I’ve now written or spoken about four of the churches in Revelation 2-3 and you might be interested to hear and read it.
Letters to tolerant and compromised churches: Pergamum and Thyatira (Revelation 2:12-29)
First, the churches of Pergamum and Thyatira: you can hear my sermon and see the presentation on the Canley website.
Second, my notes for the Canley housegroups on the next two churches, Sardis and Philadelphia.
Letters to a sleeping and an obedient church (Sardis & Philadelphia) Rev 3:1-13
Review: We’ve looked at the letters to four churches, each with good points and most with some kind of problem. We’ve been using the letters to help us pray for God’s guidance as to how CCC should be moving forward.
1. READ Revelation 3:1-13
What you need to know about names
In both these letters, Jesus talks about ‘names’. If you didn’t spot it in the letters to Sardis and Philadelphia, go back and read it again! (For bonus points, which other letter(s) in Rev 2-3 talk about names?)
In the first century names were very important, they were supposed to give an idea of who the person was, what he or she was like. Roman Emperors took a new name when they became the supreme ruler – Caesar. Other Romans changed their names as they progressed politically or in the military, adding titles and dropping family names that were less important.
However, if someone went out of favour with the Emperor or local rulers, their name would be removed from books or monuments so it was as if they had never existed. In the 20th century, the Soviets did something similar, removing people from photos so that no trace of them remained.
2. REFLECT
These two letters are all about names and identity. How does Jesus identify himself to the two different churches (v 1, 7) and what do you think these mean
The stained garments probably would have come from joining in a certain pagan worship celebration and form a play on words with the ‘blotting out’ of their names. What do you have to do to be recognised by Jesus before his Father and the angels? Is it the reward for some heroic act or great evangelistic effort? How does this translate to Canley in 2011?
Philadelphia is an obedient church with no criticism. Though they seem weak, Jesus makes a lot of promises to them. What do they have to do to get the promises?
What does it mean to be made a pillar in the temple of God? Why are the names written on them?
Our personal identity is in view here as well as the bigger identity of the church. What are the things that give you identity – name, family, job, hobbies… ? What shapes the identity of Canley Community Church?
What might it mean to have your identity formed by the name of God, the name of the hope to come and the name of Jesus?
3. RESPOND:
It could be that the things you have discussed need a personal response – perhaps to the idea that your identity should be shaped by God, or needing the confidence that you can be secure in your identity as a Christian. It would be great if other members of the house group could pray for you as you explore these things.
One way of reading the promises in the letters to the seven churches is that they are not far off rewards for a distant future in heaven, but a hint of the type of church God is going to make them into. Pray, asking what kind of church is God calling CCC to be if we are to be ‘conquerors’? What promises does he have for us?
Some of the criticisms I have heard of the Occupy protesters have been utterly ridiculous. I’ll lay them out (and take them down a bit too) below the video, but you might like to see I’m not making them up – they are that obviously facile!
Number 1: “Protests are pointless, they achieve nothing”. Polly Toynbee’s response is spot on: protests work if their aim is raising the profile of the issues they are protesting – the conversation about the economy and the role of the bankers would be very different were it not for people in tents with hand made signs.
Two: “Go and get a job, that would help the economy more than protesting”. Some protesters clearly do have jobs, while others are part of the ‘forgotten generation’ of unemployed young people, saddled with debt from university and with no jobs to take. This is the generation who take un-paid interning jobs endlessly because there are no paid roles that actually use the education that they dedicated their entire lives so far to. Isn’t it right for them to stand up and say that this is not OK? How can you say to anyone in an economy like this “go and get a job” – it is the epitome of callousness and lack of heart.
Three: “Those kids with their designer clothes and iPhones…” I think this one irks me even more than the others. It comes from an oversimplification of the platform of the Occupy protesters – that they think capitalism as an entire system is fatally flawed. Perhaps some of them do, most certainly do not. They are consumers, they distinguish intelligently between what is good and right in the market economy and what is corrupt and corrupting – “it’s not about anti-capitalism, it’s about bad capitalism.” Insiders have the most right to blow the whistle and say that this is enough.
