Delivered on Sunday 14 January 2007 in St George's Chapel

Acts 16: 11- 15

Children in Ireland go to school to learn all the usual subjects, concentrating, of course, on the three Rs, 'reading, writing and arithmetic'. But they have the added delight of learning their national language, Irish. They begin that study by learning basic words. The teacher will point to a picture of a dog and the class, with one voice, will bellow out madra. She will point to a boy, and they will say buachaill. But before long they will stop learning individual words and start learning phrases. An essential part of learning the Irish language is coming to terms with the pictorial nature of the language, those short pictorial phrases at the heart of story-telling. So, for example, if someone has become successful you would say he or she is ar mhuin na muice, on the pig's back. And there are literally hundreds of these little picture phrases. Those of us who have had to learn such a language are often struck by the picture phrases we encounter in other languages. During the week I was reading an article about a football match in which one of the players was credited with having had a 'purple patch' during the game. I presume that this meant that the player in question had, for some part of the game, played particularly well. But where did the phrase 'purple patch' come from?

Apparently it goes all the way back to the Horace, a poet of the first century B.C., writing in Latin. In his usage, however, the phrase is less than complimentary. He writes "Often to weighty enterprises and such as profess great objects, one or two purple patches are sewn on to make a fine display in the distance". It seems there was custom in Horace's world that people who couldn't afford designer clothing would sew purple patches onto their own cheap and cheerful clothing. Royalty, emperors, military commanders and magistrates, these were the people that could afford purple clothing. Others, if they wanted the designer effect, could make do with a couple of patches.

I've gone done this road this morning because the central character in the second lesson this morning is a woman called Lydia. We don't know much about Lydia but we do know something: she was religious, she was from the city Thyatira, and she was a dealer in purple cloth. That last detail is curious: she wasn't a haberdasher, or a seamstress; she was specifically a dealer in purple cloth. It's the kind of detail the Bible famously picks up on. I am always amused by poor old Og, who has this written about him: "For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron."[1] Now would we need to know that he had iron bedstead? And why do we need to know that Lydia was a dealer in purple cloth? In truth, I'm not sure. But I do know, as we have already discovered, that purple was an important colour for the ancients. Its status was due, at least in part, to the fact that the particular dye necessary for making the colour purple was hard to come by. First you had to catch meat-eating sea snails, and then you had to crush the snails, and then work through an elaborate process of boiling and setting and reducing until eventually you would have a liquid that could dye a garment purple. But to produce two grams of this dye you would require twelve thousand snails. It's obvious why purple clothes were only worn by the rich and famous.

Yet even before purple became the colour of choice for the up and coming ancient, it had had a special place in Jewish history. The instructions for building the Temple in Jerusalem included the specific design of those curtains that would surround the Holy of Holies, that space where, it was believed, that God would dwell. And, naturally, you will have guessed it; those curtains were to be made of various shades of purple yarn. God himself would be clothed in purple.[2]

Then there is that story of Jesus being mocked by the soldiers. They taunt him with the words "Hail, King of the Jews", and place on his head, a crown of thorns, and on his body a purple robe. They do all this without any understanding. They think 'If you are a king then dress like a king; but, of course, we know you are not'. Ironically, they dress Jesus appropriately, with a crown of suffering and the purple robes of a king. But not just any king. In the same way as the Temple in Jerusalem covered God with curtains of purple, so now, God incarnate, God among us, would be covered in a purple cloak.

The colour purple has some considerable significance in the Bible narrative, so when we hear that Lydia is a dealer in purple cloth our ears prick up. It may be just a casual piece of information or it may be a signpost to something else. Let us see. Luke has given us some precise details about Paul's travel itinerary, so we know that this little episode takes place in the city of Philippi. Paul and his friends had been in the city for a few days but on the Sabbath day they set out looking for the local synagogue. Instead of finding a synagogue, they found instead a group of women who had gathered to pray. Paul took the opportunity to preach to this gathering, telling me the story of Christ, the good news of the gospel. And one of the women listened intently to what Paul had to say; that woman was Lydia. In fact, she listened so intently, so eagerly, that she asked to be baptized. But the text tells us that not only was Lydia baptized, but so also were her whole household. No time for baptismal preparation, no time for second thoughts, no time for intellectual debate, this is now or never. If this story of Christ is true, Lydia thought, and I believe it is, then let us all be baptized.

Lydia will have understood baptism as a gift from God, and it was a gift she was ready and eagerly willing to receive. Gregory of Nazianzus, a fourth century teacher, decribed baptism as "God's most beautiful and magnificent gift. ... We call it gift, grace, anointing, ... clothing."[3] In using the last term, 'clothing', he was picking up on something Paul himself had written to the Galatians: "For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ."[4] I wonder if he explained baptism to Lydia using that idea of being clothed with Christ. For as a dealer in purple cloth, Lydia would have known the value of the gift on offer. She spent her days selling expensive purple cloth but here was an offer to be clothed with Christ, to be clothed with true purple cloth, and it was absolutely free. To be clothed with Christ, to put on Christ, to put on the purple robe of Christ, is not to put on some purple patch purely to give off a good appearance, or a reward for some purple patch of behaviour; to put on Christ is to be given the "power to live and act under the prompting of the Holy Spirit through the gifts of the Holy Spirit".[5]

May we learn to listen carefully.

[1]The Holy Bible : King James Version. 1995 (electronic ed. of the 1769 edition of the 1611 Authorized Version.) (Dt 3:11). Bellingham WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.

[2] Exodus 26:1

[3] Gregory of Nazianzus, Oratio 40, 3-4: PG 36, 361C

[4] Galatians 3:26 - 27

[5] Catechism of the Catholic Church, p. 354.