It’s been a week of tragedy, hasn’t it. Not on the scale of September 11, of course, but still - a tragedy. No one ever thought that the Columbia would crash. Particularly no one ever thought that it would crash on re-entry... But something did, and so today we are mourning the death of seven heroes, and feeling shaken by new doubts about the failure of yet another symbol of America’s power.
We don’t know yet what caused the crash. But at least we can be reasonably sure that it was an accident, not another senseless act of hatred. As one of NASA’s spokesmen said, there is no technology on earth that can shoot something out of the sky which was going as fast as the Columbia was. So it was an accident. Something just - went wrong.
How many of you remember where you were when the Challenger went down nearly 20 years ago? I was at work. It seemed for days - even weeks - after it happened that the whole country went around draped in a dark cloud of mourning. It wasn’t just the death of some of the best and brightest people our nation could produce, it was in a way the death of a dream, the death of one of our brightest symbols of the promise of the future. Maybe it wasn’t for you, but back in those days I hung around with science fiction fans, and most of them had dreamed since childhood of space travel - even star travel. And they were devastated.
It wasn’t too long afterwards, though, that the shock gave way to outrage and scandal, when it was discovered that cost cutting and carelessness components that didn’t quite meet the required standard being passed through quality control. The design specifies that components must be engineered to within a particular degree of tolerance. And the inspectors tolerated imperfections outside the specifications, and people died.
When lives depend on it, inspections matter. When lives depend on parts being tooled to a precision measured in millimeters, tolerating imperfections has serious consequences. As a nation, we are obsessed with eliminating risk to the absolute maximum degree possible - pollutants and pesticides and carcinogens are measured in amounts almost too small to grasp. , and even a single accidental death can cause outrage and inquiry and almost inevitably a new set of rules.
But far too many people who wouldn’t dream of tolerating the slightest degree of “unorthodoxy” in matters which affect our physical lives think nothing at all of ingesting any number of spiritual carcinogens.
Pergamum was a prosperous and famous city a little to the NE of Smyrna, and like Smyrna, it had earned Rome’s favor by joining in its campaign to bring the territory under Roman control. And like both Ephesus and Smyrna, it was a center of pagan worship. Where Ephesus was a center of goddess worship, and Smyrna was a center of emperor worship, Pergamum had two claims to spiritual fame. It was a center of the cult of Asclepius, the god of healing, and it was a center for the worship of Zeus, the father god of the Greek pantheon. It’s a spectacular site, on the top of a mountain with glorious views of the Mediterranean and you can still see the ruins of the temple, with a huge throne-like altar set in the middle of a courtyard.
That may be what Jesus is talking about when he tells the church there that they live where Satan has his throne. We don’t know for sure. But we do know that at least one of their members Antipas, had already put to death because of refusal to denounce Jesus, or to participate in some form of pagan worship.
Remember that these letters all have the same format... Jesus introduces himself, says “I know...” and proceeds with the report card, beginning with the good stuff. In this case, the good stuff is that one act of holding fast to their allegiance to Christ. And that matters, and Jesus commends them for it. But his introduction is ominous.
Remember that he introduced himself to the Ephesians as the one holding the seven stars, reminding them of his presence among them and calling them back to their first love. To the church at Smyrna he reminded them of his power and his deity and his resurrection, calling them to courage and promising final victory. To this church Jesus introduces himself as the one “who has the sharp two-edged sword. [Rev 2:12] This is Jesus as judge, Jesus as the one you can’t bamboozle, the one who can’t be fooled or wheedled into compromise with truth. “Indeed, the
word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. [Heb 4:12]
This is not the sword of the warrior who will defend the Pergamum church from their external enemies; this is the sword of the surgeon who will expose their own spiritual diseases, displaying the cancer they have allowed to grow in their body for all to see. The suffering the Pergamum church is experiencing from their pagan neighbors is nothing compared to the harm they are doing themselves by not being able - or willing - to tell the difference between truth and lies, to discriminate between good and evil.
