Chinos.

Revelation 3:1-6

February 24, 2019

I.

The Lord’s complaint against the church in Sardis is that they are Christians in name only.  They look alive.  That’s what everyone says about them.  They have a great reputation.  Maybe they have lots of activities and programs.  They have well-attended services.  Maybe they are even growing with lots of young families.  The church certainly appears to be thriving!  

Yet the Lord says they are in fact dead.  How can a church look alive and actually be dead?  Isn’t that kind of discouraging?  I mean, we spend so much of our energy wishing, hoping, planning, dreaming for the day when the church shows some obvious signs of life and growth.  Then, when we really do finally attain some success by whatever measure we choose, the Lord could look at us and shake his head.  Nope.  Looking good isn’t enough.  A church can outwardly appear to be fantastic… and still be dead.  It might make us want to just throw up our hands in frustration.  It takes a lot of work to make a church look good and successful; if Jesus says that’s not enough, why are we bothering?  

Success in God’s eyes is apparently not the same as success in our own eyes.  God has a different metric; God has different standards for determining success.  I am always repeating the famous quote of Mother Teresa, who says that God does not call us to be successful but faithful.  God looks at our faithfulness.  God looks at our trust.  God looks at the heart.  God examines the quality of the fruit we bear in terms of our actions.  In fact, I wonder if a church can even look in many ways like a complete failure… and still be judged faithful and steadfast by God.

Real discipleship means a rejection of many of the categories by which we measure worldly success.  In the wilderness, Jesus says no to Satan’s temptations, which were about wealth, fame, and power.  If a church is busy organizing itself to attain those goals, if it is working to be rich, popular, and influential, then maybe they are Christians in name only, like in Sardis.

The city of Sardis also looked prosperous and powerful.  It had a lot of big, beautiful buildings from when it was the main outpost of the Persian Empire; but it was now actually in decline.  In its center there was an impregnable fortress… which had nevertheless fallen twice to enemies who used stealth to take it from within.  (You’d think they would have learned after the first time.)  

The Lord suggests that this could happen to the church in Sardis; he will come also by stealth, like a thief, he says.  Maybe he will then overthrow the corrupt and complacent leadership of the church.  Maybe he will even blot their names from the book of life. 

This church in Sardis is sleepwalking; they need to wake up and “strengthen what remains.”  And it is good to know that even though Christ declares the church dead there is somehow something to strengthen, still something that hasn’t yet completely died.  There remain a few in Sardis who do remain faithful, who still proverbially wear clean robes.

II.

So how does a church know when it is dead?  That sounds like an odd question, but the Christians in Sardis didn’t know their church was dead.  Apparently you can be dead and not aware of that fact, like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense.  Churches can even be dead and have everyone tell them they are thriving!  Apparently, you can think your church is vibrant, dynamic, and successful, when actually it is dead as far as Jesus is concerned.  And his is the only opinion that matters, because not to be connected to him is to be dead.

Jesus tells the church in Sardis what is basically the cure for such a death.  He says: “Remember then what you received and heard; obey it, and repent.”  Remember, obey, repent.  Reconnect with the original good news.  Obey it.  Change your direction, your way of thinking and acting! 

Once again we get reminded of how everything depends on the original gospel they received.  Jesus himself says that the main reason for his coming is to proclaim and embody the Kingdom of God.  The early church makes the radical affirmation that Jesus is Lord!  This message is inherently a rejection of the powers and values that rule in this world.  

Jesus is crucified as a traitor by the Romans… but he is now still alive in a form beyond the power of death.  He will bring all who trust and obey him into that same life.  He neutralizes and negates the dominating grip of our own fearful egocentricity that separates us from God, creation, and each other.  

For the early church the gospel is inherently and necessarily political.  You could not say “Jesus is Lord!” and still be loyal to the Emperor because loyalty to the Emperor meant you hated the Emperor’s enemies and Christians are forbidden to hate anyone.  You could not be a follower of Jesus, you could not obey Jesus’ commandments, and still be what the Empire approved of as a “success.”  To be faithful to Jesus is to renounce any concern for acquiring and keeping the things Jesus rejects: like money, fame, and power. 

