The In-Between

Acts 16:9-15

During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.

We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days. On the sabbath day we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. A certain woman named Lydia, a worshipper 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. 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.

I’m in the middle of a book right now, a memoir by the musician Michelle Zauner, called Crying in H Mart. The book mostly a really lovely grief memoir about Zauner’s, who’s half Korean and half white, Korean mother dying of cancer. There’s a part in the middle of the book in which her mom, who had always had a kind of aversion to organized religion, is convinced by a good friend and caretaker from her local Korean Christian church to do kind of a last-minute hail-Mary baptism while she’s still conscious on hospice. Zauner writes that she is a little disappointed that her mom, after standing firm in her indifference to religion her whole life, gives in to the well-intentioned, but misguided baptism. After the ceremony, Zauner goes into her mom’s bedroom and asks, gently, but sarcastically, “Did you accept Jesus into your heart?” Her mom, fatigued and still indifference response, “Ya, I guess so.”[i]

As I was read that passage last week in Zauner’s memoir, I immediately thought of this week’s passage that Meredith just read for us—and I thought of how far we’ve strayed from the organic, thoughtful conversions like Lydia’s, into these urgent and forced conversions, into these conversions with no real meaning, just a misguided desperation. In her memoir, Zauner isn’t angry about religion, she doesn’t see this last-minute baptism as a harmful thing; it’s more that she seemed to just see this “acceptance” for what it was—less of an acceptance, and more of a resignation; something that was more for her friend than it was for her. And again, that’s fine, it's harmless. But it’s also meaningless.

So let’s look at the circumstances of Lydia’s conversion. First of all, it describes Lydia as a “God-worshipper.” What this probably meant is that she was a gentile, but she was sympathetic towards the Jewish people, and liked some aspects of their God. So I read this as she had an inclination to some kind of theism or spirituality, but hasn’t quite found her thing yet. But here we have Paul and his buddies down by the river—it was common for displaced Jewish folks to build places of worship or make places of prayer by bodies of water—just kind of chatting with this group of women. Now, this is radical in itself, that Paul sat down to have a serious conversation and teaching women with this group of women who were likely worshipping in some capacity. And then you have Lydia specifically, whose heart is open to this new movement Paul is speaking of. And that’s the thing—you can’t force someone’s heart to be open to anything. For someone’s heart to be open to something, they have to want something, they have to be looking for something. And my assumption here, is that Lydia was looking for something. Lydia was looking for a spiritual home.

We know so little about Lydia—but what we can deduce from this passage is that she was likely some kind of wealthy merchant and businesswoman. Dealing in purple cloth meant she was dealing with the elite, the one-percenters, essentially. The fact that it’s written that her household was baptized after she was means that it was indeed her home, that it was no beholden to a man. We know that she was an atypically powerful woman for her day. And so with this in mind, I’m so endlessly curious about what drew Lydia to this group of eccentric itinerant radicals. As a clearly successful, financially comfortable person in the Roman Empire, she had a lot to lose by joining up with the apostles. It makes sense that thus far, Jesus’ message would mostly attract the downtrodden, the eccentric, the suffering, the oppressed. But what could have drawn Lydia, a woman with riches, connections, and status to Jesus’ message?

The more I thought about it, the more I realize that Lydia had a very unique perspective. Yes, she was wealthy and successful. Yes, she was probably well-respected if the elite bought their purple cloth from her. But she was still a woman in a time when women were property, when a woman’s identity was only legitimate through a man, whether it was a father or a husband. So we don’t know how Lydia got to this rare place for a woman of her day, but here she was, a successful business woman.  But considering how rare this was, I’m going to go ahead and assume that she probably dealt with a lot of stuff that the high-status men of her day didn’t have to deal with. And I say this because today, in 2022, we are still fighting for things like equal pay in the workplace, we’re still fight against sexist and discriminatory practices, we’re trying to fight biases; I mean, for God’s sake, we’re still fighting for women to have control over their own bodies. So if women today are facing these kind of harmful assumptions and barriers, we can only begin to imagine what Lydia must have been putting up with.

And so while she surely led a comfortable life, she didn’t feel complete. This could the beginning of a rom-com from the early 2000s, right? The overworked, successful career woman in the a male-dominated world who “has it all”—except for a man. But Lydia wasn’t looking for a spouse, or a family. She was looking for God. She was, after all, a Gentile who found something attractive in the Jewish God, and so became a God-worshipper, but not a full-on Jewish convert. She was floating somewhere in the in between. And this makes perfect sense—because she was floating somewhere in the in between during her everyday life—working with the pompous, oppressive elite, and yet still remaining a second class citizen. So she had the unique perspective of someone who knew firsthand how the elites acted, how they wielded their power, what their priorities were; but she also knew firsthand what oppressed peoples had to put up with. And I imagine that Lydia was feeling torn. I imagine she was looking for someplace where she could feel accepted and comfortable; I imagine she was looking for some kind of fulfilment to really complete her. And she found that something when she heard Paul preaching and teaching.

