* * *
John was a pastor to seven churches in the late first century. His congregations were much like our own except that they spoke Greek instead of English, had an emperor in Rome instead of a president in Washington, and wore sandals instead of sneakers. In the essential things they were like us—they got up in the morning and went to bed at night; they ate and drank; they had jobs and lived with families, had good days and bad days, laughed some of the time and cried once in a while.
They were also like us in that they believed in Jesus Christ and experienced themselves as saved—freed from sin and free for God. They met together to grow in that deep and wide life. They sang songs of praise, offered prayers together, encouraged one another. They had heard the good news that God was for them, loved them, was personally interested in them, and had done something radical and final about the mess they kept making of things. As they worshipped, their lives expanded beyond the cramped borders of their egos. When they entered into the praise that pulses at the heart of all existence, they discovered that their quite ordinary lives—that nobody else had thought were good for much—had meaning, and they kept finding meaning in unexpected places. Just like we are doing.
In the middle of all that, some important people got the idea that these Christians were dangerous. These important people became terribly afraid of their songs and their prayers, and they mounted a campaign to stamp them out. One day Roman soldiers came and took old John away from his churches and put him in exile on the island Patmos. Curious, isn’t it, that the soldiers considered the old pastor a threat to their law and order. He had no sword, no army. All he did was teach his people to pray, lead them in worship, teach them songs and Scripture, and train them to live honestly with compassion and fairness.
You might have thought that the government would have been glad to have these little pockets of cheerful and morally sane people scattered through the society, but they weren’t. They were scared to death of them. They sensed, correctly enough as it turned out, that singing those songs and studying those scriptures and believing in Jesus Christ would completely revolutionize the world and in not very many years leave the Roman military and political giant crippled and ineffectual. So, they arrested John and put him in exile, hoping that his congregations would wither away.
One Sunday John was praying and received a vision of Jesus Christ doing his work of love and salvation in the midst of all this angry, fearful hostility. He wrote down what he saw and heard and then smuggled it onto the mainland. The scroll got into the right hands. The word was passed. The Christians met cautiously and secretly. When everyone was assembled, one would read from the scroll what their old pastor had written down for them, the vision that gave them vision to see the world as it really was.
It is as if John’s saying to his beloved congregation: “Do you think that Rome is running things? It is not. Christ is running things, and this is how he is doing it. Do you think that persecution and blasphemy and death and Caesar are the last words? They are not. Worship and life and praise and the living Christ are the last words.”
After the scroll was read in one congregation, it was passed surreptitiously to the next, until all seven had read it. The people were convinced by it that their lives counted, that everything they did was critically significant in what Christ was doing in redeeming the world. They became steadfast. Cheerful. Bold.
What stirring times those were! Real persecution heightened the importance of what they were doing and sharpened all their senses. Roman persecution, in an unintended way, convinced the Christians beyond wavering that they were on the right track. If the government was aroused over a few lower-class people saying their prayers and confessing their Christ, then prayer and confessing Christ must be highly significant acts. The scroll was passed from church to church. Early in the scroll were individualized messages to each of the seven churches; each congregation’s uniqueness was recognized and addressed. These are the messages we are looking at, one by one, submitting ourselves to examination: the final exams that show us where we are in relation to Christ’s great presence among us and his great work among us.
* * *
Saint John’s letters to his seven congregations subjected each church to an individual examination. Saint John said that Christ, the light of the world, is standing in our midst. Christ’s brilliance shows us just what we are—it probes into all the dark places in our lives and brings everything into the daylight. The light of our Lord first provides a diagnosis, but after it provides the diagnosis, it becomes a healing presence. A medicine is prescribed for each. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
Christians have not changed so much in twenty centuries. The Christian life is still lived in human lives that are subject to eternal questions. Christ is in our church. He examines our lives to bring us out into the open, where we can live freely as forgiven persons without guilt or regret. Let us submit to the examination. Let us allow the light of Christ to probe our lives, expose our failings, and heal our sickness.
Christ’s brilliance shows us just what we are—it probes into all the dark places in our lives and brings everything into the daylight.
Again, each of the letters follows a similar outline: First, Christ presents a particular part of his character. Next, Christ examines the Christians. The examination reveals both strengths and weaknesses, and so corrective action is commanded. Then, an urgent promise concludes each message.
To the Christians at Ephesus: “I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first” (Revelation 2:4–5). The examination revealed some great things about the Ephesian Christians. They were hard workers. They didn’t give up easily. They were faced with constant opposition, but they didn’t waver. There were daily acts of mercy and compassion to perform, and they did them with regularity. They didn’t forget to gather together, despite the danger, to worship each Lord’s Day. They were also discerning about doctrine.
