May 25: The Sixth Sunday of Easter
Well, we are here. The great celebration of Easter is coming to a close. If celebrating Easter is long in your rear-view mirror, come sit by me.
Soon we will celebrate Pentecost, the birthday of the church. If that holy day has not necessarily been a biggie on your list of days either, well you can sit on the other side of me.
In my experience of my little corner of the world there is often a gap in the “celebrating” between the glory of Easter Day and honestly, the Sunday after Labor Day. Growing up as a child I most definitely went to church in the summer, but somehow it felt like earning extra credit when you already had a B+.
Also, my experience of learning scripture in the Episcopal Church relied heavily on what was being read in the lectionary cycle, the readings that are assigned for each Sunday. I’ve found that I had really missed a bunch of stuff during my summer hiatuses. I hadn’t earned as much extra credit as I thought I had.
I was older when I finally heard today’s stories, Lydia and the man by the pool by Beth-zatha or Bethesda. I mean I wasn’t today years old. But unlike many stories from scripture that I had learned regularly in my September-through-Easter church life, I hadn’t had time to inwardly digest these as thoroughly.
Both of these stories hold up for me some inescapable truths. First, no matter how smart or faithful I try to be, that does not mean that I can predict what God will do; the Holy Spirit is at work. God’s grace and mercy are gifts, and one is free to be guided by the Spirit in using that gift or one can chose not to. And being a disciple of Jesus, being a learner of the Way of Love, that school doesn’t have a summer break.
In today’s story from Acts we find Paul meeting up with a woman named Lydia in Phillipi, a Roman colony in northeastern Greece. But, by beginning the reading here we miss out on some pretty interesting travel notes.
In the beginning of Chapter 16 of Acts, Paul meets up with Timothy who goes on to become an important figure in Paul’s work and the building of the early church. They had great success in helping congregations as they went on to travel together.
In the two verses just before today’s passage picks up, Paul and Timothy are rerouted a couple of times in their journey. The reason given, not storms, bad roads or wars, but because they were diverted by the Holy Spirit.
Imagine if that popped up on your maps app on your phone, Rerouting, The Holy Spirit said so. They ended up in Troas in what is now Turkey across the Aegean Sea from Greece.
It is while there that Paul has this dream about a Macedonian man calling to him from across the sea to come and help. After this dream “Paul had his map” [1] “being convinced” that God was calling them to Macedonia to proclaim the good news.
I marvel at Paul’s openness to the work of the Spirit in his life. I’m sure the falling of his horse and being blinded helped in this regard. But still.
Paul and Timothy arrive in Macedonia and hang around in Philippi for a couple of days. And it wasn’t until the Sabbath when they headed out of the city to a place they had heard there was a prayer meeting that they found who the Holy Spirit had sent Paul to meet.
Who they found was not a Macedonian man, but Lydia. A worshipper of God, meaning she was not Jewish but she believed in God and practiced her faith in worship. Not only was she not a man, she also was not Macedonian. She was from Thyatira, back across the Aegean from where Paul and Silas had just come.
Scholars have differing views about Lydia. She was a luxury item dealer; purple cloth was expensive and reserved for the very rich and powerful. Did that mean she was rich as well? Maybe. She owned a business and had a household. Did that mean she was a widow? Maybe. Or maybe she had built this life for herself.
What is completely clear about Lydia is that she listened to what Paul had to say. Her heart was opened, and she and her household were baptized. And in addition to that, she opened her home to Paul and Timothy. She received grace, the good news of Jesus and embraced it so fully that she became in important part of Paul’s story and ours, too.
Our gospel story today at first glance is one of the many stories of Jesus healing someone in need, Jesus extending grace and mercy. But what is interesting about this story is the man who was healed and his reaction to Jesus’ compassion.
The man, who for 38 years had been waiting to be healed, has been described by some as ungrateful. This would be hard to glean from the portion of the reading we heard today. You have to trail along for a bit longer to get the rest of the story.
It is a little curious to wonder about the man’s answer when Jesus asks him, “Do you want to be made well?” He doesn’t reply with a yes or a yes please or even a question like “How could you do that?” He tells Jesus that for all these years that he has been by this pool named Beth-Zatha, which means “House of Grace” he has had no one to get him to the water as it had been stirred up. The belief was that angels came and stirred the waters and those who entered in just after this had happened could be healed. Everyone gets there before me, he tells Jesus. My initial response to this is pity for him because he must have felt alone.
Jesus says, “Stand up and take your mat and walk.” And instantly the man was made well, and he followed Jesus’ directions. Seems like a good idea to our ears to pick up that mat and go forth. Except it was the sabbath. Carrying anything, even the mat you’d been freed from after 38 years, was against the sabbath law.
When the man is stopped and questioned about violating the sabbath laws he says the one who healed me and told me to do it. When asked who had healed him, the man could not answer. Jesus had slipped away from him without any further interactions.
But later Jesus finds the man at the temple and speaks again with him. But instead of thanking Jesus for this great gift, instead of using his gift of healing to bring comfort to others, he does quite the opposite. The man who is now able to move freely takes his newly restored body straight to the authorities and ID’s Jesus; presumably knowing that this was not going to be a good thing for Jesus.
Now it’s a little easier to see why he has been called ungrateful. And that pity I felt for him at the pool shifts a bit.
Unlike Paul and Lydia who take the gift of the good news and build their lives around it, this man seems willing to take the grace and then squander the gift.
It would be easy to say be a Lydia and not like the man at the pool. But I don’t think anyone in all of creation is an EITHER/OR being. Not a one of us is EITHER all one thing OR the other. I know in my own life I’ve been both of these people. I’ve used my gifts to build up the body of Christ and I’ve chosen to do precisely the opposite.
The one thing that I am certain of is that we are ALL heirs of the grace of God regardless of who we are or what we are going to do with that grace. We do not know what happened next for that man or how the gift of grace took shape in him as time went on. We are not equipped to predict what the Holy Spirit will do. How she will reroute, inspire or trouble the waters.
“My Father is still working, and I am working, too.”
That’s what Jesus says to the leaders once they catch up and harass him after being ID’d.
“My Father is still working, and I am working, too.”
As we enter into this season where for some of us things slow down a bit, I want to remember that. God is at work. Jesus is at work. The Holy Spirit is at work. Whether we embrace the gifts we are given or accept them without recognition, God is still working, not for extra credit, but in love.
Amelia McDaniel
[1] The Message, Eugene H. Peterson, page 2003