Jezebel.

Revelation 2:18-29

February 17, 2019 

I.

Thyatira was smaller than the other cities to which the Lord is speaking.  It was centered on its artisans and merchants… and even these enterprises were thoroughly enmeshed into the Roman pagan system.  

In order to participate fully in many of the professional guilds and trade associations, you had to engage at least indirectly the various religious cults.  You’d go to a meeting of like the Rotary Club or the Association of Bronze Smiths, and you’d have to say the Pledge of Allegiance to the Empire and pray to Apollo, whose temple was providing the food.  Maybe sing a hymn to the goddess Artemis just for good measure, and at the end take up a collection for legionnaires wounded fighting against the Germanic barbarians.  

Attending such meetings difficult for Christians, which made doing business nearly impossible.  That was where all the deals were made!  That’s where you connected with customers and providers.

And in Thyatira, as in most of these cities, the church had some members who thought engaging with the Empire was not such a bad thing.  Last week it was Balaam and the Nicolaitans.  Here it was a woman called “Jezebel.”  Jezebel in the Hebrew Scriptures was the pagan wife of the very bad Israelite King Ahab.  She bullies him into all kinds of injustice and idolatry, which gets explicitly called out by the prophet Elijah.  It doesn’t end well for Jezebel.

This is as good a time as any to remind ourselves that these conflicts were not merely religious differences.  Avoiding idolatry wasn’t just because you had to maintain a separate religious identity.  Christians did not go to their deaths and suffer all kinds of indignities over mere theological opinions and style.

We don’t quite understand this because in our culture we have largely reduced religion to a private, personal hobby, disconnected from all other parts of our life.  Like having a model train set in your basement, or following a sports team.  There is no reason why we would refuse to interact with someone who had a different hobby, like Irish dancing.  And a hobby usually has no impact at all on your business, or what you eat, or how you vote.  There is mutual antipathy between some hobbies, like bird-watchers and bird-hunters.  But we don’t care that much anymore about what religion someone holds, as long as it stays their own private hobby and doesn’t impact much else.  And it doesn’t usually occur to us that our faith makes much of a difference in what we throw in our carts at the Shop Rite or what we order at Applebee’s.

But in the first century, people were conscious of how the established religions were integrated into the Empire, which was a system of predatory injustice and oppression, colonialism and war.  These religions rationalized and excused the violence, theft, slavery, inequality, and status quo of imperial rule.  

To participate in these religions was to share in the complicity, responsibility, and blame for all kinds of injustices and atrocities.  That is what Christians could not abide.  

II.

That’s why Christians who favored a more lax and open approach to the prevailing economy and culture are so sharply criticized here.  That’s why they get called loaded, nasty names like “Balaam” and “Jezebel.”  They are advocating a direct or indirect participation in the evil and violence being done in the name, and under the protection, of these religions, especially the cult of the Emperor.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophet Elijah and Queen Jezebel get locked in mortal combat because worshiping the Lord and worshiping Baal are two completely opposed ways of life.  To worship Baal was to support the absolute power of the king and the ruling class of land owners.  While to worship Israel’s God is to favor a commonwealth of tribes, clans, and villages, with land ownership spread out more equally among them.  To worship Baal meant the king was the law; to worship God means only God’s word is law.  The two systems are utterly exclusive and incompatible.  Elijah correctly observes that an absolute choice has to be made.

In those days idolatry was worshiping Baal, Apollo, or the Emperor.  In our time we have secularized idolatries that look non-religious.  Our idolatries are the myriad things to which we dedicate our time, energy, and wealth.  But all idolatry is an expression of our egocentric sinfulness.  It is a kind of self-worship that feeds our greed, gluttony, lust, and so forth.  It is about what we get.  Idols are just projections of our own desires, hopes, and dreams.  They are about what I want.  

And because what I want invariably clashes with what someone else wants, idolatry always leads to injustice.  It turns into a power struggle over who gets what, where there are necessarily winners and losers.  Idolatrous systems invariably end up featuring both massive inequality of wealth and power, and perpetual war.  

