When I was in my early teens, my dad introduced me to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He must have gotten the VHS cassette for Christmas because I can distinctly remember life before The Holy Grail and life after it. After its arrival, I’m pretty sure I watched the movie well over 100 times, memorizing all the jokes and catching all the visual gags I could. It’s a silly film, but it knows it’s silly, which makes it all the more fun.
The basic plot is that King Arthur is gathering knights to join him at the Round Table in Camelot. Arthur and his squire, Patsy, set off on fake horseback, which Patsy deals with by knocking coconut halves together to sound like they’re on horses. (Something tells me the budget was too small to afford horses!) Along the way, they’re able to collect Sir Belvedere the Wise, Sir Lancelot the Brave, Sir Galahad the Pure, Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave-as-Sir-Lancelot, and Sir Not-Appearing-in-this-Film — who never appears in the film.
As Arthur and his court approach Camelot, God appears in the heavens and orders them to find the Holy Grail. So, they wander throughout England seeking it. (Why the grail would be in England is another absurdity of the story.) Along the way, they encounter many troubles. French soldiers have taken over a castle that the knights try to breach with a Trojan Rabbit, forgetting they were supposed to get inside it before their gift is accepted. They encounter the Knights who say “Ni,” who demand they bring a hedge to appease them. They fight the Black Knight, leaving him whittled down to just a torso and a head, while he still hurls threats at them. They meet Tim the Enchanter who directs them to a cave where directions to the grail are written, only this cave is protected by a vicious rabbit, who is done in only when they use the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.
They finally make it to the Bridge of Death, where they can only cross if they can answer the bridge keeper’s three questions. Robin and Galahad both fail, and are cast in the Gorge of Eternal Peril. Lancelot makes it across, and Arthur stumps the bridge keeper, who is last heard falling into the gorge himself. Eventually, they reach the castle that holds the grail, only to have the modern-day police arrive to arrest the knights for slaying a British historian much earlier in the film.
Amazing, right? I’m guessing if you already love this movie, you’re right with me, and the rest of you think I’m weird and that this movie sounds so pointless. So, sorry if you’re in that camp. I swear it’s a highlight of 20th century moviemaking.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is an adventure story where almost everything the characters do is a dead end. It reminds me of what is happening to Paul, Silas, and Timothy in Acts 16. While this story is only a few pages removed from the story of Peter and Cornelius from last week, things in Acts have progressed quite a bit. Paul, the once-bitter persecutor of Christians, is now traveling throughout the Roman Empire to share the gospel. In this chapter he’s embarking on his second of three missionary journeys.
Paul has parted ways with Barnabas, who joined him on the first journey, but he’s added Silas to his team. They head from Antioch towards Derby and Lystra. There they add Timothy to their team, a young man who will become like a son to Paul in his ministry. Things are looking up for them. They are going around to the new churches in the region and encouraging them.
But then they continue their journey into the heart of what is now Turkey. They have plans, but it appears that God has other plans. The Holy Spirit forbids them to bring their message to those parts of Asia. They kept going in that direction past where the Spirit said “no,” only to find that the Spirit continues to prevent them from spreading the gospel. N. T. Wright observes, “The only divine guidance they get is negative: not this way, not that way….Like the children of Israel in the wilderness looking for the pillar of cloud and fire, they are relying on the spirit of Jesus, and the spirit appears to be allowing them to wander this way and that without a clear sense of guidance.”
Could you imagine doing this? They have walked diagonally across Turkey, seeking to spread the gospel and to encourage new churches, only to have Jesus continually say “Nope. Not now.” This is a trip of over 700 miles, about the same as if you set out from here to walk to Atlanta, only more mountainous than that. The only positive for them was adding Timothy, but the rest seemed like a whole lot of wasted time and effort.
I think it is in our nature to want life to move in a straight line. In particular, we like to believe that if we do the right things, make the right plans, and keep our intentions and actions pure, then everything should work out. We’ve done the work, and we deserve what we get!
Only, life rarely moves in a straight line. It’s filled with detours. It’s chock full of unexpected events. Time and chance happen to us all. Even more than that, this passage sure makes it clear that there are times when we make plans and God says “No. Not yet. Not now. Not what I want.” Sure, God wants to see the gospel spread to the ends of the earth, but for some reason the time is not right. So, despite Paul’s good intentions, God says “not now.” It’s good for us to remember that sometimes the God we serve is the God of Not Now — and I think that’s a hard lesson for all of us, particularly your impatient pastor.
In the words of Meg Jenista, a pastor whom I’ve quoted two weeks in a row, “Convenience is not a gift of the Spirit.” That’s a good but hard life lesson. It’s also a good but hard faith lesson.
So, Paul, Silas, and Timothy arrive on the northwestern coast in Troas, and they are “weary, disheartened, and puzzled.” But God comes to them again, changing the “not now” to “here’s what I want you to do.” Paul has a vision about a man in Macedonia pleading with Paul to help them. It’s at this point that Luke, the author of Acts, joins the team. (Did you notice in verse ten how “they” all of the sudden changed to “we”?)
