This is why Lydia's story is so remarkable, because Luke evidently had encountered something in her so impossible to ignore that he couldn't help but tell her story. It is significant that Lydia didn't see her social position as placing her on another level of importance from all the others who lived with her. Lydia's household was not a family, a biological grouping, or an ethnic or tribal group who had prior reasons for living in community together. And it is this entire household that Lydia invites to be baptized with her - some of them may have been related by birth or marriage, many by accident of employment, others perhaps by the connection of having been friends or visitors dwelling under her roof and sharing spiritual connections.  

Theologian Tom Breidenthal has written that Paul remembered Lydia because she had shown him that the fundamental community that makes up the church has precisely this character of the household. Lydia's "Christian householding," Breidenthal writes, "is both a training ground and a preview of the social life of heaven". Christian householding is not about autonomy but about connections. It is about radical availability and mutual vulnerability to and for one another. Members of a household attend in all things to the life of the household; and in the process they learn to pledge themselves to take care of another, and of equal importance, they come to allow the possibility of being taken care of themselves. And so despite his predilection for downplaying the roles of women in the early church, Luke found here in this group of women, on the margins, a model of the very Kingdom of God.

Lydia had the resources of a wealthy merchant, which allowed her to have her own home and to express her hospitality by inviting Paul and his friends to the household's table to be fed. She could have offered them money, but instead invited them into her household, which extended from the place she worshiped, through her doorway, to her table, and into the life of her household. The community of the baptized in Lydia's household was the first house church, a model for a new form of faithful community. The life of Lydia's household, on the margins of Roman society because they were women, became the center of the emerging church.

It is this dance from margin to center that we continue today, and Lydia has many lessons to teach us about our life in community as St. Thomas' Parish. Lydia's household is a reminder that the church discovers its essential mission-mindedness from the households of the marginalized. Lydia models for us the virtues of living open to encountering a stranger's religious experience of God, available even to be transformed by it. Lydia, too, was one who offered and shared her own worshipping community, without restraint or qualification, with all who would gather with them.