Revelation 2:12-17 - Living Where Satan Is

When I was ten my family went on a trip to the South Pacific. I believe I’ve mentioned it before. Seeing the joy in the hearts of the people of Tonga who really had nothing was a life-changing moment for me. But it wasn’t all joy like that. Throughout the trip we would go from country to country, Tonga, Tahiti, Australia and New Zealand and at each place we would sit down at a restaurant and my dad would ask for ketchup. “I’m sorry, we don’t have any.” Well, on the last day of our trip we’re sitting in a restaurant and we look over at a table near us; there’s a bottle of ketchup. My dad asks the waiter if we could have some ketchup. “I’m sorry, we don’t have any.” My dad points across at the bottle on the other table. “Oh, you mean tomato sauce? Right away.”

One neat thing, though, was that we flew into New Zealand and spent a couple days there at the beginning of our trip, and then another couple days at the end, before we headed home. As we flew into New Zealand, the pilot came over the radio, informed us of the weather and welcomed us to Auckland. “You are now entering New Zealand, set your watches back twenty years.”

And the pilot was right. It was a different world. Things were much slower, and we happened to be staying there over a Sunday, and pretty much the only thing open on that Sunday was our hotel. We walked around town near our hotel and no restaurants were open, we turned on the television and watched sheep dog herding and lawn bowling and there were no commercials on Sundays. Life stopped on Sundays so that people could celebrate the Sabbath.

It used to be that being American meant that it was mostly assumed that you were a Christian. It used to be that on Sundays nothing was open and nothing was done so that people could go to church and not break the Sabbath. What a different world we live in today, what a different pace we live at, and what different expectations we have for Sundays.

I. Where Satan Lives

Many Christians bemoan the loss of the Christian values of our country. Many Christians look with longing at the times past where Christians were deciding the values of the culture. But there are some who think that this might actually be something that will be good for Christianity. They will say that it is good that as a Church we are competing with so many other things in people’s lives. They will say that it is good that our faith doesn’t make us fit in with the culture around us, but rather causes us to stand out, to be different.

I must admit that I like the theology that says this; I like the idea of standing out as Christians and being a prophetic voice to the world and the culture around us. But, practically, this is much harder. When we compete with the entertainment and self-centeredness that the culture around us glorifies, we find it much harder to be heard. Life in the majority is a lot easier than life in the minority.

A Muslim scholar, someone who is pretty wise, actually, pointed out that reading through the New Testament, he could not find anything that talked about living life as a Christian where Christianity was in charge of the culture. Whereas, when he read through the Koran he could not find anything that talked about how to live as a Muslim as part of the minority. This is an interesting point to be made. Islam, as a religion, one that we believe was made up by humans, was designed to be in charge, to control and rule over a culture, to shape that culture into what it wanted the culture to be. But Christianity, a religion that we believe was handed to us by God, was lived out for us in the words and works of Jesus, doesn’t talk about ruling over people but rather talks about what it is like to live in a culture that may not accept you, that may disagree with you about what it means to follow God, that may attack you or punish you for your faith.

And when we look at the church throughout history, when we look at the church in the world today, it is precisely where the church is persecuted, where people are dying for their faith that God is really working and that Christianity is so very alive.

Today’s scripture, another letter from Jesus to an early church, this time in Pergamum, talks about what it means to be a part of God’s kingdom even when the earthly culture around you is turned against God. Jesus tells the Christians of Pergamum that he knows where they live. He tells them that they live in the place that Satan has his throne. Wow, they are living in the center of evil. And yet he is thankful that they are remaining true to his name, that they do not renounce their faith in him.

Jesus wasn’t just being symbolic; he wasn’t just being poetic when he talked about Satan having his throne in Pergamum. It was the city that was the center of emperor worship in Asia Minor. This was the place where people went to worship the emperor. This is where there was a temple set up to the emperor, the real sign of power in the day. And yet, even in this haven of evil, even in this center of, well, Satan’s power there were Christians, meeting, praying, praising, and remaining faithful. It is in the places of darkness that the light can truly shine so very brightly.

II. My Faithful Witness

We would love to see the world go back to a place where Christians were completely in charge of our culture. But perhaps we can be a stronger voice by standing up and telling those around us, not that they have to live the way we want them to live, but rather telling them that there is an option, that there is a better way to live.

