Our lessons during the Easter season focus on resurrection stories, the new life that emerges from an encounter with the Divine. In our first lesson today, we hear Peter call Tabitha/Dorcas to “get up,” to rise to a transformed life enabled to incarnate God’s love in Joppa in ways she had yet to imagine. God was not finished with her. It is a story reminiscent of Jesus’ raising of Lazarus, calling him out of the tomb as a new person, unbound from all that had held him hostage in his former life. (Jn.11:43-44) And also similar to the story of Jesus’ raising the son of the widow of Nain (Lk.7:14-15) and the raising of Jairus’ daughter (Mk.5:41-42), each called to get up, and they did.

Scripture doesn’t tell us what their new lives were like. How God would use them day-by-day is not the message for us. What we need to hear today is that there is new life available to us after all the deaths of our lives, all our losses, all our discouragements, all the dark valleys into which we wander. No matter how dismal the circumstances may seem, how deep the depression with which we may struggle, how strong the grief that consumes us, there is the sure and certain hope of the resurrection in this life, as well as in the life to come.

When we hear God call us by name, we know change is in the air. Nothing will be the same. God is at work in our lives, transforming us into a new creation of self-giving love. Seldom is that done in the twinkling of an eye; rather it occurs in the daily interactions the Holy One brings our way. Such transformation takes our willingness and cooperation. We have to get up and leave our self-centered ways behind us in the tomb of the past, cleansed, made whole and holy, as we move into the Way of Christ, ready to be God’s hands and feet and voice in the world around us here and now.

Listen . . . God is calling your name! Get up!