What Now? (Acts) | Vocation Restored

Tabitha didn’t work miracles. She worked material. Thread and needle, robes and clothing, made for the most vulnerable women in her community. And when she died, the widows didn’t describe her faith. They put on what she made.

That is her eulogy. Not words. Evidence.

This week we look at what the resurrection actually restores, and why the feeling that your ordinary life doesn’t add up to much is not a personality flaw. It’s a wound. One that Jesus came to heal. Because we are not waiting for the new creation. We are working toward it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Brothers and sisters, I'm gonna give it to you straight this morning. I hope that's okay with you. I just want to start by saying we've been lied to. We have been lied to. I want you to listen to what I'm about to say, and I want you to tell me if this sounds familiar to you. Okay, you ready? The physical world is temporary and corrupt. What is real and what is good is spiritual and eternal. The soul is trapped in a body that it needs to and will one day escape. Now, does that sound vaguely familiar to anything that you've heard or believed, or maybe even are trying to live out? There is a problem with this gospel that I just presented to you. And the problem with this gospel is that it didn't come from Jesus. This gospel, this is the gospel according to Plato. This is the Greek philosopher who was around roughly 400 years before Christ. And it's Plato's philosophy that became the part of the foundation of the Western culture, which most of us grew up in, or at least under the influence of. And today my concern is that there are many Christians who cannot tell you the difference between the philosophy of Plato and the gospel of Jesus Christ. And the result of us adopting this philosophy and living it out, believing it to be the gospel of Jesus, is that it's just left us hanging in some very desperate and difficult ways. This small gospel produces a kind of life where what matters is ultimately where you end up when you die, that that's what it's all about. Or that everything between now and then is just waiting. That your soul is really the thing that God cares about, that your body and your work and your ordinary life, those are all just temporary, and all of those things will pass away. And so as I express this kind of way of thinking, most of us take probably minor issue with what I just said, if if we take issue with any of what I just said. But the way that this kind of thinking and believing works its way out has a lot of us sitting in this place where we come to church and we worship and we hear about Jesus and we sing the songs, and it's good and it's encouraging. But when we're away from church, we're away from the family of God, we find many of us ourselves sitting around waiting for our life to matter or to feel like our lives matter. We're waiting for our days to mean something, waiting for the real thing to start. Well, maybe the real thing that starts when I die and I and I go to heaven. I know that many of us feel or have felt like life doesn't really add up to much, at least the ordinary days that we live. Maybe not that you don't have much, but that what you do have doesn't mean very much, or like every day is pretty forgettable, runs into the next day. And some of our days are even quite regrettable. Maybe some of you even feel like there is an extraordinary life happening out there somewhere to someone else, but you're just sort of getting through. You're waiting. It's the best you can do, is wait. And that feeling that I'm describing this morning, it has a name. And the name is not inadequacy or depression or ingratitude. That name is a wound, what I'm describing. It's a wound. It's what happens when the gospel that we were handed is just too small. It's too small to matter on an ordinary Monday or Tuesday once we leave church and get into our quote real life. So this morning I want to point you to something bigger, okay? I want to talk about the truth of the resurrection. And the truth of the resurrection is that Jesus does not simply ready us for life after death. There's much more to it than that. The resurrection of Jesus Christ, what it actually does is it restores meaning to the lives that you and I are living today, right now, every single day. We're not waiting for new creation. We are working toward new creation. So let's get into it. Open your Bibles or uh you can turn on your Bible app to uh Acts chapter 9. We're actually continuing a teaching series through the book of Acts. We're so glad you've joined us for this today. Based on that intro, maybe some of you are wondering, I'm not so sure that I'm glad that I've joy. What kind of church is this? What is this guy saying? Well, let's see what the word has to say to us. Uh, Acts chapter 9, we're gonna uh skip all the way down to verse 36. Okay, we covered part of Acts 9 already. We're gonna start in verse 36. In Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha. In Greek, her name is Dorcas. She was always doing good and helping the poor. About that time she became sick and died, and her body was prepared and placed in an upstairs room. Lida was near Joppa, and so when the disciples heard that Peter was in Lida, they sent two men to him and urged him, Please come at once. And Peter went with them. And when he arrived, he was taken upstairs to the room, and then he got down on his knees and he prayed. Oh, sorry, let me back up. Peter went with them, and when he arrived, he was taken upstairs to the room. All the widows stood around him, crying and showing Peter, uh showing him the robes and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was still with them. Peter sent them all out of the room, and then he got down on his knees and prayed. Turning toward the dead woman, he said, Tabitha, get up. She opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up. He took her by the hand and helped her to her feet, and then he called for the believers and the widows and presented her to them alive. This became known all over Joppa, and many people believed in the Lord. