May 11, 2025 (4th Sunday of Easter)
Tepid
Revelation 3:14-22
It seems like when you get ready to move to a new community, there’s one thing you don’t really know, maybe even can’t know, until you get there and actually start living your life: What’s the water like?
Now I know there’s more to the equation than just what the community’s water supply is like—there are variables from house to house, what kinds of pipes, how old they are, how old the hot water tank is, and so on. But the town’s water quality is something I’m not sure we really think to ask about.
I grew up in a town where the city water came right out of the river—the river called “Verdigris,” which is the name for the greenish patina copper gets as it’s exposed to air. Yes, the river water there tends to have a greenish-greyish color to it, largely because the land is relatively flat, which means the water has a lot of time to pick up mud and stuff as it flows along.
To make it usable, of course, it has to go through quite a lot of filtration, and it’s treated with chlorine and other things to make sure it’s safe. But in the summer, when the level is low, no amount of filtration in the world is going to get all the muddy taste out of it. I grew up with it, so I didn’t really even notice it until I didn’t live there anymore—then I would come back, and have a drink of water, and…well…ugh.
The other thing about our water in Coffeyville, and I daresay most places where the water comes out of a river or a reservoir, is that in the summer it’s not cold when it comes out of the tap. The sun beats down on the water, and warms it up. That just makes the muddy taste that much worse. And it’s hard water, so you get lots of buildup of minerals in your coffeepot or your shower head.
On the other side of the coin is the water that comes out of taps in Portland, Oregon. That water comes from the Bull Run Reservoir, which is on the side of Mount Hood and is filled by snowmelt off a part of the mountain that really stays pretty pristine in the winter. It’s very clean and pure, and there’s minimal processing required to make it drinkable. It’s quite soft, and it tastes good.
When it came time for us to move from Oregon to Iowa, I had a hard time getting a good answer to what kind of water we were going to find there. Northwest Iowa is pretty flat, and having grown up drinking muddy flatland river water, I figured that’s what we would find there. But Sac City turns out to get its water from a deep well, so it’s actually pretty nice.
In the letters to the seven churches that are found in the second and third chapters of Revelation, the author of the book alludes to some things that were familiar to people living in those cities. For instance, in the letter to Pergamum, verses 12-17 of chapter 2, the author speaks of the faithful being given “a white stone, with a new name written on that stone.” In Pergamum, the local stone from which many of the great buildings were constructed was black. If a person wanted to put up an inscription, they had to get some white marble to carve the inscription into, and then that marble was affixed to the black buildings. They would have stood out pretty dramatically. Also, when people in Pergamum went to a feast, it was common for each guest to receive a stone with their name on it, which was their ticket into the event space.[1]
Today’s reading is the final of the seven letters, and the original hearers in Laodicea would have recognized that the author uses the condition of the Laodicean water supply as an illustration of what the church was like. There’s more to it, of course; the author also talks about white garments, contrasting with the prized, naturally black wool from sheep raised by Laodicean farmers; and calls to mind the healing minerals Laodiceans used to make medicine for the eyes. But it’s the condition of the water supply that brings the most drama to this passage.
Tom Wright, in his study resource called Revelation for Everyone, describes the Laodicean water situation. The city is on the river Lycus, but it tended to dry up in the summer and wasn’t worth a whole lot the rest of the year. So the city depended on water that was brought there from the nearby communities of Hierapolis and Colosse.
Colosse had a water supply similar to the Bull Run water we enjoyed in Portland—it came from snow-fed streams high on Mount Cadmus. The Romans were brilliant water engineers, and water from Colosse was brought to Laodicea via the famous Roman aqueducts. But the wonderfully fresh and cold Colossian water was exposed to the Turkish summer heat, so it was just lukewarm by the time it got to Laodicea.
To the north of Laodicea was the city of Hierapolis, where there are hot mineral springs that are famous to this day. Romans traveled from all over to bathe in the hot springs of Hierapolis, which were thought to have healing properties. That water was brought via aqueducts to Laodicea as well—but by the time it got there it was no longer hot; it was just tepid, and the minerals in it made its taste absolutely awful.[2]
John compared the condition of the church in Laodicea to the water situation in that city. The water was just nasty—what had been fresh and cold when it left Colosse, and the hot mineral spring water from Hierapolis, was just tepid and foul-tasting when it reached Laodicea. “Neither cold nor hot,” but just lukewarm.
Have you ever known Christians like that?
