Acts 15:9-16 Life in a Community Church

For the past few weeks we have been reflecting upon the beginnings of the Christian church – those early years after the resurrection of Jesus. We have witnessed this time mostly through the experiences of Paul, the church’s first missionary, as told by the author of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles.


Now, when you come right down to it, this particular Biblical narrative is quite the adventure story. It has its share of prison escapes, church fights, grisly executions, and a good dose of circumcisions and healings thrown in for good measure.

Today’s story, however, has none of the swashbuckling elements that we have come to expect in the Book of Acts. In comparison, it is a tame piece of prose, a blip on the radar screen. Like a snapshot, it is a story so brief that it would be easy to skim right by it – onward to the next stoning or shipwreck.

However, I think that this little vignette about Paul and Lydia is worth stopping for, worth savoring for a few minutes because its message is terribly important to the Christian faith and particularly to a community church like we are.

The tale begins with a vision which Paul had in Troas, on the shore of the Aegean Sea, in what is now modern day Turkey. Now, in Paul’s day, the Aegean Sea was acknowledged as the boundary between East and West, for on its far coast lay Macedonia in what we now call Greece. So there was Asia on the Turkish side and Europe on the Greek side.

Anyway, here we have Paul enjoying the sunset one balmy evening, dabbling his feet in the briny water. Then, quite unexpectedly, our missionary experienced another one of those pesky visions. This time he witnessed a man standing on the far side of the Aegean Sea, pleading with him, "Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

Having learned to take these spectacles seriously after his experience on the Damascus road, Paul immediately scrapped his idea of heading east into Asia to spread the Gospel message and instead sailed west and arrived in Philippi, a city about as close to being the capital city of Macedonia as you could get.

There he and Silas and his other missionary buddies hung out for a few days until the Sabbath rolled around - and, like most preachers on that seventh day, Paul had the urge to – well – you know - preach. Whether he could not get top billing at the synagogue in the city or whether there were not enough religious males in Philippi to even have a congregation, we do not know.

However, what the author of Luke/Acts does tell us is that Paul ended up outside the city gates down by the riverside that Sabbath morning with a bunch of apparently well-organized women no less who looked for leadership to Lydia, herself not a Jew but still well versed in the Torah (a God worshipper, one translation calls her).

Apparently, these women met regularly in a small house to pray, preach, sing, and praise God. Now doing all this without the men folk was in and of itself quite unusual. Added to that was the fact that the women obviously welcomed newcomers and strangers because Paul and his friends were gladly received and made to feel at home in this small Gentile faith community. Such a welcome was not commonplace either as Jews and Gentiles did not mix freely.

Well, Paul must have preached a heck of a sermon that morning because, when all was said and done, Lydia first and then her whole community were baptized (each and every one of them), and she invited Paul into her home to rest up and stay a while.

Lydia then holds the distinction of being the first Gentile in Europe to be converted to the Christian faith. She is an interesting woman, and we know little about her except that she was in the business of purple cloth, a color of fabric associated with royalty and wealth.

Now we do not know if Lydia used the expensive method of dying her fabric (That would have been by utilizing mollusk shells, a real breach of Jewish kosher dietary regulations), or if she dealt with the knockoff version of purple dye based on a plant derivative.

But either way, it was physically demanding and dirty work and so generally would have been relegated to what the rich folk might have referred to as society’s riffraff. In short, Lydia was a blue collar worker, economically probably smack in the middle of the middle class, like a lot of us.

However, I am not concerned about her socioeconomic status this morning. What I find intriguing about Lydia is her unwavering commitment to hospitality. In a time when welcoming Christians into your home could be pretty dicey (what with all the persecution going on), Lydia opened her doors and her heart to Paul, paving the way for – and here is the interesting part for us - the notion that the church should be a diverse faith community where strangers with their sometimes strange customs and traditions are embraced.

There is a lesson here in Lydia’s little snapshot story. And it is a lesson that we as a community church really need to take to heart. But first, let’s talk about what a community church is – that is, what we here at RVCC are called to be.