Many in the culture around us look down on Evangelicals. They think that we’re hypocrites who want to push our agenda and our values on the people around us. And some of their attacks on us are fair. But if we started taking a different approach, if we began to look at the world around us and stop treating it like we were living in the New Jerusalem but rather realized that we were living where Satan had his throne, then we could truly make a difference to the world around us. And we could put an end to the complaints people have about Evangelicals.

What if we were telling those around us not that they had to live the way we thought they should, but rather that there was something worthwhile about living this way. What if we were standing out as an example of a better way to live, what if we were being faithful witnesses for God. It is interesting because Jesus does mention a faithful witness by name, Antipas. And the reason Antipas is mentioned by name is that he was killed for his faith. Is this something that we are willing to give up for our faith, our very lives? It’s hard to figure because it’s just a question to us; it is one that is not based in reality around us. But, it helps us to see that having faith, being faithful, isn’t always going to be easy for us, sometimes it will mean that we need to sacrifice. Faith that doesn’t sacrifice isn’t necessarily faith at all. And so we can learn from the people of Pergamum. We can learn what it means to live in a place that is not welcoming to our faith. We can learn how to follow Jesus when it is not the popular thing, the expected thing to do.

III. Cultural Compliance

But God criticizes the people of Pergamum as well. They are standing out, they are living amongst a culture that does not accept them, they are being a light in the darkness, but they are also giving in to the culture around them. They are allowing themselves to be influenced, to be changed, to be tempted by the culture around them. This, of course, is the danger of being that light in the midst of the darkness. The danger is that you might start accepting the darkness as light. The danger is that your eyes might adjust enough that you don’t realize that you’re living in darkness at all anymore.

We are called to be faithful. We are called to shine in the darkness. We are called to live in a way that might not be popular and in doing so, encourage others towards this path. This means that the way we live may not match up with the way that the culture around us lives. This means that we cannot expect the culture around us to change, but we can invite people to live like us instead of living as our culture suggests. What if, instead of telling those around us that they must be faithful to their spouses, we instead showed them how faithful living truly can be better for them. When talking to our youth, encouraging them to wait until they’re married, instead of telling them just to do it because it’s what God commands, we can explain to them that it truly will lead to a better relationship with their future spouse. Instead of trying to get our culture to become what we want it to be, we can show those around us that sometimes it is better to live in a different way than the culture around us lives. We can be faithful witnesses by showing the contrast, by living faithfully in a world where faithfulness to God is not the norm. This is what the people of Pergamum dealt with, and this is what we have the opportunity to deal with. How are we going to follow God in the coming decades? As our culture continues to move away from faithfulness in God? Are we going to be that light? Are we going to shine Jesus’ truth out to those around us? Or are we going to comply with the norms and the beliefs of the culture around us? Perhaps, instead of putting our energy into trying to change the world into the way we want it to be, we can stand up against the world and teach those around us what it truly means to follow Christ. Amen.

Revelation 1:17-2:7 - Remember Your First Love

I. Important Teachings in Revelation

I have mentioned before that the book of Revelation is a difficult book to look at. It is full of confusing and difficult sayings and many a Christian has found him or herself falling off track as they try to figure out what Revelation is about to the point of ignoring the other, important teachings of the Bible. That being said, there is an important section of the book of Revelation, that moves away from the apocalyptical writing and basically talks to real people struggling with real issues as they are parts of real churches. I believe that Revelation 2 and 3 are the real power of the book of Revelation, not because they avoid apocalyptic writings but because they are surrounded by apocalyptic writings.

Revelation 2 and 3 spend time talking to seven churches that were going while Revelation was being written. And these chapters look at these churches and commend what they are doing right and correct when they are off track. In taking time to look at the problems and joys in these individual churches in the midst of a book talking about the end times, God is making it very clear where his priorities are.

