Hodor.

Revelation 3:7-13

February 3, 2019

Transfiguration

I.

The congregation in the Asian city of Philadelphia gets the best marks of the seven churches the Lord addresses in this part of Revelation.  They have kept God’s Word with the patient endurance of nonviolent resistance, and he says they will be preserved from the coming time of trial.  In fact, of the two churches who receive Jesus’ highest ratings, one, Smyrna, is economically poor, and the other, Philadelphia, is politically powerless.  Neither church is at all successful by the world’s standards.  They are humble, weak, at-risk, broke, and struggling.  Yet they stay faithful.  And so Jesus loves them most of all.

Jesus here describes himself as the One who has “the Key of David.”  This term comes from a reference in Isaiah to the Temple.  The physical Temple had been destroyed probably a couple of decades earlier.  So this “key” wouldn’t mean access to a particular building.  Rather, it probably refers more generally to forgiveness, atonement, and reconciliation between God and humanity, which is what the Temple was supposed to be about.  

Jesus is reminding them he is himself the new Temple; he is now the Way to God.  No one comes to the Father except through him, the truly Human One who is also Emmanuel, God-with-us.  He holds the “door,” the passage, between this world and the world to come, between earthly regimes and the Kingdom of God.  He has the “key of David” in the sense that he controls, indeed he is, the interface between Creator and creation.

The good news to this congregation is that because of their good works Jesus Christ is holding the door open for them to eternal life. 

This would be important for them to hear because they are used to having doors slammed in their faces.  They have been kicked out of the Jewish synagogue that they used to be members of.  That door was closed to them; they would have been informed that they are no longer considered Jews, no longer part of Abraham’s family, no longer part of the chosen people, and therefore no longer saved.  Not only that, but more practically they no longer benefit from the Jews’ legal exemption from Emperor-worship, which means that now they are liable to be looking at the inside of the locked doors of prison cells.  

But Jesus is saying that he, the Messiah descended from David, determines who has access to God.  Those who exclude fellow Jews because they follow Jesus are not really Jews at all, he says.  They have by their rejection of him and his followers, cut themselves off from the covenant.  For the true Israel, the true descendants of Abraham, are those called by the Messiah, Jesus.  

Not those recognized by the Empire.  Not those who had tied themselves to a corrupted and collaborationist Temple institution which, by the way, conspired to kill Jesus.  Not those whose hypocrisy, injustice, and compromise got the Temple demolished.  Not those who focus so forcefully on keeping the letter of the Torah, but the One who himself embodies and enacts in his own sacrificial death the true spirit of the Torah, he who is the Word of God, is the One who indicates who is the true Israel.

II.

It is the followers of Jesus’ Way who are faithful to the spirit of the Hebrew Scriptures, where the original call of God to Abraham in Genesis 12 is that by him “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”  God sends Jesus Christ into the world specifically to widen and broaden the Hebrew faith so that it becomes an open, welcoming, and expansive movement spreading the good news of God’s Kingdom of love revealed in him.

Unfortunately, Judaism at the time was moving in exactly the opposite direction.  Their reaction to the destruction of the Temple was to double-down on the meticulous, literal keeping of the rules of the Torah.  Because of its radical inclusiveness, in which the Gentiles are welcomed, the church’s message of love and freedom in Christ runs up against this new version of Judaism.  

The church proclaims Jesus as Lord.  By making the centerpiece of their message the good news about the resurrection of someone the Romans executed for sedition, the church identifies with and speaks to the victims of Roman colonialism, war, and conquest.  This made them an enemy of an Empire which could tolerate a lot of religions, as long as they all agreed there was really only one lord that mattered, and that was the Emperor.  Even Judaism was a government-approved religion, therefore giving at least a back-handed nod to the Emperor’s primacy. 

The Christians intentionally take the more difficult and dangerous way of nonviolent resistance.  They do this to identify with the common, poor, ethnically diverse, working people who were the routine victims of the Empire, and win them over to their expansive, welcoming, healing, communal faith.           

