The Man from Macedonia

Previously On Church...

As I was looking back on it, there’s a story in the news lately, and the last three sermons we looked at together each have something to say about it, so I thought I’d spend today looking at that.

So, previously on church!

Paul on the Damascus Road

Saul was walking down the road to Damascus to kill a whole bunch of followers of the Way.

Jesus visits him and causes him to repent, to literally turn around from the path he’s walking and go a different direction.

Peter imitating Jesus, and healing a woman...

We then saw Peter nearly step by step repeat what Jesus had done.

He raises this woman back to life, lifting her up with that word in Greek Anastasis.

He practiced resurrection.

The Gentiles becoming believers...

Last week we studied what happened when the old categories of in and out were erased in favor of everyone being welcomed in the Holy Spirit.

Bible Breakdown

Common English Bible Chapter 16

9 A vision of a man from Macedonia came to Paul during the night. He stood urging Paul, “Come over to Macedonia and help us!” 10 Immediately after he saw the vision, we prepared to leave for the province of Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.

Lydia’s conversion

11 We sailed from Troas straight for Samothrace and came to Neapolis the following day. 12 From there we went to Philippi, a city of Macedonia’s first district and a Roman colony. We stayed in that city several days. 13 On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate to the riverbank, where we thought there might be a place for prayer. We sat down and began to talk with the women who had gathered. 14 One of those women was Lydia, a Gentile God-worshipper from the city of Thyatira, a dealer in purple cloth. As she listened, the Lord enabled her to embrace Paul’s message. 15 Once she and her household were baptized, she urged, “Now that you have decided that I am a believer in the Lord, come and stay in my house.” And she persuaded us.

Visions are not rare in the Bible

God speaks to God’s people a lot in the Bible through visions and dreams.

I’ve never had this happen, and in fact I’m a little bit jealous!

But here in this story, Paul has a dream where he sees a “man from Macedonia.”

A man from Macedonia is a…you guessed it…Gentile

First of all, “The Man from Macedonia” just kind of sounds like a great gun slinger in a country and western movie, doesn’t it?

But this is interesting particularly coming off of last week’s story.

Macedonia was in what is present day Europe.

So again if the categories are Jewish and Gentile, Paul has to wrestle with the fact that God is using someone on the outside to come and speak to him.

Just as a quick aside, how often do we dismiss something based on the source providing it?

Don’t listen to that, that’s fake news.

Don’t trust them, they have an agenda.

Get ride of that podcast, they’re nothing but liars.

At least according to this passage, sometimes God speaks to us through the people we are most quick to dismiss.

Paul and his traveling buddies had to “conclude” that God had called them there.

Because this is true, Paul has to gather the team.

Paul is at this point on a missionary journey, and he has a bunch of folks with him in the team.

Including, you may have noticed, Luke.

Everything has turned from “they” to “we,” which is kind of a nice shift too, isn’t it?

To conclude that God is speaking to Paul by way of this man from Macedonia, they have to get together and figure it out.

Paul is going to have to explain the vision, no one else saw it.

His traveling partners are going to try to poke holes in the vision.

Maybe you didn’t hear him correctly?

Maybe God’s trying to test us, to check and see if we’d be easily fooled?

Maybe you ate too much candy last night and this was just a fever dream...

They have to engage in an ancient spiritual practice called discernment.

It’s not enough to have a vision alone. We have to discern it.

Some folks in our day think that if they have the vision they have the answers.

They have their own trusted sources and they won’t listen to anyone else.

They feel like if they have more than a couple of people who agree with them, they’re all set.

And they feel like anyone who disagrees with them must just hate them or their vision, so they lock them out.

In the process of discernment, you welcome things that our culture doesn’t seem to value right now.

In the process of discernment, you try to listen to a wide range of visions and opinions and sources.

In the process of discernment, you are suspicious of people who agree with you.

In the process of discernment, you welcome disagreement and different perspectives.

After all this, Paul and his team decide that the vision is authentically from the Holy Spirit, so they go.

They find themselves in a city that is going to mean A LOT to Paul later, Philippi.

Talking to women at the river bank is imitating the master.

The beginning of Lydia’s story sounds a lot like Jesus in John 4 when Jesus meets the woman at the well.

Jesus is just out hanging around in the middle of the day and strikes up a conversation.

After some prayer time, they do the same thing.

Lydia has three strikes before they start.

She’s a woman

Sad to say, it was still very much counter cultural for a man to be speaking to a woman at this point.

They were largely seen as the property of the men at that time.

So even striking up this conversation would have been extremely taboo for Paul and his group.

