Purple

Acts 16:9-15; John 14:23-29

May 1, 2016

Lydia could have made a bundle over the past couple of weeks, what with all the Prince memorials and tributes. I’m betting that the dealers in purple cloth have pretty much sold out in the days since the death of the great purple one.

We don’t like to think about such things, but the deaths of celebrities remind us of our own mortality. We’d prefer to remain distracted. That’s perfectly reasonable, and all the more so these days when we life such profoundly distracted lives to begin with.

Seriously: how many times in the average hour do you reckon you check your device? How often do you walk down the sidewalk checking e-mail or texts or Facebook or whatever other communication you check regularly? How often do you check your device while you’re watching something on TV?

I’m not even going to ask how often you check when you’re in the car. I’ll just hope that, at best, you only do that if you’re stopped, preferably pulled over to the side of the road. (Seriously, distracted driving is deadly – don’t do it. Nothing is worth it.)

I ask these questions because I’m pretty confident that most of us live pretty connected lives, and many of us are tethered to our devices practically all of our waking hours. I was on the bus the other day, and about half way to church I put my phone in my pocket to take a look around. Every other head on the bus was bent to a screen. Then I looked out the window and the first half dozen pedestrians we passed were also staring at screens, including one poor soul who started crossing an intersection in one direction while buried in a screen, only to realize midway across that she’d actually wanted to cross the other street. It was like a video game come to life. Heck, I’ve seen cyclists riding down the road checking their phones.

I actually kinda admire their coordination. I’d kill myself trying to do that, and it wouldn’t have anything to do with attention deficit.

But attention deficit is, of course, the point.

When I wrote that sentence last week – sitting upstairs at the Northside Social – I paused, and, swear to God, I moved the cursor on my Mac to the tab with Facebook open on it. Even in the midst of drafting a sermon that pivots on the question of what we pay attention to I was struggling to pay attention; to keep focused on the words and the moment and the process; to avoid the distraction presented by omnipresent media; to avoid the temptation of limitless social and digital connectivity.

I think it’s safe to say that we are the most connected generation in the history of the world. I cannot imagine that we are not also the most distracted and distractible.

Distraction is nothing new under the sun. After all, the great turn in the book of Acts – represented grammatically in the passage we just heard by the change in voice from third person to first person – comes about because Paul has a vision in the night that distracts him from the course he was on and sends him off in an entirely new direction: toward Macedonia.

This story recounts, or, at least symbolizes, a critical moment in the life of the church as it grew beyond its original community and spread out into all the world. Macedonia meant heading into the Gentile world. It meant that Paul, an observant Jew, would be breaking bread with all kinds of people who were outside of his normal circles.

The expansion of the Jesus movement depended upon the support and the leadership of women such as Lydia. Talk about moving outside of the comfort zone for a Jewish man of his time. Surely this was a stretch for Paul.

Not much is known about Lydia or the others, but the detail about the purple cloth is suggestive. Due to the costs of creating the color, purple cloth was exclusive to the wealthy, to the princes of the world, as it were. A woman in the first century who had her own business dealing with a wealthy clientele was, no doubt, formidable. Heck, maybe she even had her own “woman card.”

Conservative evangelicals are prone to quoting the Pauline letters to “keep women in their proper place,” but they would do well to pay attention to the actual story of Paul. When confronted with an obviously gifted and accomplished woman, he doesn’t try to mansplain to her about church, about her place in the world, or even about Jesus. Instead, he accepts her hospitality and honors her leadership in her community even as he shares his vision of the good news with them.

It is, in its way, an exercise in the art of leadership through powerlessness, or, better, through letting go of the power of privilege. It takes an incredibly careful attention to the present moment, the present human context, the relationships, and the personalities to exercise such leadership. It takes, that is to say, deep compassion, humility, and love.

We could use such leadership today, when what we seem to have, instead, is bombastic, self-centered, power-hungry people pretending to seats of power.

The present moment calls for the church as clearly as Paul’s midnight vision. “Come over and help us,” the broader culture says in all of its brokenness. The moment calls for the church not as an institution sitting in judgment, but rather it calls us to show forth a way of leadership from below, of leadership through letting go of power, of leadership through compassion, humility, and love.

It’s convenient for those of us in the Mainline tradition that we have seen our cultural power and position shrink almost to nothing over the past half century. We may not have wanted to let go of the position we occupied in the middle of the 20^th century when cultural commentators could accurately describe something like the Protestant Establishment that held sway over American social and political life in the 1950s. But, for all kinds of well-documented reasons, that consensus establishment fell apart in subsequent decades.

To be sure, the fall was accompanied by much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from the increasingly empty pews. Pastors lamented falling off of the front pages of the New York Times, who, true story, used to cover sermons from the large churches of New York the way they cover the Twitter feeds of athletes and celebrities today. Mainline theologians decried their ever-shrinking role as public intellectuals whose opinions on war and peace once mattered to policy makers.

There was a great deal of reaching and grasping as power slipped surely away from the church in the 1960, 70s, and 80s. But by the time I finally got around to going to seminary in the 90s, we were beginning to focus back on this original story of the church, and to see that, rather than mega-churches, Jesus did his ministry with a tiny group of followers. Rather than grand edifices, Paul did his ministry in the homes of women such as Lydia. And, instead of powerfully placed public leaders, the early church did its work through the uncontrollable, unpredictable movement of the Holy Spirit.

Responding to the Spirit’s movement demands of us a humility based on our acknowledgement that the power to act with love in the world comes from beyond us and is not subject to our control.

Responding to the Spirit also requires of us focused attention to the present moment, because God is here, now, in this moment. Yet we spend so much of our own time absent. We are angry about something that happened yesterday, or last month, or when we were children. We are worried about something that won’t happen until tomorrow, or next year, or never. We are focused on screens that promise us – what? Something more interesting than where we are or who we are or with whom we are?

God is lord of the present time. If we want to grasp that – or, rather, if we are willing to be grasped by that – by that power of love in this moment – well, then, here is where we need to be, and now is when we need to be here.

I think part of the power of performers such as Prince – to tie this back to where we began – part of the power he tapped into came in his ability to create moments that were utterly, completely, sufficient to the present while being about more than the performance. That is to say – and if you watch footage from a concert you see this clearly – the audience becomes part of the show in their willingness to let go of everything for the sake of the dance, for the sake of the spirit of the moment.

Sure, that kind of ecstatic experience, in and of itself, is not much different than a drug-induced haze – and sometimes, to be sure, the two are mixed. But there’s also a lesson in letting go that gets enacted from the stage when generous performers let go of their control and the spirit of the song takes on a life of its own among the gathered congregation.

A concert is no more or less real than a worship service. The main difference is that, as church, we pledge ourselves to one another for more than this moment, and we trust that the spirit that binds us together also sets us free, and that in our freedom we are somehow bound back by the love of God who calls us together to serve the who grants us freedom to respond in love.

Or, as Jesus put it in John’s gospel:

“Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. […] Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”

When we come to this table, we enact this invitation to love, and to the radical hospitality we receive when God makes a home with us. Come to the table of grace.

Amen.