Christ says that if the church in Philadelphia continues to hold fast to the message and sustain their patient resistance to the violence and exploitation of the Empire, they will not only be allowed through the open door into the Temple, but they will become a veritable pillar of it.  They become part of its structure.  They get incorporated into Jesus Christ himself.

This is the way the Christians deal with the crisis of the destruction of the Temple: they understand that Jesus Christ himself and his gathered people is the new Temple.  To make this point they, like all Christians, adopt and  revitalize some aspects of Temple worship, and extend them to all their congregations.  We today don’t even realize where these practices come from: they gather on the first day of the week; they share in an offering of bread; they consider themselves a new priesthood; and they participate in the one sacrifice of the Lord for the forgiveness of sins, which brings new life to the world by his blood.

III.

The mission of Christianity is to take the values and meaning of God’s  Temple to the people so that the center of faith is not some specific GPS coordinates, not one particular building, but everywhere.  In Christ the Temple, the place to encounter God’s saving Presence, is in everything God has breathed into being.   Jesus says we will worship not on this or that mountain but in Spirit and truth.  Now we are the Temple.  We are the place where Creator and creation meet; we are the location where salvation and forgiveness, the Kingdom of God and eternal life, happen.

When Jesus says that the Philadelphians will be a pillar in the new Temple it means they can never be made to leave.  They are a permanent fixture in and of the Temple.  Indeed, they help provide the space for reconciliation, forgiveness, peace, and love.  The church in Philadelphia has kept Jesus’ word so far.  I suspect that keeping his word does just this.  It makes room, it carves out a protected zone where blessing and goodness can happen.

Keeping his word means obeying the Lord’s commandments, mainly that they love God and love their neighbors, and they love one another as he has loved them.  The faith is more than what we merely think; it is what we do.  Jesus knows their “works,” that is, the way they share in and express his love together.  They enact in their lives and relationships his compassion, his generosity, his welcome and acceptance, his healing.  They share together in their congregational life acts of mutual forgiveness and grace.  This is what opens the door to life.  The door opens when in our lives we are in tune with Jesus whose Spirit inspires us to do as he does in giving ourselves for others.

The church in Philadelphia is rewarded by receiving three names.  First, they receive God’s name.  Priests in the Temple wore turbans with the name of God emblazoned on them.  It is a way of showing whom they serve and to whom they belong.  To belong to God is to be absolutely free from all other owners and allegiances.  It is ultimate freedom.  

Second, they receive the name of God’s city which is to come.  Their true home and citizenship is the New Jerusalem.  They have zero loyalty to the nations, regimes, empires, systems, and rulers of this world.    

And finally, because they have not denied his name, they receive the name of the Son of God.  They are Christians, people who follow Jesus as Lord.  Thus they hold fast to the essential core of the gospel, which is that Jesus, whom the Romans crucified, is nevertheless still alive, guiding the church.  

The good news is that the powerful regimes in this world do not win.  Violence and injustice do not win.  Propaganda and lies do not win.  Economic inequality and exploitation do not win.  Ethnic divisions and racism do not win.  Nationalism and militarism do not win.

They lose.  They necessarily collapse in a smoking, burning, disintegrating ruin, to be replaced by the emergence of God’s holy city, a shining place of healing, justice, peace, and love.

IV.

The church in Philadelphia gets the door held open for them to this blessed and joyful new world because they are anticipating it now, at great cost to themselves.  They are already a place of blessing and inclusion.  They are already a place of non-violence and equality.  They are already a place of forgiveness and peace.  They are already a place of healing and welcome.  They already live in God’s love, in spite of the cost.  They are already the Temple where God and creation come together, and reconciliation happens.  They are already drawing on the New Jerusalem that is coming.  That’s what gives them the strength to hold on, to resist, and even to conquer.

Maybe Jesus Christ is holding the door open for us as well.  Maybe if we keep his word… maybe if we don’t deny his name… maybe his name will be written on us.  Maybe if we can identify and avoid the values and practices of Empire in our own hearts and lives, resisting the selfish addiction to violence and profit, convenience and gratification by which we are currently strangling God’s creation and people….  

That’s when we will find his life in us, and become a pillar in his Temple of holy love.

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