Passionate people are frightening, and yet I admire them. I like passionate people, whose feelings run very deep. But they are scary. They remind me that it is possible to go out of control and to commit to things so intensely that we lose sight of everything else. That scares me. That sort of passion can produce suicide squads to hijack planes and send them into the Twin Towers. Passion!
And yet I admire passion too. I admire passion because I know that the world is not going to be changed by people who just take things as they come, the bitter with the sweet, and lazily lounge around. I admire passion, intensity, burning hot within someone’s soul, but also reaching out and drawing others. Passion it gets things done.
Recently one of our church leaders said that she had observed that few of us appear to be passionate people. We don’t emote, we don’t get intense, we don’t shout, we don’t clap. We are quiet. We are not, she said, passionate people, and especially we are not passionate about Kingdom business and witness.
My first reaction was, well, she has not been in some of the meetings I’ve been in; and second, that passion shows up in various ways, not all of them noisy. I used to be a member of a church in Silver Spring, and the same thing was said about that church – no passion for much of anything. But someone said, “Oh, we get passionate. We get excited. We just do it quietly so that no one will ever know!” Hmm …
What do you feel deeply about? What do you feel passionate about? Does it scare you when intense feelings stir? Do you have a hands-off reaction if you are around someone who expresses strong, powerful feelings? And, if I were to suggest to you today that we ought to feel and indeed can feel passionate intensity about Kingdom work, what would you say?
Play with me on this a little while. I want to think with you about passionate feelings. I have a little phrase I want to work with: “purple passion”. “Purple passion.” Now what does that mean? What is that about, besides the fact that it is a neat alliteration?
Curiously, the color purple is often associated with passionate feelings, intensity. It goes way back, well before Elizabeth Taylor began marketing purple perfume. It’s earlier than a grape-hued dinosaur named Barney chanting, “I love you, you love me.” Purple passion – I expect it has to do with the way your face and your neck color up when the adrenalin flows and the heart pumps hard. “Purple passion” means exceptional, tremendous conviction.
Back in the fifties I remember a silly song about “Purple People-Eaters”; the name attached itself to the Minnesota Vikings football team, whose intense style of play was symbolized by their purple uniforms. A few years later, Alice Walker wrote her book, The Color Purple, which explores the profound feelings of African-American women in emotionally charged settings. Purple passion! I had a professor in college who thought my writing style was too flowery, too wordy, just plain too much – and he would write on my papers, “Leave out the purple prose.” He meant I was way over the top. And the one I like best of all – in the those churches which have bishops, typically bishops wear purple shirts; so pastors who are ambitious to be elected as bishops are said to have caught “purple fever.” I like that!
So – are you still playing with me? Let’s talk about passion, purple passion. There was, in the city of Philippi, in the ancient colony of Macedonia, a woman named Lydia. Lydia was a businesswoman – a seller of purple. That means that she traded in purple cloth, the finest and the most expensive material available. She was the Saks Fifth Avenue of Philippi – trading in purple.
Something happened to Lydia one day. She had been bopping along through life, fat and sassy and perfectly happy, but something happened to the lady who sold purple. She got her passion stirred up! I guess, you might say, Lydia went into a purple passion! How did it happen?
I
Lydia’s journey to a passionate life started when she let the Spirit of God transform ordinary worship into extraordinary openness. Lydia’s calm life began to find a new dimension because Lydia opened her heart and listened eagerly – there’s a passionate word – she listened eagerly to the word of God.
A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; … The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul.
Lydia started a journey toward purple passion because she was willing to be open for the Lord to say something new and direct to her. For Lydia, who, according to the text, was already a worshiper, already a praying person, it would have been easy to have said, “Ah, one more Sabbath. They’re all the same. Go and sit and smile and go home.” But Lydia came to “church” that day with an open heart and an eagerly listening mind. She came expecting God to speak to her – not just to the world in general, but to her.
Someone has commented that you might just as well shoot some church members, because whether you hit them with a bullet or brush them with a new idea, either one will take their breath away! We get so committed to “this is what I do” and “this is the way I am”, that we are not willing to hear anything new. We are not prepared to hear anything intended for us personally. And so we miss the rich excitement that God wants to give us.
