Let Your Light Shine
Day 263 – 20 September
The Garments in the Upper Room
Now there was in Joppa a disciple named Tabitha, which, translated, means Dorcas. She was full of good works and acts of charity. (Acts 9:36, ESV)
Two Centuries of Needles
In December 1834 a handful of women met in the vestry of the Wesleyan chapel in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, and resolved to form a society. Cholera had swept the town that year; in the panic, the clothes and bedding of the poor had been burned wholesale, and whole families were left with nothing to wear against the winter. The women wrote down their purpose, to administer relief to the poor in plain and necessary articles of clothing, appointed a Wardrobe Keeper, and gave the society a name, in their own words, in allusion to the character of Dorcas recorded in Acts nine, verse thirty-six. They were far from alone. Six years earlier a group of Black women in New York had founded the African Dorcas Association to sew clothes for children who could otherwise be kept from school for lack of a decent coat, and turned out a hundred and sixty-eight garments in their first year. In 1834 sixteen women in Easton, Maryland, founded a Dorcas Society that still operates under its original constitution today. Glasgow had a Royal Dorcas Society by 1864; a Dorcas circle in Sydenham, south London, met on five Tuesdays in Lent and produced a hundred and sixty-six garments in a single year; the movement was at its height across the Victorian world, and there are Dorcas societies still, in churches on every continent, sewing for people they will never meet. All of it, every stitch of two centuries, traces back to one woman in a seaside town and a single verse about her. That is what a life full of beautiful works does. It goes on working long after the hands have stopped.
Full
Luke introduces her in a single verse, and every word of it is doing work. “Now there was in Joppa a disciple named Tabitha, which, translated, means Dorcas. She was full of good works and acts of charity” (Acts 9:36). Three things stand out. First, the word for disciple: μαθήτρια (mathētria, a woman disciple), the feminine form, and this is the only place in the entire New Testament it is used. Luke gives her a title no other woman receives in so many words. Second, her two names, one Aramaic and one Greek: Ταβιθά (Tabitha, from the Aramaic tabyeta, a gazelle) and Δορκάς (Dorkas, a gazelle), the same creature in the two tongues of her town, a seaside port where Jew and Greek rubbed shoulders; she was known and loved in both. Third, and above all, the word πλήρης (plērēs, full). She was full of good works, πλήρης ἔργων ἀγαθῶν (plērēs ergōn agathōn, full of good works), and of ἐλεημοσυνῶν (eleēmosynōn, mercy-deeds, acts of charity), the word we met on Friday. This is Luke’s word for a character saturated with something. He uses it of Stephen, full of faith and of the Holy Spirit; of Barnabas, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith; John uses it of Jesus Himself, full of grace and truth. It means a vessel with no room left, a life brimming. And Dorcas is the only person in the New Testament of whom it is said that she was full of good works. Every other beautiful work we have looked at this week was a single garment. Hers is described as a whole wardrobe.
The Garments in the Upper Room
Then she died. The disciples washed her and laid her in an upper room, and sent to Lydda for Peter, and when he climbed the stairs he walked into the scene that makes this the perfect crown for our week. “All the widows stood beside him weeping and showing tunics and other garments that Dorcas made while she was with them” (Acts 9:39). The Greek is ἐπιδεικνύμεναι (epideiknymenai, displaying, holding up to view): the widows were showing Peter the χιτῶνας (chitōnas, tunics, the inner garment) and ἱμάτια (himatia, cloaks, the outer garment) she had sewn for them, very likely wearing some of them as they wept. Her works were in the room, held up by the people they had clothed. And if you gather this week’s six mornings into that room, they make exactly the same scene. Laid out in that upper room, in the hands of the ones they warmed, are the week’s garments. Monday’s is the pattern itself, the discovery that the word Jesus chose for good works was the word for beautiful, and Suger’s doors that lead the eye past the gold. Tuesday’s is a coat of mercy, sewn gladly and never grudgingly, the lifeboat crew’s kind, loved more than performed. Wednesday’s is a cloak paid forward, cut for a stranger who would never know the maker, the open hand of the Neapolitan bar. Thursday’s is a garment stitched under insult, patience worked into every seam by hands that could be bitten and stay gentle. Friday’s is the coat with no maker’s label, the secret deed sewn in the chamber of secrets for an audience of one. And Saturday’s is the cloth itself, cut and laid out before she ever picked up a needle, the works prepared beforehand like a Roman road. Six garments, one seamstress, one upper room. That is what a life full of beautiful works looks like when it is finally held up to the light: a roomful of people wearing what love made.
