Southminster Presbyterian Church

Over the course of the Lenten season, on Wednesday evenings, we are walking through the seven letters Christ wrote to the seven churches of Asia Minor found in Revelation 2-3. In preparing for this week's message on the letter to the church in Pergamum, I came across Eugene Peterson's thoughts from his book, Reversed Thunder, that seemed quite worthwhile.  I hope you find them worthwhile as well.

The church is the place where we come to find out what we're doing right.  As such, it's a place of affirmation.  The church is also the place where we come to find out what we're doing wrong.  As such, it's a place for correction.  The church is also the place where we come to hear the promises of God.  As such, it's a place of motivation.  No Christian community can do without any part of this message.  We need affirmation, we need correction and we need motivation.

 

In the church we're always in process of being affirmed.  We find those parts of our lives that are working well.  Discovering them gives us zest, confidence, and assurance.  We're also always in process of being corrected.  We find those parts of our lives that aren't working well.  There's a relentless quality to the Word of God that insists on training us to live a victorious Christian life.  The training takes place in seven areas: We're trained to love (Ephesus), to be suffer (Smyrna), to tell the truth (Pergamum), to be holy (Thyatira), to be authentic (Sardis), to be in mission (Philadelphia), and to worship, using things to praise God, receiving gifts to serve him (Laodicea).

 

The church is the community of people who explicitly and consciously submit themselves to the direction and training of the Holy Spirit so that excellence is pursued in these seven areas.  Strengths are recognized and developed; weaknesses are exposed and corrected.  We get encouragement (no one is all bad); we get correction (no one is all good); and we get motivation, acquiring the energy to endure to pain of growth to the joy of maturity.

 

John neither complains about his churches nor glorifies them.  he accepts them as facts.  They are God's means for calling people together so they can realize who their Lord is and who they are, and develop the relationships that are coherent with those identities.

 

The churches in Revelation 2 and 3 show us that churches are not Victorian parlors where everything is always picked up and ready for guests.  They are messy family rooms.  Entering a person's home unexpectedly, we're sometimes met with a barrage of apologies.  John doesn't apologize.  Things are out of order, to be sure, but that's what happens to churches that are lived in.  They're not showrooms.  They're living rooms.  And if those living in them are sinners, there are going to be clothes scattered about, handprints on the woodwork, and mud on the carpets.  There's no evidence in the pages of the New Testament that churches were ever much better or much worse than they are today.  A random selection of seven churches in any century, including our own, would turn up something very much like the seven churches that John was attempting to give pastoral advice to.

 

For as long as Jesus insists on calling sinners and not the righteous to repentance (Luke 5:32) - and there's no indication as of yet that he has changed his policy in this regard - churches are going to be an embarrassment to the fastidious and an affront to the upright.  John sees them simply as lampstands - places where the light of Christ is shown.  They themselves are not the light.

 

A corrupt church still functions as the church.  Dirty lampstands don't extinguish Christ's light.  Of course, it's better that it be neither of these things, neither tarnished out of neglect nor polished out of vanity.  It's better that it simply be there, inconspicuously receiving and unselfconciously sharing the light of Christ.