Lukewarm Vomit.

Revelation 3:14-22

March 10, 2019

I.

The last of the seven churches of the province of Asia to which John writes is Laodicea.  The church in Laodicea gets no commendation.  The best they get is an opportunity to change their ways before it is too late.

Like the city, the Christians there are well-to-do and successful.  Yet the Lord insists that they are really “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.”  They imagine they are a thriving and successful congregation.  In truth they are a complete failure as disciples of Jesus Christ.  

The city was fed by an aqueduct that brought water from a hot spring in the mountains; but by the time the water got to them it was tepid and odorous, nearly undrinkable.  That’s what Jesus says the church is like.  Jesus is disgusted by them because they are “neither cold nor hot.”  They are lukewarm, boring, confused, and unpalatable.  

That is, because they are trying to maneuver a middle way, balancing their Christian faith with their pagan, Roman culture, making a blend of these two influences, mixing elements from each into what they probably think is a creative synthesis, they end up being truly faithful to neither.  If this compromise extended to the question of patriotism or Emperor worship, then they have denied and renounced their faith in Jesus Christ.  Jesus says he will “spew them out of [his] mouth” in disgust.  It would be more honest for them to simply admit that they were not Christians at all, and embrace being “cold,” than mess with this silly, inherently contradictory, adulterated religion.

In their attempt to be moderate, cautious, and conciliatory, they have practically extinguished the fire of their own faith.  In their reticence about extremism, thinking it too dangerous or costly to be overt and public about their faith, they in effect throw cold water into what should be a pot boiling over with spiritual enthusiasm.  They are therefore nauseating, compromised, and useless.  Their worship and communion is shot through with the vile, sulfuric flavor of a doomed and corrupt society.

This is a church in which groups like the Nicolaitans, who get criticized in other letters, were not an issue… because they had won.  The church had embraced the approach of fitting in, blending with, and accommodating to the surrounding culture.  This was basically a Nicolaitan congregation, virtually indistinguishable from the surrounding society. 

The relationship of the church to the culture has been one of the themes of all these letters to the seven churches.  The church is trying to carve out its own faithful place in relation to both Roman society and a changing Judaism.  John hears Jesus taking a most extreme perspective on this.  And that is understandable.  Jesus himself does not have a particularly positive relationship with the Roman or the Jewish authorities, who basically conspire to have him executed.  This is a central, indispensable element of the gospel.  The Jewish Messiah dies on a Roman cross.

The question is, “Now what?”  What do we do with this kind of good news, moving forward into the culture that rejected and executed Jesus?

II.

John’s point is to ask how followers of Jesus could possibly manage to find good things in the system that killed him.  Jesus does not compromise; he chooses to get himself crucified.  That’s why he reminds the Laodiceans that he is “the faithful and true witness,” who is at the same time the beginning and the end of the whole creation.  These things are all woven together in one tapestry.  We cannot just take the parts of it that are comfortable and convenient to us, and ignore or set aside the challenging, difficult, and risky parts.  The word for “witness” in Greek is the same as martyr.

The Laodiceans were not following Jesus.  They were taking his forgiveness without repentance, accepting his life without taking up his cross, claiming to believe while not doing anything about it, trying to find themselves without first losing themselves.  That cheapens God’s grace.  And it leads to perverse, ego-centric distortions of the faith in which we think we’re okay while we continue to do unspeakable crimes against our neighbors. 

Many, many scholars and commentators and preachers have recognized in Laodicea the compromised, comfortable, domesticated, establishment church, that is little more than a spiritual cheerleader for the culture in which it finds itself.

I have found that it is normal for some Christians, when they observe the church moving to be more inclusive, to complain about how it is just caving in to society.  Especially since the 1960’s, when churches got involved in various social, civil-rights, and anti-war movements.  The charge was that the churches were just exchanging the gospel for trends, fads, and popular opinion.  They basically said the church was Nicolaitan: all about compromising with and sucking up to an increasingly secular society.

