(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.