(Daniel 12:1-4; Revelation 3:1-6)

I thought about calling this sermon “Zombie Church,” and then I thought: what would Dan do with that when he prepared the slides? I decided I didn’t want that on my conscience, so I stayed with this more theological, if less vivid, title. Either way, you get the picture: this was a church that appeared from the outside to be alive, but was dead on the inside, where it mattered. As such, this is quite a harsh letter, with no praise for the church at all. There are a few people left who have remained faithful to Jesus, and they will be rewarded; for the rest, there is only a stern warning to wake up and repent before the judgment of God falls.

This warning is expressed in extraordinarily vivid and powerful language. If we get the sense that the church in Sardis was living off their reputation, off the accomplishments of the past, this was no less true of their city. Before Ephesus rose to be the great city of the Anatolian peninsula, what we now know as Turkey, Pergamum was; but before Pergamum, and far greater, was Sardis, one of the most famed cities of the ancient world. The city was founded some time around 1200 BC, about the time the Israelites were coming up out of Egypt; the heart of the city, its acropolis, was a natural stronghold like that of Pergamum, only far more so. The upper city of Sardis sat on a small plateau 1500 feet above the valley of the Hermus river—a plateau bounded on almost all sides by sheer cliffs. Only at one point, where it connected to Mt. Tmolus, was there any access at all by road, and that road was narrow and steep. Even at the time of the Revelation, to capture Sardis was proverbially to do the impossible.

Sardis was the capital of the kingdom of Lydia, which we’ve mentioned several times in this series, and the security it gave its rulers is one of the reasons for their rise to power. The other is that the Pactolus, a small river that flowed through the lower city, had gold in its bed, which was the foundation of the kingdom’s great wealth. The first king of Lydia, King Gyges—who may have been the “Gog” mentioned in Ezekiel, and referred to again in Revelation 20—used that wealth and his impregnable fortress-capital to build a powerful kingdom. He and his successors allied themselves with powers like Sparta, Egypt, and the Phoenicians; it seems likely they were the kingdom known to the Israelites as Lud, mentioned several times in the Old Testament.

And then King Croesus declared war on Cyrus and his advancing Persian empire. Croesus invaded, fought a couple battles, then withdrew to Sardis and sent his allies home for the winter, thinking Cyrus would never follow him—but Cyrus did, and launched a sneak attack on the city. Croesus abandoned the lower city, pulling his troops behind the walls of his citadel to endure a seige, confident that it could not be taken; but after just two weeks, Sardis fell, because Croesus’ soldiers didn’t bother to keep watch. They knew that no one could possibly climb the cliffs to the acropolis, so they didn’t notice when someone did; that someone then opened the gates and let the Persian army in. Ironically, a few centuries later, that story repeated itself: in another war, during another siege, the enemy climbed the walls and opened the gates, and Sardis fell.

Up until that point, the city had retained most of its importance—it had been, for example, the western capital of the Persian empire; but after it was taken by force the second time, it began to fade, and was soon eclipsed by the rising power of Pergamum. It continued to be a prosperous city, but one which lived on the glories of the past rather than on hopes for the future.

From that point on, not much changed in Sardis until 17 AD, when a terrible earthquake struck the area. Sardis wasn’t the only city affected, but it was by far the hardest hit; Pliny the Younger called it the worst disaster in human memory. The great problem was that the mountain spur on which the upper city was built wasn’t rock, it was just ordinary soil, and not even particularly dense soil at that; and it appears that the earthquake caused a large portion of the acropolis to collapse. This, incidentally, is why I didn’t show you a picture of Sardis as I did of Pergamum; what remained of the plateau has been further reduced by 2000 years of erosion, and there just isn’t much left. They did rebuild the city and put up new walls on what remained of the acropolis, but the disaster was a tremendous blow to Sardis’ economic health.

We have, then, a city which should never have been taken by force, but which had been—twice—because its defenders failed to keep alert, and thus failed to notice when their enemies came upon them like a thief in the night; and we have a city that had been struck by disaster and lost much of what had made it great, and had been forced to rebuild and strengthen what remained to it in order to keep going. And we have a church in that city which needed to learn the lessons of that history, for it too was living in the past, failing to pay attention as its strength crumbled. They had been so polluted by the idolatry of their culture that they were all but dead spiritually, and they didn’t even know it.

This is why there’s no hint of persecution in this letter—the spirit of compromise that was tempting the church in Pergamum and had taken root in the church in Thyatira had completely conquered the church in Sardis. It may well have been a different compromise, for the Jewish community in the city was large and powerful—the synagogue was not only huge, it was part of the complex of buildings that made up the cultural center of the city. Whatever the content of their compromise, however, what mattered was that the church had sold out the gospel in order to accommodate themselves to their culture. They had no price to pay and no sacrifices to make for belonging to the church, because they’d gotten comfortable with the world; indeed, they’d settled down quite nicely and gone to sleep, and were in real danger of never waking up.

For us, it’s easy to take this and say, “This is our former denomination, this is why we’re leaving”; and that’s true, as far as it goes. The main line of the Presbyterian Church in this country has a long and honorable history, but its leadership has gotten comfortable with the world and gone to sleep, and the life is bleeding out of the denomination. That said, if we stop there, we’re kidding ourselves, because the temptation to get comfortable with the world, to just give people what they want and tell them what they want to hear, is there for every church.

