God's Via Positiva #12 | Say Amen to Makers

0:01 Our passage for this morning, this fourth Sunday in the season of Easter, this Mother's Day, comes from the Book of Acts. The Book of Acts describes the travels of the Apostle Paul and other early Christians. As Paul and his friends visit cities and villages around the Mediterranean, they pull up a chair and start talking to anyone who is hungry for a spiritual conversation. These early Christians share their faith with all sorts of different folk. And they plant churches, new communities of believers. Today's text describes one such encounter. So listen now for God's word to you as it comes to us from Luke's travelogue, the book of Acts chapter 16, beginning with the 11th verse.

1:07 We therefore 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 in 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 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.

2:04 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. This is the word of God for you, the people of God. Thanks be to God. As an adolescent, I loved Western movies. I liked the vistas of snowy mountain passes, churning rivers, galloping horses, boisterous saloons, and the twirl of six guns snapping into their holsters. I also liked the lingo of these films. While hosting pretend cattle drives in our backyard with neighborhood friends, all of whom were mounted on one-speed bikes, we would practice our westernisms. We're burning daylight, friends.

3:12 Someone would begin, I reckon so, someone else would respond. And then off we would speed to face the bad guys around some bend in the trail. When we were inevitably ambushed by our foes, we would raise our cap guns and growl, it's time to meet your maker. I tried to snarl these words like John Wayne standing alongside Catherine Hepburn in the film Rooster Cogburn. Facing down a ruthless gang, old rooster raises his rifle and rumbles, curse your murder and hides, meet your maker, before unleashing bullet flying theory. It was a fun phrase, threatening but also sort of religious.

4:07 What I did not realize, ascribed my blue Schwinn banana seat bike, was that Rooster's Challenge had been around for a long time. A long, long time. 300 years before Christ, the philosopher Plato speaks of meeting God, the maker. And down through the centuries, other authors from Dickens to Dostoevsky have used the phrase, meet your maker. who was speaking to reporters in 1949 on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Winston Churchill quipped, I'm ready to meet my maker. Whether my maker is ready for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

5:03 And Churchill may have been right. The prime minister lived another 15 years after making that observation. my maker I like this antique sounding name for God I like it a lot I say this in part because of the maker movement have have you heard of the maker movement over the last 15 years there's been a renewed interest in this country in all sorts of crafting. More and more people have been taking up making things by hand, fabricating things that they used to purchase, fashioning everything from wooden bowls to steel knives, stirring pots of jam and canning tomatoes, knitting scarves and blankets, building chicken coops and sewing dresses, throwing clay and making music.

6:12 Some say that the maker movement embraces a return to a mindset that was prevalent in this country in the 1940s. During a time of economic hardship and international shortage, people had no choice but to make the things that they needed. others say that the maker movement harkens back to an even earlier time to a period when settlers alongside and often learning from indigenous communities were compelled to make everything that they needed to survive and thrive now these historical examples people crafting because they had no alternative, cast the current maker movement as something of an anomaly.

7:09 Why are people expressing an interest in reclaiming basic crafting skills, blacksmithing, canning, weaving, furniture making, in a time of relative prosperity? Isn't necessity the mother of invention? Or is something else driving the maker movement? Some cultural observers say that the impulse fueling a renewed interest in making things has an anti-consumerist and environmental underpinning. Makers want to live free from the shadow of big corporations, entities with the ability to churn out obscene amounts of soulless stuff on the cheap. Others suggest a prepper or survivalist mindset undergirds the maker movement.

8:17 society unravel, there's a set of skills that people will need to have in order to provide for themselves. Personally, I sense a deeper impulse in our cultural return to crafting. A spiritual impulse. To make something is to tap deep into our identity as human beings. There's something immensely satisfying, something that scratches an itch in our souls when we roll up our sleeves, prepare our materials and begin to mold and shape, cut and sew, saw and glue, write and edit, knead and bake, strum and hum. We were made to be makers. We were made by the great maker.

9:24 that's how the good book puts it before John Wayne before Winston Churchill and even before Plato scripture describes God as our maker scripture also of course describes God as creator and it's important to know that those are two different things two different words in the good book, creating and making. When God fashions something out of nothing, the Hebrew Bible tends to use the word bara. We translate bara as create. God created the heavens and the earth. When God uses raw materials to build something, the Bible uses a different word, asha. We translate asha as to make. Reaching into the mud, God says, let us make humankind in our image. The word create occurs 53 times in scripture, and most of the time creation is reserved for God. The word make occurs 2,500 times in scripture. Again and again, the Bible describes both humans and God as makers. What are some of the things that God, a shah, makes?

