapter in 1 Corinthians, that people were saying the dead stay dead; they do not rise. All of human history, all of our earthly experience tells us the dead stay dead.
But if there is a God, and there must be a God or nothing in this world makes sense or is even possible—why does this world even exist if God does not—then life is possible, even after death. Jesus proved it, before his death and his own resurrection, by raising at least three people from the dead. And after his resurrection, when he sent his disciples out into the world to preach the good news of salvation, he sent them with the power and authority to prove he sent them. Peter confessed that, the first time he did a miracle, raising a lame man at the Temple: “I’m not a magician. I’m no one special, and I have nothing of value to give. But I have the name of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, the only name given under heaven by which we must be saved. In his name, stand up and walk.”
So the people of Joppa, friends of Tabitha, sent for Peter, not to conduct a funeral, but because they believed in the one who sent Peter. And when Peter arrived at the house in Joppa, they showed him what Tabitha meant to them. They held up a shirt. It was a really nice shirt. I imagine Peter gave it a careful inspection; the seams were straight, and all the stitches were even. Yep, it really was a nice shirt, but clearly it meant so much more to them. To the women this simple shirt summed up the entire life of Tabitha. This shirt said it all better than they could put into words. This here is why we loved her. This is why we miss her. This shirt is what she means to us.
Can you imagine Peter looking at the shirt, looking back up at the women, and saying, “It’s just a shirt”? I wonder what Tabitha would have thought if she had been told, after you die your entire existence, the significance of your whole life comes down to a shirt, maybe a tunic and a couple robes, a pile of laundry.
Peter didn’t tell them, it’s just a shirt. He understood, they weren’t showing him Joppa’s new spring fashion line. They were trying to show him Tabitha and her love: a woman who was always doing good and helping the poor. She made shirts for people who didn’t have any. She made clothing because this is what she could do, this is what she was good at, maybe nothing special, but she could make someone’s life a little easier.
Jesus could have been talking about Tabitha when he told his disciples that, on the last day the King will say to those on his right, “I needed clothes and you clothed me.” He said, “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me... For whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”
There were no great monuments built to Tabitha; very few people are named after her. Her life’s work wouldn’t mean anything of greatness to the world, just a pile of shirts. And when her friends were trying, somehow, to let Peter know how much she meant to them, they showed him a shirt, and he understood.
Now this should have been Tabitha’s funeral. As a good Lutheran preacher, I can’t go to a funeral and just give a eulogy. When mourners want the entire funeral sermon to be a eulogy, for me to talk about what a wonderful person the dear departed had been, I need to say, “You’re forgetting something: the coffin, the grave.” Their wonderful, saintly, dearly departed has died, and death is the wages of sin. The sinless don’t need coffins. And that was true of Tabitha, as well. I can’t list her sins, but I know she was a sinner. I can’t name one single sin that she ever committed–well, yes I can; I can name ten of them, the Ten Commandments, because, like every one of us she broke all of God’s law during her life.
And the one thing that mourners at her funeral need to hear, much more than they need to hear about all the good things she did, is that she sinned, but she had a Savior who died for her sins. Tabitha put her faith in the same Savior we believe in and trust, the sinless Son of God who died on a cross for us. The sinless don’t need coffins, but the sinless Son of God needed a tomb, because he took all our sins upon himself. Christ, who had no sins, became sin for us, so that, in him, we might become the righteousness of God, by faith in his blood.
This was Tabitha’s funeral. But, of course, this isn’t a funeral sermon. We’re really not here to talk about her sewing; we need to talk about what happened in that upstairs room, when Peter got down on his knees and prayed, and Tabitha opened her eyes.
A few months ago there was a story about a woman in Detroit who was pronounced dead. The family mourned and sent her body to the mortuary, where a worker saw her move, and the funeral home called 911. Her funeral turned into a celebration, just like Tabitha’s. There’s just one big difference between that one and the story we read this morning, that woman was still alive. They celebrated because it was all a mistake—she didn’t die after all.
Tabitha died; there was no mistake. The reason we’re celebrating is because she was made alive again. But then she died, again, at some point, probably many years later. I don’t know when, but I know eventually Tabitha needed a funeral, and mourners wept and showed people the clothing she had made, again, and then her body was laid in a tomb where it remains to this day. She died. Again. But we’re still celebrating, because this story really isn’t about Tabitha. It’s about the Savior who died and rose again, who lives, still, to give us the joy of Easter and the hope of resurrection.
Tabitha wasn’t raised because she was a good person, she was raised to demonstrate that Christ has overcome death. And he sent his disciples out into the world with that message, the good news, and with the power to do miracles, even raise the dead, to prove that this was a message from God. That’s a message to pay attention to. That’s a message that both gives hope and comfort to our funerals and encouragement and purpose to our daily lives of love and faith.
This Thursday is Ascension Day, forty days after Easter. Jesus returned to his Father, and our Father, to a throne of glory at God’s right hand, where he continues to use his power for us and for his church. We wait for his return, and while we wait, we want to live like Tabitha lived, always doing good, helping anyone in need, using our time and talents the best we can to serve and glorify God.
Now, I should tell you, I didn’t pick this sermon text because I thought it would make a good Mothers’ Day message. It didn’t even occur to me; this text was simply one of the readings assigned to the Sixth Sunday of Easter. As far as I know, Tabitha wasn’t even a mother. But in the shirts and garments her friends showed to Peter, which showed what she meant to them, we find a lesson for mothers, and for their children, that it’s not great accomplishments that we need to or want to be remembered for. It’s not what will impress the world that our families will point to as the reason we mean so much to them. It’s the love we show and the good we do for others. And it’s the lesson Jesus taught, whatever we do for one of the least of these, whatever we do for our children, our families, for our mothers, we do for our Savior who died for us and lives for us, that we might live for each other and for him who gives us the hope of eternal life. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
