(Message © by Rev. Larry A. Langer, First Presbyterian Church, Jasper, IN, February 13, 2011)

“7 churches: Brickbats and Bouquets”

“4. God’s Message to Thyratira: Counter the Culture”

Revelation 2:18-29 and Mark 9:38-49

“I know your works – your love, faith, service, and patient endurance. I know that your last works are greater than the first. But I have this against you: you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet, and is teaching and beguiling my servants…” (Revelation 2:19, 20)

For the past 3 weeks over one million people have been acting “counter-culturally” in Egypt. They have been going against a culture some say has been a severe dictatorship with now-former President Hosni Mubarak. The telling part of his rule has been that the country has been operating under so-called “emergency powers” for the past thirty years! These emergency powers have given the government, military and police officials very broad authority to disallow many of the human rights freedoms that people living in a freer society enjoy: Freedoms such as the right to free speech, free assembly, and freedom to choose the country’s leaders. It has been a real blessing, though, that even as the military began to show its force, there was not any violence, as the crowds did freely assemble, as the government fell and Mubarak resigned.

Once again, as it has often been the case in our own country, it has been the young folks, the twenty- and thirty-something crowd, who led the protests. Others followed and then over one million people went counter to the culture. They ended up changing the culture!

In our own town, a group of concerned citizens has chosen to be counter-cultural and protest against the prospect of having a 75 megawatt electricity generating facility in our town that will burn grass and natural gas and heat a lot more water in its process. The culture the citizens are going against is one of a governmental entity trying to make economic use of an old facility, and a business entity trying to make profits.

The counter-cultural folks are concerned about the air quality for our citizens; the cultural folks are concerned about the air quality, also; in fact, the Environmental Protection Agency has a lot to say about the particulate emissions, but are especially wanting to enhance the economy of our area and the company’s profits. So, we have a counter-cultural movement right here in our own town, one that has even seen a few protestors around our own town square.

Counter-cultural revelutions are nothing new! Our own country was founded upon a counter-cultural revolution:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed, (etc., down through), “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor…

Of course, we know this document in its entirety as the “Declaration of Independence.”

We also know of a document that has stood the test of time, actually of time immemorial. It has withstood wars between tribes and nations, between one people group and many people groups, and has withstood the murder of its leader. His name was Jesus, the document is the Bible, and the culture is the one in which we avow, “In life and in death we belong to God. Through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, we trust in the one triune God, the Holy One of Israel, whom alone we worship and serve.

We go on to avow,

We trust in Jesus Christ, fully human, fully God. Jesus proclaimed the reign of God: preaching good news to the poor and release to the captives, teaching by word and deed and blessing the children, healing the sick and binding up the brokenhearted, eating with outcasts, forgiving sinners, and calling all to repent and believe the gospel.

Don’t a lot of these sound counter-cultural?

Then we get to ourselves in our “A Brief Statement of Faith,” and we avow,

In a broken and fearful world the Holy Spirit gives us courage to pray without ceasing, to witness among all people to Christ as Lord and Savior, to unmask idolatries in church and culture, to hear the voices of people long silenced, and to work with others for justice, freedom, and peace.

Don’t a lot of these goals sound counter-cultural?

The question is, do we have the courage to always do what needs to be done counter-culturally in the world?

This is our challenge, even as it was the challenge to the TCC – the Thyratira Christian Church. In fact, the letter to the TCC ought to be read and acted upon by every Christian church today upon threat of death to its people and to the church. This letter is all about what happens when the Christian Church doesn’t stand up for Christian principles, the principles of Jesus Christ himself. But the truth is, to quote one theologian, “The Christian Church has so watered down the Gospel that we have inoculated the world against the real thing.”

The truth is, because a great number of the Churches of Jesus Christ have done and are doing this, the Christian faith is becoming more and more irrelevant. When there is no difference between what is said from the pulpit and what is said from a presidential or classroom podium, or what is accepted in the sanctuary mirrors what is accepted on main street, or what is taught in Bible Study classrooms and what is taught in politically-correct classrooms is the same, we Christians, the Christian church and the Christian faith become irrelevant. The Judeo-Christian faith has always been and always needs to be counter-cultural until Christ comes again and the culture becomes of Christ!

This is the brickbat thrown at the TCC. They had allowed a “Jezebel” into their midst, into their congregation, and this person was teaching the ways of the world in which the people were living. This person apparently had claimed to be a prophet, one bringing “a word from God.” This person could be believed in those days, because there really wasn’t any “official” way to determine whether or not a person was truly a prophet of God or a prophet of something or someone else.

The Apostle John, in his first letter of three (not his gospel, but the first of those little letters toward the end of the Bible) said,

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, (I John 4:1-3), of which you have heard that it is coming; and now it is already in the world.

