Acts 16:11-18 A Tale of Two Women
11 From Troas we put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace, and the next day we went on to Neapolis. 12 From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony and the leading city of that district[a] of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days.
13 On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. 14 One of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. She was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. 15 When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. “If you consider me a believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my house.” And she persuaded us.
16 Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. 17 She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.” 18 She kept this up for many days. Finally Paul became so annoyed that he turned around and said to the spirit, “In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!” At that moment the spirit left her.
It’s a longer read this time…with a Latin lesson thrown in as well! That’s because I have finally got around to reading a Christmas present: a copy of Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. It has given me wonderful insights into the world the Church was born into and grew through, eventually absorbing the Roman Empire itself. The Book of Acts traces the Church’s spread through this Empire and beyond. With Mary Beard as guide, I have seen the tale of two women in particular from a fresh perspective: that of Lydia and the un-named slave girl at Philippi.
I learned that Philippi was a Roman colonia, granted that status in 42BC after Mark Antony and Octavian (later Emperor Augustus) defeated Brutus and Cassius in a power struggle. Coloniae were typically settlements of Roman citizens, in this case pensioned-off soldiers, in allied or conquered lands. Ex-soldiers received a gift of land and citizenship rights as a sort of benefits package after military service. The veterans gained the means to support themselves and the Empire gained land occupied by men (and they were all men) loyal to Rome and with a vested interest in holding that land and ensuring Roman values and ethics prevailed.
By the time Paul and his companions arrive in Philippi it is a well-established and leading colonia. It’s a fair assumption that this was very much “a Roman man’s world” and dominated by Roman values held by ex-military men with the mindset that they brought. Let’s put it this way: we might think of ‘toxic masculinity’ as a new issue, but Philippi might well have been a community where the #MeToo Movement would not have made much headway and where the motto “If you can be anything in this world, Be Kind” might have been treated with open derision and mocking laughter. Yet, remarkably, this part of the Book of Acts shows Christianity take root in Philippi through the experiences of two women. And here’s where we have to learn some more Latin!
You see, one of the women is a domina and the other is a serva. A domina (Lydia) is the Roman title, the Latin word, for a woman who is the head of an independent household. A serva (the slave girl) is the Roman title, the Latin word, for a female slave. A domina and a serva are polar opposites. They are at the two extremes of social status, financial resources, position, influence, educational level, social rank, etc. Both are making their way and living their lives in a decidedly masculine world.
How remarkable it is then that the church at Philippi has its roots in the tale of these two women: what they do and what happens to them. The genesis, the origin, the beginning, the nucleus of the church at Philippi is in the story of two women living in the same city but from opposite ends of the social spectrum. They are each, in their own way, critical to the foundation of the Church at Philippi. One as hostess and benefactress. The other as their prime evangelistic prize whose story had become the talk of the whole city. Look at the history of any church plant – then or now – and I believe we will see the same thing: the critical role of known and unknown, named and unnamed, women. Women who are otherwise invisible and in the long-term totally overlooked and undervalued.
Even though neither of them is mentioned later in Paul’s epistle to the Philippians, I find it inconceivable that the woman who hosted the evangelists and most likely the fledgling church did not hold a leading role in the Church at Philippi. As the domina hosting Paul and his team she would become their sponsor with a civic responsibility for them and their behaviour. It also seems inconceivable to me that this fledgling church took no responsibility for the slave girl who, delivered from her spirit, would have become useless to her owners. (Did the serva become an ancilla – a protected female house-slave – in the household of Lydia? I’d like to think so!) It’s cruelly ironic that the two women who are mentioned in the epistle to the Philippians (Euodia and Syntyche) only get a mention because they’ve fallen out big-time and it impacts the whole church. Yet even this highlights the crucial and fundamental place of women in the mission and ministry of the Church. As General William Booth of the Salvation Army famously said in another time and place, “Some of my best men are women.” Is there a lesson we need to relearn here?