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Right up front, Luke is concerned with who this woman is, and so he tells us. He says, In Joppa, verse 36, there was a disciple named Tabitha, and in Greek her name is Dorcas. Tabitha in Aramaic, Dorcas in Greek. In other words, she was known in more than one community. She moved between worlds. She belonged to more than one group, just like you. You move between worlds. You exist in different communities. And perhaps the person you are to your fellow employees is not the person you are to your family. I would I would hope not. I hope you're not trying to parent everyone at your job. Probably people wouldn't appreciate that very much. And I hope you're not running your home like you are running your business, right? Your family probably wouldn't appreciate. We move through different uh worlds and and and between your family and your friends and your work and maybe some sort of other worlds, we exist. And Luke is pointing this out about Tabitha. And then Luke tells us something about her, not just who she was, but uh gives us some more insight. He doesn't say that she was an elder, she wasn't a deacon, she wasn't a leader. What does he say? He says she was a disciple, a learner, a novice, an ordinary follower of Jesus. That's it. This is how he starts the story, Luke. He talks us, he tells us about Tabitha, a disciple. And now everything else is going to flow from that. It's going to flow from who she was. And that order really matters. It matters to us, it matters to all human beings. Identity first and purpose second. We don't always think in that order, but that's the proper order. You have to know who you are before you know what you're for. And so from this identity, Tabitha, we learned, worked. The second part of verse 36, we read, She was always doing good and helping the poor. Now, the way that she did good and helped the poor is interesting because it's not flashy. How did she do it? She did good and helped the poor by making clothes. She made robes, other clothing, coats. And not occasionally, she was always doing good. Not when it was convenient, but always. Now we don't know if she was wealthy or not. We don't know what her house looked like or how she spent her evenings. What we know is only what she made. That's all we know. Well, we do know who she made it for. It's the widows in that community. The widows in that community were among the most economically vulnerable people, as many of us know, in the ancient world. Having no husband meant having no income. Having no income meant having no inheritance and no protection. Widows were entirely dependent upon the generosity of other people, people like Tabitha, and Tabitha noticed them. Not as a project, and she didn't see them as a cause. She just saw them as people. And she understood their need and what she could do about it. She made clothes. That's the whole equation. The whole equation is who are the people that you keep noticing and what is it that you have in your hands? Who are the people that you keep noticing and what is it that you have in your hands? Those two things together are the beginning of really, I think, the heart of this story. And it's the idea of vocation. Vocation. I'm not talking about your job. I'm not talking about your career. I'm not even talking about a calling that you have to sort of search for throughout the course of your life. I'm talking about vocation. And the way I'm would define vocation is the specific, tangible, embodied way that your identity as an image bearer of God meets the needs in front of you. Can someone repeat that back to me? I'm just kidding. I'll say it again. All right. Vocation is the specific, tangible, embodied way that your identity as an image bearer of God meets the needs in front of you. Tabitha did not work miracles. She worked material, fabric. And when she dies, the community mourns, they grieve the loss, they can't imagine what life will be like without this ordinary disciple of Jesus. And so they hear that Peter is nearby. And now when people are, you know, trying to get close to Peter just so his shadow would fall on them and they would be healed, you know, he's got something going on. And these people know they they hear, and so they send for Peter, thinking maybe he could do something for Tabitha. Verse 38, please come at once, exclamation. It's they're pleading with him. These are urgent words, they're words of grief. And then in verse 39, we read, Peter went with them, and when he arrived, he was taken upstairs to the