Last June and July the 78th General Convention of the Episcopal Church was convened in Salt Lake City. You may have heard some of the news from there: Michael Curry was elected our Presiding Bishop, marriage equality was affirmed, the triennial budget was passed with significant new investments in evangelism and racial reconciliation. This was the official business, and it was good and important.
But of course there were a lot of other less official things going on, as you might expect during the once-every-three-year reunion of 10,000 or so members of the extended family. I attended for about a week, and I spent some of that time helping my friend and colleague Stefani Schatz—our Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of California—with her grass roots effort to prepare more woman to serve as bishops. Currently, there are less than 20 women among the almost 300 in the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops.
In order to make the cause more visible at General Convention, some woman started wearing purple scarves, and invited others to do the same. Purple being, of course, the color that Episcopal bishops wear. But there were a lot of people at the Convention, and Salt Lake City actually had a limited supply of purple scarves that could be found within walking distance of the convention center. So Stefani and I went out to a fabric store and bought a bolt of purple fabric, and spent a blissfully air-conditioned afternoon cutting it into scarf sized pieces. The next morning we handed them out in bunches, and over the next few days watched the Convention Center blossom like a field of lavender.
“A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was… a dealer in purple cloth.” This Sunday is one of those great days when the stories of the apostles felt as personal as news from a good friend. Lydia, I’m proud to carry on your family business!
In the Orthodox Church, Lydia carries the title “equal to the Apostles,” which is kind of a big deal in a church that doesn’t even ordain woman. Apostle being, in the biblical sense, someone who is sent to proclaim the Gospel of Christ. And although we know very little about Lydia—in fact you just heard everything the Bible has to say about her—the context offers offer some intriguing clues as to the importance of her ministry.
She was, in fact, the first convert to Christianity—or better said, to the way of Jesus—on the European continent. She was a gentile, but the text calls her a worshipper of God, meaning that she was drawn to the Jewish faith. She was evidently an independent thinker, and knew her own heart, as evidenced by the text’s mention that the “Lord opened her heart and she listened eagerly” to Paul. She is that rarest of Biblical woman who is not only named in the text, but also appears to be the head of an entire household who followed her lead in being Baptized. Hence her apostolic status.
But as a recent dealer in purple cloth myself, I want to linger a bit on that very significant detail about Lydia’s livelihood. I cannot overstate how unusual it is—in Biblical context—to have a record of her business. And not just any business: Lydia was a purveyor of luxury goods. To deal in purple cloth was the equivalent of owning the haute couture house. Even now, our bishops wear purple for the same reason European royalty wore purple. It was the most expensive and the scarcest of dye colors, declaring their status as princes of the church.
So Lydia was the head of her household, and a successful businesswoman with a household she had the authority to invite visitors into. She was evidently a shrewd negotiator, too: how could Paul the evangelist say no to someone who insisted “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.”
Which, I should mention, was not at all what Paul had in mind when he set out for Philippi. Remember how our first lesson began? Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia—modern day Greece—asking for help. And indeed something really significant happened in Macedonia—the conversion of Lydia—that allowed Christianity to take root among European gentiles. But it never involved a man in need: rather, it involved a woman of means with an open heart and eye for the finer things in life.
No doubt Lydia would have had much to talk about with John of Patmos, whose vision for the New Jerusalem could be seen as the Cartier franchise in relationship to Lydia’s couture business. There’s a whole section left out of the middle of the reading from Revelation that describes the walls and streets and gates of the city, paved with gold and encrusted with precious stones. I too might have glazed over the aesthetic description of the city as an intriguing narrative artifact, and mentally excised it from the text as the creators of the lectionary evidently did. Except that Lydia caused me to think again.
Just like Paul had to think again, when he went to Macedonia looking for a poor man and was found a rich woman. If you search the rest ofActs, you’ll find that Bible is silent about the man of that Paul saw in his vision. If he was ever found it didn’t make an impression on Luke, who wrote the Book of Acts. But I found myself wondering if perhaps the person who ultimately responded to the poor man’s plea was not Paul, but Lydia. Whose conversion called her into greater generosity.
Is it possible that God, too, loves the finer things in life? That God calls the the rich into the service of the poor, in order that the heavenly city—the renewed Jerusalem—might be a place of great beauty and abundance for all God’s people?
We can only speculate, but this much I can say this with the confidence of personal experience. Because St. Stephen’s contributed to the book drive I organized for St. Cornelius school earlier this year, over 500 brand new books were made available to schoolchildren in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the East Bay. And when we delivered the books—which almost filled the bed of my husband’s pickup—what one teacher said to me is this. “These kids almost never get anything new; everything they have is secondhand or torn. To give them a book without a tear in the cover is to treat them like royalty”
Which is like the 21th century equivalent of dressing a poor child in royal purple, no? Or for that matter, like it’s like vesting a woman in Episcopal purple. We need to be able to imagine a more generous, faithful and fairer reality than the one we currently live in, if we are to be co-creators with God in the renewing of the world. Your vision of justice and inclusion matters. Paul’s vision for Macedonia mattered. And in John’s vision of the holy city, the new Jerusalem—where rich and poor alike worship God in glorious light—I like to imagine that the servants of the lamb were vested in a luxurious purple, befitting of kings and priests.
