🐮 Easter 6

Readings: Acts 16:9-15; Psalm 67; Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5; John 14:23-29.

From the TRNG Room: Lydia the Purple Seller

Reflection

Good morning and welcome to the sixth Sunday of Easter. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. Our readings today come to us from Acts 16, Psalm 67, revelation 21 in John 14, and I couldn't help, but I couldn't help but read. Acts through a lens of privilege, and that's maybe particular to me as a, a veteran because of Saul's experience or interaction with, um, Claudius Lys in Acts 22, where this, um, soldier. Uh, a tribune. In fact, an auxiliary Tribune, a local officer, um, says to Paul or Saul, um, wait, wait, wait. How are you a citizen? I had to pay a great sum of money for this, and Saul's like, I was just born this way, which is privilege. That is Saul acknowledging his privilege that I didn't have to work for this. I didn't have to serve in the military. I didn't have to do anything that you're having to do for the same thing. Saul has privilege. And so when I read Acts 6, 9, 16, verse nine, he had a dream and he dreamed of some imaginary person saying, please come help us. And it makes me feel of, uh, feel like who is this person and what does it mean to interpret this dream in this particular way? Because, you know, this whole, you know, the dam dude in distress is like, that's a trope. Let's just say what it is. A super critical, cynical read of it could be Saul wanted to go to Europe and he tells his friends he had a dream and he didn't have a very good idea of a dream. He just like said, uh, I just, we gotta go there. I saw it in a dream.'cause remember, this is written by Luke, not Saul. And Saul does write a letter to Philippi, and we know in the letter to the Philippians, which was written decades before, Luke's version. Um, he addresses them and he does clearly know them. He has some interaction with them, and Philippi, Luke points out is a Roman colony and Rome didn't have colonies like you and I think of Rome had military veterans that they, I. Gave land to, and then said, okay, now we're going to put troops here, you're gonna train them. Um, and we're going to build up Roman culture in this place. And Philippi was one of those, Philippi was a place where the, the assassinate, the assassins of Caesar, who were the Republicans, you know, the, the, as the republic was dying, Brutus, Cassius from a two brute and. I, uh, Cassius Longus, I think is the other guy. Um, they were defending the Republic and saying, no, we are not gonna go become an empire. They lost at the Battle of Philippi against Marcus Aurelius, or I'm sorry. Um, um, mark Antony and Octavian. And Octavian after Mark Antony is dispensed with later, Octavian becomes the first, Augustus the first emperor after Caesar. So a lot of shit goes down in Philippi. It is a major military center, and I can see how if, if we, if it's possible to make sense of this reading in our own context. He wants to go to the place of privilege. He wants to go where Rome is. There's. Better greener pastures over there where the judaizers and the, the fundamentalists, if that's what you wanna call the Sadducees and many of the Pharisees, um, that's where Saul wants to go. It's, that's where. Maybe he's not making money, but he's, he's got some influence. People want him there. They don't want him around Jerusalem, even Jesus' own closest friends and his brother James. So, and that, that's, again, that's just me being. Uh, horribly, horribly skeptical of Saul, but I do believe that, that God worked through Saul and Saul like Samson. Doesn't matter what kind of person you are, it matters what you accomplish for God. It, I mean, it does matter. It does matter, but God doesn't have to answer to us. We have to answer to God, and we have to answer to each other. That's why you don't, you should not necessarily be like Saul. You should not expect to be. To follow Samson's example. Don't be like that. Um, and I bring this up that, so my, I'm doing the Sundays, uh, after doing the daily readings for three or four years because I want to provide for myself and for anybody listening, uh, a means of understanding the Bible in a deeper way, especially when it comes to military service. This weekend we are celebrating Memorial Day. Memorial Day. If you're a civilian, you may not, I don't know, maybe you do realize, but there's a difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and the difference is life or death. Veterans are those who are living and have served. Memorial Day is for those who died in the line of military service. Um, and so it's suppo. That's why it's named Memorial Day. And if you haven't yet, I encourage you to go to pew pew.ghost.io. That's my new, um, newsletter, uh, blog. Website and I wrote something for Memorial Day, inviting people to consider how, like there's, there's confluence of traditions. You can put an, uh, a, a, an Elijah chair at your Memorial Day picnic and not feel like you're being culturally insensitive to the military, which this date is supposed to be about. And so I do a lot to try and bring civilians and military