6th Sunday after Easter Year C
The Woman in Purple
Acts 16:11-15
Mother's Day is one of those awkward secular holidays. Certainly we all want to express our profound thanksgiving, our pride and our love for the mothers who brought us into the world and nurtured us into adulthood. But somewhere in all the commercialization of the day that basic sentiment is lost. Now it's become just another ritual of giving and receiving cards, flowers and telephone calls. Today restaurants do more business than any other day and telephone lines record their highest traffic. Mother's Day has become just one more obligation, just one more excuse to buy or spend,
I imagine that the woman who is primarily responsible for Mother's Day would be taken aback by all of this, after all her intent was not to honour mothers with some treacly verse or garish card but to celebrate their strength and independence. It was in 1872 in a packed Boston house that Julia Ward Howe called for a day to celebrate Mothers. She was a beautiful, vivacious and brilliant woman and was for her day scandalously well educated. But she was not born in a time when these gifts were celebrated in women. Her husband was a medical doctor and social reformer who was a well known advocate for prison and education reform. He would become a leading abolitionist. But with his wife he was controlling and cold and limited her to domestic matters, the raising of six children and keeping the house. But she could not be held down by such burdens and in 1861 she published a poem that could be sung to a familiar Civil War tune, a poem we know as the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
The poem made her famous and with that fame she began to free herself from the stultifying domesticity of her home life. She joined the Boston Ladies Club and began to lecture on philosophy and religious question though her husband forbade her to do so. She started a literary magazine and co founded the New England Women's Suffrage Association. In 1908 she became the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and letters.
During her travels she saw the worst effects of the Civil War, the death and disease and emotional and physical scarring suffered by soldiers; the poverty and desperation of widows and orphans and the economic devastation that the war had brought in its wake. Distressed at what she had witnessed she issued her Mother's Day Declaration as a call to action. She was not honouring the domestic mother as much as celebrating the independence and free spiritedness of women everywhere.
Given the history of Mother's Day it is appropriate that our text from Acts provides us with the story of Lydia, an independent and free spirited woman of biblical times.
Out text tells us that she was a dealer of purple cloth, but I like the old translation which says that she was a seller of purple. Lydia the seller of purple.
What does the colour purple mean to you? I think it is a bold colour. It's the moment in every episode of Trading Spaces where the designer opens the lids of the paint tins and the participants gasp in horror-purple! Who would ever paint their walls that colour? To have a purple room is be bold, against the grain, independent of mind and spirit. I think of the first line from Jenny Joseph's poem, “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, with a red hat, which doesn't go and doesn't suit me.” To wear the colour purple is about breaking with convention. It's about claiming who you are. It's about no longer caring what other people think.
Purple is often associated with passionate feelings with intensity. Long before Elizabeth Taylor began marketing purple perfume or the grape hued dinosaur named Barney blandly chanting “I love you, you love me” purple meant passion. I expect that it had to do with the way your face and neck colour up when the adrenaline flows and the heart pumps hard. Purple passion means exceptional, tremendous conviction. No wonder Alice Walker titled her novel exploring the developing passion of a subjugated black woman, The Colour Purple.
Lydia was a woman very much like the colour of the cloth she sold. Her name itself tells us something of her character. It's an unusual name because it is not a name often given to a person but rather refers to the name of a geographic territory. Like Indiana Jones and Paris Hilton she is named after her home town. In Lydia's time the persons most likely named after a geographic area are not movie heroes or glamorous television stars but slaves who were often named after the place from which they had been taken. Lydia might well have been a slave taken as a young girl from the province in Asia minor that has that same name. Unworthy of her own name she was known only as the slave girl from Lydia and was taken away by force to be of service far from home.
Yet when Luke, the author of Acts, first introduces us to Lydia she's living as a freedwoman in Northern Greece-in the city of Philippi, a Roman military colony. In fact, she's now a prosperous householder who's traded in purple dyed cloth, an expensive commodity favoured by the well to do. Dyes were natural not synthetic and dye for purple was made from a juice gathered drop by drop from certain marine snails. It took thousands of these crustaceans to make a yard or two of purple cloth. So it was expensive, worth its weight in silver it was said. The cloth she sold was a statement of status and wealth, the Gucci handbag or Rolex watch of Roman times. So hers was a story of rising from adversity. She had raised herself from slave to successful business woman. Imagine the determination, the strength and drive that must have taken.