As I said, my curiosity is endless here—I want to know so badly what Paul was saying that drew Lydia in. Because I couldn’t help but think of another conversion story from Acts that I preached on just about a year ago—the story of the Ethiopian eunuch from chapter 8. I realized how similarly beautiful that narrative is to the one we’re discussing today—it was a man who was in a position of relative power, but, as a eunuch, he was still sexually othered in some way; he is another person who is living in the in-between; and finds a specific passage in Isaiah that really speaks to him; and Philip, no questions asked sits with him and teaches him more about Isaiah and about the passage about overcoming trials and tribulations. He doesn’t force anything on him—this man comes to this love of the Bible and this new Jesus-movement on his own.

I wish this passage today explained what preaching, what sermon, what Bible passage, or what message of Jesus drew Lydia to this movement. But all we can do is speculate. Like the eunuch, I wonder if the material that attracted her was something about overcoming trials; I wonder if it was about a world with no more pain, a world in which everyone had the same ability to lead a comfortable and fulfilling life. Because surely Lydia, in this in-between, had seen the vast and immoral gap between the elites and the second-class citizens of the Roman Empire. And Lydia surely had experienced both the comforts of the elite, and the degradations of someone thought to be less-than. And she knew there was something wrong with it. And she was looking for a way to articulate her needs and wants for a fulfilling life, and she was looking for a way to better the world other than selling her purple cloth to the handful of rich folks who were allowed to wear it. She was looking for something bigger, and so her heart was open. And that’s when Paul found her.

It's interesting to me that Paul has this vision of a man asking for help, a man begging him to come to Macedonia and bring with him Jesus’ message of equity and peace. I wonder if Paul went expecting to see this man? I wonder if Paul was surprised to find himself drawn to this group of women, and namely Lydia. If he was, there’s no indication. Maybe Paul had a gift of intuition—to find those whose hearts would indeed be open to Jesus. Because what’s the point of a force conversion? A person’s heart has to be open to something to be really moved by it, and to really create good in the world.

We can go on forever about how and why the oppressed and the downtrodden find solace in the message of Jesus or the stories of Exodus. But there’s also something to be said for those who find meaning in these stories who are someplace else—those of us who are somewhere between privileged and disenfranchised; those of us who don’t quite know where we fit in the world, just know that something is wrong, that something needs to be changed.

I wonder sometimes, about the Church today. Not our church specifically, but the capital-C Church, the Church as a whole. I wonder sometimes if we’re in some kind of in-between. Something isn’t quite working anymore, right? Less and less people are considering themselves religious every year; less and less people are getting involved in community groups, community events. Less and less people have an inclination to be together, despite the fact that we’re all struggling so much from isolation that a combination of the internet and then the pandemic has wrought.

And so what does this mean? What does this mean for us, for the Church, for the world? Well, I don’t know, but right now it’s not looking good. But don’t worry— I think we can be hopeful. I think we can use this in-between time to continue to figure out what it means to do what Jesus would have us do in the world today. I think we can use this in-between time to continue to figure out how to reclaim the act of evangelism, to really show people what being a Jesus-follower is, without forcing anything on anyone. I think this in-between time is the perfect time to open our own hearts to what Jesus is saying to us today, to what Jesus is saying the church must be today. I think this in-between time is the perfect time to find others whose hearts are open; other people who are searching, who are pondering, who are wondering what comes next.

When Lydia heard Paul’s words, she heard what her heart had been searching for without even realizing. And so she did what she had the means to do—she opened her house to a group of strange men with a beautiful message. She was one of this new Jesus movement’s first real benefactors, sheltering this group of radicals so they could regroup and go on spreading the word and finding others with hearts as open as Lydia’s.

I’ve talked several times before about reclaiming evangelism—reclaiming this word, and this concept that’s, for very valid reasons gotten a terrible reputation for past… millennia, pretty much. But now that we’re in this strange in-between time—this strange post but not really post-Covid time, I think we can discern what it means to evangelize in this new world—what it means to spread the Good News. It means keeping our own hearts and minds open to people we wouldn’t expect, as Paul did with Lydia and her household; and it means opening our hearts and minds to new ways of being in the world that we might not expect. It means opening our hearts and minds to new ways the capital-C Church can exist in the world, and how our own lowercase-c church can exist in this community. It means being intentional and honest with our beliefs and values. It means embracing the in-between time in order to move towards an earth as it is in heaven. Amen.

[i] Zauner, Michelle. Crying in H Mart: A Memoir. Knopf Publishing Group 2021, loc. 1,916