It’s a particularly insidious one in our fractured culture, shot through with subcultures—that’s why “find a target group and give them what they want” has been a popular church-planting strategy over the last few decades. It’s easy for us to tell ourselves that we’re standing boldly against the world when we’re opposed to someone else’s culture, and never notice the ways in which we’ve compromised with the culture in which we actually live. It’s easy to focus on all the things in God’s word that don’t make anyone here uncomfortable, and just ignore everything that might. It’s easy to coast on what we’ve already accomplished, which is why the seven last words of the church are “We’ve never done it that way before.” Our church in Bellingham was only seven years old when we joined it, but it was already getting that way; which is why it no longer exists.

Look what Jesus says to the church in Sardis: “Be vigilant. Remember what you received and heard; keep it, and repent.” “What you received and heard”—the gospel of Jesus Christ. Repent of putting anything else at the center of the church, repent of following anyone else; return to Christ, remember who he is and what he has done for you. The only thing that keeps the church alive, the only thing that keeps us from sliding into compromise with the world, is to be vigilant to remember—to continue, over and over again, to re-center ourselves on Jesus Christ and his gospel of grace, to focus ourselves on him and allow his Holy Spirit to shape everything we do.

(Numbers 24:10-19, Psalm 2:7-9; Revelation 2:18-28)

In Acts 16, Luke writes, “From Troas we set sail for Samothrake, and the next day on to Neapolis. From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony which is an important city in Macedonia, and we stayed there several days. 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 gathered there. One of those listening was a woman named Lydia, a trader of purple cloth from the city of Thyatira, who was a worshiper of God; the Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. When she and the members of her household were baptized, she said, ‘If you consider me a believer in the Lord, come stay at my house.’ And she persuaded us.”

That’s the only other New Testament mention of Thyatira, which fittingly isn’t really about Thyatira at all; but it captures the fact that what importance the city had came through trade. It was actually founded during the rise of the kingdom of Pergamum as a garrison town to help hold the border against them; but it sat in the middle of a broad, shallow river valley, so it wasn’t really a defensible location, and it wasn’t long before Pergamum captured it. That’s pretty much the way the city’s history went, being repeatedly captured, sacked, and plundered, until the Roman conquest brought peace; with peace, its location went from being a problem to being a benefit, as the city became a center of trade and manufacturing.

We talked several weeks ago about the trade guilds and their importance in economic and social life; in Thyatira the guilds were unusually numerous, and unusually powerful. Indeed, they had more than just trade guilds, they had equivalents to such organizations as the Optimist Club, homeowners’ associations, and even the YMCA (the Young Men’s Pagan Association, perhaps?). The guilds were at the heart of the city, physically as well as socially; the whole life of the city flowed through them, and the guilds were where everything happened.

As we’ve said before, this was a problem for the church because the trade guilds were religious organizations—each one had its patron god or goddess, and when they gathered, it was in part for worship. Caesar worship wasn’t an issue in Thyatira, but that didn’t make things any easier for Christians there. As many times as the city had been conquered, and with all the trade that flowed through its gates, its population was extremely diverse both racially and culturally, including settlers from as far away as Egypt and Persia. As a consequence, religious syncretism—the combination of multiple religions into one mongrel faith—was common; and of particular interest for us, the small Jewish community in Thyatira appears to have blended themselves into the mix.

As a result, compromise was a major problem in Thyatira as in Pergamum, though for different reasons. Instead of political pressure to conform backed by the threat of persecution, there was the subtler temptation just to go along to get along. Don’t make waves, don’t rock the boat, don’t make such a big deal out of your differences—nobody else does around here. Just go with the flow. That temptation was having its effect, and that message had taken root. Thyatira was in many ways a strong church, loving and faithful, bearing witness to the love of Christ in their care and service for others; and not only were they strong, they were growing. But for all that, they had feet of clay: they had given place to a prophet of compromise whose teaching was undermining everything.

Thus Christ is described here in language taken from Daniel 10:6, from the description of the man who appears to Daniel in a vision. The word translated “burnished bronze” is a word from Thyatira—it was a high-quality alloy, perhaps bronze but more likely brass, which was one of the products for which the city was known. Some of those in the church might have been workers in brass, and perhaps members of that guild. The description, then, gives force to the message: the church in Thyatira must stand firm against idolatry, hold fast to the truth of God, and not let themselves be undermined by the temptation to conform to the ways and practices of their pagan culture. Jesus calls us to worship him and him alone, and that is a point on which he will brook no compromise, no matter how we may rationalize it or seek to excuse it.

The situation was particularly bad in Thyatira because they didn’t just have false teachers in the church (which was the complaint against Pergamum)—they were actually tolerating a false teacher, a self-proclaimed prophet. The letter compares her to Jezebel, the pagan queen of King Ahab who led Israel into all kinds of idolatry; this suggests that she and her followers weren’t outsiders in the congregation, they were entrenched in the leadership. The situation is clearly quite serious, and provokes a lengthy word of stern judgment against her and all her disciples.

And note how that word of judgment ends: “Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds”—because his eyes are like blazing fire, burning through everything we use to disguise or conceal our true thoughts, feelings, and motives—“and I will repay each of you according to your works.” You might look at that and say, “Wait a minute—didn’t Jesus just praise the Thyatiran church for their works?” Yes, he did; but for those who followed Jezebel, their good works no longer flowed out of their love for God and desire to please him. As such, they no longer did please him.

