Come over and help us

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

Easter 6c, Acts 16.9-15

25 May, 2025  St Bene’t’s Cambridge

Come over and help us.

When I read Paul’s vision of the Macedonian man, what always comes to mind is a rather obscure bit of New England history: In the charter granted by King Charles I in 1629 to the Puritan colonialists, the authorised colonial seal depicted a nearly-naked Native American, made modest by a bit of well-placed shrubbery, whilst from his mouth a speech scroll reads:

Come over and help us.

Over the following fifty years, initial missionary encounters that indeed included conversion and integration, a desire for a peaceful city on a hill where Europeans and Native Americans prayed and worked together…inexorably gave way to bloody wars, enslavement, and exploitation by the English colonists. And gradually the message of the Macedonian man was lost — if indeed its intention in the King’s charter had ever been anything beyond condescension and naiveté.

Today the Massachusetts state motto begins, albeit in Latin, ‘By the sword we seek peace…’ and that first generation of New England’s integrated Christian communities has been all but forgotten, Forgotten too was that first colonial motto,  spinning European colonialism as mission in the Americas,  just as Paul and his companions led the first Christian mission to Europe

It is hard to overestimate the impact the power and intention has on Christian mission; whether mission is vulnerable and listening, or if it comes backed by soldiers, slavery, and segregation.  But when your ethics teacher is the great grand-daughter of slaves, of women and men owned as chattel because of their race, you learn new things.  One is that the Holy Spirit does her work, no matter how badly we get in the way.  As Joseph tells his brothers, who had sold him into slavery: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good…to save many lives” (Genesis 50.20).

For Christian African-Americans, in the stories told by enslaved Christians and by their descendants, the very Gospel that was, in a warped and redacted form, used by slaveowners to justify their cruelty — that same Gospel nonetheless became for those enslaved women and men a Word of liberation, a Word of  hope, a Word of freedom. Asian and African theologians write of similar experiences,[1] Jesus having given not as the world gives,  and the Advocate having taught what colonisers had forgotten. 

My point here is neither “Well, it’s all okay because it worked out in the end,” no more than it is to say that only Europeans are allowed to gain  from Paul’s missionary preaching. Rather, it is to remember that Jesus does not give as the World gives.

As Paul discovered, when  drawn to Europe by a vision of a man crying “come over and help us” he instead encounters Lydia.  Here she is, this dealer in fine purple cloth, rich, confident, a householder — and a woman.  It is hard to overstate what that means in the classical world,  a woman who commands her own household. Lydia, whom the Orthodox Churches have given the title "Equal to the Apostles” —

A title she shares with Mary Magdalene,  the Samaritan woman at the well,  and Thecla who, tradition holds, after her miraculous escape from rape and execution in the arena, spent the rest of her life preaching the Gospel, dressed as a man.

In so much of Acts, we are given images of impassioned preaching in marketplaces and at crowded synagogues at trials and forums, men shouting at one another,  fighting with words and sometimes with stones. But here is a very different image.  A river outside the gates of this gold-mining Roman colony, away from the noise and the new temples and Latin inscriptions, where women gathered to pray under the plane trees and almond blossoms by the cool of the water.

Peace.

Encounter.

Humility.

Conversation.

Prayer.

A baptism by spirit and water, and the emergence of a new leader in the early church: Lydia, the first European Christian, a woman of courage, strength, and witness, householder and leader of that first European church, Equal to the Apostles, filled with the Holy Spirit.

Later generations would try to claim otherwise,  but to believe in the leadership of women is to be a Traditionalist. To recognise that mission and evangelism are acts of listening,  of meetings by the river in resistance to the powers of this world, is to rediscover that we are orthodox and traditional not when we exclude women, not when we use Scripture to exploit or abuse or divide, but when we discover the radical, listening hospitality of the Gospel.

As we prepare for the coming of Pentecost, what does it mean to be evangelists of an inclusive church? Can we reclaim for the Gospel stories of freedom and peace, at a time when the peace which the world cannot give is so desperately needed? In this place we have been redeemed and restored; like Lydia, our hearts have been opened to the word of God. Can we, like Lydia, invite others into this place of peace, untroubled and unafraid, where the water of baptism is the river of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the New Jerusalem to Philippi to Cambridge, bringing healing and hope to all.

[1] “There is a story that when the Evangelical Henry Martyn went out to Calcutta as a chaplain to the East India Company in 1805, he was appalled to discover that the recitation of the Magnificat at evensong had been banned.” Michael Doe, “Profit and proselytism”, The Church Times 15 November 2013