room. All the widows stood around him, crying, and showing him the robes and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was still with them. So they send for Peter, and Peter arrives, and they take him up into that room, and all the widows are there. And I think it's at least noteworthy that the widows don't immediately start trying to describe Peter, Tabitha to Peter. They don't tell Peter, oh, this is what Tabitha believed, and this is how faithful Tabitha was. They simply showed Peter what she had made for them. That was their testimony about Tabitha. That was the eulogy. Look at what she made. Not words, but evidence. At that moment, in that room, just sort of pictur there and the widows and Tabitha's body, as Peter is uh sort of being brought into the significance of the life of this ordinary follower of Jesus. I imagine something's happening in Peter where he's he's no longer just looking at a dead body. What he's looking at is what the powers and the principalities have tried to take. He sees the coats, the robes, the clothing. The women are holding them, they're wearing them. And what he sees is a vocation interrupted. He sees widows who are being cared for who are now wondering who's gonna care for them. He sees what was being built here, and he knows what it's gonna cost if what's being built there stops. And it seems that you have to read between the lines a little bit here. We have we do it is okay to use your imagination when you come to the scriptures. And if we use our imagination, we might imagine something sort of rising up in Peter. Something does because there's a motive, a motivation for him to then do what he does next. The question then is not necessarily does something rise up in Peter, but what is it? Not pity, probably not duty. I wonder, just in the context of vocation, if what's rising up in Peter is this sense of resistance. You will not have this. You do not get to take this. Not these women, not this work that's being done. Before Peter ever gets on his knees, the battle's already already decided in his chest. And I wonder this morning how many of us have already surrendered that battle without even knowing it. You never get the sense that Tabitha felt or thought, I just make coats. That's all that's all I do, really. It's not really anything. I wish I could do something more. No, you never get that idea, I just make coats. And some of us are sitting here, I just wait tables. I just do H V A C. I just retired. I just. I just when when we say that, we're as good as Tabitha laying there on the bed in the room when Peter enters. We're not physically dead, and I don't mean that in even a spiritual sense, but I mean vocationally speaking. Uh some of us are we have been set free from the power of sin and death, and we will spend eternity with the Lord, but somehow our vocation is dead. It's died. Or it's dying. See, the powers and the principalities, the enemy of God does not need to take your faith. It just needs to convince you that what you do with your ordinary life doesn't matter. That ordinary time is just for waiting. But see, if the coats stop, then widows get cold. And this is what a small gospel introduces or produces. Not it doesn't produce bad people or bad Christians, it just produces passive ones. People who are waiting when we could be working and discovering the real power of the resurrection. I need to give you some theological ground here because without it, this is either just a nice story that you're hearing, or it's something to sort of just be debated or argued. So I want to get a little bit deeper because this is much more than just a nice story. It's a picture of the battle that's been going on since the very beginning. I want to take you back in your minds, at least, to Genesis chapter one, when God made human beings. We're told specifically he made human beings in his image. And not only did God make human beings in his image, he gave those human beings a vocation. He didn't make human beings just to exist. He made them to bear the image of God, God's own image in the world. And if you remember, when God makes man and woman, he gives them something to do. He says, This is the world I've made. Tend to it, give shape to it, care for it, fill the world with the life and the love of God who made it. God made us in his image and he gave us a vocation. Now in Genesis 2, God puts the human in the garden to take care of it, to tend to it, to work it and take care of it. And those two words in Hebrew, to work and to take care of, are the same words used elsewhere in Scripture for priestly service and faithful stewardship. Meaning that the original human vocation was simultaneously ordinary and holy, sacred. There's no division between the two. Plato invented that decision, but the Bible never acknowledges it. And then we're told in the story that sin enters the picture and the powers moved in behind it. And they didn't just break our relationship with God, they took our sense of purpose, they emptied human life of its reason. They convinced us that ordinary time doesn't matter, and that ordinary people don't matter. And now, see, what the small gospel tries to do is fix the relationship part of the problem with a courtroom. You are guilty, Jesus pays the debt, you are forgiven. Case closed. And forgiveness is real, and it matters. But what