Easter 4

A Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers and grandmothers and mother-figures in the congregation this morning! Parents, both moms and dads, have the hardest job in the world, and we would be in horrible shape without their love and sacrifice and perseverance. Of course, it’s not easy being a mother.

One mom on Twitter wrote, “Parenting is 70% me yelling, 20% asking the kids why they’re yelling, and 10% trying to find where I left my coffee.”

Speaking of misplacing your coffee, here’s one mom’s recipe for iced coffee:

She writes, “Have kids . . . Make coffee . . . Forget you made coffee . . . Put it in the microwave . . . Forget you put it in the microwave . . . Drink it cold.”

That recipe for iced coffee alone tells us a lot about the challenges and sacrifices of motherhood. So, we thank you, moms, for your dedication to raising the next generation.

Many of us had moms who could sew. My mom spent countless hours with her Singer sewing machine. Since I was a, well, husky boy, mom would buy men’s pants for me, then let out the seat and shorten the legs to fit my short, yet rather ample, frame.

Even after she finally got an electric clothes dryer, mom would still hang the wash out to dry in the backyard on clear days. Said the laundry smelled cleaner and fresher if it dried outside on the line.

If our clothes developed a tear, mom sewed things back together.

And she even darned socks. If my socks got a hole in them, mom didn’t throw them away; she darned them!

Mom created original Halloween costumes for me, sewing them herself.  She even made curtains for several of the windows in our house.

Yes, Mom was quite the seamstress.

And so was Tabitha, 2,000 years ago. She made beautiful tunics and clothing. Her work was of great quality. Besides being a terrific seamstress, Tabitha was also devoted to caring for people.  Now some folks seem to have that gift – others not so much.

A woman tells of falling flat on her face on an icy December day in the middle of a busy parking lot. As she was lying there trying to clear her head, another woman drove up and called out the window, “Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m fine,” the first woman answered.

“Oh, good,” the second woman continued. “Will you be leaving your parking space now?”

That driver’s compassion was as short-lived as a hummingbird’s hiccup.

Elton Trueblood is a former chaplain at Harvard and Stanford. In one of his books, he shares a letter from a young woman he knew. She wrote, “I’ve often realized that it takes courage to care. Caring is dangerous . . . It leaves you open to hurt and to looking like a fool . . . I have found many places in my own life where I keep a secret store of indifference as a sort of self‑protection.” That’s interesting, don’t you think? “A secret store of indifference.”

Do you think that’s why our world seems less caring these days? Do you think we’ve lost the courage to care? Do we keep a secret store of indifference as a sort of self-protection against getting hurt?

This morning’s lesson from the Acts of the Apostles is the story of a remarkable woman named Tabitha. We’re told that Tabitha made handcrafted clothing items. Among the artisans of her day, she stood out. Her creations were of great quality, and she also worked on behalf of the poor.

When death took her, the entire community realized that it had lost a valuable resource.  “All the widows stood … weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Tabitha had made while she was with them” (v. 39). They had a hard time accepting that she was gone. So strong was this sentiment that when some disciples heard that Peter was nearby, they sent a message to him saying, “Please come to us without delay” (v. 38).

When someone dies, you understand that — as much as you may mourn the loss — the deceased is not going to return. But this community dispatched messengers to the apostle Peter, who arrived, and, well, you know the rest of the story.

The response of the community to Tabitha’s death gives us pause. When we die, there will surely be a circle of friends and family who will miss us and mourn our absence. This is only natural.

But will there be a wider circle in the community adversely affected by our absence because of the impact our lives and our ministry had on the community?

The story of Tabitha tightens the lens on the importance of living for the benefit of others and not for ourselves. The loss of Tabitha was devastating for those who had come to depend on her ministry.

Luke says thatshe was “devoted to good works and acts of charity” (v. 36). The Greek word translated into the English ‘devoted’ is pleres. That word is translated in other places as abounding, filled, full, and mature. Someone who is pleres is “full, abounding in, complete or completely occupied with.” So, the NRSV’s “devoted” is not a bad translation, but it doesn’t supply the extraordinary sense in which good works and acts of charity were absolutely Tabitha’s life. She did not dabble in good works. They were not a hobby of hers. They were not a compartment in an otherwise busy life.

Good works were her life. Good works were what Tabitha was all about.  She had the courage to care.

We cannot, then, resist the temptation to use her life as a template or gold standard by which to measure our own. Are we all called to be Tabithas?

Perhaps not. But we are called to be Tabitha-like. After all, the apostle Paul says to the Ephesian church, “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Ephesians 2:10).

The Bible is rather clear: Our way of life is to be doing good stuff.

And Tabitha is the example par excellence.

            Another point: In this story, we never hear anything from Tabitha herself. Luke tells her story for her. She is full of doing good things. She dies — perhaps suddenly. Peter restores her to life. She sits up, Peter “shows her to be alive” (v. 41) and she resumes her work.

For Tabitha, good works were not about her. She wasn’t interested in establishing a nonprofit foundation — although there’s nothing wrong with that. She didn’t train volunteers or have apprentices. Nothing wrong with that, either.

She’s just a simple woman who knows what she’s good at. She desires no more. She does her thing: good works and acts of charity.

And, by the way, she’s the first woman in the New Testament to be called a disciple (v. 36), and this disciple was a person whose vocation was to make handcrafted clothing items for the widows and the needy.

Finally, Tabitha herself, like us, was a piece of work!We are God’s handiwork. We are all handcrafted by God so that we might fulfill our vocation: doing good.

What, then, are the good works that God would like you to be doing?