I imagine someone from the Thyatiran church hearing this letter read and saying, “But, but, if I don’t belong to the guilds I’ll lose my business! And then I won’t have any money to live on, or to give to the church! Does Jesus want me to go bankrupt? That isn’t reasonable! Look at me—I tithe, I volunteer, I’m an elder—just because I go to the guild meetings and they have a little worship service for Apollo doesn’t make me any less of a Christian!” But then, I imagine someone now saying, “Yes, I know the Bible says we should give generously—but that’s not the way to run a business, especially in this economy.” Or, “Turn the other cheek, forgive your enemies—you have no idea how they hurt me! It’s unfair you even ask me that, and I’m sure God understands why I’m still angry.” Or, “You may think the Bible says I can’t have sex with that person, but this is who I am and this is what I need, and a loving God would never ask me to deny myself like that.” And then always the appeal to rest of their lives, and the insistence that this thing can’t be wrong because “I’m just as good a Christian as you are.” Which may be true, but so what? I’m not good enough either. It isn’t the point.

The point is, if faithfulness to Jesus means we have to lose a job, or give up a relationship, or forgive someone who absolutely doesn’t deserve it, then it doesn’t matter if we think it’s reasonable or not—that’s the price he calls us to pay. All our other good works won’t let us evade that. To borrow a line from Elizabeth Rundle Charles (which is usually misattributed to Martin Luther), it’s where the battle rages that the loyalty of the soldier is proved; if we stand firm on the word of God at every point except where the world and the devil are actually attacking us, then we might be professing Christianity, but we are not confessing Christ.

But here’s the good news: that sacrifice will not go unrewarded. The one who overcomes, who holds fast to Jesus and follows him faithfully, without compromise, will share in his authority and his glory in the kingdom of God. Jesus doesn’t ask us to give things up in this world because he likes to see us give things up, or because he doesn’t want us to be happy; it’s because he has something much, much better in store for us. As C. S. Lewis put it, the problem isn’t that our desires are too strong, it’s that they’re too weak. “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

(Numbers 25:1-3; Revelation 2:12-17)

“Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” This is old, old wisdom, a minor variation on Jesus’ rebuke to Peter in Matthew 26, and a pattern which we see over and over in history. The people of Pergamum knew this well, for theirs was a city that had lived by the sword. Its early prominence rested on its prominence—a thousand-foot-high granite mesa overlooking the Caicus River which made a formidable natural stronghold. Pergamum maintained a high degree of independence under the Persian Empire, before joining with the Greeks and Macedonians as Alexander the Great swept through; after his empire broke into four pieces, the rulers of the city broke free and established themselves as a small kingdom along the river valley. When the Gauls moved into the Anatolian peninsula, Attalus I of Pergamum was the first to defeat them. Unfortunately, his successors overreached themselves; in an effort to expand their kingdom, they allied themselves with Rome, which ultimately brought their independence to a permanent end as a part of the Roman Empire.

Even so, Pergamum maintained its prominence for some time. Ephesus may have been the richest city in Asia Minor by the time John wrote, but Pergamum was still the capital of the province; and while Ephesus had surpassed it as a center of Caesar worship, that was a recent development, and the imperial cult was far more important in the city of Pergamum. Attalus I only claimed the title of king of Pergamum after his defeat of the Gauls; at the same time, he also claimed the title “Savior,” and a great temple to Zeus Soter—Zeus the Savior—was built as a consequence. His descendants also built a temple to themselves, and one of them formally claimed the title “Theos”—“God.” Worship of the ruler was part of the life of Pergamum long before the Romans came; once the city accepted Roman rule, worship of Caesar fit right in to that tradition.

Given that, it’s easy to understand why Jesus would say to this church, “I know you live where Satan’s throne is.” The first Caesar to be worshiped as a God was Augustus, and the first temple built to him, in 29 BC, was in Pergamum. The temple of Zeus Soter, associated from the beginning with the worship of their kings, loomed large in the city with its thronelike altar. Pergamum had been well ahead of most of the empire in its adoption of Caesar worship, and it was common there very early on to refer to Caesar as “Savior” and “Lord of the world”; and because it was the capital, it was there that Caesar had his throne in Asia Minor, and there that the proconsul ruled in his stead. The symbol of his power was the gladius, the leaf-bladed two-edged sword of justice.

As such, the religious pressure on the church in Pergamum was immense. Jesus commends them for their faithfulness in the face of that pressure; they would not deny their faith in him even when persecution built to the point of the death of one of their own. They were bearing up under the weight of public hostility and refusing to break, continuing to bear witness to the love of Jesus Christ against all the hatred of Satan.

But if they would not break, they were beginning to bend. The lines between the church and the culture were sharp—as sharp as the edges of the proconsul’s sword of judgment; the differences between those who worshiped Christ and those who worshiped Caesar and Zeus were clear and unmistakable, and it was on those lines that they faced persecution. It’s no surprise that some were looking for ways to avoid persecution by blurring those lines and dulling those sharp edges, and so the Nicolaitans had arisen and gained a foothold in the church. It appears they were teaching that it was acceptable for Christians to participate in idol worship—with the worship of Caesar no doubt the primary focus—as long as they didn’t really believe in the idols, the way most Romans undoubtedly didn’t. The church has always affirmed that Christ alone is Lord and he alone is to be worshiped; the Nicolaitans were setting that aside.

