“Preaching ought to give you the Word in such a way that God comes to you with something bigger than mere information.”

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Here is a sermon on Sunday’s texts by my friend Ken Sundet Jones. Don’t forget to apply for the next cohort of the Iowa Preachers Project with us.

Sixth Sunday of Easter — Luther Memorial Church

Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen

In our first reading today, the apostle Paul and his companion Silas leave what’s now southern Turkey and sail north to the top of the Aegean Sea to the city of Philippi. These two missionaries to the Gentiles are carrying letters from the leaders of the church in Jerusalem who had met to decide if Paul was allowed to go out and preach to people who weren’t Jewish and didn’t follow Jewish religious laws and traditions. The letters granted permission and said pagan converts weren’t required to submit to circumcision.

But they also asked them to not engage in pagan practices or live immorally.

Most important, though, is that the letters allowed Paul to follow his nose, or in this case follow a dream he’d had of someone beseeching him to come up to Macedonia. The permission in those letters winds up being a reason we have all those NewTestament letters to believers in Thessalonians, Ephesus, Corinth, and Philippi. And that permission is also behind a Gentile baby named Sonya on the other side of the planet two thousand years later being baptized.

Later in Paul’s life, after he’d been arrested and jailed in Caesarea, Paul would write to the Philippians from prison to strengthen the new believers’ faith. Today’s reading shows him meeting Lydia, his first Philippian, who was really an immigrant from Thyatira. Acts tells us a few other interesting details about Lydia. The first is that she’s a “worshiper of God.“

When Paul came to a new location to bring the good news of our crucified and risen Lord, he’d encounter three groups of people. First there were people who worshiped pagan gods who had little interest in what he had to say. At the other end of the spectrum were those who were strict adherents to Jewish religious practices and laws who rejected Paul’s assertions about Jesus (and sometimes reported him to authorities as a disturber of the peace).

The third group were the proselytes, the worshipers of God — as Acts calls Lydia — who were divine-curious. Someone like Lydia, a foreign woman from Thyatira, would come to the Jewish synagogue to hear the reading of scriptures translated fromHebrew to Greek, to sing the psalms, to listen to preaching, and to pray. So we know that Lydia and the other women at the very least were open to matters of faith. Paul’s words to them would have had a familiar ring to them, and they would have been more open to what he told the, about Jesus.

Acts also tells us two other little details: one, that the women were at the river and, two, that Lydia was a purpler. The second detail was the reason for the first. The women were likely Lydia’s workers in the process of dying cloth purple, and the river was their water source.

Way back when we took our first group of confirmation students to the Luther sites in Germany, we visited the workshop of the woman who was Germany’s last master indigo dyer. She used urine to extract indigo dye from a native plant called woad, and we got to help her dye some cloth, but thankfully we weren’t asked to contribute urine. While indigo is a dark navy blue and comes from a plant, Lydia’s dye was purple and came from a rare sea snail called the spiny murex. It involved cutting out the little dye sacs from 100 pounds of snails to make about a half teaspoon of purple dye. That dye was so expensive that the law of the Roman Empire only allowed the nobility and the wealthy to wear purple.So far all this makes good material for a Bible study downstairs in the education rooms before worship, but it doesn’t make for much of a sermon.

The relationship between scripture and preaching needs to be more than just imparting historical facts or theological ideas. Preaching ought to give you the Word in such a way that God comes to you with something bigger than mere information.

And the way to do that with Paul and Lydia and the river and purpling is to keep in mind who doesn’t have access to what God seeks to give. The vast majority of people in Philippi probably wouldn’t see purple cloth. They certainly wouldn’t be able to afford it. So going to the river for fabric for your clothes was so beyond the reach of any of us that was illegal. And even Lydia, in spite of being incredibly wealthy because of her business, had no access to the benefits of faith granted to the Jews in the synagogue. She could be uber-interested in God and sing the psalms and pray the prayers. But she wouldn’t be allowed to be a full part of that life.

