Easter 6

When the missionary journeys of Paul and Silas took them into Europe, the first city they came to was Philippi.  When the Sabbath came, they went to a place of prayer outside the city by a river where some women regularly gathered.  And there they met Lydia. 

            We’re told a few interesting things about Lydia.  She was a businesswoman who dealt in purple cloth.  Apparently, she was also the provider for her family.  Her actual home was in Thyatira, which we know was famous for its purple dye.  In The Iliad, Homer wrote about the famous purple dye of that region. 

It’s hard for us to understand the fuss about purple cloth, but in ancient society it was very precious.  The dye was hard to find and hard to manufacture.  It was extremely valuable, and typically worn only by royalty or those with a lot of money.  Since Lydia now lived in Philippi, the chances are good that she owned the local dealership for these expensive Thyatiran cloths, sort of an ancient Georgio Armani store for the wealthy.

            Well, in spite of her considerable success, Lydia was clearly searching for something more to her life.  So regularly she would join some other women in prayer.  When Paul came to their small group, he did what was his custom.  He explained how God had also been searching for them and had come in Jesus Christ to find them.  We are told the Lord then opened Lydia’s heart to Paul’s teaching. 

            That’s a fascinating phrase: “The Lord opened her heart.”  It implies that her heart was closed.  Anyone who functions in the business world can understand why Lydia would have closed down her heart.  It’s a rough, tough, competitive world out there.  People take advantage of those who make decisions from the heart. 

But you don’t have to be in business to know that.  Anyone who has served an ungrateful public or who has tried to do something charitable only to have it thrown in your face, knows about the danger of opening your heart.  Anyone who has ever been in a relationship that went bad, been abused by a parent, rejected by a child, knows that, if you open your heart, there’s a good chance it will get broken. 

            Yes, there is a world of hurt out there, and not all of it is caused by evil people.  Some of the worst hurt comes from good people, who intend to do good things but who make big mistakes along the way.  No one falls in love intending to break up.  No one has children intending to damage their self-esteem.  But in trying to do well, sometimes we hurt others.  The ethicist Lewis Smedes has said, “I don’t know if more harm is done by those who do evil well, or those who do good poorly.”

            It all adds up to making us very vulnerable.  So we do the only thing that makes sense.  We close down the heart.  We try to get by without it.  We live in a world made up of “familiar strangers.”  They’re familiar because we work beside these people all day.  We know their names.  We see their family pictures on the desk, but they’re really strangers to us because we have never taken them to heart. 

Maybe you’re even married to a familiar stranger.  You grew weary of hoping for intimacy.  You cut some deal and figured out how to cope with each other in the same house.  But long ago you pushed each other out of the heart.  

            The great problem with closed-down hearts is that it doesn’t prevent us from being hurt.  It just prevents us from being able to love again.  It leaves us lonely and unhappy.  We can try to stay busy, as if we can somehow outrun the sadness.  We can put on the face to meet the people we meet.  We can tell ourselves we are too practical to deal with these emotional issues.  But late at night, when you’re too tired to run, and too alone to pretend, you wonder if you will ever be happy again. 

            That is why the very successful businesswoman, Lydia, kept going to the river to pray with some friends, and to ask God if there wasn’t something more.  The best move of her life was to ask that question of God, before she looked to others.  Until we open our hearts to God, we will never be able to open them to someone else. 

            There is a great deal of talk today about volunteerism.  But be careful, because if you offer to help someone or to volunteer in this society without having a heart open to God, you will inevitably try to become a god attempting to fix things.  The needs of our society are too overwhelming for you to fix.  And yet, after you have opened your heart to God, you can’t help but see that a Savior is among us.  That reminds you that it is His concern to fix things, while you are free just to offer love to others. 

            When Lydia found her heart open again, she was baptized, which is another way of saying she became open to Jesus’ mission for her life.  Notice the next thing that happens.  “And then she joined the Peace Corps, gave away all her money, and spent the rest of her life working in Third World countries.” No, that’s not what the text says.  Lydia is not called to go off to Africa, but simply to have an open heart.  She said, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.”  She’s so grateful to be able to love again that she makes room in her life for others. 

Our society has almost deified work to the point where it has become the goal of life.  “I am an attorney, a teacher, a preacher, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker,” as if that defined us.  If work defines us, then when things aren’t going well there it means that we are failures. 

So we try harder to become a more successful worker, or we get desperate to find different work.  But in Scripture, work is never the goal.  It is a means to the goal, and maybe not even the best one. 

            The calling in your life is to be open to God, and to the high drama He is unfolding in the lives of those around you.  You can fulfill that calling at work.  You can do it better in relationships.  But first you have to get that heart open.

            An open heart has to be nurtured.  We spend so much time closing it down that we have to learn how to let God open it again.  The place where openness began for Lydia was in the church.  That is part of the mission of the church – teaching us to be open.

            Our church is to be a ministry of grace, a place of hope, healing, and hospitality.  This is not so much a vision of what we want to accomplish as it is a vision of the type of people we want to become: gracious, hopeful, whole and hospitable.  For we are a hospital for people, here for folks in need of broken heart surgery. Our goal should be that whenever someone enters the house of the Lord, they are greeted with all the open love that you would give to an honored guest who enters your home. 

            Tomorrow you will return to a world that is jam-packed with lonely people who have closed down their hearts, and who are so hurt that they are spending their lives looking for one person, just one, who they can trust again.  And you are called, called by God, to live in that world with an open heart.