THE WITNESS OF LYDIA  SHARING LOVE

(Preached on Sunday, May 13, 2007)

When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, AIf you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.@  And she prevailed upon us.                                                       -Acts 16:15

 

Is the church low on testosterone?  (I realize that is a shocking question on today, of all days, when our society is celebrating motherhood and we in the church are celebrating Christian families.)  But that is the question raised by a recent review in The Christian Century of the book Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow.  Evidently Murrow believes the answer is AYES!@  He claims that men like it hot and if the church wants to attract them, it needs to turn up the heat, just like in the movies.  AFilms reflect our fantasies,@ he explains.  AMen fantasize about saving the world against impossible odds.  Women fantasize about having a relationship with a wonderful man.@  Murrow worries that a female-dominated church has turned Jesus into that wonderful man who appeals only to women.  A Achick-flick@ atmosphere prevails on Sunday mornings, complete with flowers, ferns and soft music, all geared toward women=s desires for safety, security and harmonious relationships.

 

Certainly Murrow is stereotyping (and using all the worst stereotypes) and we all know men and women who defy the stereotypes.  But clearly there is an issue here, and one only needs to look around the church on any given Sunday to realize it.  Murrow=s critique of churches as places of safety and harmony, for instance, is one that has been made by both male and female reformers of all stripes throughout Christian history.  His use of the acronym B.O.R.E.D. nicely  describes people who avoid church because they are indeed turned off by a culture of Abusyness, obligation, ritual, education and duty.@

 

In truth, the faith of Jesus was not an approach to life that focused on personal safety and security at all costs.  It was a faith that took enormous risks by standing up to a dominant culture that embraced violence, the privileges of the few at the expense of the many, and stereotypes to support those privileges. 

While churches today may not always take such risks, it is not because women rule the roost.  In fact, it may be just the opposite, that those churches least likely to take risks and stand up against the dominant culture which still embraces violence and domineering oppression, are those churches where males dominate and control.  Today I offer three stories of women who can teach us a lot about taking risks and the significant differences such risk-taking can make in healing the world.

The first woman is Lydia.  She is recorded in Acts as the first convert to Christianity in Europe.  As we read, Paul had gone to Europe when he had a vision of a Aman of Macedonia@ pleading with him to ACome to Macedonia and help us.@  Lydia is a woman from Thyatira, a city located in Asia Minor, the region Paul left to cross over to Macedonia.  How ironic that the first person helped by Paul=s ministry in response to his vision of Aa man of Macedonia@ is Aa certain woman@ who was from the very region where Paul was preaching when he had the vision.

 

This came about because while in Philippi, a leading city in the region, Paul and his companions sought out a place of prayer near the river on the Sabbath.  Evidently there was no synagogue in Philippi, and Paul=s practice was always to first preach in the local synagogue when he entered a new town.  In the absence of a synagogue, local Jews would often gather near a river for prayer and in this case it was all women who gathered.  (Where were the men?)

 

Paul shares his message about Jesus and God moves Lydia to make a deeper commitment of her life through baptism for herself and her entire household.  Several things stand out for us about Lydia.  Lydia had an open heart, like Jesus she was not troubled by new ideas and by people different from herself.  Like Jesus, Lydia found that the Aruler of this age@ now had Ano power over me.@  She received, in her baptism, the freedom to be God=s child, contrary to what the dominant culture told her was her proper place as a woman.  Finally, Lydia responded wholeheartedly to the commandment of love.  Her immediate response, after being fully welcomed and accepted through baptism into the new family of faith, was to insist on providing hospitality to Paul and his companions.  Lydia was a woman of means, of wealth (she sold purple cloth which only wealthy people could afford to buy; she had her own house and a household) and she does not hesitate to use her wealth to care for those who do not have what she has.

 

The second story includes two women: Naomi Shihab Nye, an American poet of Palestinian background and an older Palestinian woman she encountered in the Albuquerque airport.  She met this woman when she responded to the announcement: AIf anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.@  It was her own gate and as she approached the counter she saw this older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress crumpled on the floor wailing loudly.  The flight attendant was beside herself and asked her to find out what was wrong.  Naomi spoke to the woman in halting Arabic and discovered she thought the flight had been canceled and she had to be in El Paso, Texas the next day for some major medical treatment.  Naomi reassured her it had only been postponed and then using her cell phone called the woman=s son who was to meet her.  Then, to pass the time, she called the woman=s other sons, and then Naomi=s dad, so she could speak Arabic with him.  Of course they discovered they had ten shared friends.  By then the woman was laughing and telling about her life.  She pulled some homemade mamool cookies, little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts, out of her bag and began offering them to all the women at the gate.  Not a single woman declined the offer.  It was like a sacrament.  The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from Laredo C they were all covered in the same powdered sugar.  And smiling.  Then the airline broke out free beverages from huge coolers, and two little girls from the flight, one African-American, one Mexican-American, ran around serving apple juice and lemonade to everyone, and they, too, were covered in powdered sugar.  Naomi looked around the gate at the late and weary travelers and thought, Athis is the world I want to live in.  The shared world.  Not a single person in this gate C once the crying and confusion stopped C has seemed apprehensive about any other person.  They took the cookies.  I wanted to hug all those other women, too.@  Two women who took risks in sharing themselves were transforming the world by sharing love.

 

Finally, I want to share with you the story of Susie Krabacher.  At the age of 42 she has led a life of contrasts, all of which led to her current work.  As a child in Alabama, she was abused by her grandfather for years while her mother slowly lost her mind.  Escaping from her family as a teenager, she became Adevastated and messed up@ in the Los Angeles fast lane as a glamorous Playboy playmate.  After a disastrous first marriage, she found herself homeless in Aspen, Colorado.  At one point, she slept in an abandoned barn near the North Star Preserve.  When she met and married Joe Krabacher, a local attorney and businessman, she tried to live the life of a socialite but was driven by her need Ato help others survive.@ 

 

Susie is now a devout Christian who travels from Aspen to Haiti several times a year to spend weeks in what the United Nations has identified as the worst slum on the planet, Cite Soleil.  There she works with Haitian children devastated by poverty, disease and neglect, through an organization she and her husband created in 1994, Mercy and Sharing.  She first visited Haiti with a member of her church in Aspen.  Once there, she didn=t want to leave.  She began working with abandoned infants in Port-au-Prince.  Conditions were shocking and deplorable, so she convinced Joe to start an orphanage and set up a public charity to oversee it.