Probably the hardest part of writing a sermon is the beginning. If I don’t catch your attention right away, I could lose half of you. Now, some of you listen to everything I say regardless, and some of you - and I know who you are - sleep through all my sermons - but I do try to set the hook in deep enough so that you’ll hang in there with me when we get to the hard parts. The ending is the other important part. I want to send you home thinking about what I’ve said. It may be the
only thing you remember. Sometimes I start with a story, sometimes with something from the news, but I do try to vary my approach so that you don’t get lulled into a false sense of security. I want to keep you curious as to where I’m going to go, and interested enough to pay attention.
One way to get an audience’s attention is to do something a little outrageous or offbeat. There’s a great Robin Williams film, Dead Poets Society - how many of you have seen it? At one point he climbs on a desk and shouts “carpe diem”, which is Latin for “seize the day.” It became the watchword for the whole film. A pastor I knew back in Minnesota - a great preacher named Richard Davis - put a lapel mike on a plant in the congregation so that his sermon on stewardship - tithing - was interrupted right at the outset by a disgusted voice saying, “Oh, no, they’re going to ask us for money again.”
Another technique is to come on as a character, which I haven’t done for a while. I’m afraid there’s not going to be much of an opportunity in Revelation, I can’t see coming on as the beast or the whore of Babylon or even one of the angels. Maybe CNN or Fox will send a TV crew to interview the survivors - stay tuned. It’s a thought.
But at least I’m up here talking out loud, and you’ve all showed up at least expecting to hear something from God through me by the Holy Spirit. But when no one else is speaking, how does God get our attention?
God speaks to us, all the time, but it’s easy to go to sleep. We don’t want to admit it, but we ignore God, He tries to get our attention in a lot of different ways. As the writer to the Hebrews said, “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets. [Heb 1:1] The Thursday morning group spent half the class a couple of weeks ago looking at the various ways God has communicated to his people: through dreams, through angels, with thunder and lightning, with a voice out of the burning bush, with the ten commandments on the stone tablets. But then he goes on to say, “in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son. [Heb 1:2] That
was quite an attention-getter, wasn’t it? Jesus Christ is definitely the last word as far as God’s revelation is concerned. As the old hymn says, “What more can He say than to you He has said, to you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?” But even that final word gets forgotten as time passes.
For a while after September 11 it looked as though that particular attention-grabbing event would turn people’s attention back to God, but the effect wore off all too quickly. God has spoken, but we are not always listening.
The fifth letter in this series from John’s Revelation shows us a sleeping church, a church which has slept through all the alarms that the goings-on around the Roman empire had set off. They weren’t being persecuted like the churches in Smyrna and Pergamum, maybe they thought “It can never happen here.” They don’t seem to be guilty of compromise or heresy. They seem to have gotten along with the local Jews, even though the Jewish population was large and
powerful. In fact, it may have been the very acceptance of the Jewish religion by the local pagans that has kept them safe. So what’s the problem? Everything’s just fine.
As he always does, Jesus introduces himself to the church at Sardis with an identifying title, something that signals what he’s going to be telling them. This time he is “the one who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars.” [v. 1a] This is a reference to the gift of the Holy Spirit, and is a clue to what they are missing.
Next comes the dreaded report card, which as always begins with an ominous “I know.” The Sardis congregation are probably expecting high praise. After all, they’re showing up regularly for
worship, living peacefully with their neighbors, maybe even having Bible studies and feeding the poor. “I know your works,” Jesus says, “you have a name of being alive, but you are dead.” [v. 1b]
Well, of course Jesus doesn’t mean actually dead, or he wouldn’t start the next sentence with “Wake up.” But he does mean “spiritually dead” or “dead to the world” or “you might as well be dead, for all the difference you’re making.”
I recently had a conversation with someone who wanted to know, in some alarm, what Jesus meant by “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.” [Mt 5:29] So I explained that Jesus often used hyperbole, that is exaggeration, to get people’s attention.
I’m often tempted to turn the bell off the phone that’s next to my bed. When I’m awake I can hear the phone downstairs ringing, but if I’m asleep I can’t. And the most common middle-of-the-night calls are faxes from telemarketers. Not worth waking up for, I think you’ll agree. But in addition to wanting to be available for you-all, I’m also on call as a police chaplain, and when they have an emergency, I have to be available. I’ve only been called out in the early hours of the morning
twice in 5 years - but they were both life-and-death situations. I can’t afford to miss one of those phone calls.
And Jesus is making an emergency call here, to a church that’s in a life-or-death crisis, and the question is, Are they going to wake up? Or are they going to turn over and go back to sleep?
