Acts 16:9–15
This Acts story is confusing! Paul gets a vision of a man from Macedonia pleading with him. So he and the rest of his team get on a boat and head right on over to a major city in Macedonia. After a few days there (recovering from the trip? Trying to find the man from the vision?), they leave the city and head to the river, where they meet a group of women. And here they meet Lydia, a wealthy textile merchant and head of her household, who invites them to her house and is baptized.
So, to recap: Paul sees a vision of a man, but he finds women. Then, he and his crew are welcomed in by a woman living in the social role of a man (the pater familias, head of household). And the story seems to take these gender and power reversals without batting an eye. A few verses later (stay tuned for next week’s lectionary!) Paul heals another woman, an enslaved woman, and gets incarcerated for it. Maybe the writer is unconcerned about the man from the initial vision. Maybe Macedonian men are really in need of God’s grace, so bad that they don’t even know it and won’t listen to Paul. Maybe the Holy Spirit is telling us that God’s good news for oppressors (men, people who enslave and oppress others) is rooted first in God’s good news for the oppressed.
As Angela Davis said recently,
“I don’t think we would be where we are today—encouraging ever larger numbers of people to think within an abolitionist frame—had not the trans community taught us that it is possible to effectively challenge that which is considered the very foundation of our sense of normalcy. So if it is possible to challenge the gender binary, then we can certainly, effectively, resist prisons, and jails, and police.” [https://libcom.org/article/dr-angela-davis-role-trans-and-non-binary-communities-fight-feminist-abolition-she]
May our vision of God’s good news lead us to trouble the binaries of power and control. May it lead us to listen to how God is speaking to and through the oppressed. And may we recognize how the good news of liberation is good news for all of us.
Rev. Jay Bergen is a pastor at Germantown Mennonite Church in Philadelphia, and a volunteer organizer with the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), a campaign fighting to end life sentences and heal communities across Pennsylvania.