Now I, like many Christians before me, believe that these were letters written to specific churches with specific problems that are being addressed. But I also believe that they have greater truths that speak not only to the church receiving the letter but to all Christians. So I believe that it is worthwhile to look at these letters to the angels of the seven churches to see what they say to us. Some of these will speak more to us than others. Some will show us that we, as a church and as Christians, are on the right track and we can rejoice in that. Other letters will challenge us where it hurts and help us to realize that we are falling short in our call to follow God as his people. Whatever we get from these letters from Jesus to these early churches, we know that they will not hit us all at the same place. But when we look at what Jesus rejoiced about in his early church and what he was disappointed by, we can better understand how to be a part of his church today.

II. The Ephesians

The first letter that we come across in the book of Revelation is to the church in Ephesus. This is a church that we know something about, after all, we have a letter to this church from Paul.

And here, like with Paul, the letter begins by commending the people of Ephesus. They have been faithful, they have worked hard at their faith, they have stayed true to good theology. You see, in the early church, much like today, there were different ideas going around about what it meant to be a Christian. There were different leaders who focused on different things. For some one thing was more important, for others something else was. And some Christian leaders, even back then, would head off on the wrong track. They would head in a direction that was taking them away from the faith. The Nicolaitans are mentioned in this passage. They were people who wanted to make Christianity too much like the culture around it. They felt that it was fine to eat food that had been sacrificed to idols, they felt that it was okay if you went ahead and denied Jesus verbally, because what really mattered was what was in your heart. They believed that the Christian faith could accommodate the culture around it to the point that it didn’t look any different from the culture around it. But the people of Ephesus rejected this teaching. And they are commended for it.

The truth that we find here is that we are called out as Christians to be different. We cannot allow ourselves to accommodate to what we think the world around us wants us to be. No, we have to stay true to what God is calling us to be, even when this means hardship for us. Even when this means that we might not be treated in the same way as those around us. We aren’t offered food that had been sacrificed to idols anymore, and we might wonder why this was a problem in the early church, but when you realize that the restaurants all served food that had been sacrificed, and when you realize that that was where people would go to do business, all of a sudden you realize that the people weren’t able to do business the way that those around them did, they were giving up something important so they could stay true to what the Gospel asked of them.

The Ephesians were doing the right things. They were testing those who came to them, they were making sure that their theology was on track. They were studying not only God’s word but also the teachings of the apostles. And the Ephesians are commended for this. They are on track. They are heading in the right direction. But they are missing something. There is something lacking in their faith, in their walk with the Lord.

III. Your First Love

What is it that is missing? It is put so eloquently in verse 4. “You have forgotten your first love.” What is the first love that Jesus is talking about? I believe that it is twofold. The first love is the love you have for God when you really understand what it is that he has done for you. And the first love is also the love that you have for things of God like church and missions and doing God’s will. Jesus goes on to tell the people of Ephesus to remember the heights that they’ve fallen from. And I think it is worthwhile for us to remember what our faith used to be like.

Remember how excited you used to be about the gospel? Remember how you just devoured scripture because it was new to you and you couldn’t get enough? Remember what it felt like at camp when you walked down that isle to accept Christ into your life because you realized that you wanted to take the next step? Remember when you lost track of time because you were worshipping God and you had caught a glimpse of heaven? Remember when you looked forward to every opportunity you had to get together with other Christians because there was something exciting about talking about God with others.

But that excitement, that joy, that exuberance doesn’t seem to last and we end up finding ourselves going through the motions. We end up having to drag ourselves to church because we’d much rather sleep in. Some people blame this loss of the excitement on the church and they will try a different church that will be new and exciting once again, but that doesn’t last, either. Others dismiss their excitement for the Gospel and the things of God as youthful exuberance. They dismiss it as something that they cannot ever get back. They’ve had their honeymoon with God and now the relationship has moved past that stage.

But in his message to the Ephesians, Jesus tells them how to remember their first love. He doesn’t just tell them to do it, he tells them how. He tells them to do the things they used to do. It’s the way we’re built. Our emotions, our feelings are affected by what we do. We like to look at it the other way and we like to allow our actions to be decided by our emotions, but it can happen the other way around. People who feel like their relationships are going downhill and don’t see much joy in them anymore often allow their emotions, their lack of love, to keep them from working towards growing those relationships. And yet, if they started doing things that would help the relationships grow stronger, they would find that their feelings would follow. We often wait for our feelings, when what we need to do is start living as if our feelings were different and we would find them changing.