I wonder if God has set off a fire alarm in your life. Is there something going on you can’t ignore any longer? I know crises have hit a number of you recently, and for at least some it has caused some examination and re-prioritizing. But maybe there’s something long term nagging at you that you’ve never done anything about. Maybe you have a destructive habit or way of thinking that you know you should work on, that you know isn’t good for you. And every now and then ... you admit to yourself that this thing, - whatever it may be - will, if you keep it up, kill or cripple you - emotionally or spiritually or physically. But most of the time most of us are like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, you know, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.” It is the grace of God when an alarm rings that you can’t ignore, that absolutely forces you to face up to the facts.
The wake-up call came as a cockcrow for Peter. Remember, after he had denied knowing Jesus three times the morning of his crucifixion. It came to King David in a confrontation from the prophet Nathan. Samson’s haircut finally woke him up to the fact that his weakness for women had derailed his duty to God once too often. A heart attack can wake up the workaholic to the need to change his life- style, an alcoholic may be confronted by her family, a traffic accident
may reform a chronic speeder. But in one way or another, God places fire alarms and trip wires and stop signs in our life, and if we are wise we will pay attention before we run off the road. “Wake up, strengthen what remains and is on the point of death.” [v.2a]
But the fire alarm doesn’t go off unless we’ve been ignoring the ordinary, everyday alarm clock, the little reminder that - sometimes painfully - moves us into each day’s routine. Too many of us live our lives just one day after another, plodding along, without direction, without excitement, without any expectation of meeting God. And if we’re wise, we’ll let God wake us up to the fact that even our ordinary, everyday, ongoing routine has meaning.
The Lord says to the Sardis church, “I have not found your works perfect in the sight of my God. I have not found your works perfect” [v.2b] .. the word “perfect” doesn’t mean “better than
everyone else with no mistakes in it at all,” it means “complete”. Jesus isn’t saying they’ve made mistakes. He says that they’re not done. They didn’t finish what they started. They went home early.
If your life is anything like mine, you are surrounded by unfinished business. I must have six books at various stages of completion and I still haven’t finished unpacking all the boxes from my move a year and a half ago, never mind getting the pictures up on the walls. I have good intentions and to-do lists all over the place. But you know what good intentions get you....
Is God going to find our spiritual work incomplete, too? What is our spiritual work? What was your last good resolution? Were you going to pray with more purpose, but after a few tough days find yourself falling back into your old pattern? Were you going to study the Bible daily, maybe even start a program of memorization? Were you going to share Christ with a neighbor or co-worker, were you going to start coming to Sunday school? What was yours? Did you finish?
What happens? We forget. We forget who we are. We forget our identity. We forget our destiny. We forget what it really means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, day in and day out, in season and out of season, when it’s popular and when it’s tough. We forget who we are;
we forget what matters most. The urgent drives out the important. As the saying goes, it’s hard to concentrate on draining the swamp when you’re up to your - nose - in alligators.
Yet God sows our path with reminders. He doesn’t let a day go by without a wake-up call - for those who have ears to hear, for those who haven’t turned the bell off their phone, for those who know that when the bell tolls, it is for them.
'God doesn’t do anything by accident. That annoying interruption in the middle of your working day might be an opportunity to minister to someone. That pesky project that just won’t come together, that proposal that got turned down, that dent on your new car - those might
be pop quizzes on how well you reflect Christ under stress, object lessons on the difference Jesus makes in a life that belongs to him. Who was watching? God is... can you see him? Do you hear him?
But those wake-up calls don’t just come from the outside. Sometimes the most interesting ones ring on the inside. No one can hear them but you. There are times when I go to bed on Saturday
night really unsatisfied with the sermon. But I’m too tired to think any more, so I go to bed and hope that I can fix it in the morning. Now what do you think happens? Do I sleep? No, if I go to bed with an awkward ending or a fuzzy central message, I will inevitably wake up around three or four with my mind churning, rewriting and polishing and filling in the gaps. My mind simply will not leave me alone until it is dealt with. And you know what? I’ve come to believe that it’s not
my mind at all; I think it’s the nagging voice of the Holy Spirit. The most effective alarm clock, the wake-up call that is the hardest to ignore, is the one from within. The one which is a voice that says, “You’re not finished. Get up and go to work.”
What was the last wake-up call you received? What did you do with it? Did you get up and get started, or did you turn over and go back to sleep?
The church in Sardis wasn’t compromising with the pagans around them. And neither are we. They weren’t worshiping the local gods or patronizing the local brothels. And neither are we. But the church in Sardis wasn’t being the church of Jesus Christ. They weren’t living the life that Christ called them into, a life of joyful, prayerful, hopeful service and witness. Are we? Are you?
“Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.”
