Sermon: Acts 16:9-15, May 25, 2025

Scripture: Acts 16:9-15

Preacher: Bailey Bjolin

Title:

Over the past several years, I have been learning how to accept the generosity of others. It’s not

easy. In fact, a lot of the time, it can feel really bad. But like any kind of practice, the more you

work at it, the easier it gets. And thankfully for me, it’s been getting a lot easier.

I say thankfully because over the last little while I have found myself leaning on others a lot

more than usual. In my last year of my library program, I wasn’t able to find a job, in spite of

applying to as many places as I could find. Even here, in the valley, I have been relying on the

hospitality of Gord and Pauline, who have provided me with a place to stay and with (delicious)

food to eat in the evenings. And in June, I will rely on the generosity of Rosemary, who has

given me her home to stay in for the rest of my time here.

In my church back home in Vancouver, we started a mutual aid fund, where congregants and

their friends can apply for small micro-grants if they are having trouble making rent or buying

groceries. I applied to that grant a few weeks ago and got enough money for gas and groceries to

make it to my first payday at St. George’s. When I needed support, it was given to me, no

questions asked.

I don’t say this to elicit sympathy, but rather to illustrate that generosity often works within the

shameful and the taboo, the things we’ve often been told to keep private. But it’s because of the

generosity of this community as well as the generosity of my church in Vancouver that I am able

to stand here today and preach for you. The more we can talk about the real-life impact that

generosity has in our lives and in the lives of those we love, the less taboo it becomes to seek

help when we need it. And for so many others, radical generosity can be a matter of life or death.

Today, I want to talk about the kind of radical generosity that manifests in hospitality.

In our story today, we are introduced to Lydia, who is a dealer of purple cloth. At this time,

purple cloth is a symbol of royalty and wealth. Not only does Lydia deal in purple cloth, she is

also a homeowner. We know this because her whole household is baptized in verse 15, and this

indicates that she is responsible for other people, perhaps servants, or family members or

children. Her position is atypical for women at the time, being part of the “quasi-elite” class: she

is an artisan as well as a homeowner.

She also gathers alongside other women in a place outside of the synagogue, in some sort of

“place of prayer” beside the river. Lydia is a worshiper of God, which means that she is likely a

Gentile sympathizer with the Jewish faith.

In her encounter with Paul, her heart is opened by God and she is baptized. She is now a wealthy

woman and a Gentile convert to the Jesus movement. Through her conversion, she has moved

out of the Roman Imperial social order and into a new order. And what is the first thing we see

her do in this new order? She extends her hospitality: she urges Paul and his companions, saying

“if you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.”

How do we understand Lydia’s wealth? Didn't Jesus say '[i]t is easier for a camel to go through

the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God' (Matt. 19.24)?!

What's up with that?

Talking about money can be complicated. There are a lot of values we have wrapped up in

money and there are moral expectations around how we spend or save it.

We might have judgements about those who have more money than us: did they make their

money dishonestly? Do they spend their money lavishly? And then there are our judgements

around those who have less money than us: were they lazy? Did they make bad decisions?

There are plenty of Bible verses that offer us guideposts for how we can think about money and

wealth. Jesus, in particular, has a lot of say about wealth. In Jesus’s upside-down kingdom, the

last shall be first, and the first shall be last (Matt. 20.16). This proclamation comes at the end of

Jesus’s parable of the labourers in the vineyard, in Matthew 20. In this parable, a householder

goes out to hire workers for his vineyard. He hires workers at 6 a.m., 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m, and 5

p.m. At the end of the day, he tells the manager to pay the same daily wage to all the workers,

with those last hired getting paid first. Of course, this causes the workers who were hired first to

grumble. They say, “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who

have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat” (Matt. 20.12). In response, the

householder says, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius?”

(Matt. 20.13-15).

Jewish New Testament scholar AJ Levine has a unique reading of this parable. In AJ’s reading,

the householder works within the economic system at the time to make sure that everyone

receives enough money to feed themselves and their family. The focus now becomes one of

righteousness; the householder is doing what is right by requesting “from each according to his

ability and [giving] to each according to his need” (Levine, 2014). The point, says AJ, is “not

that those who have “get more,” but that those who have not “get enough.” One does the work—

in the labor force, in the kingdom—not for more reward, but for the benefit of all” (Ibid.).

Indeed, we should see this parable as characteristic of Jesus’s attitude towards wealth: Jesus is

often directly focused on the responsibility of the rich: the person in possession of wealth and

status. In this case, the householder should “open [their] hand to the poor and needy neighbour in

[their] land” (Deuteronomy 15:11).

And we see this idea— that the rich have a responsibility towards those who are poor— reflected

elsewhere in the books of the New Testament.

Zacchaeus is not told to give away his possessions. Rather, the text makes a point to tell us that

Zacchaeus either intends to give back or already has given back to the poor and repay four times

over those he has defrauded (Luke 19:1-10).

In 1 Timothy, the love of money is likewise condemned as the “root of all evil” (1 Tim 6:10), and

those who are wealthy are told to share their wealth with those who do not have it (1 Tim 6:18),

and to trust not in riches but in God (1 Tim 6:17).

Therefore it’s not money per se that is the problem; rather, holding tightly to wealth instead of

giving generously to the poor— that is the problem.