My definition of a community church is a faith community that is rooted in the secular community. It arises out of the community itself as the community’s sacred place. When I read Ernie Knight’s history of our church, I found out that is exactly what occurred here. That long ago Ladies’ Mite Society did not set out to create a denominational church. They set out to build a church for their community here in Raymond.

Now we happen to be affiliated with the United Church of Christ, but we are first and foremost a community church. And that means one of our defining qualities is our diversity.

I mean, if you walk into the First Methodist Church or St. Someone or Other’s Episcopal Church, you are going to find a gaggle of Methodists or a passel of Episcopalians. The worship will be pro forma because in a Methodist church you will use the Methodist hymnal and in an Episcopal church you will use the denominational Prayer Book.

However, when you walk into a community church, it is not that straightforward. Because not everyone in Raymond is the same, it would follow that we can not expect everyone in our church to be the same. We come from an enormous spectrum of theological and political beliefs. We grew up with a variety of worship styles that we bring with us here because those rituals and traditions are an important part of who we are.

This inbred and inescapable diversity can be our greatest strength, or it can be our most profound weakness. It can be a source of unending excitement – or potentially destructive conflict.

But the lesson we learn from Lydia and Paul is this: diversity is good. We are called to welcome the politically conservative Baptist stranger and the theologically liberal unchurched newcomer – and so we are called to, maybe not like, but still embrace those rituals and traditions that they bring with them – because their rituals and traditions are as much as part of them as ours are of us.

And I believe that, as a community church – particularly in this day and age of growing narrowness and parochialism – we are called to unceasingly expand our notion of community. As our bulletin reminds us, we are “ministers to the world.”

Think of it this way, if Paul had not preached to the Gentiles with their different customs and strange dietary laws, you and I would not be sitting in these pews today, and Christianity would most likely have remained a sect of Judaism.

So what does all this embracing diversity and welcoming other traditions mean for us? First and foremost, it goes without saying that racism, sexism, ageism – all the isms have no place here. And, for me, as your pastor, it means that I can not possibly please everyone all of the time.

Hey – it is a fact! Someone is not going to like a sermon because it is not inspiring enough – or it is too liberal – or not liberal enough. Someone is not going to like the musical responses because they are in a foreign language or because they have African roots or call for a drum. Someone is not going to appreciate a new hymn when the hymn supplement is filled with the old ones he or she grew up with. And for some of us, the hymn supplement is filled with music we never heard before we came here because those songs were not part of our church tradition.

Sometimes, as your pastor, I feel like I am doing a carefully orchestrated balancing act, seeking to proclaim the Gospel by weaving with Donna between hymnals and musical styles, seeking to proclaim the Gospel by threading my way through ritual and tradition, on the one hand, and new ways of looking at our ancient stories, on the other hand. But as Paul and Lydia would surely agree - this is good – and it is energizing – and it is fun.

In many ways, a community church like ours is similar to Maine weather. You know how the saying goes: if you do not like the weather in Maine, then wait five minutes. Well, if you do not like what is going on in worship or education or mission, wait – it will change. We are a community church – and nothing is written in stone.

I believe that as long as we keep talking with the appropriate people about what we like and not just dissing the music or the sermon or the worship style or the curriculum or whatever we do not like – but instead offer suggestions to make those aspects of our community life more meaningful, our diversity will be the most wonderful source ever of creative dynamism and life.

It may not always be comfortable for everyone all the time here, but a community church is not supposed to always be comfortable. It is supposed to be a place where we can experience God and deepen our spirituality in different ways. Sometimes those styles are well within our comfort zone, but sometimes they are strange or just rub us the wrong way.

But, hey, that is the nature of the beast. That is life in a community church which values openly sharing our faith journeys – different as they may be - , which values being assured that if we stray into narrowness or any of the isms, someone will be there to beckon us back to the openness and acceptance that Jesus expects from us who call ourselves his followers.

Rev. Nancy Foran is pastor of the Raymond Village Community Church, Raymond, Maine

http://www.rvccme.org/