With new wind in their sails — quite literally — they take a ship from Troas, past the island of Samothrace in the Aegean Sea, and land at Neapolis. From there they walk to Philippi, which was an important Roman colony about 10 miles inland from the sea. This was a prominent city for several reasons. First, it was on the Via Egnatia, which was an important Roman trading route. Second, it was the site of the battles between Mark Antony and Brutus and Cassius, who were Julius Caesar’s assassins, an event that happened around 90 years before Paul showed up. Third, it was a place where many Roman soldiers retired. So, Philippi was a majorly important Roman colony for economic, historic, and patriotic reasons.
It’s also a place that apparently didn’t have very many Jews. Luke writes that the team went outside the city walls to a river where they guessed there was a place of prayer. He’s not talking about church camp, folks. No, a place of prayer means a synagogue, only they must not have had the requisite ten men needed to found a synagogue, so the Jews and God-fearers would gather for prayer by this river. It’s notable that Paul the Pharisee turned Christ-follower, encounters a small group of women by this river and together they talk about what God is doing in the world, evidence of how radically Jesus has changed Paul’s life.
I wonder if Paul and his team were disappointed. They had a vision and went to the big city to see it fulfilled, only to find themselves outside of the city. They were looking for a synagogue and instead found a prayer meeting made up of God-fearing women who weren’t even Jewish.
Our passage focuses on Lydia. She is what I would call a bridge person. She is in Europe, but she’s from Thyatira, which is back in Asia. Luke calls her a “worshipper of God,” which means she’s a Gentile who worships Yahweh, the God of the Jews.
Lydia is also someone whose story undercuts the expectations of her day, which is simply another way this radical good news of Jesus flips the world on its head. Paul went to Philippi with the vision of a man needing his help. Instead, he met a woman, who became the first Christian convert ever in continental Europe. She’s also a wealthy business woman. She dealt in purple cloth, which was a luxury item, as though she was selling Hermes bags or something along those lines. In many ways, she’s very similar to Cornelius, the centurion from our story last week — both in terms of stature and in the surprising openness to the gospel.
One of the accusations against the early church was that it paid no heed to Roman conceptions of class, gender, or nationality. Celsus, the first Greek to write a book trying to discredit Christianity “alleged that the church deliberately excluded educated and wealthy people because this faith appealed only to ‘the foolish,…slaves, women, and little children.’” In the Roman world, classes didn’t mix, and it was virtually impossible to change one’s class. You inherited your place in society. And in this short passage, we see how the gospel breaks down those distinctions of class, gender, and nationality. Lydia is wealthy. Paul makes tents. Yet, Paul shares the gospel with her, and the Lord opens her heart, changing not only Lydia’s life but also her whole household. She invites Paul and his team to use her home as a base of operations for their stay in Philippi.
So, if you’re keeping track, we have moved from the frustration of the Spirit saying “not now” to Paul as they traveled across Asia Minor to the unexpected success of a women’s prayer gathering outside of Philippi. God, indeed, moves in mysterious ways. Without God saying “not now,” without the vision calling him to Macedonia, and without the openness to see God doing things that defied his expectations, Paul and Lydia would never have met. Yet, they did because life does not move in a straight line.
N. T. Wright observes that, “We sometimes think it would be nice if life were not complicated, but it is, and the complexities matter. They are part of God’s world and God’s work.”
I have one more complexity to add to this story. It’s in the verses that follow what we read. Paul and his team stay in Philippi, and they make it their habit to go to the river for these weekly prayer gatherings. A young slave girl who makes money for her masters by fortune-telling sees the team and says, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” Day after day she’d do this, and Paul gets “very much annoyed” — that’s how Luke describes it — and he delivers the girl from this spirit of divination, freeing her but eliminating her owners’ income stream. They’re not happy. They haul Paul and Silas in front of the local leaders and want their pound of flesh, so the leaders order them beaten and imprisoned.
If life moved in a straight line where everything worked out for those doing God’s work, surely this wouldn’t have happened. Yet, it does because life is complex and curvy and anything but straightforward. The point of it all is that we should strive to be faithful in all circumstances, not just in the times and situations where it feels like all is well.
Paul’s missionary team went through weeks of “not now” from God as they looked longingly at all the places they could share the good news but were prevented from doing so. They believed they could do some good, but God said “not now, the timing isn’t right.”
Paul’s missionary team achieved success in a surprising place with a surprising person. Paul went to Europe looking for a “man from Macedonia,” and he encountered a “woman from Thyatira” by the river outside of Philippi. It was the start of the church that would spread throughout Europe and beyond.
Paul’s missionary team soon found themselves harassed by a fortune-teller, and soon were imprisoned for freeing her. Still, they found ways to be faithful while they waited for what God had in store for them.
Friends, we need to be open to the Spirit’s leading. Sometimes the leading is “go, do.” Sometimes the leading is “no, not for you.” Sometimes it’s “not now.” The God we know in Jesus Christ is the God of all times and circumstances, and we are at our best when we listen and obey God’s direction, even when it stops us in our tracks.