Who would have a right to critique contemporary society if not designer-clothed, technology-wielding young people? Only an Elijah-style prophet, living in the wilderness, kept separate from the taint of technology, or debt, or mass-manufactured clothing – a twenty-first century Gandhi. But even one of Gandhi’s aides, Sarojini Naidu, recognised that it took a lot of money to keep Gandhi poor. It is unthinkable to exist outside the bubble of capitalism in 2011 while remaining in contact with it and having a voice to criticise it. Get over the idea that it is wrong for the protesters to be identifiably part of the capitalist system.
It is not clear what the Occupy Together protests will achieve. It is even unclear how cohesive the movement will be, or how cogently their demands for change will be framed (though the London group have created a good summary of what they want). What is clear to me is that there is a desire for change and that this is in no way the same as the ‘rioting’ of this summer.
The comments of other people on the article itself are interesting – both supporting and criticising Ferriss.
The title sets up the binary that Ferriss pursues through the article: intellectual bad, engineer good. Taking a rather unique definition of intellectual (“Being an intellectual had more to do with fashioning fresh ideas than with finding fresh facts.”) in order to contrast it with scientists and engineers who dealt only with hypotheses that they could check with lab tests. Ferriss goes on to intellectuals sought only to create ideologies that were based on imagined utopian dreams rather than any real experience and that they were all failures. He takes a slightly different route to the standard critique of modernity but ends at a similar place: modern ideologies are empty and we must leave them all behind. The have (without exception, apparently) only caused damage to humanity, while technology and science have exclusively benefited us.
There’s plenty to critique in his argument (which my summary has probably not perfectly represented – which, as you’ll see, will be deeply ironic!) Some commenters have been upset with people saying there are straw men to be found in the article. A straw man is a weak or misrepresented summary of someone else’s argument or work, which then makes your argument look strong. It’s an analogy from somehting like martial arts, where knocking down a straw man is easier than taking on a real opponent.
An example (one of many) is Ferriss’ treatment of Marx. “Karl Marx studiously ignored the improving living standards of working-class Londoners — he visited no factories and interviewed not a single worker — while writing Das Kapital, which declared it an “iron law” that the lot of the proletariat must be getting worse.” Now I’ve not studied Das Kapital, but to suggest that Marx was anti-fact and did not research seems a very unfair accusation. Imperial Russia allowed the publication of Das Kapital because it was not just ideology, but a ‘scientific’ work of political economics. Marx should be seen as one who straddled the binary of this article – mixing ideology and scientific technique, as many scientists do, especially those who are pioneering new fields. And Marx cannot be blamed (as Ferriss later suggests) for the failure of communism in the Soviet bloc – commenter Jon Munger says that’s like blaming Darwin for eugenics.
The article is even more flawed than just containing straw men. Ferriss’ style of argument and his shallow treatment of sources puts him firmly in the camp of idealogues (which he conflates with intellectuals), ironicaly arguing that this approach (the one he is practising) is fatally flawed. He is constructing a new ideology, not based on verifiable hypotheses that can be falsified by experimentation, but constructed from a few opinions and comments of hearsay. Scientism (the ideology that science and technology provide unrelenting progress and benefit for humanity) has been in doubt for decades. The ultimate demonstration of the power of science to affect people are the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of the early and middle part of the last century. Scientism is just as dangerous as any ideology in the hands of people who will do absolutely anything to defend or advance their way of life.
When we talk about the end of ideologies, the lack of resonance there is now with the big ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries, we need to be careful how we do it to avoid creating new (or re-stating old) ideologies that are just as flawed. We choose the direction we take our world in, science is just one tool (one particularly effective tool) to move us in that direction. Science is not morally superior to other approaches, nor is it the only tool we should use, as Ferriss proves. As a writer I am sure he knows that his rhetoric is not scientific. It is a tool, we must choose how we use all the tools available to us to do good, rather than harm.
[These are the notes prepared for the housegroups at Canley Community Church - the first in a series on the letters to the seven churches.]
”We’ll be reading the book of Revelation for the next few weeks.” That’s a scary thought for lots of Christians – not just because of the scary things that are written about in the book, but also because it’s so different from the other books in the New Testament, which makes it difficult to read and understand.
There seem to be two different types of response to reading Revelation. Some people seem to understand it all – “those people will be left behind, this means that person, here it’s talking about the government…” The rest just think that the whole book is impossible and just ignore it, going back to a nice story from the gospels, or a good meaty chunk of Romans.
