In the Acts of the Apostles, the
community of Christ begins to take root around the Mediterranean. Peter, Paul and other disciples of Jesus
travel to different districts, cities and towns with the good news of the resurrection
of Jesus and of the coming of the kingdom of God in the world. And, as the reading emphasizes, success and
fruitfulness come not from strategic planning but from spiritual attentiveness
and openness.
In the reading, the places where
Paul starts and where he wants to keep going – Phrygia, Galatia, Mysia, Bythnia
and Troas, are all in Asia Minor, in modern-day Turkey. He knows that area. But where he ends up – Macedonia, Neapolis
and Philippi, are all across the Straits of Bosphorus , the Sea of Marmara and
the Aegean Sea, in modern-day Greece – new and unfamiliar territory for him.
The Lord opened Lydia’s heart to listen
eagerly to what was said by Paul. 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.
“When she and her
household were baptized…”
How do you baptize a
household?
If this were a joke,
the answer would probably be “very carefully.”
But it’s not a joke;
the Book of Acts is serious about this.
More often than not when people hear and receive the good news of the
way of Christ and the coming of the kingdom of God into the affairs of the
world, it’s not just them as individuals who are baptized and welcomed into the
community of Christ. It’s their
household, which means their family – all members of it, their family business
if they have one, all the property and assets they have, whatever servants may
be part of the household and any other people regularly involved in managing
their affairs. In other words, it’s all
they have and all they do in the world that is baptized – that’s welcomed into
the community of Christ, dedicated to the coming of the kingdom of God, and celebrated
as part of how God is transforming the world not just one heart, but one whole
household at a time.
So, “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. [And] she and her household were baptized…”
It sounds so simple
and matter of fact. Really, though there
was nothing simple nor matter of fact about it.
Just think of all the
twisted, crooked lines that came together to lead to the happy outcome of this
story. There is Paul, who a short time
and only seven chapters earlier was tracking down Christians all over the
country to kill them in the name of God, now a Christian himself and one of
Christianity’s most public preachers.
There’s the way he and his friends ended up in Greece when they had made
all their plans to be in Turkey instead.
And who knows why instead of staying in Neapolis, a nice easygoing
seaside town, they came instead to Philippi, a more hard-nosed Roman imperial
city where the popularity and power of the empire and the emperor would make
the way of Christ especially hard for him to preach and hard for others to
accept?
Then there’s the
women Paul ended up preaching to, and where he found them. They were a mixture of Jewish women and women
known as “God-fearers” – Gentiles drawn to Judaism and what it had to offer,
who became kind of “associate members” or non-Jewish adherents of a Jewish
community – not real Jews, but kind of half-connected and allowed to
participate in some of the community life.
Philippi being the imperial city it was, though, there was no synagogue
where the women could meet, so they created a place of prayer for themselves
just outside the city by the river which is where Paul managed to find them.
Which is also where he
and Lydia met, and what a story Lydia’s must have been. The fact she was known as a businesswoman – a
seller of purple, was itself unusual in its time. Was she widowed? Was her husband ailing? Was she ever married; against all odds and
laws at the time was she a woman who either inherited a family business or
built it up herself? And why was she in
Philippi? She was from Thyatira which is
actually one of the cities Paul travelled through himself to get to
Philippi.
This story is far
from simple and matter of fact. It’s as
twisted, as random, as full of inexplicable coincidence and unexpected
consequence from unplanned events as our lives are, when we really stop to
think about them.
When we think about
our life journey,
who we meet along the
way,
who we fall in love
with and marry and why,
what we end up
studying or doing for a living,
where we work and
with who,
what our health is
like,
who our kids are and
what they end up doing,
who your minister is
and what we end up doing or not doing together as a church,
what happens to us at
different points all along the way that we don’t plan and can only
weep and laugh and marvel at …
are any of our lives
ever just simple and matter of fact?
And even in the story
of Paul and Lydia, just when it seems there’s a happy ending – contact made
with a community of faith, Lydia and her household baptized into and committed
to the way of Christ, Paul with a comfortable home to work from for a while, if
we were to read on into the next chapter, the very next thing that happens as
Paul goes from Lydia’s house to preach in the marketplace, he gets in trouble
with the imperial police and ends up in jail.
But you know, even
that in the end turns out for good, and by the time Paul ends up leaving Philippi,
this has been one of the richest chapters of his missionary experience and the
church that’s established in Philippi grows into one of the most open, vibrant
and faithful of all the churches he starts, and one he happily keeps in touch
with for the rest of his life.
And isn’t that what
we want for our life – to know that God somehow gathers up all the threads and
is able to weave them into a wonderful tapestry. That no matter how broken or scattered or
useless we feel at times, we have a place in God’s kingdom, we are part of
God’s work in the world. Isn’t this what
we want for ourselves, for our family and our household, for our church, for
our community, and for all the world?
So, how do we baptize
our household? How do we commit our
experience and our journey to the way of Christ and the kingdom of God? How do we celebrate all we have and all we do
as part of how God is transforming and healing the world one family, one church
and one community at a time?
I wonder if it
depends on our image of God.
When I was a child,
baptism for me was by full immersion as a believer, confessing my sins and
giving thanks – and my life once and for all, to Jesus for saving me from God’s
judgement and eternal hell. And I know there
was talk at church about having to grow into that commitment and growing into
faith all my life. But what most stuck
for me was the notion of once-for-all escape from the fear of hell. I was so scared of God that that’s all that
mattered, and I didn’t pay as much attention as I might have to the
continually-growing part. I was just so
glad to be saved that the rest didn’t matter quite as much.
Since then, though,
I’ve come to know God more as a loving and creative parent, just desiring the
best for us and all the world, working patiently and faithfully to help weave
and keep weaving all that is, into a tapestry of glory, of grace and of love
for all. And somehow the image of sprinkling
rather than full immersion seems to make sense as an expression of that.
Not a once-for-all
flood – not a full, sudden, highly charged, cathartic washing and cleansing of
all the bad and leaving only the good, but rather a choice for showers – the
choice of letting yourself be sprinkled and to receive continual, as-needed,
season by season, year by year refreshment of your soul, growth of your faith,
renewal of your hope, broadening of your love.
And how we do that –
how God does that in each of our lives and in each of our families, how God
does that through us in the life of our church and our community, is something
we each only know for ourselves in whatever twists and turns and opportunities
and challenges we live by.
So, how do you
baptize a household? How do you commit
your experience and your journey to the way of Christ and the kingdom of
God? How do we celebrate day by day and
season by season, all we have and all we do as part of how God is transforming
and healing the world one family, one church and one community at a time?