Her money was no good in the God store. The contrast between what her wealth availed her in the world and the limits she encountered up the hill from the riverbed at the synagogue was an eternal chasm. And it makes Lydia and her household ripe for the Holy Spirit’s picking.It’s not too big a leap to that exclusion along the river and in the synagogue in Philippi from a pool of water at Bethesda outside Jerusalem a thousand miles away and decades earlier where a man had been ill for thirty years and had been excluded from every aspect of life. The pool was said to roil on occasion on account of angels stirring the waters, and whoever got to the waters first would be healed. But our guy faced the impediment of not being able to move himself. If Lydia, with all her advantages couldn’t make herself what was right and salutary for God, this man was in worse shape. Forget about religious issues. He couldn’t even move off his mat to get a few feet to the pool. The barriers were too great.

Acts also tells us the story of Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch who, like Lydia, was a pagan God-worshiper. He’d been barred from worshiping in the temple in Jerusalem because he’d been castrated as a boy to make him safe to serve in his queen’s treasury. When Philip told him about Jesus and his benefits, the eunuch pointed to some water and asked he was also banned from baptism.

“What is to prevent me from being baptized?” he asks. The answer: not a single thing.Jesus at Bethesda never asks about the man’s qualifications or his worthiness. The guy at the pool tries to explain, but it’s like Jesus rolls his eyes and thinks “Here we go again with the folderol about meriting what I have to give. I’m not interested in anything but two requirements: your need and my mercy.” And with that divine intent, the man is healed. Jesus just hits ‘er done, and the fella doesn’t even realize it yet, because Jesus has to tell him to stand up and collect his kit and head home.

Up in Philippi, the letters Paul has in his apostolic messenger bag do the same thing for Lydia that Jesus did at Bethesda. They create a situation where the excluding boundaries are treated as irrelevant. Lydia and her whole household are baptized, which presumably means spouse and children, and both free and enslaved servants. Her supper invitation to Paul and Silas is how a wealthy purpler picks up the mat of her life and starts walking.

Both stories are perfect for this day when Emily and Zach bring Sonya to the font to be baptized. Not only is she the fifth generation, like her sister, to be baptized in that baptismal gown, Sonya also is carried here as the latest in 2000 years and countless generations of undeserving, unremarkable, and unrighteous sinners to encounter our Lord in the waters ofbaptism. And today he will give her what he gave Lydia and her household and what he gave the man in Bethesda: access not exclusion, mercy rather than judgment, and life over against death.

Paul met Lydia with letters in hand, but today Jesus gives Sonya traveling papers for her journey, just like the name of our ship, “Hjemad” — homeward. For as good and faithful the well-intentioned promises from Zach and Emily and from Sonya’s sponsors are, there’s only one promise that counts, one declaration, one Word. It comes in these words that God only uses a pastor as a mouthpiece for: “I baptize you.”

This eternal promise is made to a baby who’s as unaware as she is undeserving. All the better to contrast with Jesus’ utter graciousness.

There’s no purple robe here made from outrageously expensive fabric that none of us could afford. Instead there’s a different robe that Sonya’s baptismal gown represents. It’s the same thing as a pastor’s alb and the funeral pall that will one day drape her coffin.

In John’s vision in the book of Revelation, he sees the heavenly host arrayed in white. I suspect some of them had worn purple in life and others had been clothed in rough spun sackcloth. But nowJohn is told their old robes had been washed in the blood of the Lamb and come out looking like Jesus at the Transfiguration. And that’s the most expensive fabric of all, because it cost Jesus his life. [change from purple stole to white]

Today the letters written in God’s Book of Life record Sonya as part of that host in white not purple. And the promise of our second reading is that she — and you, my friends and fellow sinners — when all things are brought to completion will be found at the river of life flowing through the City of God. Already today, you’re included. The robe is yours. The place is reserved. For when God chooses, when God says “You!” it happens right then and there. And we’ll all be reminded again that we shall gather at the great river that the little bowl of water in this font flows from.

Amen.

And now may the piece, which far surpasses a baby’s understanding and ours, keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus from whom flows Living Water. Amen.

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