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.
But the Jews knew their god. He had actually spoken to them, and rescued them from slavery - a couple of times, I think, once only a few hundred years ago, when Persia ruled, and once long ago in the past. Well, lots of people have stories like that. But what made their god different is that after he rescued them he gave them special rules to live by.
Their god expected them to give alms to the poor, and to treat their slaves kindly, and to be honest in their business dealings, and even - now, this was hard to believe - they even forbade men to lie with anyone but their wives! Their god was holy and righteous, they said, and expected his people to be holy and righteous as well. And to top it all off, they insisted that their god was the creator of the whole universe and was the god even of people who had never heard of him. Well, naturally this caught our attention. And then when they told us that their god really frowned upon worshiping other gods at all - I mean, NOBODY else expects exclusive allegiance - we started thinking, “What if they’re right?”
So we - my husband and I - started learning about their religion. We couldn’t actually become Jews ourselves, of course, I think you have to be a descendent of their ancestor Abraham, and anyway my husband wouldn’t have stood for being circumcised - but we learned the prayers and started reading their sacred writings. Some scholars in the Jewish quarter of Alexandria translated them into Greek about a hundred years ago, which is a good thing because not very many of them speak the language it’s written in any more! If they live in Palestine they speak Aramaic, and everywhere else they speak Greek just like the rest of us do.
And one of the really unusual things about the Jewish religion is that they expected God to intervene in history on their behalf and rescue them again, this time by sending them a king. And they expected it any day! And their teachers said that this king will rule the entire world and that everyone - Romans, Egyptians, everyone - would come worship in Jerusalem.
Well, anyway, we didn’t understand all of it by any means, but this was certainly the kind of god we wanted to worship. And they let us come to the synagogue to learn and pray even though we had to stand at the back. They called us god-fearers, and were really patient with us.
But then my husband died and I decided to take over the trading end of the business and leave the dye works in the hands of managers. And there wasn’t a synagogue in Philippi. It’s a Roman colony, you know - or maybe you don’t. It was founded by Alexander the Great, and named after his father Philip, but the Romans took over almost 200 years ago. And most of the people who live there are descendants of Roman soldiers who were given land there after their military service was completed. It’s strategic for trading, because it’s right at the end of the Via Egnatia which cuts right across the north of Greece, but it’s not very big. There were hardly any Jews there at all, and you need at least 10 men to have a synagogue. And even if I were Jewish, which as I’ve already explained I’m not, women don’t count.
So there were a handful of people - mostly what they call god-fearers like me, but two families of Jews - who used to meet at the river every seventh day as their god commanded. That day is called the Sabbath and you aren’t supposed to work then, just rest and pray and enjoy being alive. The reason we were at the river is that you need to be near water for the prayers, if at all possible, because of having to wash beforehand. Well, as I said I’d been there for almost 14 years, and every week we went through the same routine, and it was good, don’t get me wrong, it was good to spend time in the presence of God with other people who also believed, but I kept wondering if there shouldn’t be something more.
Occasionally a traveling rabbi would come through on his way to somewhere else, and I kept trying to find out more about this king they were expecting, and what things would be like when he came. And they all said that when the king came there would be peace and justice everywhere, that there wouldn’t be any more corrupt officials or unjust taxation, that riots and famines and wars would all be a thing of the past. And that everyone would worship the one god, and that people would stop treating each other like merchandise to be bought and sold and used and thrown away.
And the more I heard, the more I wanted that to happen, and the more I looked at the city and the people and the world around me the more I thought how desperately we needed a king like that. The Romans say the emperor is a god, and it’s true that Roman rule means the bandits and pirates are under control, but their officials are just as corrupt as anyone else’s.
But for 14 years I had been waiting, and looking, and puzzling over it all. And I think that by the time Paul came I had gotten so used to waiting I wasn’t even sure what I was waiting for anymore, just that whatever I had wasn’t enough, and hadn’t been for a long time.
So when he sat down with us that Sabbath morning, and joined us for the prayers, and then sat down to teach, I didn’t expect anything different.
But as he spoke of the man Jesus, and told us that he was indeed the one sent by God to save us, but wasn’t a great king who would rule from a palace as everyone had thought, I started to feel something new, something stirring that I had never felt before.
It wasn’t the government that Jesus was going to change, said Paul, it was the people. And he wasn’t going to do it with armies, or with laws. Paul explained that Jesus would forgive all the sins of anyone who believed in him, and give us a new heart and a new spirit. And we could believe that it was true because God had raised him from the dead after the Romans had killed him.
That was really shocking. A lot of people left and wouldn’t listen any more when Paul told us Jesus had been crucified. But Paul explained that Jesus had done it on purpose, it wasn’t that he was weak or powerless. Paul said it was necessary for Jesus to die because someone had to pay for our sins, and only someone who didn’t have any sins of his own to atone for could pay for ours. The reason that Jesus didn’t have any sins, he said, was because he wasn’t just a man at all, but he was really God in human form. Some other people got up and left after that.
But I kept listening. Was this what I had been waiting for? But - why on earth would god do such a thing, I wanted to know? "Because God loves us," said Paul. "Jesus died so that everyone who believes in him will live forever." “How does that work?” I asked. “What do I have to do to get eternal life?” Paul explained that what I had to do was repent of my sins and be baptized, and after that simply to listen to Jesus and follow him.
And so after thinking about it for a bit that’s what I did. My whole household, all the servants and their families did too. And I can’t speak for them, of course, but my whole life changed from that moment on. That gnawing discontent that I felt was gone, even my servants and employees noticed that the ambitious slave-driver they were used to had changed. I begged Paul to stay at my house, I was so filled with a desire to hear more about Jesus that I begrudged the time I had to sleep. And of course everywhere I went I had to tell people the wonderful news, and more and more people started coming to hear him speak, and of course after he left we continued to meet.
And I suppose that’s the end of the story - if all you want is how the church began. But it really was a beginning, not an end. Because instead of simply waiting for something to happen, I am with Jesus every day, and my whole life is filled with joy.
And what I want to tell you is that if you’re like me, coming every week to pray but really waiting for something more, what you’re waiting for is Jesus, and he’s already here.