And because injustice knocks life out of balance, spawns inequities, and does damage to people and planet, it always leads to a reckoning.  It always draws down a correction, that is, a general catastrophe.  It can be ecological, or economic, or political, or all three.  But injustice is unsustainable.  

This sad trajectory happens repeatedly in Scripture and history.  The book of Revelation itself is mostly a blow-by-blow description of the disaster that results from the injustice that calcifies out of idolatry.

So when some Christians in the early church advocated compromise and cooperation with idolatry, they were betraying the basic and essential confession of our faith, which is that Jesus alone is Lord.  They were replacing that confession with the affirmation that my ego is my lord.  I will be governed not by what God wants for all of creation, but by what I want for myself.  That is the idolatry that slides inexorably into death and destruction.

III.

The woman called “Jezebel” and her followers in Thyatira apparently suggested that Christian faith was deeper than all these superficial political considerations.  As long as you believed in Jesus in your heart, stuff like what you eat doesn’t matter.  They were already beginning to reduce faith to the domesticated private hobby it pretty much is today.  To them behavior didn’t matter as much as having the right spiritual knowledge.

But the Lord says, “You think you’re getting deeper into God?  No.  You’re really going deeper into Satan.  You are caving in to the 3 big temptations Satan offered to me in the wilderness.  When you dedicate your life to the pursuit of money, fame, and power you are following Satan, which is to say your own ego, whether you realize it or not.”

The alternative is that the church hold fast to the teachings and example they have from the Lord Jesus, and continue to do his works of generosity, compassion, forgiveness, truthfulness, and love.  On the margins of society, he is forming new communities based on different values, practices, and relationships.  It is a matter of witnessing to different principles than greed and profit, and developing instead an economy of sharing in which people bring what they have and receive what they need.

These are the “works” of the “Son of God.”  In Matthew 11, Jesus points out what he is doing to validate his ministry: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”  It is a marvelous summary of Jesus’ work and the work he gives to his continuing church to do in his Name.  It is about enlightening, empowering, embracing, educating, enlivening, and enriching people.  

We need to approach our relationships, including the marketplace, not with an attitude of “How can I get what I want?” but of “How can we humbly share together in God’s amazing abundance?  How can we treat each other with dignity and grace?  How can we grow out of our own toxic and corrosive self-interest, and participate together in the joy of the Lord?  How can we make this about what we contribute to the common good, more than what I get for myself?”

The one who conquers their own ego will be given a taste of God’s ultimate triumph and truth, like the morning star that anticipates the dawn; like an advance token of the Light of the World.  It is that Light, that bright morning star, which we are given to share with others by our generosity, compassion, sharing, and love.

IV.

We usually don’t realize the degree to which we are ourselves compromised to egocentricity and its global Empire.  We don’t understand the full extent of our own idolatry.  Were we do to an analysis of what we consume and where it comes from and how it is made, we would find ourselves buying into soul-shaking evils all the time.  We are doing unmeasurable damage to people and planet every minute.  Our whole world as we know it is structured around injustice and war, and has been for all of history.  It is practically unavoidable.

We can rationalize it.  Make excuses for it.  Justify it.  Deny or ignore it.  We can even make a virtue out of it!  All of which involves minimizing people’s suffering, and therefore degrading and disregarding the cross on which Jesus Christ chooses to identify with the victims of our choices.

Or we can turn and follow Jesus.  We can keep the life he gives us alive within us and and among us, as expressed and reflected in our actions.  We can learn to rely on the Presence and power of the Holy Spirit, and keep that gentle, subtle Light of the Morning Star alive in our hearts, feeding our words, shaping our work.  We can, by his power, let go of what we want, and to hold on to what God wants, as he shows it to us in Jesus Christ.  

+++++++

The Limits to Tolerance.