But I noticed that often the folks who complained about this did the much same thing themselves.  But instead of trying to be relevant to society today, they were all about getting back to the society of 50 or 60 years ago.  They just wanted it to be like it was.  And they equated the situation back then with a Christian ideal, or at least better.  They were in constant mourning for the stability, order, authority, unity, and prosperity of the 1950’s.  

In fact, the whole argument in the church for the last 2 or 3 generations has not been about how to stay true to the gospel and uncorrupted by society, but which society, the society of which era, we prefer to be corrupted by.   

The problem is that, 2 centuries after John wrote his book, the church got coopted by the Empire.  And for the next 1500 years, in Western Europe and the places they conquered, the church was completely identified with society.  We were a Christian culture.  The State was nominally or de facto Christian.  I still remember beginning a day in public school with the Lord’s Prayer and a Christian hymn, the Pledge of Allegiance and a patriotic song.  It was all one thing.

III.

And the thing it was, was Laodicea.  In other words, the church embraced, with some modifications, the lukewarm vomit ecclesiastical model.  We mixed the intense, wild, disruptive, inclusive, radical, apocalyptic fire of the Holy Spirit, with the cool, heartless, chilly, rational, calculating, stifling, soul-crushing glacier of the Empire.  And we got a tepid establishment religious institution that had all the trappings and wealth of the State, but which was “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked” in spirit.  A church that, to preserve its own status and position, endorsed, excused, and attached Christ’s Name to a nauseating list of atrocities: the crusades, slavery, colonialism, genocide, war, economic injustice, environmental depredation, bigotry, and even still with these astonishingly widespread cases of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.  Tell people, especially young people, today that you’re a Christian, and you will immediately see them put up their guard.  Our reputation is deservedly awful.

Jesus’ advice to the church in Laodicea is to repent.  He couches it in terms to which the people could relate: the gold, the clothing, and the eye medicine were all things for which the city was known.  He uses this to say they need to find real value, know true purity, and come to see clearly.  They need to change their minds and their actions, and open their doors to the living Presence of the Lord who is knocking, and who wants to sit at his Table with them.  There is still hope, even for them!  But they have to listen to his voice.

Instead of asking what is going to make us rich, popular, and safe; instead of asking what is going to appeal to the market, or what will sell, or what will placate and appease the powers, values, trends, and habits of society, Jesus suggests that society doesn’t matter.  What the culture calls success is irrelevant.  Only what he wants matters.  A church is a church if and when it reflects and expresses the good news of Jesus Christ, “the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the origin of God’s creation.”

We are called to live in a new and alternative culture and society: the Kingdom of God.  We are called to affirm that only Jesus is Lord!  We listen only to Christ’s voice, not the voice of our own egos telling us what to fear and what to want for ourselves, prodding us to selfishness and violence.  His cross means we are free of those sour motivations.  When we take his cross in ourselves we stop making crosses upon which to sacrifice others.  We stop fearing and excluding and blaming and condemning and stealing from others.

And we start living together in joy and love.  We become people of hope, always living into the future of peace that Jesus Christ reveals to us.

IV.  

Yes, we have to do that in a particular time and place.  But we will always be asking what Jesus Christ wants of us.  And yes, sometimes what Christ wants does flow together with other things happening in society.  For he is Lord of everything, and he is always about freedom and equality, forgiveness and non-violence, inclusion and healing.  He is always about breaking down walls and breaking open cages.  He is always about expanding the table and widening the family.  Sometimes, like with the abolition of slavery, society gets moved by his Spirit in and through us!

Christ is never about resuscitating the church of my favorite decade of the past.  Neither is he about selling out to whatever is going on now.

Christ is the origin, he is the destiny, and he is the living and trustworthy witness to the truth of God’s love for the world, for which and to which he gives his life.  That is the bright, wide, open, joyful truth that we need to be about as well.

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