The summer between high school and college, I was working at a grocery store as a box boy. It was a good job that I quite enjoyed, though I’ve got to say that you can only talk about the weather so many times a day as you take people’s groceries out to their cars. One day I came to work very upset and very depressed. My girlfriend had broken up with me the night before. But my job was such that I had to smile and make light conversation with strangers, though I didn’t feel like it at all. At the beginning of the day, I felt that I had a fake smile plastered on my face when I was around people, and it would disappear when there was nobody around. But as the day progressed the fake smile became real, as I made the effort to be friendly and have conversations with people, my heart started warming up.

I think this can be true in many ways with our relationships. When we don’t feel like things are going well, we can start acting as if they are and discover that things can and will turn around. And I believe that this can happen in our relationship with God. We need to rediscover our first love. This doesn’t mean that we have to wait until we hear a song we like. It doesn’t mean that we need to find a church that matches our worship style. What it means is that we need to begin treating God as if he were first in our lives again. And we just may discover that when we begin to do this, God will take that place in our world and in our lives once again.

Matthew 2:1-12; Isaiah 60:1-6 - Following a Star

I. Astrologers

The Christmas story is full of familiarity. It is something that we are used to. It is something that we know. Because of this I find that I often don’t pay attention to the things in the story that should stand out and make me wonder. We’re used to Jesus being born in a stable so we don’t realize what it must have truly been like for Mary and Joseph as they entered Bethlehem. We’re used to the angels appearing to the shepherds, so we don’t catch the power of the moment, the fear that the shepherds first had, then the excitement as they went to see this thing that they had heard about. We’re used to the star in the sky and the three kings coming from the east and we miss the real strangeness of their arrival.

And so, this morning, I’m going to set you straight a bit by going back and looking at the magi and what they bring to the Christmas story. First of all, I need to correct a few misconceptions about them. I feel that I end up correcting these misconceptions every year and so they might be getting old to you, but I’m going to do so anyway. First, there weren’t necessarily three of them and they definitely weren’t kings. The wise men who came to visit Jesus were Magi. We’ll talk a bit about what that means in a minute. But first we need to talk a bit about the timing. You see, the Magi didn’t come on Christmas Eve, or even on Christmas Day to worship Jesus. They came sometime in the first two years of Jesus’ life. How do we know this? Because when they visited Jesus he was living in a house with Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem. The first day he was in a stable. And also, Herod wanted to have Jesus killed and so he ordered all boys under two years old in Bethlehem and its vicinity to be killed. Another thing that helps us to see this is that when Jesus was dedicated when he was 40 days old, his parents had to give the offerings of the poor, showing that they were without means at the time. After the Magi gave gifts of gold, frankincense & myrrh, they most likely would have used this to buy a better offering to give for Jesus’ dedication.

And so the story is not exactly how we see it in our Christmas programs. And yet it definitely has something to teach us. But to understand the message of the Magi, we need to understand who they were. Think about it for a bit. Can you think of an English word that begins with Magi? Perhaps magic or magician? That’s what the Magi were, magicians. And not the kind who do tricks, either. These were people who were known as wise men, who were advisors to kings, who used astrology to come up with their predictions of the future.

The Magi who visited Jesus to welcome him to earth were astrologers. Let that sink in for a moment. They weren’t Bible scholars, they weren’t kings or rulers, they were people who looked at the sky and attempted to tell the future based on what it said. They were charlatans who practiced a form of sorcery that is outlawed in the Bible. They were pagans, or a better word for it today, witches.

II. Following a Star

You see, this is what makes the story of the Magi visiting baby Jesus stand out to me: the fact that the very people to welcome Jesus when he is born are people whose job is one that God doesn’t approve of. Most synagogues in Jesus’ time would have the same reaction. They would refer to them as sinners and pagans and believers in superstitions and would do what they could to keep them away. And yet these are the people that God reaches out to in his own way by putting a star in the sky that will draw them to Jesus. God sees these Magi not as someone to keep away from his Son, but instead pulls them to his Son. God calls out to the Magi in their superstitions and brings truth to them. And when they come to see Jesus they are welcomed by Jesus and the holy family, and God even speaks to them in a dream on the way home. God’s response to the Magi in the story of their visit to see Jesus is exactly the opposite response to superstitions or pagans that I see in the church today. We do all we can to avoid superstitions. We do all we can to avoid things that seem to be not of God. And in doing so we end up excluding people who do practice these things.