Some heretics, the Nicolaitans, were trying to worm themselves into the church and upset its devotion to Christ. They were a group that denied the necessity for any moral standards—they taught that you could love Christ and do what you liked. But the Ephesians were not taken in by the attractiveness of the doctrine—while they bore up under the persecutions and adversities very well, they did not tolerate these evil men. They were a vigorous, alert group of Christians. Christ commended them for all this—he knew it well and approved of it. But he also saw something else. In their vigor to do the right thing, they had become the wrong kind of people. What more could you ask of Christians? Well, love for one thing. “I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first” (verse 4).
Love was the beginning of their faith. And ours too, of course. The foundation of Christianity is an immense act of love—the love of God for them, for us, for all who come to God. For them, it was the beginning of a new life. God’s love for them was the experience that brought everything else to wholeness. Their love for God involved them in a life that had purpose, intensity, and passion. Their love for one another diversified and extended the experience. As they went along, though, they found it easier to keep doing everything else but love. Their pastor was blunt: “Remember then from what you have fallen” (verse 5). This was not a gentle drifting away but rather a catastrophic fall. This was not an item that they happened to overlook in the press of urgent concerns. This fall was so massive in its implications that they might as well have been leaving the center of existence. For love is not what we do after we get the other things done, if we have any energy left over. Love is what we do, period. It is not how we work; it is our work. Other things can support it, they can grow out of it, and they can lead up to it. But if we don’t love, we aren’t doing what we were created and saved to do.
Why did the Ephesians abandon their first love, the love of God—the primary love, the essential love? Why did they go on to fritter their lives away in all these good but lesser things? Because everything else was easier. None of it was bad or harmful as such, and most of it had to be done, sometime or another. They weren’t hurting anybody, and they were helping many. But they weren’t at their best. They were not living at that center where the action of God is in full force. In a word, they were lazy. They were working day and night, doing good deeds, teaching the truth, opposing falsehood, impressing themselves and one another with their industriousness—all because they were too lazy to love.
Love is not what we do after we get the other things done, if we have any energy left over. Love is what we do, period.
Ephesus had the reputation of being the love capital of the ancient world. The fertility love goddess, Artemis, had a great shrine in Ephesus. The goddess with a thousand breasts attracted the curiosity of tourists and the devotion of the unloved looking for love. She was famous and impressive and popular. There was only one thing wrong: it wasn’t love; it was lust. It was the manipulation of appetite and the exploitation of bodies. Artemis was false advertising. Love packaged as a commodity was the biggest business in Ephesus.
Human desire was bought and sold for profit. Men and women reaching for and longing after the best they could be were tricked into squalor. Healthy sexuality was debased into sordid pornography. But in this very city, there were some people who were onto the real thing: Love that gave. Love that accepted. Love that was sacrificial and redemptive. Love that paid its promises. Love that wasn’t out to get but out to give. Love that didn’t leave you wasted and cheapened but fulfilled and enriched. Love that brought the longings for more, for excellence, for passion, and for wholeness into all affairs of everyday life.
Then, like Hawthorne at Brook Farm, the Christians in Ephesus quit. They quit because it was too much for them. It demanded their total selves. It required them to keep their whole being in Christ. It didn’t seem like such a bad thing to quit; after all, there were plenty of important church jobs to do, and there was a moral life to lead, and there was all that evil in the city to fight against. Then they got John’s letter, his vision, and the line addressed just to them, which I’ll paraphrase:
I know all the good things you are doing, but I have this against you: you are a bunch of quitters! You abandoned the first love, the very first thing that you were called to experience and share. And in Ephesus of all places—where so many people are looking for the real thing and being sold a bunch of fraudulent substitutes. And do you know something? Listen now closely: I really don’t need any more church jobs done, any more morality exhibited, any more evil fought. What I need is some people who will do the central, the essential, the Christian thing. I need people who will love—love Christ, be loved by Christ, love your neighbors, be loved by your neighbors.
Love is what Christ still requires of us. It is what he won’t do without. If we won’t do it, he will go on and find someone who will. He is not going to lower himself to our standards. Instead, he is going to raise us to his: to love. In the end, we will be judged on our love. “I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.” Terrible words! The God who is for us is against us! But he wouldn’t be for us if he let us get by living without love, would he?
The Ephesians’ strongest virtue became the source of their failing—they worked so hard to be right and correct that they forgot who they were being good to and how their righteousness affected others: “You have abandoned the love you had at first.” You have lost your first love. Saint Paul wrote the following to a group of Christians in Corinth who had a similar problem:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. (1 Corinthians 13:1–3)
Back in the early days of their Christian life, the Ephesians had been enthusiastic in love. They were one of the groups that the pagans looked at and exclaimed, “How they love one another!” There was a transforming energy that was at work in them. They reconciled enemies, they helped the poor and sick, they worshipped with joy—and all their work was brimming with love for their Lord and for their brothers and sisters.