United Methodist bishop William Willimon told a story about a conversation he had with the parents of a student he had known when he was the campus minister at Duke University. These parents came to see him very upset, because their daughter was planning to go to work in a dangerous part of the world after she graduated from college.
They said, “She told us she heard God calling her to go there.” And they asked Willimon if he could do anything to change her mind.
But he said, “You had her baptized, right? And she went through confirmation when she was old enough to decide for herself, right? You raised her to be a Christian; so why does it surprise you that she is answering a call from God?”
They said, “We never would have done any of it if we had known it would lead to this. We just wanted her to be a nice person.”[3]
Their daughter wasn’t prepared to be a lukewarm Christian—she had been called by God and was passionate about serving Christ, even if it put her in danger—and her parents were upset!
The letter to Laodicea is the only one of the seven that has nothing positive to say about the community’s situation. There’s nothing about holding firm in the face of persecution, nothing about resisting false teachings, like those of the Nicolaitans—and nobody knows, by the way, what exactly the Nicolaitans taught—nothing positive at all. They brag about how strong and wealthy they are—Laodicea had declined help from the empire after a devastating earthquake, because they felt like they had enough wealth and resources to be able to take care of their own selves. They’re tepid, lukewarm, their faith put away in a box after the postlude on Sunday morning and having no effect on how they live the rest of the week.
And, to make matters that much worse, First Christian Church of Laodicea has slammed shut doors even to the one it claims to follow. (That pretty language we like, “I stand at the door and knock,” if we look at it in the original language and context, is not a sweet call to “let Jesus into our heart”; it’s actually an image of a householder demanding to be let into his own home after others have locked him out!)
So what is it about Laodicea that has earned them the most critical of the seven letters? Why are they lukewarm? Why do they boast about being rich, strong, and self-sufficient when they’re actually week, needy, and poor? Why does Jesus seem to have been shut out of their church?
Laodicea was a wealthy city; it stood at the crossroads of two major trade routes and its natural resources—well, except for that awful water—were very much in demand. When natural disaster damaged their city, maybe three decades before Revelation was written, they turned down imperial disaster assistance. They didn’t need it; they were perfectly capable of rebuilding their own courthouse, thank you very much.
And yet…
Jesus, speaking through John, has nothing good to say about this church in this city. They have a tall steeple, full pews and offering plates every week, a massive endowment, lots of staff and programs—but they’ve left Jesus out in the cold. And they don’t even notice; they don’t need him.
Justo González, in his Bible study called Three Months with Revelation, asks a very pointed question that remains relevant right here and now:
Could it be that the worst danger that threatens the church, much worse than persecution, criticism on the part of the rest of the society, or economic and theological difficulties, is an easy life, an abundance of goods, the lack of real challenges?
In this country, for many years, mainline Christianity stood at the very center of life. Churches were full, offerings were abundant, Sunday school rooms overflowed with children. Every church had lots of programs and lots of people at meetings and social functions. If the doors of the church were open, people came through them. Nobody asked, “Do you go to church?” They asked, “Which church do you belong to?”
I don’t think anyone could argue that this is our reality today. A lot of churches these days have a lot of conversations about how it used to be, and how we really need to do something to make it that way again. I don’t think it can be done. What’s more, I’m not sure it should be done.
Why not?
Do you know the Beatitudes? I’d guess most of us know them well enough that we don’t really hear them anymore. And I’d venture to suggest that as a result, we don’t entirely know what they mean.
Let’s look at the very first of Matthew’s Beatitudes. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” it says. What does it even mean to be “poor in spirit”?
Maybe we think it means a person who doesn’t go to church, who doesn’t spend time in prayer each day, who doesn’t read the Bible very often. But if we look at the Greek, this beatitude has a shade of meaning that is generally lost in translation (although one of the English versions I have access to does capture it). And that shade of meaning is precisely opposite to what First Christian, Laodicea thought of itself.
“We’re rich, we’re strong, we don’t need anything,” they said.
“Blessed are those who know how much they need God’s help,” says the Beatitude.
If a person or a church is wealthy and strong, they can delude themselves into thinking that they don’t need anyone or anything—not even God. It’s when we are put in a place where we know we can’t make it on our own that we can turn to God, admit we don’t know what to do, admit we need help—and once we have done that, then we have opened that door to the one who stands there knocking, so that he can once again come in and give us a truly abundant life.
[1] N.T. Wright, Revelation for Everyone (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), p. 23.
[2] Wright, p. 38.
[3] I don’t remember where I got that story; it was probably from an issue of Pulpit Resource, a preaching journal Willimon edited.
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