Revelation 2:12-17

February 10, 2019

I.

Pergamum was the capital city of the Roman province of Asia, and it was apparently full of pagan temples, including one dedicated to the cult of the  emperor.  This is probably why the Lord refers to Pergamum as the place “where Satan’s throne is.”

The congregation generally gets high marks for their faithfulness.  He especially lifts up a martyr named Antipas who gives his life rather than deny his faith.  

But he criticizes them for tolerating a leader he calls Balaam and the pesky group he calls the Nicolaitans.  Both of these are probably unflattering euphemisms for Christians who participated at least tangentially in the pagan cults by eating meat which had been sacrificed to idols and possibly engaging in sexual immorality, which are two often related things.  

The reference to “Balaam” refers back to a nasty episode near the end of the book of Numbers in which the Israelites, who are about to enter the Promised Land, allow themselves to get seduced into relationships with non-Israelite women and their deity, the Baal of Peor.  That doesn’t end well for anybody.

The Nicolaitans have come up before.  It is possible that their name, which is a combination of the Greek words for “victory” and “the people,” refers to their willingness to compromise the faith in order to gain popularity, both among the Christians and in the larger pagan culture.  These kinds of beliefs eventually degenerated into what we call gnosticism.  They were seeking ways for Christians to get along with and accommodate to the Empire.  

The apostle Paul deals with the same practical issue in his first letter to Corinth: what to eat.  Most publicly available meat had been slaughtered according to the rituals of some pagan temple.  The question then became whether partaking of this food was in effect a form of worship of the idol.  Paul advises against eating such food out of love for sister and brother Christians who do see it as a pagan practice.

The situation a generation or two later is considerably more dire.  The Nicolaitans are basically saying that “Hey, as long as I believe in Jesus in my heart, who cares what I eat?  Pagan gods aren’t real anyway, so what difference does it make?  Forget that love thing; I’m not going to let the Jewish superstitions of some in the church inhibit my freedom in Christ to eat whatever I want.  We’re not Jews anymore, yo?  They kicked us out.  Plus, how are we supposed to do business and get ahead if we can’t even have lunch with pagans, which is to say, just about everybody?  Plus if we don’t eat meat sacrificed in the Emperor’s honor it’s even worse; we could go to jail.  So there’s that.”

II.

In rejecting the practices and arguments of the Nicolaitans, the Lord is insisting on a clean and fairly absolute break between faith in him and participation in the Empire.  Christians cannot do both.  Much of the rest of this book will be graphic depictions of the ways the Empire is going down.  The Nicolaitans want to compromise with, and participate in, and retain some of the benefits of the Empire.  But Jesus says that’s like offering someone a ticket on the Titanic.  “No,” he says, “Don’t be fooled.  Don’t get on board the big, new, shiny, ‘unsinkable’ boat, where the oligarchs dine sumptuously under crystal chandeliers while the workers are locked below the water-line singing Irish folk songs with Leonardo DiCaprio.”

The whole essence of Christianity’s original message is about the Jewish Messiah who was executed by the Empire, yet who still lives!  Why would you cooperate with the bad guys in that equation?  Why would you seek to get along with the power that did its best to kill God?  Why would you want to associate yourself with its mass-murder, torture, theft, rape, conquest, and wanton destruction?  Why would you want to become complicit in all 

that and suffer its terrible consequences?  To join with the Empire is a categorical rejection of God and Jesus Christ.  It is to choose death.

The importance of these cities in Asia Minor was that they represented in many ways the heart of the Roman Empire.  The people there — at least the leaders and the establishment — were enthusiastic, patriotic, religious supporters of the Empire.  They profited and benefited from its order, stability, and administration.  They certainly didn’t think of themselves as colonized.  They were the colonizers, but they didn’t think of themselves that way either.  Rather, they were “bringing the benefits of civilization to barbaric and backward peoples.”  The brutal tactics of the legions were completely justified.  Slavery was necessary for economic growth.  Crucifixion was the only way to treat terrorists.