Jeremiah preached to Israel in the sixth century BC—Israel, who also was vigorous in doing things but had forgotten about love:
I remember the devotion of your youth,
your love as a bride,
how you followed me in the wilderness,
in a land not sown. (Jeremiah 2:2)
Back in the beginning there was a love affair, remember? Back in those early days, life was dominated by the thought of the God who loved us and gave himself for us. Back in the beginning it was like a honeymoon, a courtship. Remember?
Our Lord examined the Ephesian Christians and had this—abandoning love—against them. He examines us and has the same thing against us. But he didn’t only diagnose. He also prescribed a cure: “Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent” (Revelation 2:5). Remember, repent, and go back to work like when you started out.
The remembrance is useless if it moves into indifference or rebellion. Repentance is the resolve to return to those early truths, the first reality, that we felt really secure upon. The days of our history may rust and corrode the best realities of our lives, and we need to get cleaned up once in a while. Some changes have to be made. We have to return to what Christ first meant to us.
* * *
The important thing right now is not whether you pass the test but that you take the test. By taking it, we acknowledge that it is this by which we want to be judged. By taking it, we grasp the God of love openly, receiving him and sharing him as if nothing else in the whole world matters, for in truth nothing else does.
The examination concluded with an urgent promise: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God” (Revelation 2:7).
The promise wasn’t given casually. It wasn’t offered as a pleasant option. There was urgency, necessity, in it. He who has an ear, hear. Henry Ward Beecher once said, “The Churches of the land are sprinkled all over with baldheaded old sinners whose hair has been worn off by the constant friction of countless sermons that have been aimed at them and glanced off and hit the man in the pew behind.”*
The promise is that the Christian who recaptures that first love—the one who becomes what he was called to be by Christ—will eat of the tree of life in God’s paradise. That brings us back to Genesis and the garden with the tree of life, the garden from which Adam and Eve were expelled and the tree of life from which no one ever ate. The tree of life bears fruit that enables us to live eternally with God. It is the food that finally satisfies our needs. By returning to the first love, we are rewarded with the first food. The return to our origin includes a return to God, who not only loves us but feeds us. When we return to loving God and the world for which he died, we return to Eden.
When we return to loving God and the world for which he died, we return to Eden.
Examine yourselves. Have you strayed from your first love of Christ and those early bursts of love for your neighbors? Are you truly loving your brothers and sisters? Remember, repent, and then do the works you did at first—love.
Do this in remembrance of Christ.
Amen.
Skip Notes
* Henry Ward Beecher, quoted in William Barclay, Letters to the Seven Churches (Louisville, KY: Westminste
r John Knox, 2001), 14.
The Test of Our Suffering
After about an hour and a half of driving on our way to the ocean in the summer—a trip we make once or twice a year—just when it is getting hot and we are getting bored, we enter the town of Smyrna, Delaware. The name, like the ring of an alarm clock, wakes me up. Then, over on the right is the church of St. Polycarp. Another clang. The two names activate engrams in my brain cells that keep me alert the rest of the way to the beach.
It is dangerous to drive the highways of America. If you want to preserve your life, keeping secure and cozy, stay off the highways, where you not only have to dodge drunk drivers, who might at any moment murderously swerve into you, but also have to avoid all the towns that set stories going in your mind that demand you give up your life. People who quit reading the Bible ages ago and haven’t been to church in years drive through Nazareth, Bethlehem, Bethesda, Joppa, and Damascus, and before they know it, Jesus, who said, “Deny yourself and take up your cross daily,” and Paul, who said, “I am crucified with Christ,” are saying it again*1 as old memories resonate. We drive through Ephrata, Bethany, and Philadelphia—and Smyrna—and are ambushed by a gospel story.
Part of the reason that going through these towns has made such an impact on me is that I didn’t grow up around names like them. Like for all children, names were important to me. I grew up in Montana and Washington, and when I was young, my family would travel those roads and I would hear the names of the towns—Missoula, Kila, Kootenai, Pocatello, Issaquah, Puyallup, Sequim, Yakima, Walla Walla—wonderful names, Indian names most of them, names that evoked the wilderness that one encountered nowhere else. And in the midst of all that strangeness there was Libby. Libby? Some logger’s girlfriend, maybe, some trapper’s woman who left him. My childish mind fantasized scenarios of those. And not far from there was Eureka, an unexpected evidence of culture. Eureka was the Greek exclamation “I have found it!” What on earth did anyone find in that place? I sometimes wondered. What was worth exclaiming over, tucked way back into a range of mountains?
This Hallelujah Banquet Page 3