I wonder if you have ever had an invitation that changed everything. Perhaps it was an invitation to dinner that turned into a life-long friendship. Or a suggestion about applying for a job that opened doors you could never have imagined. Perhaps someone said, “Come to youth group with me,” and you found a place where you knew you belonged for the first time. Invitations can change everything. Welcoming one another opens the door to relationship, and relationships are always transformative. Not infrequently, this is where we meet God.
Our reading from Acts suggests two invitations. The first is a summons to Paul that comes in a dream, inviting him to “come over to Macedonia.” The second is from Lydia, and this changes everything for Paul’s mission.
Decades before the Christian movement adapted itself to traditional Greco-Roman patriarchy, there were glimmers of something very different. Long before the old hierarchies asserted themselves, there were signs of something else. Even though the full story is lost, clues remain; names are remembered. Mary Magdalene: the first witness to the resurrection, the one who carried the news to the men who remained in hiding. Dorcas, who cared for the poor and supported the vulnerable in her community; the only woman explicitly given the title “disciple” in the New Testament. There is Priscilla, who with her husband Aquila, were teachers of the faith and colleagues of Paul and her name is almost always mentioned first. There are more than a half dozen women who are named by Paul in letters to the Romans and the Philippians, important enough to be singled out by name for greeting or concern.
And then there is Lydia. Lydia is the very first person who receives the good news that Paul shares when he leaves Asia and enters Europe. Up to this point, Paul has journeyed around Syria and founded churches in what is now Turkey. Then, in a dream, he senses a call to travel to Macedonia or Greece. His first stop is a city called Philippi. Founded by Greeks and named for Philip of Macedonia, the father of Alexander the Great, the city was refounded by the Romans as a retirement community for Roman army officers and their families following the Roman conquest of the region. In Paul’s day, it is estimated that there were about 15,000 residents of the city. There was a small elite, upper-class, as well as tradespeople and well-off farmers. Maybe as much as a quarter of the population would be classified as poor. A smaller percentage were slaves, mostly individuals owned as family servants by the wealthy. Eventually, the Christian community would be made up of people from all of these segments of Philippian society.[1]
But that was later. First, there was Lydia. It is actually astonishing how much we know about this woman. The description is brief but very revealing. She lives in Philippi but she is originally from Thyatira, in what is now Turkey. She owns her own home and is the head-of-household. She is a merchant who specializes in purple cloth, the very expensively-died fabric that was permitted to be worn only by the elite of Roman society. Dealing with the wealthy has made her prosperous. She is also a “God-fearer” or “Worshipper of God”. This is a specific term for a non-Jewish person who is drawn to the faith community of Israel but has not converted to Judaism. She is a seeker. She has gone to a place where others gather to pray, and that is where she meets the Apostle Paul.
Paul sits down in the middle of this gathering. This is the traditional posture for preaching or teaching in Jewish worship. What happens next probably occurred over some weeks, but in the telling it is greatly compressed: Paul tells the story of God’s grace and mercy made available to all people through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. God opens Lydia’s heart to embrace this message. She and her whole household are baptized. And then, God having opened her heart, she opens her home to Paul and his companions. And with that act of hospitality, a church is born. Lydia is the first convert; the first patron; quite possibly the first leader, since the one in whose home the community typically gathered became the pastoral leader. The message of God’s welcome to all – Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female – found a place in Lydia’s heart, and she reciprocated by welcoming this new community to form in her home.
It’s easy to read this as just another conversion story, but there is so much more here that I suggest we linger for a while with Lydia and let her story ask questions of us and of our journey of faith. The first thing we notice about Lydia was that she was a spiritual seeker. We don’t know what religious practices may have shaped her life. Temples and shrines to gods and goddesses were all around. Religious devotion to the Roman Emperor was a patriotic duty but probably not very spiritually satisfying. Like many others of her day, the teachings and practices of Judaism were deeply attractive to Lydia.
What was she looking for? Obviously, we don’t know, but my hunch is that it was a combination of monotheism and ethics. The great gift of Israel to the world is this conviction that there is only one God, one source of all that is; and that this God has a moral character. The God of Israel is said over and over again to be “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love;” One who loves justice and shows mercy, who makes promises and keeps them. Israel knew that people become like what they worship. Who we think God is shapes who we become as people. The moral character of God was, I think, deeply attractive to those who longed to be and become better people.
Lydia the seeker invites us to ask ourselves: what are we seeking? Where is the hunger of your soul leading you towards? It is easy to neglect this question in the midst of our busy lives. For those of us for whom life is a series of tasks to get done or goals to be accomplished or health crises to be endured, it is easy to forget to ask where God is in the midst of all of that. The seeker is one who is on the lookout for the presence of God. The seeker is looking for God in the world around her, and in the people he meets, and in the challenges and opportunities along the way. Lydia reminds us to continue seeking.
The second thing to notice about Lydia is that when God opened her heart, she opened her home.[2] Having been welcomed into God’s family, she becomes a welcoming presence to others. And notice how this gesture is described: she “urged us,” and “she prevailed.” The urgency of the invitation is a sign of deep desire to give back, to reciprocate the gift she understood she had been given.
Lydia’s hospitality invites us to ask whether we are hospitable people? We, too, have been welcomed into God’s family through baptism. We, too, are recipients of love divine and grace amazing. Do we make it our life’s work to welcome others? Are we open to sharing who we are and what we have? Are we open to being changed by those who come into our lives? For hospitality, you see, is always a two-way street. When I extend hospitality, I’m not only giving; I’m receiving. Genuine hospitality creates relationships, and relationships always change us.
We are living in an especially dangerous time. We have become a far less hospitable society. Millions of people are living in refugee camps around the world, but the United States government has effectively eliminated refugee resettlement. In this, the richest nation in the world, hundreds of thousands of children do not have enough to eat all the time. Government programs that support nutrition and health care for these children are being cut back or cancelled. We are a nation of immigrants, but we are unable to construct a rational, fair, and sustainable immigration policy that allows good people to live and work safely just as our ancestors did. More than that, we have become inhospitable to each other. Generosity of spirit and tolerance for difference are in short supply and not highly valued.
God has welcomed us. Are we willing to be people who extend God’s welcome to others? Are we willing to receive hospitality and so be transformed by it? You see, there were two parties to Lydia’s hospitality: she opened her home, Paul and his companions went in. A Gentile woman invited Jewish men. She persuaded them to move way outside their traditional paths of comfort. Everybody in this story is taking a risk, and their courageous partnership transformed them all. Paul became more convinced of his view that in Christ there was no longer Jew vs. Gentile. And Lydia became a leader of a Christian community in which, at least for a little while, there was no longer male vs. female.
There are a lot of conversion stories in Acts. There is Cornelius, the Roman soldier on whom the Holy Spirit descends as it did on the disciples at Pentecost. There is the Ethiopian eunuch, another God-fearer who is drawn to the God of Israel. Great stories, but they both end with baptism. What is so remarkable about the story of Lydia is that we find out what happens after she is baptized. Lydia shows us what a transformed life looks like: it looks like a home opened wide enough to found a community and big enough to be inhabited by God. May that be said of us and of our communities as well. Thanks be to God.
Paul W. Walaskay, “Acts 16:9-15, Exegetical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Vol. 2 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), p. 477. ↑
Ronald Cole-Turner, “Acts 16:9-15, Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Vol. 2 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), p. 478. ↑