Revelation 3:1-6
May 9, 2021
We’re all familiar with the way different people can experience the same event, and yet perceive and understand that same event in vastly different ways. There are ongoing investigations from a forensic standpoint into the ways eyewitness testimony can under certain situations be less than 100% accurate.
There are other sources of differing perceptions of course, one of the most common and obvious to us all being that each of us is different and brings different skills and experiences of life to our interpretations of all that we perceive.
Were we to isolate ourselves from outside influence, and ask the question, “What is the central theme, or most important aspect, of this reading from Revelation 3,” there would undoubtedly be many different answers. The more variability you introduce into your subject group, age, sex, religion, wealth, first language, etc., the more the response would differ.
Missionaries to pre-modern tribal societies have long noticed this, as well as the fact that the many Old Testament stories that carry little intrinsic interest for us, become central to the interests and curiosity of tribes completely removed from Western cultures and history.
For example, tribal groups in India who are neither Aryan or Dravidian in origin hear the Bible from a standpoint that is often closer to the experience of the original Hebrews addressed in the Old Testament. These Dalits and Adivasi, as they are called, thought to be indigenous 3,000 years ago, are neither Hindu nor Muslim, they don’t look like most Indians, they are mostly below the poverty line, which is pretty low in India, and they are generally alienated from everything about national Indian culture.
There is recognition when they hear certain Bible verses. The resonance is different when they hear Exodus 22:21: “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Or this from Deuteronomy 24: “You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land in one of your towns. 15 You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset, because they are poor and their livelihood depends on them; otherwise they might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt.”
Their connection, by means of similar life-situation, to the recipients of these Old Testament texts from 3,000 years ago, enables a more direct link of situation to interpretation. The hearer experiences the real-life compassion of the Lord. They hear their own feeling and experience already described in the holy book. To hear this is to know that God sees, God hears. Hope is sometimes born from mere recognition. Most don’t know this, but 88% of the population of Nagaland, a State in India, is Christian. Two other states, Meghalaya and Mizoram, are also majority Christian.
These are just examples of what I want you to experience when we see a few things about our own reception of this letter to Sardis, but also of your reception of a sermon on the letter to Sardis after you have learned that the preacher is leaving, retiring. You’re hearing today a sermon that will be one of the last 13 sermons I will deliver here.
If you heard last week’s sermon today, exactly as I wrote it, you would hear it differently than you did a week ago. This has to do with the ethos of the preacher, the situation, which now has changed from a week ago. My words, though not as extreme as a dying man’s last words, are nonetheless similar in that there is now a predictable endpoint. Every preacher has some earned capital that must be sometimes spent. Just like in retirement itself, I will now be spending capital, and will try to bear that in mind the next few weeks.
But more important in the long term for each of us, is our attention to all the details that God gives us in the texts we read from scripture. It’s hard for us to imagine that perhaps 15% of Americans have no memory at all of the events of 9/11. Anyone younger than 25 or so will have little real memory of that day of the attack. In a fashion similar to the fact that I don’t remember Pearl Harbor, the day that will live in infamy, whereas those 90 and older can recall the visceral feeling when the news came over the radio that Sunday morning in December of 1941.
The experience changes you. The experience of 9/11 changed the Fire Department of New York city and its family members in ways that you and I were not changed.
And so sometimes it’s helpful to be aware of the situation in life of the Bible’s original hearers, readers and recipients.
Most of us know nothing about the city of Sardis. We’ve never been there. The ancient city is in ruins, like so many. Before today we perhaps knew it had a vague biblical sound to it. By now, if you’ve heard the previous four weeks’ sermons on these letters in Revelation, you could guess that Sardis is located in Turkey, known then as the province of Asia, already a part of the Roman Empire by John’s time.
But we wouldn’t know, and I certainly did not know, that Sardis was a capital city. It was the capital of the kingdom of Lydia. The name Lydia is familiar to Bible readers from Acts 16, where it is the name of a businesswoman who comes to faith in Christ through the apostle Paul. She was from Thyatira, our city from last week, and Thyatira, like all seven cities from this group in Revelation 2 and 3, was located in Lydia, which was essentially the western half of present-day Turkey. Being named Lydia would be like naming your child America or Tennessee.
Why do we need to know anything about Sardis and Lydia to understand this text? Why does it matter that Sardis is capital of Lydia? Isn’t the Bible the same for everybody? Doesn’t the Bible speak to all of us, all of humanity, for all time?
In a word, no. But also yes. The Bible does speak to all of us. The Bible is the same, however well or poorly it is sometimes translated. But of course, what is different is you, and me. And the Dalit tribesman in India, as well as the merchant or farmer in Sardis 2,000 years ago. We are different from each other, and so we hear differently. We experience things differently.
For example, regardless of what you think of the British Royal family, you would experience having breakfast with Prince Charles differently than his sister Princess Anne would. You would remember it. “This is actually the heir to the throne of Great Britain that I’m sitting across the table from,” you would say to yourself, while watching him try to figure out what grits are. Anne would be less impressed with her older brother than you or I would. Anne, after all, has competed in the Olympics, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Charles has not.