I hope you see this morning, or at least get curious about, is the idea that the courtroom gospel fixes the verdict, but it leaves the vocation untouched, unaddressed. You walk out forgiven, but still empty, still waiting, still saying, I just the powers don't need to take your soul. They got your Monday through your Friday. The resurrection of Jesus is not primarily a courtroom verdict, it is a cosmic announcement. Jesus did not simply absorb the punishment. He defeated, we're told, the powers that derailed God's human project. And so Jesus on the cross and through the resurrection is taking back, you see, what sin had stolen. And what sin had stolen was not just our standing before God, but our entire reason for being here on the earth today. Biblical theologian and New Testament scholar N. T. Wright puts it this way: He says, the goal is not heaven, but a renewed human vocation within God's new creation. In other words, what the resurrection does is it restores image bearers of God to their work, to their vocation. Not to a destination, not to even just a general sense of purpose, but to the work that God has made them for, to do in the world, to partner with God as He's making all things new. That the powers have lost the battle for years. Your soul. That happened when Jesus died and was resurrected from the dead. They lost. The verdict was read, not guilty. That is incredibly good news for you and me today. But those powers are still fighting for your vocation. They're still fighting for your Monday. They're still fighting to keep you small and passive and just waiting. And the resurrection of Jesus, what is that? It's the announcement that they will not win. It's Peter's the embodiment of the announcement of the resurrection. These powers will not win, not in this room, not if I can do anything about it. And the resurrection of Jesus that they will not win. We are not waiting for new creation. You do realize that the scriptures teach us that in the end all things will become new, right? And we're not just waiting for that to happen. We're working toward it right now in our ordinary time with whatever it is that we have in our hands. Tabitha is not a footnote in the story of renewal and restoration. Tabitha is a soldier in that story. Now at the end of his longest argument about the resurrection in his letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul has something interesting to add. This is 1 Corinthians 15, 58. The Apostle Paul says, Therefore, my brothers and sisters, stand firm. Stand firm. Look, if everything's cool and everything's great, then you don't have to be told to stand firm, right? Something's happening that causes Paul to tell the believers to stand firm. He says, Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say, Therefore, go to church. Therefore, believe the right things. Therefore, wait faithfully and quietly until heaven. No, he says, your labor is not in vain. Because the resurrection means that the physical world has a future. This might be news to some of us, depending on sort of the background that we have or the upbringing in church that we experienced. But what we discover throughout the scriptures is that our bodies matter. They count for something. We serve an embodied God. Jesus chose to take on flesh. We call it the incarnation. That alone tells us a body is important. Because what you do with your hands in orientation toward God and in orientation toward others is being gathered up into a kind of work that God is doing, a work that will never end. But here is what Paul assumes in that verse. He assumes that you know how to orient your work toward God and to other people. He assumes that we wake up knowing that the work that we do matters. And this is how it matters. This is how we work in such a way that it matters. That the answer is not coming up with a great program and then just giving money to fund some good that's happening in the world. No, it's about us living, embodying the vocation that God has called us to. And that's what's being restated. For you and I to bear the image of God in the world, to tend the world, to shape the world, to care for the world, to fill the world with life and with the love of God who made it. And so maybe a way to begin to sort of grasp a hold of this is to think about who God is already noticing. How do I begin this vocation thing? Who is God already noticing? What if you begin to notice those people? And then bring what you have into that space, whatever it has. You know, I'm just reminded, this isn't my notes, but just real quickly, I'm just reminded of the story of Moses. And Moses was a bit of a mess. I mean, he had blood on his hands, he'd had a weird upbringing and didn't know who his real family was, and and he he did some crazy stuff, and then he was out of the picture for like decades, and and then and then God says to him, Hey, I'm gonna use you to to deliver my people from Pharaoh. And Moses like, I don't know about that, you know, I don't talk so good, and you know, and I I don't I don't I don't have anything. And and uh when Moses was questioning his vocation to God, do you remember what the question that God asked him? What is in your hand, Moses? It was a staff. God said, Great, I'll work with that. Throw your staff down. Remember, he threw it down, it became a serpent. And then the