Signs of Resurrection Life

John 10:22-30, Acts 9:36-43

Grace and Peace to you all in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Tabitha’s community surrounds her at the time of her death bringing all the fruits of her life’s labor with them. They came with the clothes Tabitha had made for them. All these clothes must have kept this community warm in the cold months, dry in the wet months and protected from the sun in the hot months. The people who surround Tabitha, literally wore her very fingerprints on every fiber on their body. It’s an extraordinarily touching image that the book of Acts paints for us today.

We can sense the raw emotion those people were feeling as they came to pay their last respects. They loved Tabitha and they loved how she cared for the community using her gifts in textile work. Tabitha touched the lives of her neighbors as she put her life’s resources into crafting something that helped people live their lives joyfully and comfortably. She was clearly a servant leader.

As you might have picked up already, I don’t really think this reading in Acts is so much about Peter’s ability to raise Tabitha from the dead. Nor do I think it’s about Tabitha herself becoming alive again. I think it’s about the community of people and the clues we get in the text about how this community lived together and experienced the risen Christ in their day-to-day lives.

The Risen Christ is the person to which the sign of Tabitha’s own resurrection points.

As the crowd gathered at Tabitha’s deathbed attests, her community has had a very real experience of what I am going to call Resurrection-Life through Tabitha’s, quiet, Spirit-led, servant-leadership in this early Christian community. Christ’s very real, resurrected, alive presence is made known through the Holy Spirit’s work in Tabitha.

And I am emphasizing the word “experience” today, because in our Gospel lesson, Christ himself directs us to focus on experience. In the Gospel text, we join Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem during the festival of the Dedication, which we call Hannukah today. Jesus has a crowd of learned religious men that the Gospel of John always groups together with the phrase, “The Jews,” and these people are asking Jesus to “speak plainly” and just say that he is the Messiah.

Jesus doesn’t ‘say’ “yep, I’m the Messiah, here I am!” he instead he emphasizes the ways his ministry and work on earth has led communities to experience God’s goodness of life, healing and wholeness.

Up to this point in John’s Gospel Jesus’s work has helped many communities experience the joy of life, healing of wounds and wholeness in community. He’s turned water into wine at a wedding party, he’s healed many people as he passes through their towns, he fed many thousands with scant food, he’s walked on water to calm a storm that threatened the boats of his disciples and of others, he’s spoken merciful words to people deemed condemned by human law, and he’s given a blind man sight.

Jesus emphasizes for this learned religious crowd, that the experience of life, healing and wholeness through his actions, is all the proof needed to know that he is of God. A God who is good and desires all these things for all of creation.

Our Gospel text finishes with Jesus saying, “The Father and I are one.” This is as close to the “plain talk” that the religious leaders want. Jesus says there is a complete unity between himself and God and the proof of this is through the experience of his ministry. And this ministry carries on to this very day through the power of the Holy Spirit gifted to communities of people like ours. Like us in this room today.

So, we zoom out from our scripture texts to our time, 2000 years later, we are now The Disciples gathered together into Christian communities, just as Tabitha was described as a disciple within a community of other disciples. We are called by God through Jesus and empowered by the gift of the Holy Spirit today to have a passion for experiencing and helping others to experience “Resurrection Life.”

What this means is that we are called to hone our spiritual work and all of our resources into a life devoted to Christ, as Tabitha was in the Book of Acts. We are called to worship God through Christ Jesus and then be turned out into the world on the wing of the Holy Spirit, to do a ministry of “Resurrection Life” where we help people experience God’s desire for us to live life to its fullest, be healed when we are sick and have a sense of wholeness in body and spirit.

Now, we don’t participate in a ministry of “Resurrection Life” because God requires us to do so to “be saved.” No. God is too good for that and has already counted all of creation among the saved, the reconciled and the forgiven through Christ’s death and resurrection.

Instead, we are called to participate in a ministry of “Resurrection Life” because we know that is how Jesus Christ and God become known in the world. Remember, Tabitha’s life of clothes making for her community and her resurrection are signs that point toward God’s love for the whole world through Jesus Christ. So, our participation in “Resurrection Life” is a sign too that points in the exact same direction!

What do our ministries of Resurrection Life look like today?

It looks like those moments doing healing prayer together on the first Sunday of the month. There’s a reason these prayers feel so emotional for so many, and why I’ve heard story after story in this congregation that healing really happens after these prayers. It’s because you just had an encounter with Resurrection Life!

Resurrection life looks like the 20 or so members of this church who join hands to make healthy food to feed our neighbors who live in a food desert in the neighborhood surrounding Grace Lutheran Church in Hartford.

Resurrection Life looks like the children of this church playing together in the classrooms, in the playroom or on our playground sometimes a couple of hours after the church-sponsored events are over, because their parents and the members of this congregation have created a place where the kids want to be.

Resurrection life looks like the children today who will partake in their First Communion – an experience of the real and intimately close presence of Jesus Christ in the bread and wine that we can see, touch, smell and taste.

These experiences of Resurrection Life point as signs, as plainly as possible to the truth of Jesus’s resurrection; to the truth that life wins over death, that sin is swallowed up by the cross, that we are made whole through the ministry of Jesus Christ, that Christ’s very Resurrection has begun an unveiling of God’s Kingdom on Earth; to show us that God is really here right now working alongside us in our ministry of “Resurrection Life,” leading us into Heaven on Earth. Heaven and earth are on their way to becoming folded into one single piece – like a piece of cloth – and it’s all because Jesus Christ was born to be One with the Father to spread healing, life and wholeness throughout all of creation.

Jesus tells us today that God’s gift of life, healing and wholeness through Jesus Christ is experienced and in that experience we know what resurrection looks like. What the Kingdom of God looks like. And we can feel it because it’s right here active in the world through people like Tabitha, through people like all of you.

Praise be to God for showing us that Resurrection Life is here and now. Praise be to God for the promise that death is swallowed up by life. Praise be to God that healing and wholeness were brought to us through Jesus Christ and that we continue to experience Christ’s presence with us through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Let us praise this truly awesome Triune God!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

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