Your background makes a difference. To live in Sardis 2,000 years ago was to be aware that you lived in the capital of the former empire of Lydia, which was home to the King who was so wealthy, his very name turned into a synonym for wealth. Until our current crop of zillionaires came along, one wasn’t as rich as Bill Gates of Warren Buffet, but as “rich as Croesus.” The wealth of King Croesus was renowned, but even his wealth couldn’t protect him, and may have led him into foolish decisions.
For Croesus, in 546 BC, attacked the Persians and was soundly defeated by Cyrus the Great, and his capitol city Sardis was conquered. The acropolis of Sardis, the indomitable fortress built at the pinnacle of the city would have remained indomitable but for a thief in the night. For Sardis had never been captured by force, and it wasn’t even in 546, because invaders of Persia entered the city by stealth under cover of night because a traitor opened the gates, when its defenders were not expecting it.
A similar event happened in 218 BC. Sardis had surrendered to the Greeks under Alexander the Great in 334 BC, but in 218, in the series of small wars that ensued between Alexander’s Ptolemaic and Seleucid successors, Sardis was again conquered when another traitor opened the gates in the night.
I’m guessing the church in Sardis heard the word of Jesus promising to come like a thief in the night with a particular resonance. They seem to have taken the warnings of Jesus to heart, for the city remained Christian up to and even beyond the conquest by Islam in 716 AD for some time.
Bible language can be particularly challenging in an age of rationalism. We read here that this text is the message of the one who holds the seven Spirits of God. How does one HOLD a Spirit. And how SEVEN?
This one who holds the Spirits says, “you have the name of being alive, and you are dead.” What does dead mean here? How does one speak to the dead? And why would one? Speaking to the dead church he says, “Awake and strengthen what remains and is almost dead.” Then he says, “I have not found your works perfect in the sight of my God.” And we want to say, “Who’s perfect? We’re only human!”
What’s going on here? What’s happening is that the same one is speaking as said, Take the log out of your own eye! to those who could only see the speck in their neighbor’s eye. It’s better to cut off your own right hand if it causes you to stumble than for your whole body to go to hell. You just need faith the size of a mustard seed and you can cast that mountain into the sea.
That’s not my way of thinking or speaking. I specialize in the specific, the pedantic, even. My words are “Well yes, but…” I hedge, I qualify, I balance. Jesus says to the dead, “Wake up!” He said it to the daughter of the synagogue ruler, he said it to the son of the widow of Nain. Wake up, get up! She’s only sleeping, he said, as the crowd laughed at him scornfully.
What’s happening there? The power of Jesus Christ, the power simply of his words, is greater than the always feared King Death. Jesus speaks and it is the Word of God giving life. He exaggerates to tell the truth, for death in the face of Jesus Christ is merely a short sleep. But why should this surprise us? After all, what gave life to the world was the Word of God. Let there be light. Let the earth bring forth every living creature. And let us make man in our own image.
We persist in not seeing the power of the Word of God, and the consequent power of words in particular and in general. Plato understood so clearly the power of words that the first few chapters of The Republic are about what kind of literature is appropriate for children. Plato was not an advocate of free speech, and argued that poets are the most powerful threat to any ordered society.
The Word operates within this sphere and with the assurance given to us that God’s Word never comes back to him having not accomplished its purpose.
Warnings come to us out of God’s love. Remember the traditions you received and heard; keep that, and repent. This is revelatory in a sense we don’t often think about, that the one who has the seven spirits says “Repent.” We hear that word Repent, and think of old fellows with long beards and sandals holding a sign that says Repent! We’ve been given this narrative that encompasses the meaning of Repent by New Yorker cartoonists and others who think that Repent is some kind of pre-internet meme, some kind of clown language, something to laugh at. We’ve had the word stolen from us.
But if there was ever an unfunny word, it’s Repent, coming from the mouth of the crucified one. You see that? He knows what’s ahead. He knows how the universe works for he made it with the words of his mouth. Repent is all kinds of things.
Turn around and go in a different direction is central, of course. But repent; repent is get off the broad and easy path that leads to destruction. Repent is give up on anger and hatred and slandering others. Repent is open your eyes, for the Lord can see everything you have stolen from others. Repent can be “close your mouth,” for the Lord continually hears every lie that is spoken.
The church in Sardis is not necessarily small and struggling. That’s merely the human viewpoint. We’re bigger than the first church, which had only eleven. The largest most successful church, in the eyes of the world, may be “have the name of being alive, and yet be dead.” The life that Jesus speaks of here is the animating life of the Spirit. He holds the Seven Spirits of God. As he said in the Gospel of John 7, “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. 38 He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”
Repenting is beginning. To Repent is to turn. Cease from lying and stealing, and begin to send living water out of one’s heart. Be a fount of goodness. Bear good fruit from the good tree. Make the small corner of the world you inhabit a place of beauty and goodness. The promises of the crucified one not only change our hearts, they are an objective change to the world as it exists today. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
“He who conquers shall be clad thus in white garments, and I will not blot his name out of the book of life; I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels.”