Acts 16:9-15
Easter 6 - Year C
Here is an opportunity to tie two weeks of lection together. If we add in next week's passage from Acts 16:16-34 we hear of two women. It is helpful to hear their stories together as well as each of their stories.
The School of Christian Mission Study, Jesus and Courageous Women suggests:
"The author of Acts next presents the story of the slave girl, a parallel image to Lydia's story, to further show the universal nature of the Gospel. While Lydia is an independent woman of means, the slave girl is the property of masters unwilling to hear the Gospel. Her value to her masters is her gift of clairvoyance. Then she hears the promise of a greater gift -- the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A woman enslaved not only by her social status but by her age and her gender, was so overcome by the message of the grace of Christ, her faith broke the chains of servitude."
If we were to focus only on Lydia we might find some assistance in the image of her "household." Today's culture war over "family" (defined by what it excludes instead of what it includes) would be aided by returning to the image of a "household." The "household" contains all manner of relationships that expand to more than two generations and hold together folks of differing status.
Would it aid your congregation to consider it a "household" instead of a "family"? What would be freed up by this change?
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2004/may2004.html
Lydia prevailed upon Paul. Not much prevails upon Paul except visions. Lydia must have been quite a vision in her purple [grin].
With Mother's Day coming up it might be that what Lydia heard from Paul was a vision from a Prince of Peace that was a precursor to Julia Ward Howe's 1870 Mother's Day Proclamation and something worth spending some time in jail over when cries of "foul" are raised by the economic powers of the day.
Mother's Day Proclamation
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have breasts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
- - -
preparation for council
is as important as council itself
preparation for prayer
is as important as prayer itselfin our preparations we feel
beyond our restrictions on feeling
limits of what is possible are released
from their position of sergeant-at-armsdeep hurts and pains
despairs and destruction
dance in our heads
and we on their gravesdeeper joys and hopes
loves and resurrection
dance through us
and we dance onhaving prepared open lives
we eagerly enter council
listen and speak in prayer
steadfastly instigating peace
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html
Last week Peter had a vision. This week Paul has a vision. Beware, next week you will have a vision and unexpectedly travel to stay with someone.
Last week Gentiles were welcomed in. This week Gentiles are traveled to. Next week "Gentiles" (by whatever measure of being left out, marginalized, exiled, etc.) will continue to open their hearts (a miracle in itself that one could wish upon the religious insider).
"Gentiles" as Gentiles, women as Gentiles, foreigners as Gentiles, any discriminated against individual or group as Gentiles: plead for non-Gentiles to finally get a vision that will trigger compassion within themselves and stop the discrimination and physical/economic/spiritual violence against "Gentiles". This is a call to the insiders to stop being blind to the consequences of their decisions and actions. For Paul it is an extension of his first encounter with Jesus. His blindness became more than simple blindness, it was also a motivation to not be blind again, to see Jesus everywhere, even in heathen Macedonia.
It is in our conversion that we find hope to be converted and reformed again and again. The goal of a once and always reforming Church is a good one for an individual. The Spirit of a Living G*D, revealed again and again in vision after vision, continues to push us to join the Jesus, Peter, and Paul tradition of an expansive and expanding view of G*D's presence in this world.
To extend Lydia's closing comment, "If you have confidence we are growing deeper in G*D by doing so together, let us stay with one another, be guests of one another, and, together, envision others, now separated from us, joining us." Would this be something that your congregation would be comfortable with as a practice and not just a nice thought?
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2010/05/acts-169-15.html