11:05 Well, according to the good book, God makes the beasts of the field. God makes humankind. God makes every new day. This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. God makes promises to us. God makes covenants. God makes laws. God makes righteous judgment. God makes wondrous things, says the book of Psalms. God makes new hearts grow in those who are repentant. God makes peace.

11:51 What are some of the things, Asha, that humans make in the good book? Noah makes an ark. Ruth makes a family. Hannah makes a coat. Samuel makes a cart. Jonah makes a hut. The people make shrines to worship God. The people make promises too to be faithful. Of course, people in scripture, being people, also craft things that are not so virtuous. The people make complaints. They make deceitful words. They make idols. They try to make gods in their own image. Little carvings and castings that will do their bidding.

12:47 In the face of these mistakes, the good book cautions. And then it encourages us. We have the ability, the capacity to address human need and to solve problems and to cultivate beauty by making things. What's more, scripture tells us that humans have the ability to make more than huts and coats and carts. We have the capacity, the prophets tell us, to forge justice. It's the same word, asha, make a hut, make a just world. We can use our toolboxes and sewing kits and paintbrushes to make good things happen.

13:50 And this is, in fact, the charge that God lays at our feet. We are called to shape the good in this world out of the raw materials that we are given. In today's text, the Apostle Paul travels to Macedonia to the city of Philippi. There, he and his companions stumble on a few local women down by the river, and being friendly fellows bent on sharing the gospel, they strike up a conversation. According to the book of Acts, one of these shoreside women is named Lydia.

14:35 Now, Lydia is an intriguing figure to me, even though her time on the biblical stage is admittedly brief. She makes her entrance and exit in two quick verses. Still using his words with frugal creativity, Luke, the author of Acts, tells us a lot about this remarkable woman. The first thing that we learn about Lydia is that she is a worshiper of God. She's a person of faith. What faith? Well, that's not entirely clear. Most scholars think that Lydia was Jewish, but the text doesn't say this. Perhaps the nature of her faith is left open-ended for a reason.

15:31 Maybe she was a free thinker, a person with an independent set of beliefs. Draw whatever conclusion you want. All Luke says is Lydia was a person of faith. Luke also lists this woman's hometown Thyatira. Now Thyatira was a Macedonian city famous for its dyeing of cloth. Archaeologists have found inscriptions in stone all around Thyatira indicating that an extensive guild of fabric dyers operated there. People who plunged yards of linen into kettles and pulled out cloth all the colors of the rainbow. Lydia was originally from this city of Kettlestirs. Now, though, she lives nearby in Philippi, where she carries on the same work.

16:32 And then Luke gets specific. He tells us that Lydia was a dealer in purple cloth. Now this seemingly insignificant tidbit conveys a lot of information. The materials used to make purple dye came from coastal shellfish. And the process of harvesting these shellfish and removing the portions suitable for dye made purple the rarest of colors in the ancient world, and consequently, the most expensive. This fact leads scholars to conclude that Lydia was a person of some means. She was, in all probability, a wealthy merchant. She was a maker who traded in a rare and prized commodity.

17:28 finally Luke tells us that Lydia is the head of her household she's the one making decisions when the time comes to act this businesswoman is comfortable with her authority and confident in her business dealings after Lydia and others are baptized this merchant invites the apostles to enjoy the hospitality of her home. She extends care and support to them. Here Luke tells us that she prevailed upon the apostles, which is a nice way of saying that Lydia wouldn't take no for an answer. She was a force for good. In his letter to the Romans, written after this scene takes place, the Apostle Paul describes God as one who forever works to weave things together, to take the wild twists and turns of life and forge them into something good.

18:45 I wonder if he had Lydia in mind when he wrote those words. I wonder if he was remembering all the people that he encountered in his travels who, like Lydia, when life seems uncertain and messy, step forward, to be builders of faith, shapers of hope, and knitters of the good. I wonder, in a world that desperately needs simple acts of gentleness and hospitality, if Paul was encouraging us to say amen.