She’s a Gentile

There’s a reason Luke goes out of his way to tell us this again, even though we know we’re in Philippi.

The early church is still struggling with the us/them problem of Jews/Gentiles.

So not only is Lydia a woman, but she’s a Gentile woman.

She’s wealthy

Luke tells us that Lydia is a dealer in purple cloth.

Purple cloth was actually incredibly rare in those days.

Usually only royalty buys that stuff to make their capes and robes and such.

So Lydia likely was pretty wealthy, which would have raised more than a few eyebrows that she would even bother talking with these dirty disciples!

The message really grabs a hold of her!

Paul preaches the Gospel, and the text says that “The Lord enabled her to embrace Paul’s message.”

Side note: Interesting that God would have to enable us to embrace the message of the gospel...

It’s almost like our being able to have faith in the Grace of God is in and of itself a Grace of God.

But that’s a sermon for another day...

However it happened, it’s pretty clear in these few short verses that Lydia’s all in.

They just kind of brush past the idea that her whole family was baptized.

There’s a lot that’s happened in here.

She left the riverbank.

She got her family.

She convinced them that this message was worth while.

Then they each got baptized.

And household isn’t just the four person nuclear family we’re thinking about now.

Back then your household was grandparents, aunts, uncles, servants.

They all come to accept this message, because Lydia gives it to them.

She’s pumped!

She responds to God’s grace with hospitality.

But then Lydia turns back to her new friends, the missionaries, with a neat line.

Literally in Greek that last line in the story is “If you think that I have become a believer in the Lord, come and stay in my house.”

It’s essentially like “Let me prove to you that I have actually accepted the message.”

It’s not enough for Lydia that she has recieved this message.

It’s not enough for her that it would be some kind of thought experiment.

It’s not enough for her that she would belong to some kind of club.

Lydia needs to respond to the grace of God, and she uses hospitality to do so.

Lydia knows that faith is only as good as it is acted upon.

She knows what the James would write later, that faith without works is dead.

She knows that action is required.

Buffalo Resounds

What happened?

On Saturday, an 18 year old walked in to a super market in Buffalo and opened fire, killing 10 and injuring three others.

It’s a horrific tragedy, one that has captivated the nation and had us asking some really hard questions.

The great theologian Karl Barth says that preachers should have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

In my case, both of those things live on my iPad, so you’re just going to have to trust me.

But still, I’m overwhelmed by how much of what we have been preaching about the last few weeks shows up in this story.

This young man had made a habit of “othering” people of color.

Through what are becoming way too common after shootings like this, we have discovered that this young man wrote a kind of a manifesto.

In it, it’s pretty clear that this guy was in to some fairly racist stuff.

He was under the impression that both African Americans and Hispanic Immigrants were trying to replace white people in our nation.

He admitted that he was pretty bored during the lockdowns, so he started reading the darkest corners of the internet to find this inspiration.

Side note: if that’s you right now, maybe try Wordle or learning to bake bread.

He was locked in to the kind of thinking that there are “us” and there are “them,” in a much more extreme version of what the Jewish and Gentile Christians were wrestling with.

No one helped him discern any differently in that vision.

To be sure, the young man had a vision.

I’m just wishing that someone, anyone, would have been able to help him better discern that vision.

I’m wishing that he had some kind of community that could have helped him see how anti-Kingdom his vision was.

I’m wishing that some stronger voices in his life could have spoken against what he was railing against in this manifesto.

I’m wishing that a worshipping community could have shown him what the peaceable kingdom of God looks like, where there is no black or white, Jew or Gentile, slave or free.

But alas, no one was there to help in that work.

In fact, sad to say, through the internet this young man was able to find a crowd of people who agreed with and even encouraged these thoughts and his vision.

How do our stories speak to this situation?

We have to repent, just like Paul on the Damascus Road.

By way of reminder, this often misunderstood and misused word Repent simply means to turn around.

To repent is to recognize that the story is headed in one direction, and that we really don’t want to be going there any more!

As a nation, I think a healthy dose of repentance is necessary.

I think we need to turn around from the direction of racism and bigotry that have far to wide of an accepting audience.

I think we need to turn around from echo chambers where the only voices that we hear from are the ones we agree with.

I think we need to turn around from division, from hatred, from blame, and from willful ignorance of the pain our brothers and sisters are experiencing on a daily basis.

It’s time to turn around my friends.

It’s actually long past time.

We have to imitate the master, and recognize that violence and hatred are never the answer.

Like Peter, we would do well to not just claim Jesus as our master, but to imitate him.

In this case specifically, we need to recognize that for Jesus violence and hatred were NEVER ever the answer.