Now, this doesn’t mean they were trying to destroy the church. Most likely, they believed that joining in the festivals of idol worship with their sacrificial feasts and their sexual immorality was harmless, just an empty gesture that would fulfill patriotic obligations and enable Christians to keep their jobs and their businesses. Maybe they even argued that participating in the festivals honoring Caesar or Zeus or Asklepios was a form of cultural engagement, a way to be relevant to the culture and thus make their Christian outreach more popular and effective.

Jesus rejects this, comparing the Nicolaitans to Balaam. You might not remember his story, except for something about a donkey; he was a prophet whom King Balak of Moab hired to curse Israel as they traveled through the wilderness, but who blessed them instead, because he was a true prophet. You can see that if you look at Numbers 22-24. However, he also wanted the money Balak had offered him, and so he taught Balak to use the women of Moab to lure the Israelites astray—to have sex with them and join them in their feasts worshiping their pagan gods. Balaam couldn’t curse them, but he could teach Balak to tempt them into sin so that they would curse themselves, and they did.

What the Nicolaitans are doing is anything but harmless, because we become like what we worship, and what we do shapes how we think. If you’re familiar with the story of the Facebook game Cow Clicker, it was created as a satire on social games like FarmVille, but it quickly became a serious game which thousands of people played devotedly—why? Because the action of playing the game changed how they thought about it. Going out and saying “Caesar is Lord” or affirming by their actions that Zeus deserved their worship would have the same effect on the Christians of Pergamum. You can’t keep doing something you don’t believe in for very long—either you’ll quit doing it, or your beliefs will begin to change to match your behavior. And of course, far from convincing others to worship Jesus, seeing Christians worshiping the gods of the culture would only teach the culture that it didn’t need to change.

The same is true with our own Nicolaitans today. There are a lot of voices in the church urging cultural compromise for the sake of being relevant, or non-judgmental, or loving, or enlightened; and to those who feel that temptation Jesus speaks now as then as the one who has the sharp two-edged sword. Hebrews tells us that God’s word is so sharp, it pierces even to the division of soul and spirit—which is to say, it’s so sharp it can even do the impossible, dividing the indivisible. We need to feel the sharp edge of his word, and we need to live accordingly.

We are not faithful to Jesus when accommodating ourselves to the desires and idolatries of our culture is more important than submitting ourselves to his will; nor are we faithful to him when we are willing to publicly compromise our worship of him to keep people from being mad at us. It doesn’t matter whether our idols are “conservative” or “liberal,” or what part of our culture holds our allegiance; the only thing that matters is that they are not God and do not deserve our first priority. God alone, Christ alone, is to be worshiped; everything else must come second.

(Psalm 23, Psalm 135:15-18; Revelation 2:8-11)

What do you think of when I mention myrrh? It was one of the gifts offered by the wise men to Jesus and his parents, and as the carol “We Three Kings” reminds us each year, the perfume of myrrh was one of the smells of death. Myrrh and aloes were used in funeral preparations to make the body ready for burial; and during the Crucifixion, Jesus was offered wine mixed with myrrh to help ease the pain. Myrrh is strongly associated with suffering and death. Wondering why I’m talking about this? The Greek word for myrrh was “smyrna.”

Now, this is almost certainly a coincidence, but it was understood to be a significant one, because Smyrna was a city of suffering in both mythology and its history. In myth, it was connected with the story of Niobe, who mourned for her children (who were killed by Apollo and Artemis for her pride). In recorded history, as the Kingdom of Lydia was rising to the power that would make its King Croesus famed for his wealth, Smyrna fought them off for many years before they were finally overcome. In revenge, the Lydians destroyed the city. People continued to live there, but they were not allowed to rebuild the walls, mint coins, or do anything else that a city could do. It was over three centuries before the city of Smyrna was allowed to come back to life—and they did think of it as a resurrection, comparing their city to the mythical phoenix.

Another important point about Smyrna is that it was regarded as an unusually beautiful city (especially by Smyrnians, who loved to brag about it). They praised it for its harmonious architecture, rising symmetrically to its battlements, and then to the fortified top of Mount Pagus that rose behind the city. They used various images to express this, but their favorite was the crown; this became the primary symbol for the city, appearing on all its coins. It was not, however, a crown of life. When the city of Smyrna sought to honor one of its citizens, the highest honor it had to give was a crown—and in every case we know of, the crown was awarded posthumously.

Finally, it appears that the Jewish community in Smyrna was particularly unpopular, and particularly hostile toward the Gentiles of the city; this resulted in a stark division between Christians and Jews in Smyrna, with almost no Jewish converts, and exceptionally vicious persecution of the church by the local Jews. To give you an idea, when Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, was burned alive a century later, some of the Jews actually went out on the Sabbath to gather fuel for the fire. Combine that with everything else that we’ve talked about, and you can see why the church in Smyrna was suffering.

Which makes it remarkable that Christ has no complaint against them, only praise and encouragement. They have been suffering, they are oppressed and poor, but they have remained faithful, and their hearts have not grown hard or cold; they have not lost their first love. There’s no major problem with the church, nothing big they have to address—they just need to be prepared to hold fast, because as bad as things have been for them, worse times yet are coming.

This is why he says in verse 10, “Do not fear.” You are going to suffer, but don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid, because the one who’s speaking to you is the first and the last, the one who died and came to life. He was there at the beginning, he’s already there at the end, and he’s here all along the way, all through life, every step. He is always present, always faithful, and he’s already faced the worst this world can possibly do to you. They can abuse you, they can torture you, they can kill you—he’s been through all of it, he knows it all well, and he knows what he’s asking you to bear, because he already bore all of it for you. You will not have to bear it alone, because he bears it with you.