When my little brother was three years old, he had a favorite comic book that he always wanted our grandfather to read. This poor old tattered comic book was a Bugs Bunny edition, with no color. I think it was meant to be a child’s coloring book; all the pictures were just outlines, nothing but white space. Well, my brother wanted it just like that, with no color; and he wanted our grandfather to read it, over and over, the same way every time. No amount of persuasion could shake that boring pattern. Since I was a big nine-year-old, I was tired of that old story and those bland, colorless cartoons. I thought that book could have used some vitality, well, some purple!
But that’s the way some of us are in our spiritual lives. We want our worship bland; we want our prayers colorless; and most of all, we want nothing new, nothing challenging, nothing demanding. Sometimes you will tell me at the door after worship, “Pastor, I never heard that passage preached that way before.” And when you do, I am never sure but that you are telling me that therefore it must be wrong! We want things kept the same, on even keel! But I tell you, if we do not worship God with open hearts and eagerly listening minds, we will never feel any passion, we will never get any intensity, we will never be captured by mystery.
I’ve told some about my favorite public prayer moment; I was interim pastor of the Calverton Baptist Church, out in Silver Spring, twenty-some years ago, and one morning, a lady was called on to offer prayer. She said, “Lord, I pray that something will happen today that’s NOT printed in the bulletin.” Amen! Open to God breaking in. Open to God doing something special, for us.
Do you want passion, purple passion, for God and for His way? Then come here each Sunday expecting a word from the Lord, expecting beauty in the music, expecting warmth in God’s people, eagerly, on the edge of your seat, listening for God’s word for with your name on it. And, like Lydia, you will be on our way to a purple passion!
II
But then Lydia, once she began to hear, did something else, very important, toward gaining a purple passion. Lydia took her first step of commitment. She didn’t know everything yet, and doubtless she hadn’t sorted out all her feelings, but she took a step on the basis of what she did know. She made a commitment.
Here’s a formula for you to learn: feelings follow facts and faith, and not the other way around. Maybe you can say that with me: feelings follow facts and faith. If you want to feel something, and you decide to wait for the feelings to come on their own, you will wait a mighty long time. If you think that, well, I have to get some kind of yearning burning before I commit myself to the Lord, you may be waiting to put Methusaleh’s grandchildren to bed! It is not going to happen. Feelings don’t come first; feelings follow facts and faith. Feelings for the Lord come after you first hear the facts – eagerly listening to the plan of salvation – and after you take a faith step.
It says that after her eager listening, “she and her household were baptized.” They stepped forward to declare their faith. You know, there is no substitute for stepping out to make a public commitment to something. That’s what will give you the courage to stay with it. Take marriage, for example; there are plenty of passionate couples out there, plenty of guys and gals who have a passion for one another. But I will tell you that something special happens when they stand up here and say those “I do” words publicly. In wedding rehearsals, I always coach them that when I ask, “Do you take this woman to be your ‘awfully’ wedded wife?” – she does not want to hear, “I’m thinking about it” or “I guess so”. She wants to hear robust, “I do”. One groom took me so seriously that when we had the wedding, he said, in response to that question, “Yeah, I sure do.” Well, okay. It may have been corny, but it was passionate. Because making a public commitment brings home the absolute, final character of what you are doing. And making a commitment creates a passionate feeling.
Lydia’s response, and her family’s response, to Paul’s proclamation, was to take the first step and to be baptized. It was not that baptism saved them, but it was an act of public obedience and declaration. You see, Lydia was at risk; after all, this was a prominent businesswoman. She had a lot of investment in this purple cloth thing. What if some customer had said, “Well, if you are going to join that Christian bunch, I’ll just do my shopping somewhere else”? What if somebody in her uppity social circle had said, “Lydia, if you are going to do that, you can just forget about the monthly meeting of the Philippian flower-folks? Christians are not our kind”? It’s easy to get pushed around by people who are not on the same journey we’re on. That co-worker who thinks it’s weird to be a Christian. That classmate who thinks it ain’t cool to follow Jesus. But when you take the first step – when you commit to baptism, and you can’t undo baptism any more than you can undo being born – then you are going to feel a passion for Christ. And nobody will shake you loose from that. It’s going to be a right purple passion!