When people laughed at Jesus for what he said, he didn’t ridicule them, but instead healed them.

When his disciples cut off the ear of someone trying to arrest him, Jesus used his own power to heal the soldier.

When he was hanging on the cross unjustly, bearing the weight of your sin and mine, the words that came to him were “Father forgive them.”

When we imitate the master, we have to realize that there are things that our culture celebrates that we need to let go of.

We need to let go of violence. It has no place in the kingdom.

We need to let go of hatred. It has no place in the kingdom.

We need to let go of negativity. It has no place in the kingdom.

We have to follow the early church and break down any wall between “us” and “them.”

Just think of what would have happened if Paul had held fast to the us and them reality of the Jews and Gentiles

He would have dismissed the vision of the Man from Macedonia as just a silly dream.

He would never have sat down to talk to Lydia.

She and her household would never know the Lord.

And seeing as this is the first recorded witness of the Gospel coming to Europe and the western world, it’s likely that we wouldn’t have either.

Our country has made an art form out of dividing ourselves between us and them.

Us can be white and them can be people of color.

Us can be straight and them can be LGBTQ.

Us can be conservatives and them can be liberals.

Usually here I put up a joke about the Penguins and the Fliers, but

A) That’s too painful for me right now.

B) That’s too trivial for us anymore.

We know where we have fallen in to the trap of us versus them.

It’s time for us to start breaking those barriers down.

There is no us.

There is no them.

Maybe it’s happenstance, but I think it’s interesting that this is the story that Luke starts using the word WE.

We went to Troas.

We discerned the Spirit

We were talking to the women at the shore.

What if we adopted the word We a little bit more.

We are one nation under God, indivisible.

We are in this together, no matter who we voted for in the last election.

We are brothers and sisters, and WE belong to each other.

What can we concretely do today?

All of that is kind of 30,000 foot kind of theology.

I wonder what we can do practically, on an individual level, to respond to this horrific attack?

Take responsibility without feeling guilty

My dad always used to say when I got in trouble that I needed to do some soul searching.

Which always made me feel like he wasn’t going to tell me what I did wrong, I just had to figure it out on my own...

But in reality, soul searching is frequently required in a situation like this.

And in order to do that we have to mark the difference between responsibility and guilt.

A different example: A while back someone who worked for me in youth ministry accidentally left a student behind at an event.

She recognized that she had done it in about 4 seconds, so the student wasn’t left behind for long.

In fact, the student didn’t even know he had been left behind.

But still...

The employee who worked for me was guilty.

She committed the action.

She forgot the student.

She was guilty.

But I was responsible.

As her boss, it’s my job to look after my employees.

As the youth pastor, it’s my job to take care of my students.

As the guy in charge, I bore some responsibility.

We as white American Christians need to learn to take responsibility without feeling guilty.

No one in here pulled the trigger in Buffalo.

No one in here (I hope) has a pages long racial manifesto sitting on their laptop right now.

No one in here (again, I hope) has ever engaged in outward racist behavior.

But we might ask what our responsibility is.

Where have we contributed to feelings of anger and hate toward our Black brothers and sisters?

Where have we contributed to an environment where such violence is seen as acceptable?

Where have we encouraged the walls between the imaginary “us” and the imaginary “them?”

Again, none of this is meant to make us feel guilty.

But it is to take responsibility, to recognize our role in the way things are now, and to hope to find a way forward.

Be a people of prayer

We owe it to our selves, our church, our nation, and our world to be in serious prayer about this.

Paul only saw the vision of the Man of Macedonia because he was deep in prayer.

They only discerned that it was God’s Spirit speaking because they prayed together.

They only met Lydia because they were specifically looking for a place for prayer.

There are so many in our world and in this situation who need our prayers right now.

I pray for the victims, for folks who are going to have an empty seat at the dinner table for a while now.

I pray for our African American brothers and sisters, many of whom have said now that it’s difficult to go to the grocery store without fear.

I pray for the young man, who is clearly disturbed and hurting, that he might find peace, and healing, and wholeness.

I pray for us, who are all still trying to sort this out and make sense of it all.

I hope that we will all join together in these prayers.

Take an active approach to love

I love Lydia’s story, because she has to respond to the Gospel with action.

“If you think that I am a believer, let me be hospitable.”

I think one of the best things we can do in the wake of this shooting is to take an active approach to love.

Let’s not just sit back and wait for the next one to hit.

Let’s reach out to our brothers and sisters of color and ask how we can best love them.

Let’s be a good neighbor to our brothers and sisters down the street and around the world.

This young man was out looking for a fight.

We respond best when we get up and go out looking for love.

It’s the best response we could possibly have.