magicians they throw theirs down and they become serpents as well. But then Moses's serpent eats their serpents. It gets really crazy, really weird, really fast. But the whole point is we're so focused on what we don't have or who we're not that we miss the thing that's in our hand. You you might not have miracle working in your hand, but you might not, but you might know how to use needle and thread. Now, I don't know how to use needle and thread, but maybe you know how to swing a hammer. And I might be getting a little bit ahead of myself here in the notes, but I want us to start thinking about what would happen if I began to notice the people that God notices, and I just show up an ordinary person with whatever it is I have in my hand. God has chosen you for this work. People with thread and needles and trucks and tools and relationships and sets of hands and availability. Because Jesus is going to return and finish what was started. But between now and then, he's entrusted some work to us to take back what the powers stole, not just from us, but from the world, from our neighbors, from our family, from our friends. You know, the world has plenty of religion, probably too much religion. But what it's short of is people who know what they are for. And every person in this room who retreats into waiting leaves a vacancy of some kind. And vacancies have consequences. I mean, somewhere there is a kid sitting alone in her bedroom, wondering if anybody sees who sees her or cares whether or not she's alive. Right now. Somewhere there is a neighbor who has been successful in every way that you can imagine, except in the ways that truly matter. And he's wondering what his whole life has been about. Somewhere there's someone on a crew that doesn't say much, but is carrying on their shoulders an enormous weight of an entire family. And that person wonders if they can sustain everything that's going to be required of them to take care of the people that they love. And they wake up feeling that weight every single day. These people in our world are not waiting on your religion. They're not waiting on a program, they're waiting for a person. And because Jesus has ascended into heaven and sent his spirit and filled us with his spirit, they are waiting for people like us, image bearers of God, to notice them and to show up with whatever it is we have in our hands. They're waiting for you and me to stop waiting. Look at verses 40 and 41, Acts 9. Peter sent them all out of the room, and then he got down on his knees and he prayed. Turning toward the dead woman, he said, Tabitha, get up. And she opened her eyes and seeing Peter, she sat up, and he took her by the hand and helped her to her feet. And then he called for the believers, especially the widows. I love that. Because they are the ones that she mattered to the most. And presented her to them alive. Now you might be sitting here thinking, I could never do what Peter did. Okay, maybe you're right. But that's the wrong question. The question is not whether or not you can raise the dead. The question is whether or not you can make a coat, or your version of that. She's raised because what God is doing on earth through ordinary people cannot be stopped. That's what the resurrection is about. That the powers will not and do not get the last word over a life that is pointed, oriented toward God. They did not get Tabitha's vocation, and they will not get yours. Now, Peter knew that better than anybody. He was a fisherman from Galilee. And do you remember Peter's claim to fame? He had a few, but the big one was denying Christ three times before Jesus was hung on a cross. The night that Jesus needed him most. Now, how does Peter know that Jesus forgives and restores vocation? Because that's what happened to Peter. Jesus restores Peter, the resurrected Jesus, restores Peter on a beach over a charcoal fire. And now, where's Peter? He's in an upper room in Joppa raising the dead. That's what restoration looks like when Jesus reaches a person. I'm talking about you and I'm talking about me. This is what restoration looks like when the powers lose. And so before we close this morning, I want to give you a moment, not to think about Peter, but to think about Tabitha. I want to give you two questions, and I want to encourage you to sit with them honestly. They're not new questions. They're kind of, in a way, some of the oldest questions. But they are what it looks like to be an image bearer who is paying attention in the world. And to even ask these two questions and to attempt to answer them, I think is an incredible act of resistance. And the first question is: who are the people that you keep noticing? Who are the people in the world that when you notice people, they are the ones that you notice. The ones whose situation bothers you in a way that you can't quite explain. The people on Island or in the world that you just your heart is drawn to them for some way. That noticing is not accidental. And guess what? Not everybody is drawn to the people the way that you are. It's easy for us to think, well, everybody cares about these people. No, they don't. But you do. Notice them. That noticing is not accidental. It is the image of God in you recognizing who God sees and what God is seeing. And so for you, maybe it's young people. For you, maybe it's old people.