These days, at least in the Presbyterian Church, USA, we ask for a Statement of Faith and a recounting of a person’s faith journey, as well as personal references, when we consider a person for ordination as pastors or commissioned lay pastors. Our hope is that what the candidate for a pulpit says about his or her faith will resonate in our hearts and minds by the power of the Holy Spirit as being an authentic expression of the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

If we who are charged with ascertaining the spirit of a person for ministry and the gifts of the Holy Spirit that that person has for ministry, merely smile sweetly and say, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful that so-and-so is going to be a minister; he or she is so sweet,” then we are as guilty as the folks of the TCC of which our letter today speaks.

In a local congregation, if we just want warm bodies as our elders and deacons, or we ever want elders and deacons in office for any other reason than they are believers in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior first and foremost, and then that they will work hard to ascertain how the Holy Spirit is seeking to guide the church through them, such officers might just be as the Jezebel of which the letter speaks.

The Jezebel of the letter basically was trying to bring the culture of the day into the church. While Thyratira wasn’t a major crossroads town or a major Roman government town, it was still an important manufacturing town.

It was originally a military outpost assigned to protect the road from Pergamum to Sardis. But now it was a town of more trade guilds (read “unions”) than any other Asian city. The trade guilds played an important religious role is the city, which was a commercial center of weavers, leather-workers, potters, and bronze workers. Furthermore and as a result, the Christians who were members of those commercial trades would have a difficult time holding to a non-compromised faith in view of the pressure from the guilds to worship at the various city temples, and attend the guild feasts, most of which have religious connotations.[1]

I mean, can’t we picture this today, even? We work for a company and feel that we must go to a certain church to be part of the “in crowd”? Or we work for a company and feel we have to do other things – play games, go to practices, hang out in bars, do anything other than church, to stay in good graces and get ahead. I have observed before from this pulpit, that corporate boards of large corporations usually and often have their important board meetings on Sundays, not during the workweek.

So, the Jezebel of the day was bringing into the church that it was politically correct to overlook some types of sin, including eating meat sacrificed to idols and having sex outside of marriage. But it really doesn’t matter what the sin or the sins are that anyone brings into the church; they are still sins and need to be dealt with by the church body. As Earl Palmer said,

The theological principle that underpins this passage is that the created order of God is moral, and the violation of that moral order does not go unpunished. Interpersonal immorality has always been destructive to human relationships, because such sins, just as the sins of false gods, pride, selfishness, etc., go cross grain to the grand design built by God into the very fabric of life.[2]

Now, here are the bouquets and a challenge to the TCC. The bouquets are, first, that the TCC had a faithful bunch of members that did very good church work – they loved (and this is the word agape), they had faith, service and patient endurance…and, they were getting even better and growing in it. The church had faithful folks who loved each other and who were growing in their faith, their service, and in their patient endurance.

Secondly, the bouquet was that there was a way out of the promised death for Jezebel and the followers: They could repent. As Earl Palmer said,

These are the three good-news words planted firmly within the judgment: “They could repent.” It is not too late for the TCC to reach out to the Lord of the grand design. Nevertheless, one warning remains true: because of God’s love, the grand plan for human life must judge sternly the injustice of sexual exploitation of human beings, the sins of pride, greed, anger, and every other transgression.[3]

Now, here’s the challenge. Earl Palmer says it well:

These Christians have a responsibility, a mandate toward the nations. What we must understand in this letter to the church at Thyratira is the fact that the temptations which these Christians faced in this city were interwoven into trade skills, the success in business and the economic survival of the Christians…If they stood against temptation in their very jobs, the real option they had to face was economic suffering as well as spiritual suffering…The most subtle challenge to faith does not usually originate in public amphitheaters but in the daily places where we earn the money we need to live…The approach of this letter is to place the daily lives of the Christians upon as larger stage and within a larger context. I must see my task, my daily deployment, as part of the larger goal of my life. This is the only way that I can correctly size up the demands of any job so that on the one hand I am a good and hard worker and yet on the other keep faith with my integrity and any greater loyalties… What the trades need, what professions need, what all deployments of our lives need is not our soul but our skill, not our worship but our hard work. When we once learn this vital alignment of values, we will do better in our work, (in our society and in our churches).[4]

These principles have been at work in Egypt these past few weeks. These principles should always be at work in our daily lives. And God will get our soul! May it be so! Amen.

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[1] Earl Palmer, Revelation (The Communicator’s Commentary), (Waco, Texas, Word Books, 1982), p.140

[2] Palmer, 142

[3] Palmer, 142

[4] Palmer, 143