Works That Speak When You Cannot
Three things the week has claimed are proved true in that room. The first is that beautiful works are seen. Peter had never met Dorcas; he learned who she was from her works, held up in front of him by their wearers. The arc opened with Peter himself telling scattered Christians that their neighbours would observe their beautiful works and glorify God, and here the apostle is the observer, and the works do the talking. The second is that they are beautiful, καλός (kalos, beautiful, lovely) in the sense we opened with: a tunic sewn for a widow who could never pay for it is goodness that draws the eye and warms the heart, and the tears in the room are the proof. The third is the one the week has only hinted at until now. Beautiful works outlive the worker. Dorcas could say nothing; she was dead on the bed. But she had left behind her a roomful of witnesses in her own handiwork, and they spoke for her when her own voice was gone. Nothing done in love is lost. It goes on being worn, being shown, being told, long after the hands are still, which is why a society founded in a Manx chapel in 1834 was sewing in her name eighteen centuries after she threaded her last needle.
Tabitha, Arise
And then God did something in the room that turned it from a wake into a witness. Peter sent the mourners out, knelt, and prayed, and turning to the body said, Tabitha, arise; and she opened her eyes, and sat up, and he gave her his hand and presented her to the saints and widows alive. Augustine’s line on it is exactly right: Peter was the instrument, and the Lord was the hand. Then Luke writes the sentence the whole arc has been travelling towards: “And it became known throughout all Joppa, and many believed in the Lord” (Acts 9:42). Read that beside the verse the month is named for. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. A woman full of good works; the works seen, held up in a room; the God who honours what love makes reaching into that room with power; and many believing in the Lord. It is Matthew 5:16 acted out from beginning to end, and the glory goes exactly where Jesus said it would, to God and never to the seamstress. Two things must be said carefully here. Dorcas was raised as a gift and a sign, never as wages for her sewing; Matthew Henry drily observed that she would have enjoyed heaven better, and that she was brought back for the sake of the widows and the town, for others’ good and God’s glory. And the God who raised her is the God the letter to the Hebrews describes, who “is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name” (Hebrews 6:10); He remembers every garment. That is the crown of the week. The beautiful works are seen, they are lovely, they outlive us, and the God who never forgets them uses them to draw the watching world to Himself.
Full on the Lord’s Day, and Full Tomorrow
The crown leaves one question with you on this Lord’s Day, and the widows would have answered it without hesitating: what have your hands made that someone else is wearing? The church you sit in this morning is meant to be a Dorcas, a body so full of beautiful works that the town knows it by what its members have sewn: the meals, the visits, the debts forgiven, the strangers welcomed, the patience under abuse, the secret gifts nobody traced. When such a church gathers, it is the upper room before Peter arrived, a roomful of people wearing what love made. Worship, then, is the moment the garments are held up towards the One who gave the hands their skill, so that the credit runs past the seamstress to the Lord. And when the service ends, the arc sends you out with the one word the week has been building: be full. Do more than a good deed now and then; let the works fill you, the way they filled her, until fullness is simply what people find when they look at you. Sew a garment tomorrow that someone will still be wearing when you cannot speak for yourself. It will speak for you. It will outlive you. It will be shown, one day, in a room, by someone weeping, and God will take it up in His own hands and use it to draw a town to Himself. Be full of beautiful works, and leave the showing to the people who wore them.
Declaration
If the people I have touched were gathered in one room, I know what I would want them to be holding. I want a life so full of good work that it can be seen without my saying a word, shown by the ones it warmed: the mercy, the gift, the patience, the secret coat, every one of them cut from cloth that was laid out for me before I began. I know none of it buys me anything; the fullness is a gift, and the raising of what I make is in hands far greater than mine. But I also know that nothing sewn in love is ever lost. It goes on being worn when my voice is gone; it speaks for me when I am silent; and the One who never forgets a single garment takes it up and uses it to draw the watching home. So today, with the others, I hold up what has been made and let the thanks run past me. And tomorrow I go and sew again. Let me be full. Let the ones I clothed do the showing.
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