The city of Philippi was like Gettysburg—it was known for the battle fought there a century before. Caesar Augustus had defeated the army of Brutus and Cassius. Caesar had made the town a military base, which defined the city’s population, and most of its residents were from elsewhere.
Here was concentrated the spirit of imperial Rome, in its pride and prejudice and arrogant aggression. Here Caesar was worshiped as a god, with Mars, the Roman god of war. Violence was assumed as the means to law and order. There was greed and exploitation but also commerce and prosperity.
The woman Lydia shares in this prosperity. She imports purple cloth, the costly fabric reserved for the ruling class. She owns property, she’s got enterprise and initiative, she has access to cash and capital. She’s an almost modern woman, and the text treats her that way. She is not identified by any husband’s name. She has an independent character, and apparently she does not buy the established religion of the empire, even though she depends on its defenders to be her customers.
Because Caesar was honored in Philippi as “Lord and God,” no synagogue was allowed. So any Jews had to say their common prayers outside the city gates. And only the women dared to do it. But why is Lydia with them? Why is this prosperous Gentile praying to this Jewish god who had been defeated by the gods of Rome?
One Sabbath, on the riverside, some strangers show up. They have a message. She listens to this message, and “the Lord opened her heart.” She believes it, she signs up, she gets baptized, and her household too. That means she puts her whole household under the sovereignty of God, the God of Israel, even inside a city of the gods of Rome. When she said at her baptism that “Jesus is Lord,” she meant that Caesar wasn’t.
Why put her business at such risk? What did she hear in the message, that she should do this, and choose to be identified with the followers of a dead man, executed by the soldiers and officials who were her customers? What in her self-interest was anything that Paul could offer her? We don’t find her miserable and enthralled in sin. She seems to be on top of things.
We can only reason that she must have believed that Jesus really had risen from the dead, and that behind him was the one God who had made the universe, and that his kingdom of justice and righteousness really was spreading in the world, and that she could join up with it. She believed the message and she trusted the messenger. She was skilled in trusting her suppliers and sizing up her customers, she was used to taking calculated risks, she lived by investing her current capital in long-term gains, and she trusted what the stranger told her. Well, faith is that which looks beyond self-interest, isn’t it. Faith is what brings you out of yourself.
She challenges Paul to have faith in her. She says, “If you judge me to be loyal to this lord, then stay at my house.” So direct. So open. This kind of woman you would build a church around. The Lord had opened her heart and she opened her home. Her house becomes the church in Philippi. Her hospitality gave them a sanctuary. Both safety and holiness.
The disciples can gather here for the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, and sit around her table and break her bread and pray. The Holy Spirit is among them. God has moved into her house. And for years to come her hospitality and her sanctuary will define that congregation, and it would always be St. Paul’s favorite church.
How strange, that the mighty God of the universe should work this way—compared to the very successful gods of Rome. This one God will conquer the other gods, the gods in power at the time, the gods of pride and prejudice, by means of a small-group-meeting in a businesswoman’s house. How typical, then, that this God’s mighty universal power works through grace and love.
How lovely, that what Jesus promised to his disciples in John 14 came true so quickly with this Gentile businesswoman and her staff and her Jewish friends, that, as Jesus said, “My father will love them, and we will come to them, and we will make our home with them.” The Holy Trinity at home with Lydia.
The Holy Trinity had moved in to Philippi, and was at home in Lydia’s house, and her little community of Jesus was the temple of this new God. The other gods had their splendid temples in Philippi, the temple to Mars, the temple to Caesar, where you could go to make your contact with those gods. But if you wanted to get close to this God of Jesus, you went to Lydia’s house.
Her house was an intimation of the vision of the Revelation, our second lesson. To her house would come the people of every nation who happened to live in Philippi: Jews, Italians, Gauls, Germans, barbarians, army veterans, their wives, their slaves, their sales people. Her house was the city of God inside a city of Caesar. And the food on her table was for healing, for the healing of the nations.
This vision from the Revelation, from the last chapter of the Bible—it has a double application. It’s a vision of the new world of the future, when Christ will come again, and stay, and the Father and the Holy Spirit with him, and the Holy Trinity will bring heaven down to earth. It’s the final answer to our Lord’s Prayer, when we pray, “Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.”
But it’s also a vision of the church today, the church as the witness and first fruits of the Kingdom, when we practice what we pray. The church as the practice of the City of God. The gates of the city are always open, which means calm security and constant welcome, a sanctuary city, perfectly hospitable to human life as it should be, within the holiness of God. It’s not meant to be the whole world, but the capital city of the larger world, and the nations will walk by its light, and the various peoples will enrich it with the gifts of their own peculiar cultures. The mission of the church.
This enlightened capital city does not conquer nations like Rome did or London or Washington DC, but it heals the nations. “The leaves of its tree are for the healing of the nations.” The Greek word for healing here does not mean a miracle cure, but therapeutic care, attendance—what nurses do in hospitals. It’s what God does among the nations by means of God’s word and by the service of God’s people. It needs no armies and no force. There is no struggle and no battle. It heals the nations by means of grace and peace and a very hospitable kind of holiness. The church’s mission.
In our Gospel lesson, this healing is the peace that the Lord Jesus promised his disciples on the night before he died, and this healing is the peace that he gave them three days later on Easter afternoon. It’s an active peace, and it makes all things well, and all manner of things well, the ultimate healing. Peace with God, achieved by his atonement and communicated by the Holy Spirit, peace with each other, achieved by forgiving sins, and peace for the world, by the Lordship of Christ, to whom we witness. The peace of the city, the peace of the kingdom, the peace in Lydia’s house.
At Consistory on Monday night we were discussing our new mission statement, and whether it’s better to say that we offer “a space of unconditional welcome” or “a sanctuary of unconditional welcome.” The word “space” suggests openness, a community of openness, room for you to be you, and the spacious feeling of this room. The word “sanctuary” suggests safety and holiness, but a sanctuary can be guarded and closed in and restricted to the holy.
And yet our City Councilmember Brad Lander was brilliant last Sunday afternoon when he challenged us to think of “sanctuary” as a verb, an active verb, a doing, a campaign, a calling. By contrast “space” can be empty, unless it’s the space I spoke of on Easter, the space coming out of the empty tomb, full of the light and power of the resurrected Lord Jesus.
Whatever we end up saying, our lessons today challenge us, that though the marvelous sanctuary in which we worship is a great means of our mission, it’s the community of the congregation itself that by our life together offers active space among us and active sanctuary and active hospitality.
But it also means going outside our sanctuary, instead of just waiting for people to come in, but like St. Paul going out to look for people praying outside the gates, in the exclusion zones, non-citizens, where only women dare to go. There we will find the Lord Jesus in the persons of the Lydias of the world, practicing their healing before the church even notices them, who like Lydia will challenge us. But there too we will find the love of God.
Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
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