And here’s the key: “Be faithful even to death”—not just up to that point, but all the way through it—“and I who died and came to life will give you the crown of life.” Here the echoes of culture ring loud. They could look out at their city, which had been destroyed and then reborn, which gave out crowns but only to be put on people’s tombs, and which had the power to take their lives, and know that they did not need to fear because someone far more powerful was on their side—the one who is Lord even of life and death. They did not need to fear because death was not the end, and did not mean defeat; even suffering and death were included and overcome in the plan of God.

This wasn’t a new thought. After all, the psalmist doesn’t say, “Even though you lead me near the valley of the shadow of death, you show me a way around it so I don’t have to pass through.” The thing is, though, a lot of people live as if God had made them that promise, and they don’t hear his word telling them otherwise. We see the reason for that in Psalm 135: we become like what we worship. What we put first in our lives is what we worship most truly, and when we set our hearts on things other than God—when what we want most and love most are things of this world—then we grow spiritually deaf and blind, because the things of this world cannot give sight, and cannot teach us to hear. That’s why these letters are addressed to “him who has an ear.

Being deaf to the voice and call of God is a terrible thing, but never more than when suffering comes—and it always does. We all pass through the valley of the shadow of death sometimes; for those who are there because they’ve wandered in by themselves, it’s a fearful place, with no certain hope and no clear direction. But if we find ourselves in the valley of the shadow and we know ourselves to be sheep of the Good Shepherd, then we have hope and we have a direction; we know that we’re only there because he has led us there, that he is guiding us through it each step of the way, and that he will lead us out the other side.

And yes, the time will come when the shadow will close around us completely, and we will finally emerge not into the light of this world, but into the life of the next; but for those who walk with Christ, even that is nothing to fear, for it is the final victory. Those who are faithful even to death share the victory and resurrection of Christ, and live to die no more; the one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death. This is our promise through times of trial and tribulation; this is our hope in the face of our enemies.

(Genesis 2:8-9, Isaiah 6:1-10; Revelation 2:1-7)

What would you say are the four most important cities in the world? According to the global management consulting firm A. T. Kearney—I saw this in National Geographic at my in-laws’ house a couple weeks ago—they are New York City (no shock), London, Tokyo, and Paris, with Hong Kong at #5. Now, that factors in things like cultural experience—Paris is that high in part because of the cathedrals and the museums—so if you’re thinking in terms of power, you might arrange that differently; for my part, I think they’re crazy to list Beijing down at #15, given the looming significance of China as a military and economic power. Still, if we all made our own lists and combined them all, I’d bet it wouldn’t be much longer than four.

In the Roman Empire at the end of the first century, the list was even shorter. Rome was most important, of course, but among the provincial cities, three clearly dominated: Alexandria in Egypt, Syrian Antioch, and Ephesus in Asia Minor (which covered the western part of modern-day Turkey). Asia Minor was perhaps the richest of all Roman provinces, and Ephesus was its biggest and most important city—it had a quarter-million people, which was huge in the ancient world. It was a great seaport with a superb natural harbor at the mouth of the Cayster River, and through it flowed three major trade routes between Rome and the East; this made it an extremely important commercial center, and contributed to its great wealth.

Now, I said two weeks ago that we must understand the historical and cultural context if we’re going to be able to understand Revelation. I spent some time laying out the general context—if you weren’t here that Sunday, it would help to pull up the first sermon in this series and either read it or listen to it; we also need to look at some specific things for Ephesus, because this letter—like the next six—uses the particular history and situation of the city to make its point.

First, the city had been completely destroyed twice, and each time rebuilt on a completely different site—if you wanted to mark Ephesus on a map, you’d have to ask which one, at what point in history. The great biblical scholar William M. Ramsay dubbed it “the City of Change.” At the time of this letter, there was the threat of yet another change: the silting-up of the great harbor by the Cayster River, which would destroy the city. That did eventually happen, which is why the ruins of Ephesus now sit several swampy miles from the Turkish coast.

Second, Ephesus was a city of tremendous religious importance. I noted two weeks ago the temple of Domitian that was built there—as a center of Caesar worship it was second in importance only to Rome; but that paled in significance next to the great temple of Artemis, one of the famed seven wonders of the ancient world. The donations and gifts it attracted had done as much as trade to make Ephesus rich and powerful. And of particular importance for our passage, while the temple was the largest building in the ancient world, the original shrine out of which it had grown was a tree shrine. The tree was the emblem of the presence of the goddess in her sanctuary at the heart of the vast building; it was the principal symbol of Ephesian religion. The promise of the tree of life, then, isn’t only drawing on Genesis 2, it’s also an assertion that what the Ephesians claimed for Artemis in fact belonged to God.

Besides the cultural context of this letter, we also need to note the biblical context. If you remember a couple years ago when we worked through 1 Timothy, or if you happen to have pulled those sermons up more recently, you know that I argued that Paul’s central concern in that letter is to help Timothy deal with a group of false teachers who are doing great damage to the church in Ephesus; it’s clearly an urgent situation, and everything in the letter is aimed at stopping the spread of heresy. The purpose of the letter is to keep the false teachers from leading the church completely astray from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So what do we see here? “You have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false.” They have overcome the false teachers and held fast to the truth, even in the face of hostility and opposition from their society. Paul’s concerns are no longer an issue—the church is strong, they’re working hard, they know the truth, they’ve got it right. They are an example to the other churches.

