7: Asleep in Sardis

To best summarize today’s message, we have to look at a cartoon from 1945 to 1972. This cartoon is about a possum named Pogo and his alligator friend, Albert. The guy who wrote this comic, Walt Kelly, was an animator at Disney and worked on Pinocchio, Fantasia and Dumbo and used the comic strip to engage in political and social satire. That’s enough about that. What I’m telling us to focus on is the words on the comic book cover: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” This is supposed to set the tone for the entire sermon today. Unlike the last four weeks where there was a specific enemy and a specific person responsible for making or causing us imperfection from the outside in, we come to a place named Sardis and find that the enemy is now not on the outside, as an external force pushing us further along the wrong path, but an internal force, who is us, that causes us to miss the point of our faith entirely. Here is the warning for us: if we are not conscious of what we are doing and the decisions we are making, and when I mean conscious, I mean, extremely weary of, then we are and will destroy ourselves and the people around us and it’ll be nothing to us that we did such a thing. I wish I could give you some insight into the culture and society of Sardis, but the truth of the matter is that people are still making archeological discoveries about the city even today and not much is really known about the city except that every few hundred years it is ruined by earthquakes. The one thing I found particularly interesting about the city was that when it was last destroyed around 600 AD, it was destroyed by Sasanian (yes those were the snake worshipping killing force of the Persian Empire according to the movie Jake Gyllenhall was in). Anyways, the idea is that once in the past, a long time ago when Sardis was the Persian capital of its western half, that was the heyday, the glorious time. However, when the Romans controlled the city, it had to be destroyed. The Sasanians didn’t really worship snakes, at least, I don’t think they did. In real life the Sasanian married the army and religion together, meaning that there was a priest to every infantry and their warfare was spiritualized. They had crazy tactics, which was supposedly a marriage between religious philosophies coming from zorasteriansim and modern warfare. It’s a little ironic that this city was undone by a people group that will see their undoing because they destroyed each other from the inside as the outer world put pressure on them. That’s a different story altogether, we need to continue. Revelations 3. Let’s go. ¹ “And to the angel of the church in Sardis write: ‘The words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. “‘I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. ² Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. – Revelations 3:1-2 The message to Sardis lists no specific enemies, internal or external. There is no name calling—no liars, no Balaam or Jezebel, no deep secrets of Satan, no synagogue of Satan, no throne of Satan. Consequently, of all the congregations in Asia, we know least about Sardis and its problems. Yet no other message is more damaging or more urgent than this one. Walt Kelly was right. Too often, when we encounter no spiritual adversaries, it is because we are the enemy. The only enemy named at Sardis is the angel to whom the message is addressed. Let’s take a look at this because in the mind of the writer, this message makes it clear that the angel, like any human leader, is deeply involved in the life of the congregation. The writer wants the angel to know that he/she is living a façade. He does and says what he or she needs to say and do, but there’s nothing going on in the inside. That’s the reputation that the writer is talking about. They’re doing stuff, they are doing things, but the reason for doing those things is not there. I want to stop here for a minute and challenge the idea. This is not going to be easy or even nice to swallow, but simply: are we pretending on the outside to have it all together? Let’s not miss this here. Jesus doesn’t expect his followers to be perfect, what he does expect is that his followers be authentic. I want to ask the church, I want to ask all of us, are we being authentic? The question I’m begging is a question of introspection. Are we being authentic to ourselves and therefore to God? Or are we just one of these church people that got it together on the outside, but within us, there is a need for each and every one of us to come back to life and be revived? When John writes to the angel that he/she is “dead,” he is talking about it spiritually. To be spiritually dead doesn’t mean that we walked away from God or that we are bad people. It just means that we would rather truly choose rules for a prize over an authentic relationship with God. Here’s what I mean. There are people who go to church and call themselves followers of Jesus or holy people that would rather make sure there is a witness to the offering they just put in at church, but never bothered to witness to a neighbor who just lost a job and can’t pay the bills. There are people in the church who like seeing other people fail or watch their kids fail because in their minds, they are justified by “following God.” There are people whose primary concern in raising kids is what other people would think. It’s an impressive performance, but it’s self-empowered and not spiritually driven. That is why you can look alive but be spiritually dead. A lot of churches, a lot of church people look like they’re alive, but they’re really dead. You know this. I know this. The question is whether or not we want to just settle