Sermon May 11 2025 Raising of Tabitha                                       Rev. Betsy Hogan

So do you suppose that Tabitha wasn’t really dead but she was just unconscious? 

One of the most dubious contributions of the so-called “Enlightenment” of the 18th and 19th centuries to western culture, I think, was the way in which it radically altered how people read their Bible. 

The way in which it radically altered what people understood to be “true”. The way in which it starkly limited the communication of “meaning” to what could be empirically proven to be “fact” – and suddenly forced upon people the need to intellectually rationalize and explain the kind of science-defying miracles they read in their Bibles.

Recast them as actually ‘rational in reality’ and only miraculous if somehow that reality’s not been noticed. 

Like, the feeding of the 5000 was really just everyone sharing – but if that's not noticed, it's a miracle. Or Jesus was really walking on a sandbar, not water – but if that's not noticed, it's a miracle. Or Tabitha wasn't really dead but just unconscious – but if that's not noticed, then we call it a miracle when she's raised.

I have to admit, I don't find those explanations terrifically interesting. But I also don't consider them necessary. Because whatever the Enlightenment sought to suggest and affirm and ultimately wield on western epistemologies – theories of knowledge and how we learn – the Bible’s not a scientific treatise.

It’s revelation. It’s stories meant to reveal. It’s not stories told simply to communicate facts. It’s stories told to reveal and communicate MEANING. 

And sometimes LOTS of meaning, and layers of meaning, and varieties of meaning. Because that's how stories work, and that's their point.

So was there a raising of Tabitha? There was. And how did it happen? All will be revealed, says the writer of the Acts of the Apostles: let me tell you the story.

The story of Tabitha. That's her name in Aramaic, the sort of Hebrew-adjacent language that Jesus and the disciples would have spoken, while the same name in Greek is 'Dorcas'. 

Which may seem like a sort of throwaway line in this passage from Acts, but in fact what it tells us is that she's connected with – and moves in – both the Jewish-Christian community and the non-Jewish or Gentile Greek-speaking community in Lydda, which is the place where she lives.

Which suggests she's a person of some importance in her community, Tabitha. She's called in this passage a 'disciple' – it's the only place in the Bible where the female version of the Greek word is used. So her faithfulness and her discipleship are important in the early Church and in her wider community, but we can also tell that she's a person of some importance in her community quite literally because the house where she lives has an 'upper room'.

We learn that because that's where her body is laid out when she dies, but just the fact of having an upper room – living in a place with two storeys – is a mark at this time of a certain degree of affluence. However this happened, whether by birth or by marriage or – less likely but still possible – her own initiative or enterprise, Tabitha's a woman whose life has been shaped by the experience of comfort and some wealth.

But she's also a woman whose life has been deeply shaped by her faith and the call to care and service that faith inspires. "Love one another as I have loved you," is how Jesus puts it, and for Tabitha that's real. It's her essential guiding principle, it's the shape of how she lives. 

And we know that not because SHE tells us that, and not even because the writer of the Book of Acts tells us that, but because the women of her community who crowd into her house when she dies tell us that. In fact, they tell the Apostle Peter that, when they've summoned him to her deathbed.

And not just with words, but with things. 

All these widows, pressed together and weeping because Tabitha has died – they've brought with them as precious, as a kind of embodiment of Tabitha's care and the concern she's shown them when they've been in need, they've brought with them all the pieces of clothing she's made for them. 

Just ordinary clothing, tunics and other garments is what it says in this passage, but every single piece of that ordinary clothing was a gift. Quite literally a gift that Tabitha has made for them to meet a particular need, but at the same time also representative of her gift of just... caring about them. Wanting their needs to be met, wanting for them well-being as children of God. Wanting to help.  

In effect, what greets the Apostle Peter when he arrives at Tabitha's house at the behest of the women who love her is the gift of her life in all its layers.

All the clothing that Tabitha made and gave them, that the women carry with them that day and show in their grief to the Apostle Peter. That aren't just pieces of clothing, but they're pieces of clothing that TABITHA made. And as precious for that reason as a pink baby sweater that still lives in my house, made way back in 1995 by a beloved Isabelle – who kept telling me just to keep it because the next one would surely be a girl, until eventually we both gave up on that but she STILL told me to keep it in case one day there’d be a granddaughter. Things get filled with meaning.

So "Look," the widows say to Peter. "Here are the things that Tabitha made for us and gave us." But what they expect and what they assume is that Peter will recognize that these aren't just what Tabitha gave them but they represent for them the heart of Tabitha’s life. What her life has been about. 

Because for Tabitha, the meaning of "love one another as I have loved you" was translated into the 'direct action', as it were, of good works and acts of charity. Like making and giving clothing when clothing was needed.

"When I was naked, you clothed me," is how Jesus puts it, in his teaching to the disciples, and for Tabitha, that's been at the heart of her faithfulness and the faithful living she embraced and also modelled for others. 

She's identified by the author of Acts with the name of 'disciple' for a reason – her living was itself a sermon about Christian love in good works and acts of charity. And that sermon was obviously "heard" by those around her and in that way must have snowballed, been extended, spread. 

She'd not have been named a 'disciple' otherwise – there's an acknowledgement in her being named a ‘disciple’ of that wider import of what might otherwise simply have been what she did with her one wild and precious life. As the poet Mary Oliver would put it.

And there it all is, laid out for Peter at what is essentially a funeral. A pile of clothes the women have literally brought with them in their grief, that are more than just clothes. More than just gifts from Tabitha. They bear witness to the gift OF Tabitha. They bear witness to the love of God and neighbour she’s embodied. 

They bear witness to her life. Here she still is, in their midst, alive.
  
And Peter reaches his hand out to her, and speaks to her, and helps her up, and shows her to all those who've gathered – with all their memories and experiences of Tabithaness and the gifts that for each of them mean "Tabitha" – and her life's not dead at all. 

So was there a raising of Tabitha? There was. And how did it happen? Well, says the writer of the Acts of the Apostles: let me tell you the story of how all the goodness and meaning of Tabitha’s life wasn’t dead at all. 

Thanks be to God, by whose Spirit life abides. Amen.