(Message © by Rev. Larry A. Langer, First Presbyterian Church, Jasper, IN, February 20, 2011)

“7 Churches: Brickbats and Bouquets”

“5. God’s Message to Sardis:

“Wake Up, Build Up, Dress Up!”

Revelation 3:1-6, Luke 12:13-32, and Matthew 24:36-44

“Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is on the pint of death, for I have not found your works perfect in the sight of my God. Remember then what you received and heard; obey it and repent…” (Revelation 3:2-3a)

An interesting thing happened on the way to this sermon. Our church this day is the Sardis Christian Church, the SCC. As we have read and will learn more about, it is a church – as is the town in which it is located – that has “gone to sleep” and is in danger of not “waking up.” Along with making the choice to not wake up, comes the warning from Jesus himself that he will come “like a thief in the night” and deal with them.

So, as I began to be inspired to write I thought, “It would be good to begin the sermon with a story about having “passion” for soemthing and using it, particularly having passion for one’s church, even our church, and the following of Jesus Christ and doing ministry in his name and spreading his word locally and globally.

Therefore, I went to my books of illustrations, looking for a great illustration on having “passion” for something. Alas, I went to four different books looking for the heading “passion.” I could find no such heading!

So, I thought, what’s the opposite of having passion; I’ll approach it from the negative, from the “brickbat” side. I found a heading “mediocrity” and this story:

Chuck Swindoll talks about “mediocrity,” yet “excellence” in his book, The finishing Touch.

Competitive excellence requires one hundred percent all the time. If you doubt that, try maintaining excellence by setting your standards at 92 percent. Or even 95 percent. People figure they’re doing fine as long as they get somewhere near it. Excellence gets reduced to acceptable, and before long, acceptable doesn’t seem worth the sweat if you can get by with adequate. After that, mediocrity is just a breath away.

Ever tracked the consequences of “almost but not quite”? Thanks to some fine research by Natalie Gabal, I awoke to a whole new awareness of what would happen if 99.9 percent were considered good enough. If that were true, then this year alone…2,000,000 documents would be lost by the I.R.S.; 12 babies would be given to the wrong parents by mistake each day; 291 pacemaker operations would be performed incorrectly; 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions would be written; 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes would be shipped (to site just a few examples).[i]

Hearing this, I picked up on Swindoll’s opening sentence: “Competitive Excellence requires one hundred percent all the time.” Then, I next went to the word “excellence” as the opposite of “mediocrity” and found this idea:

In his book Lyrics, Oscar Hammerstein tells of the time he saw a picture of the top of the head of the Statue of Liberty, taken from a helicopter. He was amazed at the detail and painstaking work that was done on the lady’s coiffure. Hammerstein reflected that the sculpture could not have imagined, even in his wildest dreams, that one day there would be a device that could look on tip of the head of his creation. Yet he gave as much care to that part of the statue as he did to the face, arms, and legs. He wrote, “When you are creating a work of art, or any other kind of work, finish the job off perfectly. You never know when a helicopter, or some other instrument not at the moment invented, may come along and find you out.”[ii]

Hammerstein could have also said, “When I miss a week in practice, my audience knows it. When I miss a day, I know it.” [iii]

It is the very serious slippage from excellence to mediocrity for which the Sardis Christian Church was being chastised. And, as I said in the introduction, it had succumbed to the ways of the town in which it was located. It had succumbed to the ethos of the town of Sardis.

Sardis reminds me so very much of Jesus’ parable of the farmer who had had a great harvest and nowhere to store his harvest. So, he decided to tear down what he had and build bigger and better barns to store his abundance. This wasn’t necessarily the problem, though.

The problem was that his life then turned to mediocrity. His own statement condemned him: “And, I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” But God said, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you! And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:18-21)

The Sardis Christian Church and the entire town of Sardis were not rich toward God; they were so poor toward God that it was as if they had gone to sleep. They were so asleep that William Barclay commented, “Sardis was a city of peace, not the peace won through battle, but the peace of the man whose dreams are dead and whose mind is asleep, the peace of lethargy and evasion.”[iv]

What had happened? Partly, they seemed to celebrate and honor death more than they did life. They had three important areas in their town: An acropolis, a temple, and a necropolis.

The acropolis was a tall wall that towered 800 feet about the town on the north side to protect the town. It had only been ineffective twice and that was in 600 B.C. and 400 B.C., when someone came out of Sardis and went down a hidden stairway to get water, and was seen going back up. The enemy simply followed the water carrier back into Sardis and overcame the town. Once again, it was mediocrity – doing one’s job sloppily – that hurt the whole body, hurt the whole town: An 800 foot wall penetrated through a secret stairway and door due to mediocrity.