together, uh, especially in the church, but not only in the church. And today we had, I had, well, I'll say we, in terms of my family, my household, we had that same experience where a preacher should have brought up military service. I. And they didn't. And we called them out on that and they just had this smug privileged answer of like, oh, well I'm, I'm just not like that. I'm, I'm a passive, as a Mennonite preacher, and Mennonites are pacifists. And so I, I assume the argument was like, I don't have to do historical critical work or I can do it selectively.'cause he did talk about other things that were particular to the text, like the dealing in purple, how it comes from a specific kind of shell, but he didn't mention. Lydia is an unattached female who's dealing in a, uh, commercial asset that was heavily restricted to the imperial cult. Reading not too far between the lines, between here and Act 16 and in in Saul's letter to Philippi. Philippi is full of military families. Lydia, a woman. It doesn't matter if she was peninsula born like in Rome. She's not going to be in charge of a business dealing purple without a dude. Either her father or her husband. Unlikely her son, but let's just say maybe it's her son, but she's unattached. That doesn't happen. Women had a lot of status, especially in relationship to other women like. Roman citizens, women, um, they had a lot more status than, you know, the, the woman in, uh, later in the story who's like being used by magicians or whatever. I can't remember that story as well. But, um, Lydia was either married to, or the daughter of a service member, a military member who's no longer in the picture. Telling me they're probably dead. Acts 16, nine through 15 is the perfect reading for Memorial Day because Lydia is a, probably a gold star daughter or gold star wife. Uh, there's almost no way around it. Um, I know that if you go to your commentaries, which is what this preacher said it that he did, it won't be in there. I studied under N NT Wright, who's God, who's translated, I don't know how much of the Bible and I've brought it to him. Look, Philippi is actually, the letter to the Philippians is actually a really important piece of scripture I'd, I'd love to kind of check my work of you and I. I got no response. I studied under Tom Wright at St. Andrew's. I took his Christian theology course with Mark Elliot in the. Fall of 2014, that's not enough. It doesn't matter that I was a student. I didn't hear back from him. And so these commentaries are not false. The work that is reaching you is not misleading, but it is missing a certain perspective. When I was in seminary, both at St. Andrews and at Duke, I didn't have a single veteran faculty member who I could look to for support for mentorship. I had a bunch of chaired professors, um, whose asses I had to wipe when they fucked up around student veterans. And I got burned out after one year. I took a leave of absence during which time I wrote a book, held a big conference, and then I came back, finished my MTS, and it was never enough. I could never accomplish enough to feel, to, to allow civilians to feel whatever way they needed to feel, to look at me as an equal to look at me with value and dignity. It doesn't matter that I have, I bring a, a unique perspective that I think unlocks a very important and in fact, central part of the Bible. If we are only ever just down by the river like Saul, I'm gonna go down where. I have something over someone. If a bunch of women by the river are talking and a man shows up, the man is in control. He Saul, there's no way Saul doesn't know this. It doesn't matter if they're in Philippi or in Jerusalem. Social status and gender and sex were fairly uniform. Saul knows his privilege and he's using it as best he can to glorify God. But let's be really honest about what's going on here. Saul has privilege. I. The church has privilege and we now in the West and in America at least, we've been in a society for the better part of 50 years that's filled with people who expect to get freedom without sacrificing for it and not even, not sacrificing, not even wanting to think about the fact that the freedom is not free. That there are people, an entire community that is getting them their freedom that they want to disassociate from. Uh, we have a democracy that denies military families, civil rights, and as we have all these debates about DEI and everything else, and this is what it means to be the church, Augustine said the, um, the church may be a whore, but it's my mother and I say, uh, the, the church is a dumpster fire and I've got friends trapped inside. Um, let's be really clear-eyed about what the church has done and if we want to continue to believe in the church, we have to do the work to look at our own history, our own history of privilege, our own history of colonization, our own history of oppression. Um, and that doesn't happen overnight. But it certainly isn't gonna happen if we don't put in the work. Um, and that's why Grunt Works is begins with grunts, with military rank and file believers, because if they're not a part of the gospel, it's not the Gospel of Christ.