Lydia is no ordinary woman for her times. She is a merchant, a seller of the exquisite purple cloth that she imported from her native city, which was famous in the Hellenistic world for its purple dye and the fabric it exported in that color. In Luke's words, "The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul." Paul, as I imagine the scene, began to speak of Jesus, and how coming to know Jesus had altered his life so dramatically that even his name, along with his religious beliefs, had changed. Hearing Paul's story moved Lydia, already a devout worshipper of God and a leader of others. As Luke pithily summarizes the scene: "she and her whole household were baptized."

Lydia is the first person converted by Paul to Christianity on European soil. And having been taken into God's household she turned to her new friends, and according to Luke, "she prevailed upon us" with her hospitality, and invited them into her own household to stay for a while. It was in Lydia's home that the first Christian congregation in Europe was formed.

It all began, you recall, with a vision, and Paul's following his vision to the riverside, and to the unexpected gift of Lydia and her household. Christian householding became a symbol of the basic nature of the church because Lydia responded to the Good News of the extravagance of God's love offered to all persons with her own gestures of extravagance: inviting her whole household to be baptized, and then celebrating the occasion by offering the hospitality of that very household.

Lydia recognized the essential nature of baptism: there were no longer two households but one. And because Lydia's household became part of the household of the followers of Christ, we sit here this morning, hundreds of generations later, part of the church still emerging, keeping alive the flame of the Good News of extravagant love and unrestrained acceptance.

The story is all the more remarkable because Luke, in telling the Jesus story in a fashion he felt most likely to win favor among the broadest spectrum of Roman society, shapes his stories in ways that are meant to appeal to the ruling class of Roman men. Biblical scholar Gail O'Day is among those who have noted that Luke tends mostly to include women in his stories in Acts in ways that help him portray male characters in a more favorable light. Women were second-class citizens in Roman society; and in conforming to such Roman norms in his portrayals of women, Luke tended to contribute to a further diminishment of women's roles in the book of Acts.