Good News: Acts 16:9-15
9 During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” 10 When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.
11 We therefore[a] set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, 12 and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some
days. 13 On the Sabbath day we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed[b] there was a place of prayer, and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. 14 A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. 15 When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.” And she prevailed upon us.
Reflection: “The Colour Purple: Lydia and Longing”
To borrow a line from Sesame Street, today’s message is brought to you by the colour purple. Purple, the colour of royalty – both monarchs and beloved pop stars with royal names like Prince. Purple, the liturgical colour for the church seasons of Advent and Lent, the colour of the robe placed on Jesus’ shoulders as he is tortured and mocked as “The King of the Jews”, purple the colour of the Communion wine. Purple, a colour of passion, status and transformation.
For Lydia, purple was also the colour of prosperity. Lydia was a dealer in purple cloth, trading in the city of Philippi in northern Greece. She was an independent businessperson, head of her own household, and used to dealing with the elite class who were able to buy and wear her luxury product. The dye so popular with royalty and the wealthy was originally made from the secretions of a family of sea snails called murex, and produced by either milking them or crushing them. It takes 12,000 snails to produce 1.4 grams of dye, enough to colour the trim of one garment. In the ancient world, this dye was literally worth its weight in silver.
However, Lydia may have been selling a different kind of purple. Our passage from Acts tells us that she was from Thyatira, a land-locked city in Asia that had developed a purple dye made from the madder root. It’s quite possible that Lydia’s purple cloth was dyed using this method, so she might well have prospered by producing a luxury item at reduced cost while keeping her prices high.
What else do we know about Lydia from this passage? She was a “worshiper of God”, which meant that she was a Gentile who was attracted to the Jewish faith but not a full convert. She was what we might call a seeker today, someone full of spiritual longing, drawn to a faith community but stopping short of full commitment. Her longing brings her to a place outside the city, beside the river, where she gathers with other women. Since she was clearly a strong and independent woman, we can guess although we aren’t told that she was probably a leader of this informal community which is meeting away from the local centers of civic and religious authority. Away from the city buildings and structured society, there is room to breathe and think and talk, room for openness to change and transformation.
Meanwhile, the apostle Paul finds his plans to travel to Asia vetoed by the Holy Spirit, and instead he follows a vision to travel to Macedonia. He crosses the Aegean Sea and lands in Philippi. What then takes him to the river bank instead of to the synagogue on the Sabbath day? We don’t know, although it’s possible that there simply was no synagogue. But we do know that he is willing to trust God’s leading even when it doesn’t make sense. And by the standards of the time, it certainly makes no sense that his first convert in Europe is an independent non-Jewish woman of commerce.
Where do we find ourselves in this story? Are we seekers like Lydia, no longer finding meaning in our familiar lives and culture, drawn to something bigger and deeper but not yet ready to make the leap? Are we leaders in our own communities, whether large or small, bringing people with common interests and goals together to talk and support each other? Are we evangelists like Paul, galvanized by a life-changing experience of conversion and itching to tell the world? Or are we simply gathered at the river side, breathing in and out, open to the Spirit speaking to us through the abundance of creation and the love of our friends?
One thing for sure is that we all know in our guts that there is more to life than power and material success but we’re often unsure where to look for what we need. We’re tempted by the quick fix: happiness defined by yet more money, power, and prestige. Sometimes those addictions lead us into even more unhealthy addictions: alcohol, drugs, over-eating. We turn to our addictions to mask our pain which is sometimes physical, sometimes emotional, a sense of emptiness at our core, an emptiness that cannot be filled by money or success.
I think of two tragic stories in the news in recent years that illustrate this emptiness. Continuing with the purple theme, one is the death of Prince, such a high-profile loss that when the CN Tower and Niagara Falls were bathed in purple light to celebrate the Queen’s birthday, his fans thought it was in honour of his death. At the pinnacle of success as the world measures it –with talent, fame and fortune – he died from an accidental overdose of pain medication.
And at the farthest possible end of the socioeconomic scale, a young man in Saskatoon sentenced to 11 years in jail for a series of violent home invasions. The judge noted
that he “had an early life sown with chaos, neglect and uncertainty. He, as well as the rest of society, now reaps the consequences of his tragic provenance,”
This young man had his first drink at age six, started drinking regularly and doing drugs at age nine. By his early teens, he was using cocaine, ecstasy, prescription pills and crystal meth.