Jesus is calling us into a life that is not characterized by scarcity. In Jesus’s new order, the

righteousness of one person or group should benefit those who are less righteous. But this is not

a one-way street: like in the case of the vineyard workers, this is a mutually beneficial

arrangement— the householder provides the money and the workers provide the service. I think

it also benefits us to take this accounting out of purely economic terms: so for example, think of

the times you give freely of your time or your money with no expectation of anything in return.

Why do you do this? This goes beyond economics. You visit an acquaintance in the hospital

because they are having a tough time; you are practicing generosity and you are doing this

because it is the right thing to do. It is Jesus’s commandment that we love our neighbours as

ourselves— and that commandment, at the end of the day, calls us to a radical generosity that

tests at the boundaries of the established order and replaces the economic logic of the day.

This is what Lydia was doing when she invited Paul and his companions to stay at her place after

her conversion. Lydia, a Gentile, is asking a bunch of Jews to stay with her, and we remember

from last week that this is simply not done in the Ancient world. While hospitality was seen as a

moral virtue during this time, it was strictly segregated, particularly between Jews and Gentiles.

Again and again, over and against this strict social and religious separation, we see Jesus

entering into the homes of those he has been told he shouldn’t eat with. Though he is called “a

glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 7.34), Jesus subverts this

negative label by conducting his ministry through radical table fellowship. Scholars note that

when Jesus enters into the houses of others, he often becomes the one offering hospitality, with

his hosts becoming the recipients of that hospitality.

Jesus opens up hospitality by not only reversing the direction but multiplying the direction of

service between host and guest. This generosity reaches out to touch the wider community as

well. Through this new radical hospitality, the Holy Spirit comes to dwell not only in the guest

but in the host as well; both parties are nourished by their coming together over the generosity of

the Spirit.

I want to turn, now, to a more modern-day example of this radical hospitality.

In 1933, a 36-year old journalist in the US, a socialist, Pacifist, and a Catholic, co-founded a

social program called the Catholic Worker’s Movement. This woman, named Dorothy Day, was

guided by the knowledge that “[t]here are men of God who are working not only for their

spiritual but for their material welfare.”

Dorothy Day and her co-conspirator Peter Maurin started a house of hospitality, which offered

shelter and food to anyone who needed it. Most radically, this house didn’t require anything of

its participants; it didn’t require either religious adherence or participation, nor did it require any

work or money in exchange for food and shelter (though often participants ended up contributing

to the house as they were welcomed into the shared community). Those who lived in the house

lived alongside Dorothy and Peter, and together they did what they could to extend a radical

hospitality towards those who did not have access to a living wage, housing, or food to feed their

families.

This house of hospitality spawned hundreds of other Catholic Worker houses, and many are still

in operation today.

Day was particularly attuned, I think, to the same relational power that Jesus tapped into when he

would visit the houses of friends and acquaintances. In her autobiography, called A Long

Loneliness, Day says this about her work: “We cannot love God unless we love each other, and

to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each

other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a

banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.”

I think we’ve all had experiences of generosity coming from friends and family members. We

know what it feels like to give our time and attention to our friends when they are going through

tough times. We know what it’s like to receive care from a loved one when we are sick and can

barely get out of bed. We know the powerful and transformative potential of these experiences,

and rarely do we feel that are owed anything for what we give to our community in love.

But what do we see over and over in scripture and in the works of past- and present-day saints?

We see this same outpouring of generosity, the kind we would usually reserve for our most

cherished loved ones, given freely to the stranger, sometimes even to our enemies.

This is as true for the work of Dorothy Day as it is for the householder’s insistence that everyone

gets enough money to feed their family as it is for Lydia’s invitation of hospitality to Paul and his

motley crew of Jews.

The throughline here is generosity, the kind of generosity that recognizes the humanity of the

“other.” It is the kind of generosity that knows “I am because you are.” It is the kind of

generosity that does not keep account, but rather believes in the Good News the likes of which

Paul brought to Lydia almost 2,000 years ago. It is the kind of generosity that encourages us to

open our doors, because we cannot help, in our love of God and God’s promise for us, to share

this love with others.

Now, all of us who are gathered here today are different. We all come from different social and

economic backgrounds. Some of us are rich, and some of us are poor. Some of us are raising kids

and working full-time, while some of us are retired. There is no one way to practice radical

generosity among us. We have all been endowed with our unique spiritual gifts by the power and

grace of the Holy Spirit, and we should use these unique gifts as we are called to do so.

For some of us, radical generosity might manifest as generosity of our time. We might find that

we are being called by the Holy Spirit to use our voices to protest the ongoing famine in Gaza

and to write letters to our MPs. Since we cannot literally open our doors to the suffering and the

dispossessed who live abroad, we must instead practice hospitality through solidarity.

Maybe we are called to table fellowship, and we have time to volunteer with the Sonshine Lunch

Club Soup Kitchen that happens five days a week at St George’s and which we lead on

Wednesdays.

Maybe we can organize a clothing drive when there’s a cold snap in the valley.

For others among us, we might be called to be generous with our money, recognizing that giving

so that others may have access to adequate food and housing is what brings us all closer to the

upside-down kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.

And finally, for those of us who have neither money nor time, for those of us who find ourselves

on the receiving end of this radical generosity far more often that we are able to offer it— we

must know that we are no less a cherished member of this community than anyone else here. As

God’s children, we are beloved— we are delighted in!— because what we have to offer is more

than any money can buy. In bringing our full selves to this community, we are participating in a

radical world made new. Lydia knew this. Dorothy, too. And may we always know this for

ourselves.

Amen.