Lydia's Journey

This is the story of Lydia, the first woman pastor in the Christian church (at least as far as we know). And it almost never happened.

You see, Paul and Silas hadn’t planned to go to Macedonia at all. They had hardly begun to scratch the surface of Asia Minor - that’s where present-day Turkey is. They’d covered the south coast, and gone a little way up into the interior. The obvious place to go next was Ephesus: the biggest port city on the Aegean coast, with a thriving Jewish colony cheek by jowl with the most famous fertility cult in the Mediterranean world. What a mission field! I’ll bet they were fairly drooling at the prospect.

But something kept them from it. Luke tells us that the Holy Spirit prevented them, but doesn’t say how. And usually if Paul had a dream he’d tell his readers about it. But at any rate they then tried to go north, to Pontus and Bithynia on the coast of the Black Sea, up and off a little to the east of where Istanbul. But no. The Holy Spirit stopped them again. So there they are, sitting in Troas - which, incidentally, is the same Troy whose siege Homer wrote about a thousand years earlier - up on the NE corner of the Aegean, wondering what to do next, when this time Paul does have a dream. Someone is calling for his help. “Come over to Macedonia and help us,” he says. So they do.

An interesting thing that you may not have noticed is that at this point in the book of Acts the author stops saying “they” and starts saying “we.” That’s because Dr. Luke joins up with Paul in Troas and travels with him as far as Philippi. So Luke was there for all of this part of the story.

At any rate they have fair winds to Macedonia; it only takes two days (later on it takes them 5 days to come back the other way) and walk inland about 10 miles from the port city of Neapolis to the town of Philippi. And here’s where I’ll let Lydia take over, and tell you how she became the leader of the first house church in Philippi.

Good morning. Thank you for letting me come tell my story. It’s been so many years and so much has happened that I hardly know where to begin. I could, I suppose, just dive right in and tell you about the day Paul came down and joined us in Sabbath prayer at the river outside town. But that doesn’t explain how I came to be having Sabbath prayers at the river.

Because, you see, I’m not Jewish. I’m not Macedonian, either. I’m from Thyatira. That’s in the middle of what used to be the kingdom of Lydia, which is where my name comes from. I came to Philippi because I’m a merchant, and since I was widowed about 14 years ago it’s been more convenient for me to manage things from here. Things are better for women in Macedonia, there’s no nonsense about whether or not I’m allowed to hold property and sign contracts and so on. But there are some drawbacks.

You see, Thyatira is a pretty rich town; we took the trade in purple cloth away from the Phoenicians by developing a vegetable dye that’s just as bright and a whole lot cheaper to process than the shellfish they used. So a lot of people from all over the world live there, especially dealers in linen and wool and so on. And my husband and I started taking religious instruction from the Judean wool merchants from whom we bought cloth.

They were so sure, you see, of their God. And it was so different from all the other religions. There were hundreds of gods and goddesses, it seemed, and mostly what they wanted was for you to give them things. And none of them had any morals at all. And how could you tell which god was most powerful, anyway? And none of them gave you any help at all in figuring out how to live. Most people sacrificed to one particular god, usually their trade guild’s patron, and of course everyone participated in the state religion. But if you wanted morality, or ethics, or the meaning of life, you had to go to the philosophers, and a lot of them didn’t really believe in the gods at all.

There must have been a half dozen or more different philosophies, all different, and none of them made any more sense than another. Some of them thought there might be an unknown God, but they were sure that if such a one existed, he wouldn’t lower himself to have anything to do with people. But I didn’t like that answer, it was so cold, and dry somehow. It leaves people completely on their own, with nothing on their side except power or luck.