My starting point when thinking about Revelation is that neither gets it quite right. If we understand the Bible to be a bit like a library with different types of books in it, what kind of book is it? The people who study these things call it ‘Apocalyptic writing’. It’s very different to the stories or biography of the gospels and Acts, or the pastoral and theological letters that make up the rest of the New Testament. It’s a style of writing that was popular with Jews in the first century, when the books of the New Testament were written, but one that you don’t find in contemporary Britain. It’s a type of writing that was supposed to be understood, but it was also meant to be a bit secret. It was supposed to be just a wild story to anyone who wasn’t an insider, especially the Romans. So for us to understand apocalyptic writing we need to do some decoding – and some of the codes might be so old that it’s tough to fully crack them.
Revelation is supposed to be tough to understand, it’s supposed to baffle, but it definitely has meaning that we can and should look for. But let’s not make the mistake of thinking that Revelation was written so that only you can understand it now, with the benefit of two thousand years of history. Revelation was written down for a specific audience in the late first century, an audience who were supposed to understand and be encouraged by the message in it.
Have you been scared of reading Revelation because you think you’ll never understand any of it? Have you heard people who seem to think they understand every word and verse of the book? What’s your response now – still scared, maybe you could try, still sure you’ve got it all sorted?
Read Revelation 1:1-20
Revelation starts with the vision of John as he’s in exile, under arrest, away from the churches he is a pastor to. John is old, he’s been captured, he’s not able to do the job he loves. As he prays, he is shown the most incredible vision that he’d never have seen if he wasn’t on Patmos.
John writes down what he saw in the vision and sends it as a letter to the churches in what is now Turkey – not far by today’s standards, but a very long way away for John.
Reflect
The whole of chapter 1 is shot through with worship, you can feel the reverence and love in the tone that John writes in as well as the description of how he sees Jesus.
Is that your response when you’ve got difficult times?
Read through the description of Jesus in v9-20. What images stand out to you? Why? Is this the kind of picture of Jesus that you have in your mind?
The description of Jesus uses lots of symbols and metaphors, each one full of meaning to the audience John is writing to. They build up together to be very ‘out of this world’ and strange – this is Jesus in glory, not just raised back to life, but ascended to the highest place in heaven.
Yet there’s something else about this Jesus. He’s personal. He names the seven churches one by one, and as we’ll see in the coming weeks, he has a specific message to each one. The messages are as strange and cryptic as this first chapter (and all the rest of the Revelation), but they all hint at things about the cities that have been confirmed by archaeology. Jesus knows the details of life in each city – not just the general kind of ‘this is what it’s like to be a human being’, but ‘I know what it’s like for you in your location and context’.
Sometimes these two aspects of Jesus character are put as an ‘either or’ – he’s either huge and ‘out there’ or in my heart and just about the little things. I think we need to take both – even if they are in tension and difficult to fit together neatly. Jesus is God of all creation, God of every galaxy and the furthest reaches of the Universe, but he’s also right here next to us, in our street, in our living room, no matter what it feels like.
Have you sometimes picked one or the other – a little Jesus just in my heart, or a huge Jesus who’s too far away for us to relate to? What might it mean to ‘hold both in tension’ in your life?
As we read the letters in the next two chapters, we find the descriptions of Jesus in this chapter echoed. Just a little bit from v9-20 is used to describe Jesus as he speaks to each church individually, a different bit for each one. That aspect of Jesus is just what the church needs to hear, to encourage or convict them.
What aspect of Jesus’ character do you need to see? How would Jesus introduce himself to Canley Community Church?
Respond: What’s our Prayer Focus?
As we go through this series on the first four chapters of Revelation, we want to encourage a response of prayer to what we’ve read and discussed. In your housegroup, briefly discuss what you think you should pray about based on Revelation 1. Here are some ideas as a starter for you – please come up with more ideas.
Worship and celebration – just like John’s attitude throughout this chapter, perhaps you want to respond with prayerful worship of the great and mighty Jesus
‘I want to see you’ – maybe you, like John, are in a tough situation and just a glimpse of what Jesus is like would help you – like the song ‘Open the eyes of my heart, Lord, I want to see you. To see You high and lifted up, Shining in the light of Your glory. Pour out Your power and love, As we sing holy, holy, holy. ’
I made the mistake of confusing 
