A reflection for the 6th Sunday of Easter based on the readings for the day, Acts 16:9-15 and John 14:23-29.
I love preaching that brings Scripture to life—and that brings Scripture back to life, and I hope you do too. I say this every time as a reminder that when we open scripture together we are bringing it back to life. What matters today is that love comes home. In both our readings today, love comes home.
Hear the promise in John 14:23-29 as Jesus promises that both the Father and himself as Son will make their home with anyone who loves Jesus and obeys his teaching. Love comes home and makes a resurrection appearance.
In our reading from Acts (16:9-15) we begin to understand from Lydia how the Spirit of God opens our hearts for us to open our homes. Our heart is our home, our hearth is our home.
Paul and Silas met Lydia at Philippi. When he set out Paul was expecting to meet a man from Macedonia. Instead he meets a bunch of women.
Philippi was a Roman colony. She wasn’t from Philippi but was from a city called Thyatira. She wasn’t at home in Philippi. Her name emphasizes that. Lydia wouldn’t have been her real name. She was called Lydia because that’s where she was from, where her home far from Philippi was. She was from Thyatira which is in the Turkish province of Lydia. Hence Lydia.
Perhaps Lydia was on a business trip. She was a dealer in purple cloth. Purple cloth would have been in demand in a Roman city.
It was Cleopatra that made purple popular. Julius Caesar travelled to Egypt in 48BC and met Cleopatra. He saw how she loved purple, and embraced it himself, decreeing that only Caesars could wear togas dyed completely purple. It became the colour of imperial power for both the Roman and Byzantine empires. (I got that from the Jamaica Observer – something I’ve never referenced before!) So we begin to build a picture of Lydia as a successful businesswoman who would probably have been dealing with the court representatives of Caesar’s empire. Purple was reserved for royalty, priests and nobles. These are the people Lydia would have been dealing with.
Paul and his group met Lydia at a place of prayer by the river. The storyteller tells us it was outside the city gate. These are details to underline the fact that none of these people, Paul, Silas, Lydia (and perhaps her household), none of them were at home. This is wild praying. They were all travellers.
We don’t know whether Lydia was a Jew or a Gentile. And we don’t know whether that place by the river was a recognised place of prayer, or whether it became a place of prayer because people prayed there. What we do know is that Lydia puts herself in the place of listening Israel as she listened to Paul. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. When she and the members of her household were baptised, she invited Paul and Silas to her home. She persuaded them to come and stay at her house. She was insistently hospitable. But she doesn’t just host the missionaries, she hosts the mission of God by taking love home.
When love comes home she turns our homes inside out. Lydia is a powerful woman, a successful woman. Instead of building her business empire she puts everything at the disposal of God’s mission for the sake of the world.
Holman Hunt paints the picture for us of love coming home, making a resurrection appearance.
It’s Jesus standing at the door and knocking (cf Revelation 3:20).
It is said that one of the reasons the Conclave elected Francis Pope in 2013 was because of a reflection on that passage when he suggested that when Jesus stands at the door and knocks, he’s not only wanting to come in and join us, he’s wanting us to come out to join him.
He calls us out of our comfort zones to embrace the “peripheries” of society in the world he is already loving and calling home.
When love comes home, she casts out fear, knocks down walls and rearranges the furniture of our minds.
Love turns our home inside out.
Holman Hunt’s image fits Lydia’s story perfectly. Her heart opens, and her home follows suit.
Scripture doesn’t usually give us the details of the jobs women did, but we’re told that Lydia was a dealer in purple cloth, the colour of empire, power and status.
I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed but purple is the Church of England has adopted.
The signage and letterheads are all purple. The shirts our bishops wear are purple.
What does it mean when the church wears purple?
Are we signalling prestige? Or is it Lydia we recall?
Our new Pope, Leo XIV seems to suggest that the church should be more like a home than a palace.
Addressing those who no longer believe, no longer hope and no longer pray, and including those who are fed up with scandals, with misused power, with the silence of a Church that seems more like a palace than a home, he committed the church to being a home for the homeless where the weary find rest and refreshment.
He said that God doesn’t need soldiers. He needs brothers and sisters. We all know that it’s brothers and sisters that make a home.
Following that purple thread, are we then, when we wear purple, reminding ourselves that our calling, like Lydia’s, is to put everything – status, power, influence -at the service of love, to make love feel at home in our world? Purple was the colour Lydia laid down on the table of hospitality to welcome love home. She dealt in purple and traded it for the gospel.
In a recent speech on immigration Sir Keir Starmer suggested that we are “becoming a nation of strangers”. He’s got himself into a lot of trouble. But what if there is a grain of truth in what he says? It doesn’t mean we should pull up the drawbridge and tighten our controls. Our scriptures tell us that love will come home to those who love Jesus and love often comes in the form of a stranger. Paul thought he was going to meet a man from Macedonia. Instead he met someone stranger, Lydia, a dealer in purple, a worshipper, a listener. She opened her home to him and love came home to her.
Love comes home, and when it does, it never leaves things as they are but turns us inside out. It opens hearts, it opens homes, it opens the Church. It rearranges our priorities, flips our ideas of power and calls us to join Jesus outside the gate – by the river, in the wild places, wherever people are listening.
Grits and Grains 