Acts 16:9-15
May 22, 2022
I was still a fairly new
Presbyterian. I had been attending my church in Richmond for maybe a year,
maybe a little longer. After joining the church, I was laid off from the job
that brought me to Richmond in the first place, but something told me not to go
back to Nashville yet. I was able to stay in Richmond because a dear family in
the church had taken me in, invited me to be their second daughter, and gave me
the space and time I needed so catch my breath so I could figure out my next
step.
It was spring, and I was in a small
group Bible study at church. The group met that evening, so that afternoon I
was reading through the lesson to get prepared for the discussion that night.
The scripture was from Philippians 2 …
“If then there is any encouragement
in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion
and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love,
being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or
conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of
you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the
same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus …”
I was certainly not a Biblical
scholar – then or now – but I had grown up listening to scripture. It was read
at church. My dad read it each morning at breakfast. In my more ambitions
moments as a child, I would try to read the entire Bible. I usually got stuck
in the begats in Genesis. But if I had ever read or heard these words from
Philippians before, I didn’t remember them.
So, I read them again. And again.
And each time I read them, I felt like something was opening up inside of me.
It’s difficult to explain what I mean by that. But I think the best way is to
stay that as I read these words from Philippians, I heard them in a way I’d
never heard scripture before. They were no longer just lofty words on the page,
they meant something. They were speaking to me. Had I been of the same mind as
Christ? Did I consider others with humility, believing they were better than
myself? How had I lived up to these words? And how had I failed to do just that?
Something changed that day when I
read those words. Something changed in me. I think, I may be wrong, but I think
it was God opening my heart to hear these words, to hear scripture in a way I
had never heard them before.
We don’t know what words Paul spoke
to the women gathered by the river that day, but through those words God opened
the heart of a woman named Lydia. God opened her heart to hear Paul’s words, to
accept them, to believe them, to believe in what he was preaching, and with her
heart opened, she responded to the apostles by opening her home.
This is a quiet sort of story, isn’t
it? In my Bible, the subheading for this passage is, “The Conversion of Lydia.”
But what struck me about this story is that Lydia is described as “a worshiper
of God,” before her heart is opened. And if she is being converted, it is
certainly not the dramatic conversion that Paul once Saul experienced, is it?
Lydia does not hear a voice speaking to her from heaven. She is not thrown to
the ground. No scales fall from her eyes. No, this is a much quieter kind of
conversion.
Now there is drama
leading up to this moment. We start our passage basically in the middle of a
paragraph, but the verses before our starting point tell of Paul and his
companions trying to go into the region of Phrygia and Galatia, only to be
stopped by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit would not allow them to speak in those
places. They tried to go to another place, but the Spirit would not allow them
to go there either. So, bypassing Mysia, they go down to Troas. And that’s
where our part of the story begins. Paul has a vision of a man asking him to
“Come over to Macedonia and help us.” Paul heeded the vision and went to
Macedonia, sailing from Troas to Samothrace to Neapolis to Philippi, crossing
into the continent of Europe for the first time.
And once there, Paul did not seek
out worship in a synagogue, which seems unusual. Instead, he went to the river
figuring that a prayer gathering would be happening there. And it was. And
there God opens Lydia’s heart. Although there are only a few sentences devoted
to Lydia, we learn some significant things about her. She was a worshipper of
God, but like Cornelius, she was a Gentile believer. She was not a native of Philippi,
she was from Thyatira. She was a dealer in purple cloth, which meant that she
was a businesswoman and most likely a successful businesswoman at that. Purple
cloth was the cloth of wealth and means. Purple was not an easy color to
create, so if you wanted purple you had to have money to buy it.
So, that’s what we know about Lydia.
And what we also know is that while she was already a worshipper of God,
something about what Paul said resonated with her, and through those words God
opened her heart. And when her heart was opened, she responded by opening her
home. Her response to God was hospitality.
Like I said, even considering the
vision at the beginning of this story, this is a quiet conversion. But what it
does mean that she was converted, especially because she was already a woman of
faith? Does it mean that she was converted to the gospel of Jesus? Probably.
Does it mean that she was now, in the words of John’s gospel, “born again?”
Maybe. Does it mean that her heart was expanded to believe in God in a new way?
I would think so. It may mean all the above and so much more, but what I kept
thinking as I worked on this passage, is that Lydia had been given a new
understanding of God, of God’s work in the world, of the saving grace of
Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit, and that this was the next step in
her growing in faith. This was next step in her walking the life of faith. Yes,
she was converted, but maybe it was one of many conversions that she would
experience throughout her life. Maybe the first conversion was what brought her
to worship God before Paul ever entered her world. Maybe this conversion would
be the steppingstone for the next one, and that one would be the steppingstone
for the next one after that.
It seems to me that this conversion
was not the end all conversion of Lydia’s life. I realize that this purely
speculation on my part. We have no other story of her but this. But I wonder if
this isn’t often how conversion works. It is a series of having our hearts
opened to hear God’s word, to see God’s work in the world in a new way. It is a
lifelong process, not a one-time event.
Because here is the thing about our
hearts. They can be so easily closed. Our daily lives, filled as they are with
both drama and mundane, with hopes and fears, with losses and celebrations,
with love and with grief, all of this works to close our hearts. We close our
hearts. Maybe it’s not deliberate or intentional. It’s just that life is hard.
It can be hard facing this world with an open heart because our hearts can be
so badly broken. It can be hard to hear God’s word because this really is a
noisy, cacophonous world that we live in. So, maybe, just maybe, we need to
have our hearts opened again and again. And again.
When I had that experience reading
the words from Philippians, I wasn’t reading in a vacuum. I was a youth
advisor, and we were experiencing conflict among the advisors. As I read that
passage, I began to wonder about how we were dealing with one another. Were we
coming at the conflict with humility or conceit? In our next meeting, I talked
about my experience with this scripture, what I had realized, what I had begun
to see. I don’t know if it helped all that much, but it gave us something to
think about.
As we’ve read and as I’ve already
pointed out, Lydia’s opened heart was not just about her. She responded. She
opened her home. When our hearts are opened, in those moments when we can see
in that mirror a little more clearly, we are also called to respond. When our
hearts are opened, we are called to share that in some way with someone else.
Maybe it is offering our witness or our testimony, and maybe it is in something
that we do, an action that we take. So, my question for all of us is this. Are
our hearts being opened to someone or something in a new or different way? Are
we being given a glimpse of something new? Is God working on us right now,
opening our minds, opening our hearts, opening our hands? Are we being called
to take a step in new direction, with our relationships, with our church, with
our work, with our lives?
Lydia’s conversion was a quiet one,
and I think that our lives are filled with such quiet conversions. But with
each opening of the heart, we can see more, we can understand more, and we can
do more.
May God open our hearts to hear the
Word, to see the Word, to live the Word, today and every day.
Let all of God’s children say,
“Alleluia.”
Amen.
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