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February 8, 2009
First Friends Meeting
Acts 16:11-19
‘Lydia and the Slave Girl’
Doug Gwyn
We’re continuing to look at snapshots of the early years of the
Christian movement, as we find in the Book of Acts. It began as a
renewal movement within Judaism, first around Jerusalem, and then
spreading to cities like Antioch and Damascus. But as persecution
drove Christians out of Jerusalem, the movement spread to new peoples
and places. First to the Samaritans, north of
Jerusalem. Then the apostle Paul catapulted the movement
much further into the Gentile world, further westward, among the
thriving cities of Greece and what is now Turkey. Paul had a
remarkable gift for restating the message of Jesus in terms that
different peoples could understand and find meaningful.
Paul himself was a walking paradox. As I said a few weeks ago, he
had studied with the best rabbis in Jerusalem, but he was also versed
in Greek philosophy and literature. His first reaction to
Christianity was to become its chief persecutor. Then he became
the movement’s greatest and most controversial exponent.
Paul went from city to city, often starting in the local synagogue and
making his fellow Jews very angry with him. He often made
converts of men and women who were not Jewish, but who attended the
synagogue worship services. They were attracted to the Jewish
faith, but they didn’t convert to it. They were on the
edges looking in.
In the passage Ann read for us, we get a snapshot of Lydia. She
is apparently one of these Gentiles attracted to Judaism, but not a
convert. Paul met her in Philippi. He and Silas had just
arrived in town and were looking for the local synagogue one
Sabbath. They found a group of women meeting to worship.
Lydia is described as “a worshiper of God,” which probably
means one of these Gentiles attracted to the Jewish faith. Paul
spoke to the group and Lydia was strongly reached by his message.
So strongly, that she and her household with her baptized right there
on the spot. And she invited Paul and his friends to stay in her
home.
Well, there’s a lot implied in this simple story. It takes
some unpacking for us to get it. Lydia is described as a dealer
in purple cloth. Purple was a very expensive dye, extracted from
a certain sea-shell. Only the wealthiest and most powerful people
wore purple. Lydia was well-to-do. She was a woman of
independent means, and apparently unmarried. She was the head of
her own household. Now in the ancient world, a household included
not only family, but also household servants and those employed in
one’s business. So this could be quite a group in
Lydia’s case. Lydia’s house might be a whole complex
of buildings – living quarters, gardens, business
operations.
So Lydia was another walking paradox – no wonder Paul appealed to
her! She was a Gentile who was attracted to the Jewish
faith. She was a woman of independent wealth and means – a
rarity in an ancient, patriarchal culture. She made her home in
Philippi a new base for the growing network of Christian
congregations. This is a classic example of the early
house-Church. Not a bunch of people packed into someone’s
little living room once a week, but a congregation that met in a home
that was as much a place of business as a personal residence.
Lydia’s house became a place where all kinds of people came
together, some for business, some for worship, some for both.
That’s a real paradox to our minds! Our modern society
separates out spiritual life from business life or vocational
life. Certainly, we struggle to make our work life and our
religious life consistent with each other, but they’re separate
spheres in our modern world. But it all converged in a home like
Lydia’s. The early Christian movement in these ancient
cities of the eastern Mediterranean was often anchored by wealthy
business people like Lydia, who opened their homes to the
movement.
And then we have this slave-girl, who isn’t named. She was
some kind of clairvoyant – like a modern-day palm-reader or a
crystal-gazer, I suppose. She made good money for her owners
through her ability to read people and forecast their future.
Well, she apparently had a good read of Paul and his
fellow-preachers. She followed them around, proclaiming that they
were servants of the most high God, guides to the way of
salvation. We’re told that Paul cast the spirit out of the
girl. She apparently lost her ability to tell people’s
fortunes – which made her owners very angry! They dragged
Paul and Silas before the magistrates for destroying their business,
ruining their property – this slave girl.
Luke doesn’t tell us whether she became a follower of
Christ. But it’s quite possible that she did, especially
after she was probably cast off as useless property by her
owners. The early Christian movement included a number of slaves
who had been freed or were in the process of gaining their
freedom. Sometimes the Christian movement helped slaves to buy
their freedom. They too were walking paradoxes. They were
permanently stigmatized by having been slaves – sometimes
literally stigmatized, by a brand on their hand or other permanent
marks. But their Christian community was a place where all the
usual categories no longer held so rigidly. As Paul famously put
it, they were no longer Jews or Gentiles, slaves or free, male or
female, but new creatures in Christ. This was really exciting
stuff! As these various kinds of people put on Christ, let Christ
live in their hearts and lead their lives, they became part of a new
humanity.
Wayne Meeks wrote a book titled The First Urban Christians some 25
years ago now. He identified this paradoxical quality of the
early Christian movement, as we glimpse it in the Book of Acts and the
Letters of Paul. The Roman Empire had conquered all kinds of
people and thrown them into one vast system, a smaller, ancient version
of our globalized economy today. The Empire and it’s
evolving economy mixed all kinds of peoples together, especially in
these cities where Paul was spreading the gospel. These cities
drew together all many peoples, gods, languages, cultures. People
often felt alienated, disoriented from their inherited
traditions. Some dealt with it by congregating with people of
their own ethnic group, their own social class, their own inherited
religion. But the gospel seems to have attracted people who
didn’t choose to do that – or perhaps really couldn’t
fit into the usual categories. Meeks suggests that, from the
people mentioned by Acts and in Paul’s letters, we find a lot of
walking paradoxes – freed slaves, free people who had fallen into
slavery, women of unusual independent status, Gentiles attracted to
Judaism, Jews who were more comfortable in Greek culture, and so
on. A strange brew!
Paul was a man of such strong paradoxes, he made a perfect ambassador
of Christ. He attracted people who didn’t fit in. And
he preached Christ in strongly paradoxical terms -- the crucified
Messiah. A man named Jesus who also didn’t fit in where he
was. Whose real identity was a mystery. In his letter to
the Church at Philippi, he preached Christ as equal with God, but who
didn’t count that as something to be grasped. Instead, he
poured himself out into the form of a servant or slave. The
Prologue to the Gospel of John states it in different terms: Christ was
the Word who created the world, but when he came into the world, the
world didn’t recognize him. Even his own people
didn’t recognize him.
That message still speaks to us today. We too are walking
paradoxes. We try to fit ourselves into the categories around us,
and some find it easier to do than others. But deep down, in our
heart of hearts, we know we don’t quite fit. We come
together here as a worshipping community in our brokenness, our sense
of incongruity. Out of our own struggles, we learn to accept one
another as we are. And as we do that, we begin to accept
ourselves as who we are. Because God has accepted for who we
are. We find Christ in each other and in ourselves. Christ
mediates among us and works us together into a new creation. That
new reality is first of all the community we find together. And
each of us is individually renewed by that community experience.
That is the greatest paradox. We become better and stronger
individuals by throwing ourselves selflessly into community. And
the community itself throws itself upon a God who is in each of us, yet
beyond all of us.
As we move into open worship, I’ll close with one of the Advices
and Queries (#18) from Britain Yearly Meeting’s Quaker Faith
& Practice: “How can we make the meeting a community in
which each person is accepted and nurtured, and strangers are
welcome? Seek to know one another in the things which are
eternal, bear the burden of each other’s failings and pray for
one another. As we enter with tender sympathy into the joys and
sorrows of each other’s lives, ready to give help and to receive
it, our meeting can be a channel for God’s love and
forgiveness.”
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