Discrimination is a bad word nowadays, isn’t it? And tolerance is the highest of all possible virtues. But when quality control time comes around, you want someone on the line who can tell when something meets the specifications or not, don’t you? The people at Pergamum forgot that truth and falsehood, good and evil, are really matters of life and death. And so has the church in America.
What are the sins the Pergamese are tolerating? Well, as is usual in Revelation there’s room for argument about exactly what he means...
Jesus begins, “You have some there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the people of Israel, so that they would eat food sacrificed to idols and practice fornication.” [Rev 2:14] Balaam was the Canaanite prophet, back during the Exodus, who when King Balak tried to bribe him into cursing the Israelites, God made him bless them instead. There must have been a legend about Balaam’s role in what the young Israelites got up to with the Moabite women and their gods when Moses wasn’t looking, because the passage in Numbers where the incident occurs doesn’t blame Balaam. But I
wouldn’t be surprised, since Israel’s God had done him out of a very nice fee.
At any rate, someone was clearly telling the susceptible in the Pergamum congregation that they could get away with joining in pagan practices. In this context fornication probably doesn’t mean sexual sin so much as idolatry, but it could be both. In any case, what Jesus is warning them against is “syncretism,” which is mixing Christian worship with local customs. To prosper in most businesses in the ancient world, you had to belong to the guild, sort of like being a union member, and that meant going to the guild banquets and eating food that had been dedicated to whichever god sponsored the guild. It probably seemed like a small compromise to many, one that God surely wouldn’t resent, since, after all, it was only business... and to non-Jewish Christians, the exclusive attention that Jesus demanded from his worshipers wasn’t at all what they were accustomed to. They were trying to put the new wine of Christianity into the old wineskins of the local customs, and finding it all too attractive.
The second “needs improvement” area Jesus zeroes in on is “the teaching of the Nicolaitans.” [Rev 2:15] We heard about them back in Ephesus, too. These might be just another group of doctrinally lax syncretists, but it’s probably a good bit more serious than that, since in his letter to Thyatira Jesus refers to them as teaching 'the deep things of Satan.' [Rev 2:15] So it’s not just the occasional compromise in behavior, going along to get along, that is infecting the church at Pergamum. Rot is beginning to erode their beliefs, as well. Perhaps they were denying the resurrection, or encouraging people to sexual excesses since "what was done in the body didn’t matter," both of which were heresies common in
those days as well as ours.
And apparently the church leaders in Pergamum weren’t addressing these problems, perhaps for fear of offending people, or of losing members - much the way far too many preachers in our main line denominations won’t preach against anything controversial, from abortion to Ouija Boards. Scholar Craig Keener says “Balaam and Jezebel no longer represent factions within the church, they dominate it, and Revelation’s only solution for us is repentance.”
These are not easy issues to deal with. Discernment - discrimination - is absolutely necessary. In his letters to the Romans and the Corinthians Paul deals with the matter of meat sacrificed to idols at great length.
"Now concerning food sacrificed to idols: ... we know that "no idol in the world really exists," and that "there is no God but one... It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. [1 Cor 8:1]
We are supposed to bear with the failings and weaknesses of our brothers and sisters, and as our book of order tells us, there are many things about which Christians may in good conscience disagree. But are we tolerating things that Jesus would rebuke us for? We can even lie to ourselves, you know, about our motivations. As the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” [Jer 17:9] We may tell
ourselves that we are strong Christians, who can eat meat sacrificed to idols or whatever the spiritual equivalent might be - without consequence. What are the little ways in which you are tempted to compromise with the culture? Stop for a moment and think about it.
This is why we need the word of God - “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, [and] able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. [Heb 4:12] It is Jesus the judge who can see our hearts; “before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.” [Heb 4:13]
Offer up those little compromises for Jesus to judge. Bring them to Scripture, and let the Holy Spirit speak to you. Let us hear what the Spirit says to the churches, and overcome the temptation to tolerate - indiscriminately - the compromises Jesus condemns. Our spiritual lives depend on it.