There are in these cities people, usually the ones languishing at the bottom of the socio-economic pile, who personally and directly understand what the Empire is really about.  These are the people who do all the work that makes these cities so prosperous, yet who are woefully under-compensated; whose lives are disrupted by the wars and whims of the rulers; who have no voice in any decisions of government or business.  They are the marginalized, disenfranchised, enslaved, poor, often migrant people who are attracted to the message of this odd sect preaching the continued life of a crucified man.  These people know what crucifixion is.  

These are the people who become Christians.  They have nothing to lose in the destruction of the Empire, and they gain real hope and courage from the proclamation that this Jesus and not the Emperor is really and truly the Lord.  He, the One who conquers death and sticks it to the Romans, is their God.

III.

When Jesus urges this church to “repent,” to change their way of thinking and acting, he criticizes their continued tolerance of Balaam and the Nicolaitans.  In other words, there is a limit to the diversity Jesus wants in his gospel communities.  He is demanding a single-minded focus that is un-watered-down by any openness to the values and practices of the Empire.  For them to repent means that the church would no longer have these people among them.  They will have to leave.

That doesn’t sound very nice to us.  We don’t like to hear that there are limits to diversity and inclusion.

When I was in seminary the women students advocated for a place where they could get together and discuss their concerns.  It took years, but finally the seminary gave them a small room in the basement of Stuart Hall to be the Women’s Center.  The women were happy, and so were the men who supported the idea… until the Women’s Center actually opened, and men were informed that they were not welcome.  

Some men decided this was an unspeakable crime against freedom, openness, and diversity.  How could the women complain about institutions that excluded them, but now establish their own place that excluded men?  It wasn’t fair!  Surely they could just exclude, you know, the bad men.  Why exclude us good men too?

The fact is that marginalized, excluded, disenfranchised, and oppressed people need dedicated space apart from the controlling, dominating voices of the ones who perpetrated, or benefited from, their marginalization and exclusion.  There are differentials in power and experience that make a huge difference.

You can’t attend a 12-step recovery group if you are not an addict.  Slaves in the south would conspire to meet together illegally for worship without the attendance of owners and overseers.  You can’t attend a divorce recovery group if you’re not divorced.  If you’re in a cancer survivors’ group, you shouldn’t have to accept the participation of a representative of the tobacco industry.  

And the early church also has definite boundaries.  They have to.  If you’re gathering around a crucified Messiah, it doesn’t help to have people there making excuses for and deals with the ones who did the crucifying.  If you are confessing that Jesus is Lord, it doesn’t help to have people saying that the Emperor can be Lord too.  If you’re advocating for the Kingdom of God, it doesn’t help to have powerful voices demanding continued allegiance to the reign of wealth and power.

Jesus says we may serve God or money, but not both.  Serving God is hard work requiring a lot of single-mindedness and mutual support.  For a gospel community to have to deal with the voices of those who serve money and power would be suicide.  At some point a choice must be made.

IV.

Every Empire is a projection of mass ego-centricity.  Every Empire is built on fear, anger, and hatred.  Every Empire is about gaining wealth and power, increasing inequality, dominating, excluding, extracting, exploiting, and using.  Every Empire is about crucifying, bombing, torturing, incarcerating, lynching, conquering, and killing.  And, for lack of a foundation in God’s Truth, every Empire always violently collapses in on itself, annihilating those loyal to it.  Always. 

Jesus Christ inaugurates and reveals the truth of the Kingdom of God, the anti-Empire, where love, peace, equality, and justice reign.  All who resonate with the message of oneness, welcome, and forgiveness get included.  Contrary voices expose, indict, and exclude themselves.  

A gospel community does not need any voice suggesting we hate, fear, or be angry with each other or anyone — for that is the mentality that crucified the Lord.  Rather, we are to fear only God; we are to hate only our own sin; and we are to be angry only with ourselves in not doing either one of those very well. 

