Sermon Archive

Mother’s Day—a day for honoring all our “mothers,” a day for honoring all those women in our extended family of nurture who have loved us into well-being—whether we call them “mother” or “grandmother” or “stepmother” or “sister” or “wife” or “partner” or “daughter” or “cousin” or “aunt” or “nanny” or “friend.”

And I believe Mother’s Day is also a day for honoring all those women in our family of faith who have loved this community into well-being—whether we call them “minister” or “elder” or “deacon” or “trustee” or “musician,” or “educator,” or “program director” or “committee member” or “counselor” or “sister” or “friend.”

And then even beyond this, I like to think of Mother’s Day as a day for honoring every woman in the world—whether past or present—who has drawn on the resources of her mind and heart and will and strength and soul and psyche to love others into well-being, to share with others her life-engendering, life-nurturing, life-enriching power.

So today I want to tell the stories of two such women of the past, two “mothers” of the early church, who drew on the resources of their personhood to love the church into being and then, beyond that, into well-being. These two women are: Lydia, a Gentile business woman, who out of her generosity provided the meeting place for the first gathering of Christians, the first “church,” in the Greek city of Philippi; and Priscilla, a Jewish tentmaker, who, with her husband Aquila, helped to found and instruct Christian communities in three of the principal cities of the Roman Empire—Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome itself.

So first, the story of Lydia—who, according to the book of Acts, is the first person on the continent of Europe to be baptized as a follower of Jesus and to then host church gatherings and services in her home. Lydia! Her name is really quite unusual, for it’s not a name often given to a person. Rather it’s the name of a geographic territory. Some contemporary examples of figures with names like this are Indiana Jones and Paris Hilton.

Now, in Lydia’s time, the persons most likely to be named after a geographic area are not fiction heroes or glamorous movie stars but slaves, named after the place from which they’ve been taken. So Lydia might well have been a slave who came from the province in Asia Minor that has that same name.

Yet when Luke, the author of Acts, first introduces us to Lydia, she’s living as a freedwoman in Macedonia—i.e., northern Greece—in the city of Philippi, a Roman military colony. In fact, she’s now a prosperous householder who’s a trader in purple-dyed cloth, an expensive commodity favored by the well-to-do. Lydia’s trade is one known to have been practiced by a number of ex-slaves, and she’s obviously proved to be quite good at it.

But Lydia is far more than just “a successful business woman.” She has a strong spiritual side to her as well. She is one of those Gentiles who’s been attracted to the monotheism and ethics of Judaism, so that on the Jewish sabbath, she regularly gathers with others like her at a site about a mile west of town, along a local riverbank. Luke calls it “a place of prayer,” by which he may mean “an open-air synagogue used mainly by women.”

One particular sabbath, Lydia and other women encounter there two Jewish men who’ve been proclaiming Jesus as their Messiah. They are the apostle Paul and his companion Silas. They’ve just arrived in Europe after their previous missionary work in Asia Minor. The women welcome Paul and Silas, and they invite Paul, as a visiting rabbi, to teach them. And, rather amazingly, Paul, acting contrary to the patriarchal predisposition we usually attribute to him, agrees to do so. Lydia listens eagerly to his teaching about Jesus Christ, and the message rings true to her. So right then and there her heart is opened, and she accepts Jesus as the Messiah longed for by the Jews, whereupon she’s baptized by Paul in that nearby river—she and her whole household (that is, she together with her children, extended family, and servants). So here we see Lydia, who’s doubtless decisive in business, responding just as decisively when Paul offers her quite a different sort of valuable opportunity.

Following Lydia’s baptism, she urges Paul and Silas to accept the hospitality of her home for the duration of their stay in Philippi, and this home of hers swiftly becomes the local house-church, the place to which the developing Christian community comes as persons of both genders and of every social class and ethnic group, are embraced and gathered together for meals and for the worship of God.

Thus, this mother, whose children and household are baptized alongside her, opens her home for nurturing the spiritual well-being of others and thereby becomes a mother-figure for every Christian in Philippi. Lydia puts into practice an inclusive hospitality, a welcome that flies in the face of the social conventions of her time, and, through her, the good news of Christ’s love begins the work of breaking down every barrier posed by class, or ethnicity, or gender. Praise God for Lydia and her all-inclusive love!