To follow Jesus is to refuse to participate in selfishness, violence, judgment, and inequality.  To follow him is to renounce symbols and stories that divide the world into us and them, insiders and outsiders, friends and enemies; it is to reject walls and even boundaries as imaginary and destructive lies that spawn hostility and conflict.  To follow him is always to choose the opposite Way of eternal life, equality, gentleness, and community.  That’s is the Way he offers.

The people who gather around the good news seek a way out of the dead-end rat-race of a meaningless and shallow existence of working to make other people rich.  They realize that the Empire was founded on, supported, and maintained by unspeakable cruelty and violence.  This is their direct experience.  They sense that the many officially-approved and State-sponsored religions do not change anything. 

So they worship and follow this Jewish man whom Rome couldn’t kill, who now lives forever with and in his church by the power of his Spirit; who gives them his body and his blood as a token and a promise of a new life, which they anticipate now in the church. 

III.

Remember, obey, repent.  This is the way the Lord says to “wake up, and strengthen what remains.”  

I wonder we would “remember” as the basic message of Jesus Christ.  What is the original good news for us?  How do we understand the fundamental  Christian confession?  If someone were to ask us, like in an elevator, what the point of Christianity is, what would we say? 

I worry about that.  I worry that what we would remember is the church as it was in 1956, when we looked alive but I suspect were really quite dead by any standard of discipleship, thoroughly corrupted by nationalism, racism, sexism, war, profit, and pride.  How many churches still think that is the goal, to get back to those days?     

Almost every Sunday, I urge you to remember your baptism.  Of course, this is not about recalling the details of something that happened to you when you were a baby.  “There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” says Paul.  We need to remember the one baptism in which we all share.  

When we are baptized we are baptized into Christ.  We come up from baptism clothed with him.  What we remember about this is that he gives his life to us.  We leave our old, egocentric, fearful, divided, dying self in the water.  Our new, whole, integrated, blessed, and beautiful original Self is what emerges from the water.

That’s what we’re supposed to remember.  We remember who we truly are and whose we truly are.  Like the Prodigal Son, we remember our true home, we remember ourselves: that we are Christ-in-the-world.        

Now our life is about following our true nature in Christ; it is about how much we give, lose, share, and donate.  It is about getting ourselves out of the way so God’s love may flow through us into God’s creation, into the lives of others.  It is about gathering in a community of inclusion and welcome.  It is about rejecting symbols that express our separateness and judgment, hatred and bigotry, violence and exploitation.  It is about refusing to treat anyone or anything as a mere object to be used, controlled, or even killed for the sake of my gain.

When people are baptized in the early church they are given a white robe to symbolize their new purity.  The few whom the Lord approves of in Sardis have managed to keep their robes clean, which means they have not allowed themselves to be brought down into the slime and grime of corrupt, violent, self-centered Roman society.  Their lives and their actions continue to reflect the Light of God’s love.  They are worth to walk with the Lord.

He says that whomever “conquers,” that is, whomever overcomes their own selfishness, greed, gluttony, and desire for gain, will also get their robes cleaned.  Their names will not be blotted from the Book of Life.

IV.

  
The early Christians understand that they are getting in on the ground floor of the future.  They are connecting to what is Real, dependable, and lasting.  And they have this intuitive sense that this whole Roman Empire thing is doomed.  They base their lives on the hope found in the good news about Jesus, the One “who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars.”

And the early church is eventually wildly successful, even by worldly standards.  That success is rooted in their faithfulness in remembering and obeying the teachings of Jesus, and being transformed in their minds and actions by his life.  Jesus himself says that if we try to save our lives we lose them; but if we lose our lives, that is, if we let go of what the world tells us success is, then we gain everything and live forever.

+++++++