But. “I hold this against you,” Jesus says: “You have forsaken the love you had at first.” Some commentators believe this means they had lost their love for one another—that they had spent so much time and energy fighting for the truth that their hearts had hardened; suspicion and mistrust had eaten away at their relationships with each other. Others say that this clearly refers to their love for God, though really, you can’t separate the two; if one, then the other. Gregory Beale argues that the point is that they were no longer expressing love for Christ by witnessing to him in the world; that’s too narrow, but it is an emphasis in the broader point.

We need to understand the letter as a whole in the light of verse 1. You may have registered that Christ describes himself here in language that refers back to chapter 1; this is true of all seven letters, and in each case, it ties in to the message of the letter. Here, the reference comes from 1:13 and 16: Christ is the one who holds the seven stars in his right hand and who walks among the seven golden lampstands. He has authority over the angels of the seven churches—they are in his hand, in his control—and he is present among the seven churches, watching them and watching over them. He knows what’s going on, he knows what they’re doing and not doing, and he has both the right and the power to command them to change. As well, this language reminds the Ephesians (and us) that Christ is the source of their light, and the one whose light they are called to shine. It’s about him, not about them, and not about us.

Ephesus was a proud church. Theirs was a mighty city, and they were the mother church from which the other churches of Asia Minor were planted; and unfortunately, fighting for truth against those who are servants of the lie, as Paul says in 1 Timothy, tends to breed more spiritual pride. They had been fighting these battles, and all their energy and passion had gone into the fight, and all their focus had been on the fight; and when that happens, when you pour yourself into a fight like that, it will change your heart if you’re not careful. You start off fighting for truth because you love Jesus, and after a while, you’re fighting for truth because you love truth; given long enough, you fight because you love being right, and it’s all about you.

Is that where the Ephesians were? It seems a reasonable guess. Christ begins his message to them in a way that emphasizes his primacy. This isn’t all about the Ephesians, it isn’t about them proving their supremacy or superiority by winning theological arguments; it’s about Jesus. The light of the church, the light of the stars and the lampstands, doesn’t come from the church, and it doesn’t belong to them; it comes from Jesus. Doctrinal purity is important, because our teaching is one of the glasses through which the light shines—false doctrine obscures or distorts the light—but it is not itself the light. The light is the character and goodness and love and grace of God, and though the church at Ephesus has their doctrine all in order, the light of God is nevertheless being hidden by their lack of love. Just as their city is fighting for its life against the silt that threatens to fill in its harbor, so the church is fighting for its life against the pride and harshness that had silted up its people’s hearts. If they do not repent of their sin and return to the love of Christ, they will cease to be truly a church, and he will remove them.

Now, we know from Ignatius that the Ephesian church took this warning to heart, but they still stand for us as a cautionary example. We must stand for truth, because God is truth, and false teaching can be absolutely destructive; we cannot let it slide. We must also remember what Paul wrote in Ephesians, that “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” Love cannot exist without truth, but truth is not truth without love; and unfortunately, fighting with people doesn’t tend to make us love them.

As we fight for the truth, we must take care that the fight does not harden our hearts, that we do not grow proud and cold. As we stand against our former presbytery, we must be intentional about loving them, and about praying for them and for the PC(USA); and more than that, as we fight for the truth, we must take care to remember why we fight. We must never let our focus be on the battle, but only on Christ. Everything we do should be about him, not us, and for him, not us; everything we do should be out of love, because we love him and we love the people he has placed in our lives, and we want to please him.

(Isaiah 44:6-8, Daniel 7:9-14; Revelation 1:9-20)

In his 1920 poem “Gerontion,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign’:/The word within a word, unable to speak a word,/Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year/Came Christ the tiger.” That was, incidentally, seven years before his conversion to Christianity. It’s a striking passage. The world asks God for a sign and gets the Incarnation, which Eliot captures vividly—“The word within a word, unable to speak a word, swaddled with darkness”—which was quite a swerve for the world, quite unexpected, but of course familiar and comfortable to us now; and then we get the swerve, the jolt from out of left field: “In the juvescence of the year,” in its youth, its springtime, “came Christ the tiger.” Christ the tiger. That’s not what we expect; which rings true, because neither was he. That image brings us back up against a Jesus who doesn’t fit our storyline of how things are supposed to go.

What is the tiger? Well, here’s another line, later in the poem: “The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.” Christ? Well, uncomfortably, yes. In a number of ways. For one thing, it’s not biblical language, but it captures the way that the Spirit’s work of purifying our hearts sometimes feels threatening, as if it were an attack on us. That’s just part of the picture, though; Christ the tiger is Christ as judge, as the one who not only passes sentence but executes it. That isn’t Jesus as we like to think of him; increasingly, our culture wants to boil Jesus down to being all about love, and then leave that as vague as possible so that it’s nice and stretchy. That’s not how Jesus appears to John. We see Jesus here as the Son of Man of Daniel 7, and also as the Ancient of Days; we see him as the judge of all the earth.

Notice John’s reaction: “I fell at his feet as though dead.” Coming to grips with the holiness of God and the reality that he will judge the world has that effect; it tends to make it clear why the Bible says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, because in the light of God’s glory, our evasions, rationalizations, and self-justifications are exposed as the inadequate things they are. When we see Jesus as the holy judge, we cannot deny that we deserve judgment.

