Meeting Tabitha--February 19, 2020

Meeting Tabitha--February 19, 2020

"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. [Acts 9:36-40]

Sometimes even just seeing someone as a person with a face and a story is the beginning of what brings them back to life.

Like here... A curious detail made me stop at just these two verses, and almost made me stop even before Tabitha (whose Greek name is Dorcas) is brought back from death. Luke records such a strange detail in the scene when Peter walks in and finds the body lying on the bed that I first wondered what possessed him to include it. As Peter walks into the darkened room, he finds the widows of the community all weeping alongside the bed—so far, nothing strange. But then, Luke notes that these women are—apparently while they are weeping—showing Peter "tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them." At first, I thought this the worst possible timing for a round of show-and-tell. The woman is dead, and the rest of the community responds by displaying her handiwork to the traveling healer who has come to town? Is this really the moment for something like this?

But I wonder if, perhaps, this is exactly the right moment for showing Peter the clothes and wares that Tabitha had made. Not to be crude, but let's be honest—she cannot get any more dead than she is. There is no such thing as arriving too late when you have been summoned to raise the dead. That seems to be abundantly clear from the familiar story of Jesus raising Lazarus after four days when, as the King James Version so eloquently puts it, "he stinketh." So Peter is not going to have any less work if he prays for Tabitha to be restored to life right when he walks in the room compared with waiting for five minutes to see the clothing the deceased woman had made.

But consider what it does to the situation when Peter takes the time to see these tunics and other clothes as they are held up proudly in the wrinkled, toughened hands of the widows of the community. All of a sudden, Tabitha is not a faceless, anonymous corpse in the room—she is a person. She is a human being with a story, with a talent, with a face. She is not just "the body," and she is not merely the object for Peter's divinely given power, used to wow the rest of the people in the town. She is not an "it" (the way we talk about a corpse), and she is not even just "she" or "her" (a generic placeholder for Peter to do his magic on). She is Tabitha. She is Dorcas. She has a face now. Peter takes the time--or perhaps he can't help it with these eager widows pressing in on him—to see who Tabitha was. She was a seamstress, and she would have had her own style, her own signature way of finishing a garment, her own customary way of cutting the shape of a tunic, a way of hemming a robe. You got to know Tabitha, or at least something of who she was, by seeing these garments. Recovering Tabitha's particularity was the first step to restoring her life. Peter honors this woman, and the widows of the town honor her, by hearing her story and seeing her life's work. Those works and that craft do nothing to earn her resuscitation or win Peter's respect enough to pray for her, but they are a part of the personality and the person that is to be raised. God does not raise theoretical people or generic examples of humanity—God raises actual humans with actual lives and actual faces. What seems at first to be an odd detail or digression in the story is actual the moment at which the dead Tabitha has her face restored to her so that she can be restored fully to life.

Think about how this scene speaks to us on this day—perhaps it is not given to us to heal sickness with a single prayer today, or to command the dead to breathe again with the call, "Get up." It may be that God will use you or me in such wondrous ways today, but even if not, we are still given the ability to give people back their faces. We may be a part of God's way of restoring the personality and the beautiful particularity of others who have had their faces taken away from them—we may be given the opportunity today to rescue someone from the all-consuming force of anonymity, of being lost in the crowd as a nobody. We are given the possibility to listen to someone else's story and to honor it; to take the time out of our oh-so-busy and oh-so-important schedules to look at someone else's life and to treat it with care and dignity. You may be stirred up today to visit those who are homebound--in your family, in the congregation, in the wider community, wherever—and to rescue them from being lost in a sea of anonymity and amnesia by letting them speak and treating them like human beings, not mere objects for our charity. We are so tempted to let the names prayed for in worship become meaningless and forgotten, or worse yet, to let them refer only to the work we have done—one more visit made and checked off the list, one more good deed done in the world. Or perhaps you will be stirred up to listen to someone and spend time with someone at work who would otherwise be consumed into a cubicle and treated like a number. Maybe you will be led to make sure that our outreach as a congregation and our giving to causes does not become a mere exercise in box-checking—you may be the one today who will call our attention to the faces of those going hungry in our community or world, or the hopeful futures of the students who will receive school supplies through a collection we take up. Maybe you will simply help to retell and remember and cherish the life stories of those who have already died and who are waiting for the authoritative call of the Lord to raise them up. Perhaps the first work that needs to be done before the dead are raised among us is to ensure that they have faces again—and perhaps it is enough for us today to be people who treat all whom we meet as people with names, with faces, and with stories worth cherishing. From there, we can safely leave it to God to speak the life-giving call that begins with our name, "Tabitha..." or "Steve... get up."

Right here, right now, this God of ours looks at us in the face and says to you and to me, "Child, arise."

O God who has given us each a name to be called by, and who has given us a name to call on you by, O Lord, Yahweh, O Lord, Triune God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—we are lost and awash in an anonymous sea of numbers, and we perhaps have forgotten or stopped noticing that we are reduced to our status or income or Social Security Numbers daily. We have forgotten how many around us hurt in that sea of facelessness. Grant us the peace to stop, to pause in our well-intentioned good-deed-doing and busyness, to listen, to see, to love, and to recognize the faces and the names that would otherwise be lost in a crowd or an empty room. We ask it in the name of Jesus, who is your face for us.