And now, on to the story of today’s second mother of the church—Priscilla. Sad to say, the lectionary of prescribed scripture readings that we follow excludes her story. Never once in the whole three-year cycle is it assigned as a text. And that’s a tragedy I seek to remedy this morning, for hers is quite a significant story.

In the year 49, the emperor Claudius expels all Jews from the city of Rome, and the Jewish-Christian couple Priscilla and Aquila are forced into exile. It is to the cosmopolitan port city of Corinth, located some 70 miles west of Athens, that they travel, and it is there that they settle, opening a tentmaking and leatherworking shop.

Priscilla and Aquila have a model marriage, both for their own time and for ours today. For as described here in Acts, chapter 18, and in the letters of Paul (1 Corinthians 16:19; Romans 16:3–5; cf. 2 Timothy 4:19), theirs is an egalitarian partnership, one that is not at all patriarchal or hierarchical. We observe first that in the six verses of the New Testament where they are named, they are always mentioned as a pair, never as individuals. Then second, four of these six references depart from ancient convention by naming Priscilla before her husband Aquila. And third, Priscilla and Aquila are spoken of as artisans who practice their trade alongside one another, and both are described as teachers who together exercise oversight in their churches. They're the first married co-pastors, if you will.

To quote New Testament scholar Clarice Martin (in Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Commentary, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, p. 796): “Th[is] tradition provides a rare and inviting cameo of a co-leadership and shared-power model of cooperation…and interdependency….”

But back to the story itself. Sometime after Priscilla and Aquila have settled in Corinth, the peripatetic apostle Paul arrives there for the first time. He goes to the tentmakers’ and leathermakers’ quarter (for Paul is himself of that trade), and there he comes across Priscilla and Aquila, working in their shop. They invite Paul both to join them in their work, so that he can have some income, and also to lodge with them in their home.

After spending a considerable period of time working and preaching in Corinth, Paul decides to journey on, and he invites Priscilla and Aquila to accompany him. They sail to Asia Minor and arrive in Ephesus, the fourth largest city in all the empire. Paul soon departs, but Priscilla and Aquila remain in Ephesus to teach and preach and to found and lead a house-church (cf. 1 Corinthians 16:19).

Sometime later, another eloquent Christian orator comes to Ephesus. His name is Apollos, and he is proclaiming the message of Jesus with burning enthusiasm, but also with inadequate knowledge. So Priscilla and Aquila take him aside and explain the Way of God to him more accurately, tutoring him to maturity and empowering him for more effective ministry (Acts 18:24–27). Here, Priscilla is shown to be no “silent, submissive woman” (cf. 1 Cor 14:34; 1 Tim 2:12). Rather, she is depicted as a principal authority-figure and as a primary teacher of Christian truth.

In the year 54, the emperor Claudius dies, and his edict banning Jews from Rome is lifted. Shortly thereafter, Priscilla and Aquila return to Rome and reestablish their house-church there, and when Paul later writes to the Christians in Rome, around the year 56 or 57, he greets Priscilla and Aquila warmly, calling them “co-workers in Christ Jesus…who risked their necks for my life” (Rom 16:3–4). Paul also greets the Christians who are meeting in their home.

So the New Testament offers us brief glimpses of the important work done by Priscilla and Aquila in three different cities during that quite formative period between the years 49 and 57 when Jesus was first being proclaimed to many parts of the world beyond Palestine and when none of the gospels conveying the story of Jesus had yet been written. Praise God for Priscilla and Aquila, teachers of the meaning of Christ!

On this Fifth Sunday of Easter, it is good for us to recall that at the heart of the Easter message of new life there lies both a proclamation—that a new age has dawned—and a commandment—that in this new age we are to carry on the concrete acts of love modeled by Jesus himself and practiced by such next-generation mothers of the church as Lydia and Priscilla.

Would that more of these two women’s stories were known to us and could be retold. But we must settle for the little we do know about these remarkable women. And we must keep their stories, however brief, alive—both by telling them to others repeatedly and by embodying within our own lives the noble traits these women possessed.

So, praise God for these two mothers of the church—for Lydia, who practiced the Christ-like welcome of an all-inclusive love; and for Priscilla, who modeled for us an egalitarian partnership and taught us Christ with a pastoral authority.

Let us pray: