Sermons
May 4, 2025 (3rd Sunday of Easter)
Revelation 2:1-7
Before I start, it’s probably good to deal with a few minor things, so we all get on the bus together, as Fred Craddock sometimes said.
First, and probably least important, the name of the book is Revelation, not Revelations. Specifically, it’s The Revelation to John, although we don’t typically call it that.
Second, the whole book is a letter. After a short prologue, it starts with the same kind of greeting most of Paul’s letters start with. “John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.” It was probably meant to be read aloud, in its entirety, to each of those churches, just like Paul’s letters were probably read aloud to the congregations to whom they were addressed.
Third, Revelation is not meant to be taken literally. It’s an example of a literary style called apocalyptic,[2] which flourished in the century or so before and after Christ. There are apocalyptic writings in the Bible outside of Revelation—specifically, the second half of the book of Daniel, as well as parts of Ezekiel, Isaiah, Joel, and Zechariah. There is also the “Little Apocalypse” of Mark 13, which is parallel to Matthew 24 and Luke 12. Outside the Bible apocalyptic is found in the book of Enoch, 4 Esdras, and the Shepherd of Hermas.
The point of apocalyptic writing is to present, in a sort of coded or allegorical fashion, comfort and encouragement to people who are suffering persecution or oppression. That’s done with fantastical imagery involving beasts, plagues, cosmic battles, and such—imagery which we find terrifying, mostly because we don’t understand it. But the underlying message, especially of the book of Revelation, is, “Be faithful, even as you’re suffering because of your faith, because God will fight for you against all that is evil, and God will win the battle.” All the fantastic, terrifying imagery eventually gives way to an equally fantastic, but beautiful, description of a redeemed world and eternal joy for all who have been faithful.
Fourth, because it’s not meant to be taken literally, there’s no need to try to match what happens in Revelation to current events. We don’t have to worry that the ZIP code in Topeka starts with the number of the beast,[3] nor do we have to avoid barcodes on our groceries, or whatever else people think up to make us afraid based on the imagery from Revelation. Instead, I hope we can hear the passages we’re going to examine over the next few weeks in light of that overall message: Be faithful, because God is fighting for you.
Some scholars in the past have assumed the letters to the seven churches represent seven eras of Christian faith, with the final one—the one we’ll read next week—corresponding to modern times. I don’t agree; it seems to me like just about everything described in all seven of the letters has existed in some part of Christianity or another just about all the time. And the seven letters are not meant to be a history lesson; they’re meant to communicate something about what living faithfully looks like and what it doesn’t.
Years ago jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis did a short series about music on public television. One of the things he said was about practicing.
Most of us know that, to get good at anything, we have to practice. That’s true if we’re learning to play a musical instrument, to draw or paint, to play a sport, to cook, or even to read and do math. And practicing isn’t always a lot of fun. You have to do things like drills and scales and endless pages of vocabulary, spelling, and multiplication tables.
When you start out doing some new thing, it can be fun and exciting. I remember the first time I could pick up the Bible in Hebrew and read the first verse: Bereshit bara Elohim et ha-shamayim va et ha-aretz.[4] Doors flew open! Bells rang out![5] But over the year I took Hebrew, that delightful moment was replaced with hours and hours of parsing and translating, learning grammar rules in a language that is very, very different from my native tongue.
The same happens with just about anything new we decide to do, whether it’s language or music or a sport, or whatever. When we start out, we’re having fun, enjoying the challenge, delighting in the new things we can do. But before long it begins to seem a lot like work.
Ideally, we stick it out even if it’s tedious, and at some point it begins to be enjoyable again. But a lot of times, when something gets difficult, or we get bored by drills and scales and endless pages of translations or multiplication tables, we lose interest, and we quit.
I think this can happen in congregations and communities, too.
When I lived in Sac City, the community received a grant to study the causes of poverty in our rural community. We started out with groups that met all over town to talk about how poverty looks different in small towns than it does in cities, how the changes in these communities can increase poverty or aggravate what’s already there, and so on. Those groups eventually came up with some really good ideas for ways we could help reduce the effect of poverty in our town. We organized a little group called “Partners for Progress” to work on implementation.
And at that point quite a few people dropped out.
Now I don’t mean to imply that we did nothing; several different community initiatives came out of the group, including Volunteer Income Tax Assistance for poor and elderly residents and a summer lunch program to feed kids while school was out. But the passion we started with, which led us to think we could take the world by storm, fizzled.
It’s sort of a universal reality for just about any individual who starts something new, or any group that gets going for a purpose that most of its folks are passionate about. And the churches in Asia[6] to whom Revelation was addressed would have been no exception—plus they had an added complication we don’t necessarily deal with in this time and place.
Remember that these seven churches, like churches in many parts of the Roman world before Constantine, lived with opposition, sometimes with outright persecution. It wasn’t always official and it wasn’t always empire-wide. A church might be in an area with a tolerant local government, but then their governor or proconsul or whatever they had got replaced, and maybe the next one was similarly tolerant or maybe they weren’t and started causing problems for Christians. There would have been a fair amount of free-floating anxiety around, as they waited for the other shoe to drop. When life got difficult, or the daily ins and outs of being a church in a hostile world became tedious, a church might find itself focusing on survival instead of mission, and people might well decide following Jesus really wasn’t worth the trouble.
(If you think I’m overstating the issue, keep in mind that there was quite a controversy after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire over how to handle people who had left when times were hard but who now wanted to come back. Should they be allowed to return? Should they have to do some kind of penance, or be let back in on a probationary basis? It was a big deal, and many who had not left felt like letting the others back in was a bit of a slap in the face given what they had gone through.)
It’s a normal thing for a person or a group to “lose the love they had at first,” even without the added stress of persecution. But if these Christians in Asia were going to survive the trouble they were facing and would face in the future, they needed to find it. It’s easy to get demoralized when trouble is the order of the day, when life seems to be a long, hard slog from one horror to the next. If all you’ve got is “Jesus wants us to be happy” or “being a Christian is all about being a nice person,” you’re not going to make it.
But there is an antidote, and that antidote is to remember—remember what Jesus did for us and what it means; remember the sacrifice he made for us and the victory that began when he walked out of that tomb on the first Easter morning. And after we remember, we need to repent.
Now, as I think we learn during Lent every year, repentance isn’t just about recognizing we’ve done something wrong and feeling bad about it. Repentance means recognizing we’ve stepped away from the path Jesus has put us on, turning around and getting back on it.
In the dailiness of life, bills to be paid and chores to be done, it’s easy to lose sight of our first love—our passion for following Jesus wherever he leads. When a church is aging, maybe declining in membership, maybe having to deal with a building that is too large and too old for their current needs, or whatever, it’s easy to forget that we’re here to be the body of Christ, to support one another as we figure out what it means to love God and love our neighbor here and now. But again, there is an antidote.
Remember, then turn back to what Jesus is truly calling the church and the people in it to do and be.
[1] h/t to R.E.M.
[2] Apocalypse is a Greek word that has been brought into English. Its popular meaning is “the end of the world,” but it’s more properly translated as “disclosure” or “revelation.” It’s about bringing to the fore something that has been hidden.
[3] For one thing, there is disagreement about whether the “number of the beast” is 666 or something else; and many scholars argue that the number is an example of Hebrew numerology in which that number represents the letters spelling out Nero Caesar, because some at the time when Revelation was written believed the tyrannical and unhinged Emperor Nero would return from the dead to continue the horrors he had inflicted on Christians when he was alive.
[4] This is an imprecise transliteration from the Hebrew to the English alphabet.
[5] Thanks to Frederick Buechner for this image, which he employed to describe how reading the Bible in another language can often yield new understandings of God’s word for us.
[6] Asia, in this case, refers not to the continent of Asia but to a Roman province in what is now Turkey.