Acts 16

In today’s reading from the sixteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, we are told of a vision that Paul had during the night. It’s not clear whether this was a dream he had while in REM sleep or if it’s one of those nights that he just can’t get any sleep - so he’s tossing and turning until he has a vision. These things are notoriously difficult to pin down, and sometimes in that semi-conscious state between sleeping and waking it’s not always clear even to the one who has the vision. Either way, there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, "Come over to Macedonia and help us. What is clear is that Paul takes this vision to be the work of the Holy Spirit.

Now Paul has a choice the next morning at breakfast. He can keep it to himself or he can share it. He can analyze it to death, and if he does it may eventually seem crazy to organize his life around such a flimsy piece of evidence. But Paul trusts that this is how the Spirit works. (Maybe he had just finished reading Malcom Gladwell's Blink!) Paul trusts his instincts in the same way that Peter does when he has that vision of the sheet with all kinds of non-kosher foods coming down from heaven and the same way that Philip does on the road to Gaza when he goes up to a strange Ethiopian eunuch to engage him in conversation.

Once Paul does start to talk about his vision, those who are with him also have the same choice: they can choose to ignore him or they can listen to this vision and interpret it as the Divine Lure. His vision doesn’t have to become their mission until they say so. What is interesting to me in what follows is to pay attention to the pronouns. When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them. Clearly there is a lot that is unspoken here about that process, and I always find that to be a bit frustrating when that happens in the Bible. In another place in Acts the phrase is used, “after no small amount of dissent…” It’s a clue that we don’t get a play-by-play in Acts, which is more like the accumulated minutes from a year’s worth of vestry meetings. The word “discernment” isn’t used in Acts 16, but clearly that is what has to transpire between Paul’s vision and the community’s response to in fact go to Macedonia. There needs to be a level of trust—both in the ways of the Spirit and in Paul’s ability to be tuned in to those ways—and some honest conversation. I imagine at least one person in the community might have said, “Paul, are you sure you had that vision? Are you sure it is of the Spirit? Maybe you just had some bad lamb or too much caffeine last night!”

How do we know what is truly of God’s Spirit and what is our own projection or own desire and even confusion? What the narrator in Acts doesn’t tell us is how they discerned that this was of God—simply that they trusted Paul’s vision and they went to Macedonia. They took it as God’s initiative and they went with it:

We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days. On the sabbath day we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, "If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home." And she prevailed upon us.

You don’t have to be a great Biblical scholar to recognize the name Philippi, a “leading city in the district of Macedonia.” If you sit down and read Paul’s letter to the Philippians in your Bible it will provoke your inner Paul Harvey to fill in the blanks on “the rest of the story”—namely that this encounter we heard about with Lydia and her family that leads to their baptisms is the beginning of a new congregation—the roots of the Church in Philippi. And it all began with a dream Paul had of a man in Macedonia saying, “come and help us.”