Now I’m not suggesting that you should begin reading the horoscope. I’m not suggesting that you should take up witchcraft. We don’t need these things because we have God in our lives. But we shouldn’t be scared of these things either. Instead, we should be finding ways to reach out to people who believe differently than us. Instead we should be finding ways to invite them in to the relationship we have with God. This is what God did in Jesus’ birth. He came to people who weren’t ready for him. He came to people where they were, in their own belief system, in a way that made sense to them, and he took away the superstitions they believed, and pointed them to scripture and led them to Bethlehem. It should be noted that the star, the astrology didn’t lead them to Bethlehem. It wasn’t until the Magi consulted scripture that they found the path to Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem. We, as Christians, are called to move people past their own beliefs, past their own superstitions, and lead them to Jesus as well.

III. Epiphany

We are celebrating Epiphany today. I am making somewhat of an effort this year to spend time focused on the church year calendar. I think it’s interesting to follow the church calendar and see where it takes us. And Epiphany is about the coming of the Wise Men, the Magi after we have finished celebrating Christmas, the coming of the Savior. And Epiphany is symbolized in the church calendar by a focus on light. We are reminded that Jesus is the light of the world. We are reminded that it is light that allows us to see. We are reminded that light pierces the darkness, causing it to end completely. Darkness cannot swallow light. Rather, the opposite happens. You can go into the darkest place and when you light a light, the darkness will dissipate. And if the light is strong enough, the darkness will disappear completely.

We believe that Jesus is the light of the world and we believe that we are called to carry that light into the places where there is darkness. And yet we seem to be afraid that the darkness will overtake us. We seem to think that if a place is too dark, Jesus won’t be able to shine enough to keep us in the light. And so we hold our light, and huddle in a room with other people holding lights, living lives that are afraid of the dark.

But if we live our lives in fear of the world around us, how can we reach out to the world around us at all? No, we are called to shine the light that God has given us, to illuminate the darkness, to bring those around us out of the darkness.

In seminary, a professor talked about it this way. He said that the mindset in Jesus’ day was that sin was contagious. All the purity laws that the people of Jesus’ day followed were designed to keep yourself from being infected by the sins of those around you. Sin was like a germ, and you didn’t want to get what it might give you. But Jesus in his life wasn’t about avoiding germs. No, Jesus lived a life where he went out and lived among the sinners. He ate with them. He drank with them. He stayed at their places. The Pharisees derided him for this, we often think that they did so because they thought he might give people the wrong impression. I mean, if he was fellowshipping with prostitutes, how could he prove that he wasn’t doing something else with them as well. But this isn’t really the problem that the Pharisees had with Jesus spending all his time with the sinners. He wasn’t living a holy life in their eyes. He was surrounding himself with sin, and it was going to get him. He was going to be contaminated by it.

But Jesus didn’t see sin in this way. He saw it not as a disease that was contagious but as darkness that could be dispersed by the light of the world. When Jesus spent time with prostitutes, they were the ones that were changed by it. When he ate with tax collectors, they were the ones that went away different. Jesus, instead of being scared of sin and darkness, reached out to sinners and people living in the darkness and brought them light. And this is what Jesus calls us to do as well.

Don’t live in fear of witches, instead talk with them and show them they don’t need superstition and spells when they can have a God who will hear their prayers. Don’t live in fear of astrology, instead point the astrologers to the one true light, Jesus. Don’t live in fear of people who are different than you, instead, introduce them to Christ so that you may have something, the most important thing, in common. Don’t live in fear of the kids these days who do all sorts of strange things and dress so very weird. Instead shine a light in their darkness so that they can come in contact with Jesus. It’s what Jesus did, it’s what God did through the Magi. Our light has come. Light doesn’t grow weaker when it is shared, instead it grows stronger. Let’s share the light this year with those around us so that it can truly become stronger and illuminate this whole town and this whole area with Jesus’ light. Amen.