Sardis also had a temple to the god Artemis. However, as another example of their mediocrity, the temple was never finished. The “powers that be” in Sardis wanted to build their temple to Artemis to rival the temple in Ephesus and have it recognized as such, but, because of the mediocrity of the people, the temple was never finished.

Sardis had also begged Rome to let them build the temple to Caesar, but the honor went to Smyrna.

So, what was once an important, wealthy city ended up a mediocre one. One commentator said, “No city of Asia at that time showed such a melancholy contrast between past splendor and present decay as Sardis.”[v] And as Herodotus, in the fifth century B.C. wrote despairingly of Sardis and its people as “the tender-footed Lydians, who can only play on the cither, strike the guitar and sell by retail.”[vi]

But the main telling of Sardis was its “necropolis,” its cemetery, its “place of the dead.” It was huge, known for its “thousand hills,” its burial mounds. They seemed to have a special preoccupation with death – which will lead to mediocrity, won’t it; at least mediocrity toward life? The human soul, unless overtaken by mediocrity, has an inborn sense toward excellence, toward succeeding, toward building, toward doing something well, toward improving society, toward improving a church, toward growing one’s relationship with God!

So, Jesus, the one who holds every church in his hand and who sees every church as an invaluable golden lamp stand designed to give light to the world, calls the Sardis Christian Church out of its lethargy and mediocrity. Jesus said, “I’m not quibbling with what you have done in the past. I know your works, and you have made a name for yourselves. But, now, you have gone the way of your town; you are dead, also! But you still have a chance – your works are not perfect in my sight yet. So, wake up and strengthen what is left!”

You still have a few people there who still walk with me. They haven’t gotten their clothes and hands dirty with sin and the ways of the world. They are worthy; they will walk with me – and you can, too, if you will wake up, remember what following me all is about, obey it and repent of anything that isn’t of me.

You know and I know, because we read and hear the same news, that all of our mainline church denominations are losing members like crazy. These members are either going to the non-denominational churches or nowhere at all. Part of this decline is that our mainline churches have put our people to sleep with its mediocrity.

Coming out of the 50’s, we were strong and building bigger and bigger barns, read “churches”. In the 60’s we became pre-occupied with the Viet Nam War and the social and political agenda that we soon learned to distrust. But most churches didn’t give an alternative; it merely argued with the social agenda. They didn’t give Christ, but they spoke against Caesar. Then when the homosexual agenda began to be pressed by society in the 70’s, the church was very late in awakening, so late that it has been extremely weak in its gospel message against, not only this sin, but all other sins, as well.

The church at Sardis isn’t like the one we will have in two weeks, the Laodicea Church that is “neither hot nor cold.” No, the Sardis church is asleep and irrelevant!

But the Lord hasn’t given up on it. The Lord warns that he might, though: He said, “If you conquer, you will be clothed like them in white robes, and I will not blot your name out of the book of life; I will confess your name before my Father and before his angels.”

You know, back in those days, say the commentators, “In ancient cities the names of citizens were recorded in a register till their death; then their names were erased or marked out of the book of the living…There was also some evidence that a person’s name could be removed from the city register before death if he or she were convicted for a crime. In the first century, Christians who were loyal to Christ were under constant threat of being branded political and social rebels and stripped of their citizenship.

Jesus Christ himself says to his church and his people, “Wake up. Be the church you once were; be the church my Father desires. You have the faith and the leadership; follow both. Remember what you have received and heard; obey it and repent. Be worthy to carry the name “Christian” – of Christ. And, you will never be marked off, erased, nor forgotten out of the Book of Life.

As the letter to every church has ended thus far, so ends this one: “Let those with ears hear what the Spirit is saying to the Churches.” Amen.

[i] Charles R. Swindoll, Ultimate Book of Illustrations & Quotes (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1998), p. 372

[ii] Ben Patterson, The grand Essentials, as quoted in Swindoll, ibid, p. 185

[iii] Paderewski, quoted in Jacob Braude, Braude’s Handbook of Stories for Toastmasters and Speakers, quoted in Swindoll, ibid, p. 185

[iv][iv] William Barclay, Letters to the Seven Churches (New York: Abington, 1957) p. 71) as quoted by Earl Palmer, Revelation. (The Communicator’s Commentary), (Waco, TX, Word Books, 1982)

[v] William M. Ramsey, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia (London: Hodder & Stroughton, 1904), p. 375, as quoted by Earl Palmer, ibid, p. 447

[vi] Barkley, ibid., p.71

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