SPEAKER_01 33:45

For some of you, it's maybe disabled people.

SPEAKER_00 33:49

Maybe it's sick people. I want you to think, who am I drawn to? For some of us, it's addicted to people. Others of us it's alone with people.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

For some of you, it's people in your class. People at your club. People at your work.

SPEAKER_00 34:14

People on the course. Who is it? Who are the people you have an affinity for, a connection to? You're drawn to them andor their situation. You probably know who it is because it's the person or the people that came to mind as I was going down this list. That's the first question. Who do you keep noticing? And the second question is what is it that you have in your hands?

SPEAKER_01 34:39

What do you have in your hands? I can't maybe raise the dead, but I can do what can you do? Sweep a driveway, mix drinks, watch children, teach music, fix a leaky faucet.

SPEAKER_00 35:09

What do you have in your hands? A skill, a tool, a room, a truck, an interest, an availability. That's the tending, that's the shaping, that's the caring, that's the filling the world with the life and love of God. Those two things together is your vocation. And maybe where you're at at this stage in your life, and maybe where you're at in your geography, maybe your vocation shifts a bit to where you're noticing different people or you're using a specific skill. Particularly, maybe you're a seasonal worker here on the island and you're doing this particular thing, but you brought your skills with you. What's in your hand? God may have sent you here because you have something in your hand that nobody else on this island has.

SPEAKER_01 35:59

And there are people to notice.

SPEAKER_00 36:04

Paul says that your labor in this direction is not in vain. It's going somewhere, it's participating in the project that ends in new creation. You may retire from your job, and some of you are retired from your jobs, but you will never retire from your vocation. You are the image-bearer of God, sent to do the work of the Lord. So let's close here. The good news today is not just that Tabitha came back to life, although I'm sure Tabitha was pretty pleased about that. It's that when a person knows who they are and what they're for, and they live oriented toward God's love for people, ordinary life begins to matter a lot more than it did before. Jesus is not looking for spectacular people. He's looking for oriented people. People who know that they bear his image in the world, people who have found the thread, so to speak, people who show up and make the coats and trust that the one who raised Tabitha from the dead is not finished with what God is doing through them either. So just a word to two groups of people here this morning. For anybody who's sort of kicking the tires on faith or Christianity or Jesus, maybe but isn't really following Jesus at this point. I just want to point out that the emptiness that you feel when you wonder what your life amounts to is not an accident. It's not a personality flaw. It is the echo of a vake of a vocation that you were made for that maybe you haven't stepped into yet, haven't been restored to it. The powers want you to believe that that feeling is just who you are, but it's not just who you are. It's a wound. And Jesus, by the cross and resurrection, comes to heal those wounds. He says, if you'll just come to me, I will heal that wound. And not only will I restore your relationship with me and secure your life for eternity, I will return you to your vocation and you can begin living that out again today. That's for those of you who don't follow Jesus. He's offering himself to you this morning and a reason for being here. Not here at church, but a reason for being here on this planet. And now, for those of you who do follow Jesus, the question is not whether you are doing enough, it is whether or not you are oriented. That you are oriented toward this new creation, that you recognize that you, even as an ordinary human being, are extraordinary primarily because you carry the image of God into the world. And you're being restored by the same spirit right now. Your life is being restored by the same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead. You are a living, breathing, walking, working participant in the expansion of God's rule and reign here on the earth. You have been chosen for this. You've been entrusted with this.