“Short Stories, Lasting Calls” Part 10: Lydia
Sunday, September 24, 2023 — Ordinary Time
Acts 16:11-15 (16-40)
Pastor Mike
The songs come from the innermost cell in the Philippian prison. Paul and Silas – covered with blood and bruises from their severe flogging in the marketplace – sing deep into the night. Suddenly, the whole prison begins to shake; doors and shackles come apart. A jailer wakes to his worst nightmare, a prison break, and he knows it will cost him his job, perhaps even his life. He reaches for a sword to take his own life, and a voice shouts from the darkness: “Do not harm yourself.” The jailor drops his sword and lights the facility. There, in the wreckage of the prison, the jailor washes his prisoners’ wounds, feeds them, and consents to be baptized along with all the members of his household. We might think that there is no hope to be had in the middle of the night in the bowels of a prison. We would be wrong.
I love this story. I have staked many of my hopes for the world upon it ever since I began to spend time in prisons while in seminary, meeting men and women who live on the inside. To the wider world, incarcerated folk are Nobodies, as far from being recognized as God’s children as it is possible to be. As the scripture shows us, the prison and the marketplace are always bound up together. The prison exists to protect the marketplace. In our time, the prison has even become a profitable business venture in itself. Paul and Silas are arrested for casting out a spirit from a slave girl and ruining her masters’ business. They are interrogated and flogged in the agora, and then carted off to the prison. When Jesus comes to town, he disturbs the marketplace, and he brings the prison into central focus. When he does that, when he makes a scandal of himself for the sake of the slave-girl, for the sake of the jailor, will his people want anything to do with him?
Over-against the prison and the marketplace stands the home, where a jailor can be his own master, washing wounds, setting table, accepting baptism; where a woman might say, the church will gather and be sent out from here. Christians must always think deeply about our connections to these three spheres: the home, the marketplace, the prison.
Which brings us to our character for today, to Lydia.
Even though I have loved this chapter of the Bible, for years I overlooked Lydia. I would skip over her in my haste to get to the juicy center of the story. But her presence in the city, her baptism in the river beyond the gate, and the use she makes of her home form the outer layer, the container for the drama of the marketplace and the prison.
Lydia’s origin story will be familiar to us; it’s similar to one of our favorite cultural tales as Americans. Despite being born on the fringes of privilege (in her case, because of her gender), Lydia overcame the odds set against her and became an economic powerhouse in her own right: wealthy, propertied, elite. She was a self-made woman working in the top-tier of the merchant class. “A dealer in purple cloth” is how the Bible describes her, and purple cloth was one of the rarest and most lucrative commodities in the ancient world.
Purple cloth was dangerous to produce and exorbitantly costly to purchase. The Phoenicians mastered the art of harvesting purple dye from several species of Mediterranean sea snails. Harvesting the sea snails required risky deep-sea diving long before modern technology. And it took the secretions of thousands of snails to produce a single gram of dye. Archaeologists have discovered immense mounds of fossilized snail shells along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In contemporary terms, we would call this purple dye production unsustainable and exploitative, bad for workers and bad for ecosystems. But because of that very costliness, purple became associated with prestige, coveted and worn by royalty throughout the ancient world.
The biblical text does not criticize Lydia for her work – though in the background we can hear the scathing critiques of the Hebrew prophets from Isaiah to Ezekiel against the Phoenician purple-dye economy – but it’s an important detail. It’s a way of signaling that we are dealing with a wealthy, successful, shrewd woman who would have every right to be proud of what she’d accomplished and protective of her corner of the market.
Surprisingly, we’re also told that Lydia is a worshipper of God – a Jew either by birth or conversion – and that she goes outside the city gate on the Sabbath to pray with other women down by the river. She’s never fully left her place on the margins. Even though the economic challenges faced by women, she’s a Jew living in diaspora. So, every Sabbath, she leaves the marketplace and comes to this place of movement and fluidity. Beyond the gate, by the river, she meets Paul and has her heart opened to Christ. She and all the members of her household are baptized in the moving waters of the river. She becomes the first convert to Christianity not only in Philippi but in Greece, and not only in Greece but on the whole European continent!
Lydia then offers Paul and Silas her house as a lodging place and a ‘base of operations.’ Once they have this place to come and go from, Paul and Silas can linger in the city, enmesh themselves in the community, and start causing all sorts of trouble – trouble for people like Lydia, businessowners; trouble in places Lydia frequents, the marketplace.
Lydia worked hard to play by the world’s rules and climb to the top. She used the rules to her advantage and mastered them. Lydia surrenders her hard-won identity to her new baptismal identity. She allows her economic pursuits to be interrupted, and that holy interruption becomes the foothold for the Christian community in her city. Against all good business sense and contrary to a merchant’s desire for order and stability, Lydia enters a new partnership, with holy troublemakers and, from the world’s perspective, disturbers of the peace.
It’s really that simple, and I don’t want to overcomplicate it. We don’t need to do a lot of interpretive work to identify with Lydia. Sometimes, Jesus asks us to give away all our possessions. Sometimes, Jesus asks us to hold all things in common, distributing goods according to need. We are always called to make a habit of giving to the church, to those in need. But with Lydia we are not talking about a vow of poverty or tithing or charitable giving – we’re talking about the strategic, scandalous use of the resources and privilege at our disposal; we’re talking about cracking open privacy of the home and business place so that it becomes a place of gathering. We’re talking about reframing our view of what we possess – the home, the business, the bank account, the cloth, these aren’t things, these are potential energy. We’re talking about aligning that energy with the will of God.
Even though it’s simple, it’s extremely hard to do. From one angle, giving up all that one has is easier. It’s excruciating once, but then you’re free. But to live constantly at the intersection of material resources and life with God’s people takes maturity, humility, cunning, and great faith.
Money can buy us distance from the stakes. Possessions can insulate us from the urgency of the world’s needs and from the inbreaking Kingdom of God. Prisons and forced labor exist to protect the consolidated wealth of the world, and those who possess that wealth can push prisons and forced labor out of mind. It is not evil to be propertied or to have had a successful career; what is sinful is to believe that we know best what our stuff is for, that we draw lines around what we’re willing to let God touch.
Lydia brought the stakes into her home. She made her home and her life places of gathering and sending in Jesus’ name. When the Gospel comes to town to expose injustice, to question the market, to reveal the prison, to set people free on the top, to set people free on the bottom – when the Gospel comes to down to dissolve in the waters of baptism the very rules that have helped make us who we are and bring us what we have, Lydia teaches us how to say, “Have thine own way, Lord; have thine own way.”
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.