Not the tattooed lady, but the Lydia of Acts 16.
It is a very interesting story, but best when viewed with a little context. In Acts 15, Paul and Barnabas start facing a very divisive argument within the early church. Or maybe I should say the toddler church. It had been birthed in Jerusalem and grown to Antioch through persecution and now it is starting to take those first wobbly steps on it's own. And those wobbly steps lead it to an immediate impasse.
Funny how I often find that I'll go a chapter or two back to get context and I really need to keep going back further and further to make the story make sense. Back in Acts 10 the apostle Simon Peter, a close follower of Jesus, and one of the key leaders in the fledgling church had a vision. Through this vision he came to understand that God was breaking down some major cultural barriers and offering salvation from sins to the Gentile (non-Jewish) population.
Peter acts upon direction from the Lord and goes to the house of Cornelius, a Roman centurion in the Italian division. I always laugh at this. God wanted to make sure that the first Gentile Christian could be marked as nothing close to Jewish. Part of the occupying Roman army, Cornelius was further an Italian. A foreigner who could not possibly be one ounce Jewish.
In the following months Peter defends the work that God has done, and like so many things that God touches it flourishes and the good news of Jesus is soon reaching Gentiles everywhere, but especially in Antioch. Antioch was so different than Jerusalem. A seaport town full of merchants and traders from the four corners of the known world, it had a highly diverse (and highly Gentile) population compared to the Jewish cultural center that Jerusalem was.
The early church took it's first steps into Antioch under the persecution of Saul. They fled there looking for refuge from those trying to stamp out the movement by imprisoning and killing the followers of Jesus. The news that God had opened the door for Gentiles to grasp a hold of this new faith in Jesus as the Messiah must have been particularly potent in Antioch.
So it isn't too surprising that when some people from Judea came to Antioch and started saying that the Gentiles needed to be circumcised in order to be saved that it caused a ruckus. On the surface this seems an almost inevitable thing to happen in the "culture wars" surrounding the early church. However the ramifications were pretty insidious. On the surface it looked like a faction merely declaring that in order to be saved that one must convert to Judiasm. But the argument bit deeply at the roots of a faith claiming that there wasn't anything one could do to be saved.
Paul, and Barnabas and other Christians were sent with this argument back to Jerusalem to James and the other apostolic leaders to sort out an official standing from the church leadership. I imagine it was a rough time for Paul and Barnabas. We aren't told, but I surmise that their travelling companions were opposing their opinion on the matter. That would make it a long trip to Jerusalem. Especially since these two men, Paul and Barnabas, were fully aware of how deeply the argument impacted the churches basic point of faith.
God continued to work and once the group got to Jerusalem the matter was settled decisively. Gentiles were recognized to be Christians by simply having faith in Jesus the Messiah. They were encouraged to follow some Jewish customs but they did not need to become Jews in order to have the doors of absolution opened to them. I wonder if Paul and Barnabas felt a rush of relief at that decision.
They return to Antioch with the news but shortly thereafter fall into disagreement about who their travelling companions for the next journey should be. I wonder if after the trip to Jerusalem, Paul was only willing to take those he knew would be steadfastly on his side. John Mark is noted to have deserted him in previous travels and Paul isn't willing to give the young man a second chance. Barnabas, the man known for his encouragement is less judgmental about John Mark and the rift that is caused between these two friends on this issue is a sharp one. It tears their partnership apart and sends them in different directions.
The Bible is so good at giving us the framework of a story and leaving other things to our imagination. In my imagination I can almost hear the sharp angry words between these two men. In my imagination I think that the separation had to have had an effect on them both, but especially Paul who had been mentored and encouraged by Barnabas in his first days as a believer. Those first days must have seemed pretty miraculous as men like Ananias and Barnabas accepted him - the guy who had been hunting them down and sending them to jail and death. (Yes, Paul was his new name - he was formerly called Saul, the man who was violently instrumental in the dispersion of the Jerusalem community of believers.) So it is, I imagine, that Paul comes into chapter 16 of Acts reeling a bit from recent events.
I cannot say that he was discouraged, though I imagine it to be a possibility. I cannot say that the start of this new venture had to be soured a bit by the argument he and Barnabas had, but I imagine that too, to be a possibility. And into this I see God continuing to work. Paul had great plans as to where he would go and what he would do on this journey. He comes to Derbe and snatches up Timothy as a young man to mentor, and then he tries to go to Asia.
Twice in the next few verses it mentions that God prevents Paul from going where he wants to go. Yet after that he has a vision of a Macedonian man pleading for his aid. It is a different direction than he had intended and I wonder where Paul is mentally and emotionally.I wonder exactly how the Holy Spirit kept Paul and his company from going forward with their own plans. It seems in early church history that miracles were far more prevalent and public then they are today and I wonder if it was a miraculous happenstance, or if like today, God led in the mundane closings and openings of circumstances.
I wonder what the "take away" thoughts should be on this passage and the ones preceding it. I sometimes get wrapped up in how I should teach the leading of the Spirit to room full of impressionable 5th graders. After all, I have had no visions or dreams of import. I have not spoken in languages that I didn't learn nor have I heard someone speaking like that to me. I haven't seen the Spirit of God descend in flames of fire upon the heads of those who believe or felt the rush of wind indoors described on the day of Pentecost.
So sometimes I wonder, briefly if I have the right to tell them that the Holy Spirit can lead them if they are open to his promptings. Upon contemplation of my own life though, I find that in looking back I can see the hand of God. It isn't as dramatic as it was in Paul's life or as frequent to my perception, but at critical junctures I see His influence and direction. I see the peace he gave me when dating the man who would become my husband. I see his direction out of full-time ministry in the church; a choice I know that we would not have had the strength to make on our own. Currently I see my own Asia - two attempts to take up the mantle of an educator, one ended completely, the other possibly ended and at the very least on hold.
And I think that the "take away" for me may only be partially the concept that God leads. I think for me it goes beyond this to "God has a plan" and maybe that Gods plan cannot be driven astray by our own shortcomings - a comforting thought.
In looking at the whole of Acts and even beyond it we see that Paul eventually asks for the companionship of John Mark when he is imprisoned. We see that the sharp conflict driving two men of God apart is still used to reach people who had not heard the news of Jesus. We see that Gods plan is often bigger than our own horizons. Some in the early church were locked into cultural boundaries. Very few would have seen Christianity reaching arcoss the world via the hands of the Gentile population, and yet that is exactly what happens.
I wonder about what happens to Cornelius the Italian Roman. Or the other minor characters that we meet in Acts. Their stories just give us a short glimpse into their lives. The travelling man from Ethiopia whom Phillip was miraculously transported to (yes, "beam me up, Scotty." starts in Acts) to explain the scripture he was reading. I wonder what happened to him after his conversion. I wonder about Lydia who will be soon coming into this story as yet another cultural hurdle to be crumbled by the spread of a faith in God. These were real people who had real personalities and problems. Who had friends and families that they talked to. People that they told the most important news that they had heard - a message that God has a plan and that his plan was to save the broken and the bad and bring them back to himself.
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