III
Now when Lydia got out of that river where her baptism took place, what did she do? What did she do to maintain her purple passion for the Lord?
Lydia insisted on a close fellowship with other believers. It says that Lydia urged – there’s another passionate word – Lydia urged the others to come home with her and to stay there. My guess is that she knew that unless she stayed close to other believers, she might waver. Unless she created an intimate, loving fellowship with other Christians, she might cool off.
It’s a crisp October evening, hayride time, Halloween, and it gets cold. You build a bonfire to warm your hands. After a while you notice that there in the center of the fire, where the logs and the charcoal touch each other, the fire is warm and bright. But out there on the edge, where one log gets separated, it cools down. The fire loses intensity. The coals on the edge, they aren’t red or orange or purple anymore. They are ashes, gray; they’ve lost their warmth.
Passion is kept alive when you and I find each other, cherish each other, encourage each other, and strengthen each other. I am persuaded that there is no such thing as a solitary Christian. You cannot follow Christ all by yourself. You need others, and others need you. We nourish our faith and keep it passionate by coming together in the life of the church.
Now I know that passions can be stirred by groups coming together for all the wrong things. I’ve seen the old documentaries about the Nazis and their Nuremberg rallies. I’ve seen the TV news stories about Palestinian villages crying out for the blood of Americans. People coming together can stir passions for wrong things; I know that. If you’ve ever seen how angry sports fans get when things are going wrong, you know that’s true. And, by the way, if you have never seen that, well, you just haven’t been watching any Redskins’ games lately! I know the dangers of “groupthink”.
But I also know that if your journey toward passion has begun because you were eager to hear God’s word, and if it continued because you made a personal commitment to Christ, then it’ll be all right when you gather with other believers and let them build you up. It’ll be all right, because where two or three are gathered, there He is in the midst of them, and the joy you share as you tarry there, none other has ever known.
You can keep your purple passion for the things of the Kingdom alive by allowing your church experience, like Lydia’s, to be close and intimate, warm and supportive.
IV
And so, bottom line, what does purple passion look like? What does it feel like? The Scripture text captures it in one short, telling sentence about Lydia, the seller of purple. It says, “She prevailed upon us”. She prevailed upon us – there is another passionate word. Prevailed. She insisted. She had a vision and she would pursue it.
Men and women, there are some things for which there is no other way than holy boldness! There are some times when, if you feel anything at all, you just have to stand up, stand up, and make your voice heard and your will known.
I began this morning by suggesting that passionate people scare us as well as draw our admiration. I suggested that people who feel deeply are scary; but that we do admire those definite, passionate people, because the world will not change without them. Nothing ever gets done with half-hearted, ho-hum, hit-or-miss guesses. The only way the world changes is for passionate people to stake out what they want to do and to prevail. To prevail.
Can you get to a purple passion about Kingdom work? Others have. William Carey, telling the preachers in England that he would take Christ to India, whether they liked it or not. Luther Rice, riding tirelessly around the United States, gathering pennies for missions when they said it could not be done. Martin Luther King, confronting the scourge of Jim Crow when they said that centuries of tradition were too strong. Mary McLeod Bethune, founding a college with a couple of silver dollars and an iron will. All of them tough! Hard people to work with! Stubborn, opinionated, determined, confident; and passionate! Call them right or call them wrong, but you will never call them boring! Call them bullheaded, call them fanatic, call them what you like – but you must also call them exciting, attractive, passionate.
Can you get to a purple passion about Kingdom work? Once any one of us listens to the Lord, eagerly; then steps out personally, in front of the world, to make a commitment; then gathers in a group of like-minded spirits to keep the fires burning – once we do those things, we can prevail. We can accomplish. We can keep a purple passion.
I cannot speak for you. But I can say that for me, my purple passion is Kingdom work and witness. My purple passion is to know Christ and all that He wants to teach me; my purple passion is to risk all that I am and have and ever hope to be, for Him; my purple passion is to build His church with energy and compassion and care; my purple passion is to drive forward, without reserve, toward the things to which He has called us.
Purple: come to think of it, isn’t that the color of a King? The royal purple. Oh, may you and I, like Lydia the seller of purple, become passionately the servants of the one who wears the purple, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, for He is worthy to be praised.