And yet, we want to deny it, and so the modern reflex is to deny that we have to see Jesus as judge. After all, didn’t he say, “Don’t judge?” (He didn’t, actually, but good luck making that point.) Talking about judgment is negative, it’s Old Testament religion, it’s reactionary and intolerant and even un-Christian. Worst, we’re told, it’s a denial of the love of God, because the spirit of the age insists that love and judgment are incompatible; thus you have Rob Bell write a book arguing (rather mushily and without quite standing up for it) that no one goes to Hell, and what does he call it? Love Wins. Because if there’s such a thing as eternal judgment, that must mean love has lost.

But here’s the thing, and we talked about this last year on 1 John: that’s a human definition of love. That’s not God’s definition, and that’s not how he sees it. Look at the context of Isaiah 44, where our passage this morning is immediately followed by a polemic against idols and those who worship them; on either side, we see God’s promise of redemption, but we also see the warning of judgment for those who dishonor him. The two are woven together; his love for his people emphatically does not mean that he doesn’t care what they do or whom they worship or how they live. In truth, he judges them because he loves them; it’s because he loves them that he wants them to change their ways and repent of their sin.

Put another way, we might say that God judges us because we matter to him and what we do matters, because we are important enough to take seriously. If God never judged anyone and everyone ended up in heaven regardless, that would mean that this life doesn’t matter, and that what we do with our lives doesn’t matter. Our lives would be of no consequence—they would be inconsequential. Which means that we would be inconsequential. We would be unimportant, too insignificant to bother with. This is the logical conclusion of a judgment-free faith; and it leads ultimately to Hell breaking loose on earth. Part of the gospel message is that our actions have eternal consequence, because we are beings of eternal consequence—and that God loves us so much that he took the consequence of our sin on himself, that he who is our Judge might be our Redeemer. This is why the first and the last, the living one, is also the one who died and rose again. Judgment is morally necessary if anything meaningful is to be real, even love.

That’s a countercultural statement these days, but deep down I think we all know it’s true. On the one hand, we resist the idea of judgment because we don’t want to face the idea that we might deserve it; no one wants to be in the wrong, no one wants to be guilty as charged. On the other, we know the hurts we have suffered, we see the abuse of children, the suffering of war and the evils of tyranny, we see the damage we have done to our world, and how can all that belong in heaven? It isn’t possible to acknowledge all that and refuse to judge unless you reach a state of total indifference, or total despair.

The fact of it is, we cannot stand nowhere, and we cannot see the world from no point of view; we cannot believe without someone or something to believe in, and we cannot act without a reason and a goal—some idea that there is something good we can accomplish, or some way that we can make things better than they are. To insist that there is nothing and no one deserving of judgment as sinful, to hold that view consistently, we would be forced in the end to conclude that there is nothing and no one we can truly call good; and if that’s the case, life is little more than a ghastly joke. Otherwise, there must be a judge. The only question is who, and on what grounds, and by what right.

Of course, for all of us, there is the clamoring voice of the ego that insists that I am the center of the world, and thus I am the only one who has the right to judge; the trouble for the church comes when we give into that temptation without realizing it, when we start passing our own judgments in the name of God. That breeds a terrible spiritual pride because it blinds us to a critically important truth: the judgment of God begins with the people of God. We see that here. Christ appears to John as the judge of all the earth, he commands John to write to the seven churches, and where does he begin? Not with the judgment of the world, but with the judgment of those seven churches, both praising them and calling them to repentance. The judgment of God on sin begins with us.

If we are to speak with any integrity of the judgment of God, we have to begin there, in the reality that judgment isn’t just for everybody else. We do not face God as judge by faith in our own merit, figuring that he doesn’t need to judge us because we’re better than everyone else. Rather, we face him by faith that he is a loving God, that his judgment on sin flows from his love for us sinners, and that because of his love for us he took the full weight of that judgment on himself, paying the penalty for sin that we could never pay and serving the sentence of death that should have been ours. The one whose word is a double-edged sword and whose eyes are aflame is the one who died and rose again and holds the keys of death and Hell—for us. To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, who has made us a kingdom of priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen.

(Exodus 3:13-15, Zechariah 12:7-13:1; Revelation 1:1-8)

You’ve probably been told that if you place a frog in boiling water, it will hop out, while if you put it in cool water and slowly heat it, the frog won’t perceive the danger and will ultimately let itself be cooked. I’m not sure where that idea came from, but I can’t think it was from anyone who knew much about frogs. Drop a frog in boiling water, it will go into shock and die. Put a frog in cold water, though, and it will try to jump away whether you heat it or not—frogs have absolutely no interest in sitting still for you. It’s a useful metaphor about life, but a lousy way to cook frog legs.

The funny thing is that the metaphor works because human beings often aren’t as smart as frogs; or maybe we should say that we aren’t as simple, that we’re more easily diverted and misdirected. Either way, we’re a lot more prone to miss threats, or fail to see them for what they are. We need someone to warn us of what’s happening, to call us to wake up and pay attention before it’s too late.

Which is, I think, why we have the book we know as Revelation; or much of the reason, anyway. I must admit, I feel a certain trepidation in beginning this series; Ecclesiastes says, “Of the making of many books there is no end,” and that’s certainly true of books about Revelation. I’m pretty sure there have been more commentaries written about this book of the Bible than any other; in many periods of Christian history, it hasn’t been close. There are a lot of opinions flying about, many with considerable force, and it’s easy to get caught in the crossfire—or to flinch and start ducking at every sound.

