Today we join Paul as he brings the gospel to Europe. This wasn’t where he was planning to go but we join the story at the point where Paul dreams of a man from Macedonia asking him to go and help them. Paul and Barnabas have already travelled through Asia Minor preaching the gospel, they had returned home, been to Jerusalem and now Paul is on his second journey with Silas. During the journey we are told that Paul tried to go to Asia Minor but the Spirit prevented him and they continued on their way. This is the first time that God has spoken to Paul to say where to go so immediately they set off.
Paul knew he was going to the limits of the Jewish Diaspora and to a Roman city but he still starts by looking for the Jews. They spent some days in Philippi so he finds that there is no synagogue and on the Sabbath they head out of town to the river where they expect to find Jews at prayer. Here I expect Paul hoped to find his man of Macedonia, but he was to be disappointed.10 adult males were needed to have a synagogue and it would appear that not only weren’t there 10 Jewish males in Philippi but perhaps there weren’t any and so Paul and Silas find women worshipping. But they have come a long way at God’s command and so they begin to tell them about Jesus. We don’t know how many women responded but Luke tells us about Lydia.
He tells us that Lydia is a worshipper of God, which means that she was a gentile, and he tells us that she was a dealer in purple cloth from Thyatira. We are used to being surrounded by colours – when we were moving here and asking Duncan what colour he wanted his bedroom walls there was always the option of going down to Homebase with his favourite football shirt and getting the colour scanned and made. Our clothes come in many colours and we can be spoilt for choice. I wore purple to Emma’s wedding to match with the colour scheme of the bridesmaids and because it was half price in the sales.
I wouldn’t have been able to afford purple cloth in Lydia’s day – all the dyes were made from natural resources and while some colours were easy to make others were rare especially if you wanted to be able to wash the cloth.
Thyatira was a centre for the production of purple cloth much prized by Romans who wanted to show off their wealth and power, so Lydia would travel between the two cities. We don’t know where or how she came to be a worshipper with the Jews but on this day God opens her heart to hear of his son, of his death and resurrection and she and her whole household are baptised, there and then. You can still go to Philippi and see the stream where it is thought that Lydia was baptised – indeed some of you may have been there just a few years ago when Geoffrey led a pilgrimage to modern day Turkey and Greece – or perhaps you have seen the photos they took.
Lydia is the first recorded convert in Europe and she responds by insisting on hosting Paul, Luke and Silas thus the church in Philippi is born, Thyatira is also mentioned as one of the seven churches in Revelations so we don’t know if Lydia also took the message of her new faith home. We do know that the church in Philippi continued to support Paul and he often praises them. So let’s just recap how this success story came about. Paul tries to go to back to the province of Asia but can’t and instead follows a dream call from a man in Macedonia. Once there he goes to Philippi hoping to meet with the Jewish Diaspora, there is no synagogue where he could preach the gospel so he goes to the river on the Sabbath looking for the Jewish leaders and finds only women including Lydia who is from Asia....
This isn’t the way we would have planned it – couldn’t Paul just have gone to Asia and preached there and Lydia heard him when she was at home? But if Paul had gone where there were synagogues or male leaders would he have talked to the women? Would Lydia have been able to prevail upon him to stay with her and continue to teach and preach? I wonder if in those early days Paul wondered quite why God had brought him there, I wonder if he thought perhaps he was in the wrong place – but he was in the right place talking to Lydia whom God knew had a heart ready to be opened to hear his word.. Her house became where you went to find the new church to listen to Paul’s teaching and to sit around her table and break bread and pray.
Judging by his letters Paul has problems with many of the churches that he founded but the Philippians were definitely one of his successes : they supported him financially as well as spiritually and they continued to show Lydia’s hospitality – all because he listened to the Spirit, listened when the Spirit said “no” and went when the spirit said go and met Lydia the independent business woman whose heart was ready to respond. So is this just a story of the founding of a church? Of one woman’s journey to faith? It is and yet it is also the story of the beginning of the journey of the Christian faith into the Roman world where the imperial purple and the passion of the cross meet.
It gives us hope that if we listen to God and are ready to do his will then he goes before us and prepares the hearts of those he would have us speak to. It won’t be our eloquent words or powers of persuasion but the simple words and deeds which speak of our faith in Jesus which will be heard by those God is calling to him and they may be in the unlikeliest places. In our old testament lesson we heard a very small part of the story of Ezekiel and the valley of dry bones. The book of Ezekiel is not a happy one – you could say the first 24 chapters are about the state of the nation and Ezekiel’s warning to them, the following chapters describe the surrounding nations and their faults, by chapter 33 Ezekiel’s worst predictions have come true and the temple lies in ruin. How does God restore Ezekiels hope? He whisks him away – somewhere nice, somewhere he doesn’t have to think about the destruction? No to a valley full of dry lifeless bones, makes him walk about and see all of them and then asks him “ Mortal can these bones live?” Ezekiel answers “O lord God, you know”. Can you hear the weariness, almost a leave me alone in my grief.
But God doesn’t leave him alone he asks him to do what he has been called to do – to prophesy, to prophesy to the bones that they will live. God could have made the bones rise on his own but he works through Ezekiel, and so the bones receive flesh and become bodies but without breath until Ezekiel prophesies again and the multitude live. Ezekiel has hope in the future that the nation can be restored that the most hopeless of situations can be redeemed.
Both Paul and Ezekiel ended up in unlikely places but spoke the words which God gave to them and trusted him and through them God gave new life. Ezekiel looked at his nation and despaired, he lost hope but God restored his hope – not that some golden age from the past would come again – but that there was a way for the nation to be in right relationship with God to be filled with his spirit. What do we do when we are in places we didn’t plan to go or when our plans are upset by illness or family or work? Can we still see God and hear his voice – can we also be patient trusting even when what we see doesn’t seem at all hopeful. Do we continue to have hope and to pray both for individual situations and also for the nations? We have just been through an amazing election; I hope you all voted on May 6th and that you are praying for our political leaders. Our nation faces huge challenges – is this hung parliament to be God’s unexpected way of providing a politics more of consensus than confrontation where the decisions which are taken will consider the weak and vulnerable in our society not just the strong. I don’t know but I know that God is in our future and that he has plans for us, people for us to talk to, places for us to go and that he will lead us and provide his spirit to strengthen us.
So I ask that God will unite us today as we break bread together and I ask that each one of us will know God close to us, Know him with us on our life journeys even in the dry places, Helping us to meet people who want to meet him, Trusting that we can respond as did Lydia and open our hearts and homes to them.
Amen