+++++++

Christians Are Illegal.

Revelation 2:8-11

February 3 2019

I.

The next mini-letter from the Lord Jesus through John is addressed to the church in another port city: Smyrna.  Smyrna was also famous for its loyalty to Rome.  This made life that much harder for the Christians there, and it was  compounded by a rift with the Jewish population.

One of the most important things to know about the New Testament that is not actually in the text of the New Testament concerns the details of the break between the Christians and the Jews.  Jesus and all the apostles are Jewish, of course, as are the earliest communities of Jesus-followers.  They are one of many sects of Judaism that existed at the time of Jesus.  But the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70, meant that Judaism had to reorganize itself.  The group that emerged dominant from this catastrophe was the Pharisees.  The Pharisees were the beginning of what we know today as Rabbinic Judaism.  In consolidating their power, the Pharisees decided that the upstart communities that follow Jesus as Messiah, populated as they are by many uncircumcised Gentiles who do not keep the Torah with the same literal vigor, were not to be considered Jewish anymore.

Judaism was a religion legally recognized by the Roman Empire.  They had a special exemption from having to worship the Emperor.  As long as the followers of Jesus are considered Jews, they benefit from this exemption.  But as soon as the Jewish authorities decided that the followers of Jesus were not Jews, the Christians were expected to worship the Emperor like every other non-Jew in the Empire.  This is something Christians, of course, could not do, which made them illegal according to Roman law.  

That is the reason Christians were persecuted by the Empire.  It is also a big reason for the animosity that developed between Christians and Jews.  Remember that at this time Judaism was a major and connected religion in the Roman Empire, and Christianity was still a new, fragile, minority, marginal movement.  So the Empire would demand that Christians worship the Emperor’s statue or be arrested and often executed for treason.  Many Christians died in the successive waves of persecution that lasted for three hundred years.  

Worshiping the Emperor was an explicit denial of the primal confession of Christian faith, which is “Jesus is Lord!”  There can only be one Lord, and the Emperor isn’t it.  

So the Jewish leaders were literally adversaries, ratting out Christians, handing them over to the police.  This is why they are called a “synogogue of Satan.”  “Satan” means “adversary.”  At the very least they withdrew any legal protection from the Christians, and allowed them to be arrested, sometimes tortured, and even killed for their faith in Jesus.  That sort of thing was going on in every city, but it appears to be significantly worse in Smyrna.

(Tragically, when the tables turned and the Christians had power and Jews didn’t, Christians treated Jews even worse, and that lasted for 1500 years.)

II.

The Christians in Smyrna get high marks from the Lord Jesus for their faithfulness in intense adversity.  He reminds them at the outset that he is “the first and the last, who was dead and came to life.”  The confession of Jesus as One who was crucified by the Romans yet who nevertheless lives is basic to the identity of Jesus’ followers.  These people who are facing death for their faith, are reminded that their Lord “came to life” and so will they, if they remain steadfast.

The fact that Christians are considered “illegal” is something that should give us pause, especially if we are finding ourselves ready to persecute and deport people considered “illegal” today.  Laws are made and enforced according to the perceived self-interest of a ruling class.  All kinds of historical accidents may push anyone suddenly over the line into “illegality.”  Christians are illegal for 400 years after Jesus resurrection, and still in many places in the world today.  But in God’s eyes, of course, no one is illegal.

In Smyrna, the illegal status of Christians is a factor in their being afflicted and economically poor.  If they weren’t excluded from the market-places, it is certainly dangerous for them to show up there.  They are a marginalized, oppressed community; they have to worship in secret.  Their families and their previous religious communities have not only rejected them, but stand ready to inform on them to the authorities.  It is an insecure, anxious, at-risk, and fragile congregation of Jesus-followers, in Smyrna.