As such, I feel the need more than usual to lay out a thorough introduction to this sermon series, just to make it clear what we’re doing and where I’m coming from. In the first place, we’re not covering all of Revelation, so my apologies to anyone who’s disappointed to hear that. The core of this sermon series is something I’ve been thinking about doing for years, looking at the letters to the seven churches; obviously we’ll begin with chapter 1, and then we’ll conclude with chapters 4-5, which begin the main body of the book but also, I think, give us important context for the seven letters.

That said, even though I intend to stop at chapter 5, it’s important to let you know how I approach the book as a whole. Answer: the same way porcupines kiss—very carefully. In all seriousness, I’ve said more than once that we live between the times, that the kingdom of God has already come in Jesus Christ, but has not yet been fully realized; in Oscar Cullman’s famous image, we live after D-Day but before V-E Day. The war has already been won, but the battles are not yet over, because the enemy is fighting hard. We see this tension between “already” and “not yet” all over the New Testament, not least here in Revelation. This is important because we need to understand that “the last days” aren’t something way off in the future; biblically speaking, we have been in the last days ever since the birth of Jesus.

Third, one of the big disputes is where we look to find the fulfillment of the prophecies of this book: were they fulfilled in history, is their fulfillment still to come, or are they symbolic? For my part, I’d say the answer is “yes.” If you were here New Year’s Day, you might remember me talking about typological interpretation. For those who weren’t (or don’t), it’s something we see quite a bit as the New Testament authors, especially Paul, read the Old Testament. They find patterns and events and characters in the Old Testament which point to Jesus, not literally but by analogy. Thus Matthew draws on Isaiah 7:14, which was a prophecy given to King Ahaz of Judah and fulfilled in that time, and he applies it to Jesus. Does that negate the original fulfillment of the prophecy? No, but he sees that it was fulfilled again, in a greater way, in Christ.

I believe we have something similar in Revelation, only we’re standing in a different position in history. The church in John’s day expected his vision to apply to them, and they found connections. Was the prophecy fulfilled in their time? Not completely, no, but I believe they saw it partially fulfilled. Throughout the centuries, whenever the church has passed through trials, the people of God have turned to Revelation and found comfort and encouragement. I don’t think anyone will ever completely understand the great visions that fill this book until their final fulfillment comes, and that it will be a great blessing and comfort to the church in that day—but that doesn’t invalidate the fact that it has been a great blessing and comfort to the suffering church all the way along, as John keeps assuring the people of God, “I’ve seen the back of the book, and we win.”

Fourth, how we understand the historical setting of Revelation makes a big difference in our interpretation of the letters in chapters 2-3. Scholars disagree on this, too, since disagreement is what keeps them employed, but I think we can safely trust the witness of the early church that Revelation was written in the 90s AD, late in the reign of the Caesar Domitian.

Over the course of his reign, Domitian was increasingly addressed as “Master and God” both by those who sought his favor and by those seeking to avoid punishment, and increasingly came to demand divine homage; this probably has something to do with the expansion of the imperial cult during his reign, including increased persecution for non-Jews who refused to worship Caesar, and the establishment of a formal site of Caesar worship in Ephesus, complete with a huge statue of Domitian.

Interestingly, the push for that temple came not from Domitian but from the social elite of the province of Asia Minor, which included Ephesus and the other churches to which John wrote. They wanted to gain favor and influence with Rome, and they used Caesar worship to make a great display of their loyalty to Rome and devotion to Caesar. Naturally, then, they became less and less tolerant of those who refused to worship Caesar; and so while there’s no real evidence that Domitian himself sought to persecute Christians in any major way, intolerance and persecution were rising in the provinces.

In addition to the political pressure on Christians, there was also cultural and economic pressure, through the institutions of the trade guilds. You didn’t have to participate in a guild to be in business, but they were the social networks for the various trades—and each had its patron deity, which you were expected to worship at least once a year. These patron gods, along with Caesar, were given the credit for the empire’s health and prosperity; refusal to show proper gratitude was considered bad citizenship.

What we have, then, at the time of John’s writing, is a situation in which there has been sporadic persecution of Christians—most likely why John is on the island of Patmos—but nothing major; yet the pressure to compromise the faith is building, and significant persecution looms in the near future. An old bullfrog might be smart enough to jump out before the water boils, but the church doesn’t see the crisis coming. John’s role is to warn them. And understand this: that doesn’t mean telling them to hunker down or get ready to protect themselves. In a sense, it means telling them not to do either. Instead, it means encouraging them to stand strong against the culture, knowing full well that doing so will bring the wrath of the culture and government down on their heads.

That’s a lot to ask of anyone; which is why John begins the way he does. He’s not primarily calling them to stand against something, but rather to stand for something—or rather, someone: Jesus Christ. It’s easy to begin by decrying the culture and the state of the world, or pointing out how bad this is or that is, but John doesn’t do that. He begins at the center of our faith, with the one who is the reason for our salvation and should be the reason for everything we do. He begins with praise and promise, giving glory to Jesus who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, who has made us a kingdom of his priests, and who is coming again to complete the victory he has won.

Christ is the center, and the reason, the beginning and the end; everything else John is going to say, and everything else we may say about our faith and life, flows from that truth. Is it worth resisting the world, is it worth going against the flow, even if it means persecution, even if it means death? Yes. Why? Because of Jesus.