for looking alive or if we would rather look like death but be spiritually driven. I choose the latter. But what about you? Verse 2 calls reference to Isaiah where the prophet says, “wake up because God is coming and you’re going to want to be ready for when God comes.” Moreover, you can say that this verse resonates with what Paul writes to the Romans in chapter 13—they need to wake up because what they were doing in their “sleep” was unloving and now that they know how to make their “work” whole, which is the point of these letters to the churches in Revelations (to make them whole in Christ) is that they must know that the work that isn’t complete is the spirit driven action of love. If we don’t wake up from our non-revival in our lives, that is to love other people and let our work, our actions and our thoughts be driven by love, which I’ll tell you right now, it mostly isn’t driven by love, then we will just die to ourselves and to each other. I know I’m not doing this any justice here, but let me try to expound on this thought. John writes so abstractly as if we should know what he’s talking about, he calls us to strengthen “what that is about to die.” The thing that dies when we live in a Christianity or a faith that is self-empowered and not spiritually driven is love. When you love your neighbor as yourself, as we hear the adage go, then we’re allowing in most cases to sacrifice our sanity, our wellbeing, our justice and our power and entitlement for the sake of the other person, for another person. This is exactly what Jesus did when he died on the cross. Let’s be honest here, nobody in their right mind would do this, not you, not me, not some pastor, not your parents, not your siblings—they won’t because it goes against human behavior. This is what is dying, this is what keeps us asleep from doing things in full consciousness and hyper aware of where we are headed. We are dreamless sleepers in this way. So it is time to wake up and smell the garbage on the East River and start loving the way Jesus loves because we’re never going to ever be awake if we don’t.  Let’s go to verse 3. ³ Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you. ⁴ Yet you have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy. ⁵ The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels. ⁶ He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’ – Revelations 3:3-6 I want to touch on two more points before I call it a day. Verse 3, “…what you received and heard.” This is what you received: the Holy Spirit. Do you think Jesus, through John, is telling the angel to love beyond human abilities with only human abilities? Of course not! That would be dumb and our God isn’t dumb. When we hear the gospel and elect into the saving grace of Jesus Christ, because Jesus saves out of love for us, despite of us and our doing, we receive the Holy Spirit. We receive the Holy Spirit to do the things that our human nature, in its drive for self-preservation would refuse to do—to humble ourselves to love somebody else as much as we would love ourselves, if not more than we love ourselves. We have to remember then that being filled with the power of God (the Holy Spirit) for waking up is to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge our own weakness. When we don’t remember that in our own weakness God gave us the Holy Spirit, he tells us that the Holy Spirit will come to us when Jesus ascends into heaven right before the Pentecost, is that we start to become overwhelmed by life’s circumstances. We seem to be doing an okay job at loving people in Jesus name, but then something in life goes horribly wrong and there is no power to overcome it. Then it’s all over. So we’re told to keep it and repent, that is to say that we need to remember that we have the Holy Spirit and so we should be leveraging Him at all times and if we’re not, we need to start doing that in the midst of our shortcomings and failures. Last point, before I wrap it up here. The message to Sardis reveals nothing definite about the church’s predicament beyond the fact that it is about to die. Only the metaphorical reference to those few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes (v. 4) offers a possible clue. They are promised that they will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy (v. 4), a promise immediately reinforced by a word to those who “overcome,” who will, like them, be dressed in white, whose names will not be blotted from the book of life, but rather acknowledged before my Father and his angels. At Sardis, clearly, the few who had not soiled their garments were the “overcomers.” Clean, white clothing in the book of Revelation is consistently a symbol of religious and moral purity, especially in the face of persecution (see 3:18; 4:4; 6:11; 7:9, 13), while soiled or disheveled clothing, or no clothing at all, is a symbol of religious and moral impurity and shame (see 3:17-18; 16:15). The ones who had not soiled their clothes had become marginalized, they were the small faction. You can overcome when we depend on the Holy Spirit for power. WE stay clean when we are operating in confidence that God is going to move us. We do not have to compromise anything and/or surrender ourselves to a self-preservationist view of living which is what most Christians end up doing, intentionally or unintentionally. Don’t be drained or defeated. Jesus knows that we were never meant to journey our lives alone. We will get the supernatural power and strength to do what we need to do and make it to the end. Whatever that end may be. Live into a continual awareness of God’s presence and pray constantly to be filled with His power and you will conquer everything in Jesus name. Let’s pray.