By 19, he had amassed 53 convictions in 27 separate dispositions.” Here in BC, we also hear every day about frequent offenders, the systemic roots of the issue, and our inability as a society to stop the destructive cycle.
So much pain, and such tragic consequences for the sufferers and victims and all their loved ones.
The same kind of longing that leads to the destruction of addiction also leads many, like Lydia, on new paths in their search for meaning. Knowing, like Lydia, that they need more than what is offered by worldly success, they read and think and talk to each other. They look for quiet and stillness and in it they wait for Spirit’s leading. They are drawn to life-giving questions rather than the sort of quick, easy answers designed to stop the conversation. They are not ready to let the Holy be confined and defined for them by others. Sometimes these seekers find their way through our church doors.
In his presentation on “The Heart of Evangelism”, Rev. Dave Anderson says that the majority of newcomers to the church are people in transition – new baby, new job, new home, new marriage – or people under tension, often financial or in their relationships. In transition or in crisis, we are open and ready to hear a new story.
And what a story we have to tell: the Easter story of new life, new hope, new meaning. The story of a new relationship between Creator and Creation, the story that there is wholeness and hope on the other side of pain, and an abundance of love to fill our emptiness. The story of grace, of all things given to us out of love, unearned and sometimes even unsought.
As Shug says in Alice Walker’s great novel “The Color Purple”, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”
God is always trying to please us back. Purple is the colour of power and richness and abundance: the beauty of creation, of fragrant bread and a good wine, the colour of love given without thought of return. We are all seekers like Lydia and her friends, we all long for these gifts. God gives us what we need, and simply asks us to pay attention, to notice the colour of purple in the fields.
And so we bring our full attention and all our longing to the table of Christ, where the grace of God that transformed the seekers, the community builders like Lydia, and the evangelists like Paul into the early church is still and always available to us.
Reading: “The Body of the Cosmos” by Richard Rohr, April 26, 2022
Before we celebrated Communion, Helen Wilson shared some lovely thoughts based on this meditation from Richard Rohr.
The Eucharist—or what many Christians refer to as communion—becomes our ongoing touchstone for the Christian journey. It becomes a place to which we must repeatedly return in order to find our face, our name, our absolute identity, who we are in Christ, and thus who we are forever. We are not just humans having a God experience. The Eucharist tells us that, in some mysterious way, we are an ingested God having a human experience!
This continues in Romans 8:19–25 (as creation), 1 Corinthians 10:16–17, and 11:23–25 (as bread and wine), and in 12:12–13 (as people). In each of these Scriptures, and in an ever-expanding sense, Paul expresses his full belief that there is a real transfer of human and spiritual identity from Christ to Creation, to the elements of bread and wine, and through them to human beings.
Thus Eucharist, like Resurrection, is not a unique event or strange anomaly. Eucharist is the Incarnation of Christ taken to its final shape and end—the very elements of the earth itself. It is all one huge continuum of Incarnation. It is indeed one sacred universe, all things turning around one thing (uni versus), the divine. [1]
Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn (1926–2022) wrote about “Jesus and Buddha as brothers.” On the Christian communion ritual, he writes:
The bread that Jesus handed to you, to us, is real bread, and if you can eat real bread you have real life. But we are not able to eat real bread. We only try to eat the word bread or the notion of bread. Even when we are celebrating the Eucharist, we are still eating notions and ideas. “Take, my friends, this is my flesh, this is my blood.” Can there be any more drastic language in order to wake you up? What could Jesus have said that is better than that? You have been eating ideas and notions, and I want you to eat real bread so that you become alive. If you come back to the present moment, fully alive, you will realize this is real bread, this piece of bread is the body of the whole cosmos.
If Christ is the body of God, which he is, then the bread he offers is also the body of the cosmos. Look deeply and you notice the sunshine in the bread, the blue sky in the
bread, the cloud and the great earth in the bread. Can you tell me what is not in a piece of bread? The whole cosmos has come together in order to bring to you this piece of bread. You eat it in such a way that you become alive, truly alive. . . . Eat in such a way that the Holy Spirit becomes an energy within you and then the piece of bread that Jesus gives to you will stop being an idea, a notion. [2]
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (New York: Convergent, 2019), 137– 138.
[2] Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 106–107.