But there is something else amazing about Lydia. She seems to be the head of her household, there is no husband around, even though she is a travelling trader. Unlike most women Lydia appears to have become successful on her own without the patronage of a man. When her heart is opened to what Paul and Silas says she sees to it that her entire family is baptized. There is not mention of man. There is no mention of her needing to consult anyone. This is a woman who knew who she was and bucked the patriarchal system. She was an independent woman.
But this deeply independent, prosperous and successful woman was also deeply spiritual. Even this puts her at odds with her world. Philippi wasn't the kind of place where people would take the time to pursue spiritual questions. The people of Philippi had made themselves into the leading city in the district by their hard work. Philippi was a city of commerce, a dog eat dog kind of place. Life for its citizens was hectic and busy and all about getting ahead and making another dollar. Their saviour was Rome. They had no need of the Jew's God or a Christ who saved. They had plenty of God's of their own.
When Paul came to this city he looked for a synagogue. There he could speak to people who honoured the same scriptures and from there he could announce to them that the Messiah had come. The problem was there was no synagogue in the whole city. But he did discover a group of women who gathered for prayer on the banks of the river. The women are Gentiles or non Jews who are attracted to the Jewish moral and ethical teaching. It took twelve men to start a synagogue. Though they outnumbered the faithful men these women did not count. They could not found a synagogue, so they were forced to worship outdoors by river. One of these women was Lydia.
One particular Sabbath, Lydia encounters the apostle Paul and his companions all of whom have just arrived on the European continent after a largely disappointing missionary journey through Asia Minor.
The women welcome Paul and his party into their prayer service. Paul, as a visiting rabbi is invited by them to teach and rather amazingly and contrary to his inborn patriarchal predisposition agrees to speak to this remarkable group of women. Lydia listens eagerly to Paul's preaching about Jesus. Right then and there she accepts Jesus as her Saviour. Immediately thereafter she is baptized by Paul, she and all her household, both family and servants. Here we see Lydia doubtless decisive in business now responding decisively to Paul's offer of faith in Christ. She becomes the first follower of Christ on the continent of Europe.
After her baptism Lydia exercised a radical sort of hospitality. She invited Paul and his friends to stay at her house. I love the way Luke tells us this, “And she prevailed upon us.” This is his way of saying that she would not accept no for an answer. She would not be snubbed. She would not be told that she was of the wrong race, the wrong class or the wrong gender. She was baptized and therefore equal. “She prevailed upon us,” says Luke. “There was nothing we could do.” She offers her house to the missionaries for the duration of their stay in Philippi and it swiftly becomes the local house church, the place to which the developing Christian community comes as people of both genders and of every social class and ethnic group are embraced and gathered together for meals and for the worship of God.
Thus, this mother, whose children and household are baptized alongside her, opens her home for nurturing the spiritual well being of others and thereby becomes a mother figure for every Christian in Philippi. Lydia puts into practice an inclusive hospitality, a welcome that flew in the face of the social conventions of her time and through her, the good news of Christ's love begins the work of breaking down every barrier that human beings can dream up. In homes like those of Lydia and many other Christian women, the first house churches offered a foretaste of the fullness of God's reign when all the barriers to community that we humans can erect will have been overcome, when God's community on earth will have been allowed to become fully inclusive.
This foretaste came to exist because of the faithful witness of women like Lydia. Let us praise God for Lydia. For her boldness and openness to faith, for her all inclusive love. Here's to Lydia and all women like her; bold and faithful women; Doris Anderson, June Callwood, Coretta Scott King, Golda Meir, Rosa Parks, Anne Frank, Mother Theresa, Helen Keller, Joan of Arc, Dorothy Day, Nellie McClung, Lydia Gruchie the first woman ordained as a United Church minister. On mother's day these are women to remember, strong women, women of faith and purpose, bold women to whom we owe so much. All of these are women in purple. Women of passion. They are our spiritual mothers. And because someone like Lydia prevailed once prevailed upon Paul and his companions, we are her heirs, her spiritual children.
Thank God for the woman in purple and all her offspring.