Why stay Christian under these circumstances?  Surely they were hearing from groups claiming to be Christian who argued that “Caesar isn’t a god and his statue is just a piece of rock, so it’s not like you’re actually worshiping anything if you do burn a pinch of incense on his altar.  You’re just doing what you have to do to survive!  Go along to get along!  You can still believe in Jesus in your heart.  You can still do good works.  Maybe you’ll even convert some pagans you meet at the Temple of Caesar!

“Hey, you use the Empire’s roads.  You shop at the Empire’s market.  You drink the water from the Empire’s aqueduct.  The Roman Legion protects you from criminals and barbarians.  There’s the abundant grain and the meat we get at festivals.  You benefit from Roman civilization.  Do you want all that to go away?  Would you prefer chaos?  All they ask is a little worship.  What’s the big deal?

“You don’t even have to mean it!  You’ll be putting one over on them.  They will think they’ve won, when all they get is your trivial outward obedience for a few minutes.  Then you can live to fight for your Jesus another day.

“And God will forgive you anyway!

“Or you can be lunch for a lion in the coliseum.  Your choice.”

III.

The thing is, expressing faith in Jesus as opposed to the Empire is not just verbal.  The authorities certainly didn’t want people going around dissing the Emperor.  But I suspect they were far more concerned about the subversive behavior of these Jesus-people, the way their belief in Jesus as their Lord was embodied in their actions.  We know the Christians practiced non-violence and often pacifism; we know they avoided sexual immorality; we know they did not participate in a lot of the pagan-centered marketplace.  We know they ministered to lepers and plague victims at risk to themselves.  We know they welcomed strangers and outcasts, and rejected all kinds of social stratification.  We know they practiced sharing, forgiveness, and generosity.

All of this is offensive and threatening to an Empire that wants us to be out there, buying, selling, spending, producing, consuming, and generally following the dictates of our egocentricity, craving wealth, power, and popularity, and reacting in hatred, fear, and anger, and falling into greed, gluttony, envy, lust, vanity, and the other sins.  Indeed, the Empire of today is not unique in telling us that these are really virtues.

Resisting that mentality is costly.  It can make us unpopular, poor, and weak.  It is at least considered weird or eccentric; at most it is seditious to live a life reflecting and expressing the unconditional love of Jesus Christ.             

And yet the church in Smyrna stays faithful, enduring affliction and poverty, imprisonment and even death that are the consequences of following Jesus.  For that the Lord says that in reality they are “rich,” which is to say that they draw on a deep and abundant well of faith, hope, and love.  If they remain in him, faithful even “unto death,” he says they will receive “the crown of life.”  They “will not be harmed by the second death.”

Everybody dies in the sense that our existence as an individual temporal-biological organism eventually ends.  Sooner or later our physical, material bodies give out.  But the “second death” has to do with whether we participate in God’s life and God’s truth; whether we live eternally with and in God, beginning in our repentance and discipleship now, in this mortal/historical existence, or if in the end we fall into annihilation and extinction, are utterly forgotten, and never really exist at all.  In the second death, we get separated from God and therefore from what is ever real.  

In order to be unharmed by the second death, we have to prove ourselves real by our sharing in the self-emptying love which is God’s life and mission.  The irony is that what we grab in this existence only reduces us to nothingness; but by becoming nothing so that God’s life may flow freely in us, we are given everything.  

The Smyrnaens understand this.  They endure suffering.  They resist the temptations of the Empire.  They even die for the truth.  And Jesus commends them.

IV.

Paul talks about how “this slight momentary affliction” leading even to death is like nothing compared to the vast “weight of glory” God has in store for us when we trust in him and live by Jesus’ commandments.  It is a comparatively small price to pay in exchange for an eternity in the Light of God’s everlasting love.  

We can start to live in that love now, by sharing and expressing it together, by getting ourselves out of the way and letting it shine and flow through us.  Do not fear the necessary consequences of this move.  Do not fear being declared illegal.  Do not fear being judged naive or unrealistic.  For the One who “was dead and came to life” has the power to bring us out of death to new life as well. 

+++++++