A few years ago, one of my best friends and her spouse bought a local small business in the Wisconsin town where we used to live. I met Erin, a Lutheran pastor, when the Lutheran colleagues in my town adopted me into their weekly Bible study and sermon preparation group. She lived and served in a more rural community for the first few years we knew each other, but eventually she received a call to serve the congregation right down the road from mine, one with whom our congregation had partnered for a long time. We were thrilled to get to work together, and we did often for a few years before I moved on to Illinois.
Eventually, after serving two congregations, Erin was tapped to be the assistant to the bishop in her Lutheran synod. However, after the bishop’s term was up, her life and call took a dramatic turn as she became the owner of a small lifestyle and gift shop specializing in goods that are sustainably and ethically source, located in a cute downtown shopping area not all that different from some we have in our area. When she found out her offer was accepted by the sellers of the shop, Erin was a whole lot thrilled and a little bit nervous. When I heard news I was a little bit thrilled and a whole lot nervous. And I wasn’t even the one running the business!
We wondered together (or more accurately I stressed out loud about) how she was going to learn everything that needed to be learned, how she was going to figure out what to stock and how much of it, how she was going to find employees she trusted, how she was going to deal with crises, how she was going to know what to do about things like sales tax or employment law or payroll or, or, or. Running a small business sounded daunting and extremely time consuming to me, and after I threw probably one too many scary ideas at Erin, she replied, “Stephanie! I won’t be doing everything all the time!” But I was skeptical as I thought of my friend in her new vocation as a small business owner.
Lydia, as small business owner in Philippi, was a rare woman in New Testament times. She was a dealer in purple cloth, cloth worn by and sold exclusively to powerful and wealthy people. No mention is made of a husband or father or brother in relation to her or her business; she is referred to as the head of her own household. There is little to no scholarly doubt that she ran and benefited from this business herself. She probably had to source cloth and build relationships with weavers or traders. She knew the process of dyeing, if she didn’t do it “in shop” with her own laborers. She managed customer relationships. She even had to deal with taxes! She may have had paid employees, but more likely she “compensated” servants in her household by caring for their basic needs. But even with all of that Lydia also knew, “I won’t be doing everything all the time!”
Paul, Timothy, and Silas met Lydia on their evangelistic journey throughout the areas we’d now call Turkey and Greece. They arrived in the bustling Roman city of Philippi and eventually the first sabbath day of their stay came around. When that day, a Saturday, was upon them, they went to look for a place to observe it, a day of rest and prayer to God. The rest of the city, including most if not all of Lydia’s clients, wouldn’t have stopped work for that purpose. Observing sabbath was a strictly Jewish practice and weekends as most of us know them, didn’t exist yet. So Paul and his entourage headed out of the city gates, toward the river, where they thought they might find a known place of prayer, maybe one where other people who were part of the Jewish diaspora might be gathering on the Sabbath as well. They found such a place, a gathering of women who shared the spiritual practice of sabbath-keeping.
Sabbath-keeping, ceasing all work and delighting in the presence and love of God, in the middle of a Roman city was counter-cultural. The seventh day wasn’t a “day off” for everyone else. Choosing to keep sabbath was a choice to forego business, payment, and profit for the day. It was a choice to risk not being available to customers or other business owners in the supply chain. It was a choice to step outside of the busy-ness and give attention to something other than the marketplace, a choice to stop worrying about how one will do everything all the time, a choice to turn over control of time and priorities, a choice to give attention and space to God.
Sabbath-keeping is, in a way, a form of hospitality. I don’t mean that in a “frantically scrub your house because guests are coming over any minute” sort of way, but I mean it in a way more akin to the kind of hospitality cultivated in the Benedictine Christian spiritual tradition. The Benedictine monastic order was formed in the 6th century, long before there was such a thing as Catholics or Protestants. In fact to this day, honoring that origin that predates any division, Benedictine oblates can be people from any tradition, not necessarily Catholic Christians.
Hospitality is at the core of Benedictine spiritual practice, and while their retreat centers are simple, their sense of welcoming the stranger is extravagant. A Benedictine abbey, monastery, or house can never turn away a guest seeking shelter and hospitality. One monk, Father Daniel Homan, describes Benedictine hospitality as the practice of ordering your life in such a way that you are always ready to center the needs of your guests. It’s a radical way to show love. In keeping Sabbath, Lydia, the other women by the river, Paul, Silas, and Timothy, they created space in their lives to center the needs of God. They removed everything else that may be crowding in their hearts and their minds and turned to what God needs in order to make God’s home with them.
A number of years ago a colleague of mine began noticing a peculiar change in the way people exchanged routine greetings and pleasantries. “How are you doing?” was the expected and common greeting question. The answer on the rise, she noticed, “Busy.” She pointed it out when she heard me say it once.
Busy. Instead of talking about how we’re feeling, instead of talking about what brings us joy or even what worries us, many of us just answer “Busy.” After noticing this, some of my friends started talking about how many of us and many of the people we knew actually “worship at the altar of busy.” In our culture, busy is honored. Busy means many people count on us, which means we’re important. Busy means we are being “productive members of society” and earning our keep, earning our comfort.
But God doesn’t call us to be busy. God calls us to be hospitable. God calls us to be open. God calls us to make ready our lives and our hearts and our spirits for unexpected encounters that will allow God to open our hearts to hear what God is saying. Many editors add titles to different stories in scripture that aren’t part of the biblical text. One title for this story is the “Conversion of Lydia.” Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve been conditioned to think about conversion stories as ones where the person who converts makes some decision to change. They have studied enough, prayed enough, and learned enough and now they are ready to make a decision to accept Jesus or believe in God or something along those lines.
That’s not how it goes for Lydia, though. She is not the actor in her own faith “conversion,” if we are to call it that. A worshiper of God, a keeper of Sabbath, Lydia shows up. She gathers with the community for prayer. She rejects the altar of busy, and instead leaves space in her life, creates some margins, and when she does there is room for the Lord to come and work in her heart. The Lord opened her heart. The Lord gave her ears to listen eagerly. Lydia simply created the space in which the Lord could work.
There is so much that can crowd our lives, and in some instances it can feel like we have little control over it all. The demands of our jobs are getting higher and higher as employers expect less people to produce more. The activities our kids are involved in ask for more and more time, deeper and deeper commitment, while parents, grandparents, and family friends find ourselves on the road running here and there to try to support their endeavors. It often leaves all of us running ragged. Families move farther away from each other so even being with those we love for re-connection and re-creation can occupy more space in preparation than the time we actually spend together. And then we feel pressured to fill all available time with every possible memory-making opportunity. I’ve even heard people say, “I’m busier in retirement than I was when I was working!” (That one scares me!) Our lives often leave us running ragged.
In a world that operates like this, how counter-cultural it is to just stop! How revolutionary it is to set boundaries – – or really, How radical – as in getting down to the root. How radical it is to trust that God knows just what we need in order to nurture the kind of spiritual life that God desires to share with us. We need space. We need time that is set apart, kept open, kept holy, as the commandment says. We need community to carry our prayers, hold us accountable, and delight in our experiences of grace. We need a spirit of hospitality toward God, in which we make ready our lives for God to show up and show us how to extend love in the world.
That space, that spirit, that sabbath, a full day at best, but also in minutes and moments that we can protect in our days, allows us to listen eagerly to the good news, to hear and believe that we are loved before we can do anything to earn it, that we are forgiven before we have the words to accept it, that we are worthy before we have the work to prove it, that we belong before we even know what we’re missing. Thanks be to God for this grace of the good news, today and always. Amen.
