You may have spotted that I’m one of those ministers who only wears a clerical collar for formal occasions or when it’s absolutely necessary, such as when I visit someone who doesn’t know me and I need to be identified as a minister.
One of my Anglican friends noted this attitude of mine and said to me, “Dave, you’re not so much low church, you’re more like subterranean!”
Others, more particularly older and more traditional church members, have questioned me on this and claimed that the dog collar is like some magical Open Sesame that gains ministers entry into places others can’t go. The usual claim is that it allows us to get into hospital wards outside visiting hours.
I have to disappoint these people and tell them that I have no more right to go into a hospital ward out of hours than anybody else, unless I’m a member of the hospital chaplaincy team. And then what would gain me access is not the dog collar but a hospital lanyard.
If I’m feeling particularly mischievous in the conversation, what I then retort is that since Methodist doctrine says that ministers hold no priesthood that is different from the priesthood all believers have, then maybe all Christians should wear the collar!
Why am I telling you this? Because what Jesus writes to the church at Pergamum is all about being identifiably Christian. If we ask what Jesus praises them for, it’s being identifiably Christian. If we ask where he calls them out, it’s for when they hide their Christian identity.
Firstly, then, let’s listen to the praise Jesus heaps on the church at Pergamum:
13 I know where you live – where Satan has his throne. Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce your faith in me, not even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in your city – where Satan lives.
They wore their Christian uniform, so to speak, and were clearly identifiable as followers of Jesus. They knew it would put them in the firing line in a place ‘where Satan has his throne’. Whatever that phrase means precisely, we can be sure that Pergamum was a tough place to identify as a Christian, because hostility, opposition, and even violence would come their way. Yet they still did it. And it even cost one church member his life.
This wasn’t unusual at the time Revelation was written. We are fairly sure it was written around the time that Domitian was the Roman Emperor (that’s AD 81-96, fact fans). A cruel and ruthless ruler, he only tolerated religions other than the Roman emperor cult if they could be assimilated into that Roman culture. If they stood out, it seems persecution was the consequence.
Indeed, the Book of Revelation is not so much cryptic prophecies of future end-time events as a document to give hope to persecuted Christians. Throughout the centuries and around the world, the persecuted church has taken great comfort from it.
Today, we hear inspiring and shocking stories from around the world about what it means for many Christians to ‘wear their uniform’, to be publicly identifiable as disciples of Jesus.
Here’s one I found through an email from Christian Solidarity Worldwide:
[In August], hundreds of people stormed a Christian colony in Jaranwala city near Faisalabad in Pakistan. Up to 25 churches and chapels and hundreds of homes were ransacked and set on fire.
Why? Two local Christian residents, Rocky Masih and Raja Masih, had been accused of blasphemy. Mobs, stirred up by reports that the men had desecrated religious scriptures, attacked the colony, demanding to execute the two men themselves.
Rocky and Raja were subsequently arrested and charged with insulting Islam and defiling the name of the Prophet Mohammed. Other Christians in the area have fled in fear of their lives.
This is what happens in many places around the world when you publicly identify as a Christian. Lies, false charges, violence, and the risk of death.
But what does that all mean for us, in a country where it is much safer to be a Christian, even if it is less well received than it once was?
I think there are a couple of applications.
One is that we need to take seriously what happens to other members of the Christian family around the world. We need to use our freedoms to support them and campaign for them. I strongly recommend that we look into the work of organisations like Christian Solidarity Worldwide, whom I just quoted, or Open Doors, who do similar work. Who else is going to speak up for suffering Christians if not the rest of the church? These organisations can provide us with material for prayer, for lobbying Parliament, and so on.
The other application I would draw is this. If our situation is easier, then why do we allow relatively trivial opposition to close our mouths from speaking up for Christ? I know we want to avoid the stereotype of Christians being judgmental, but the mockery or opposition we would face is nothing in comparison to what our sisters and brothers in Pakistan, Nigeria, India, Iran, North Korea, China, and so many other countries face.
Surely we could find a bit more courage to nail our colours to the mast?
Secondly, why does Jesus call the church at Pergamum to repent?
You may know one of my favourite sermon stories. It concerns a question set in a training examination for police recruits:
‘You are on the beat and you see two dogs fighting. The dogs knock a baby out of its pram, causing a car to swerve off the road, smashing into a grocer’s shop. A pedestrian is severely injured, but during the confusion a woman’s bag is snatched, a crowd of onlookers chase after the thief and, in the huge build-up of traffic, the ambulance is blocked from the victim of the crash.
‘State, in order of priority, your course of action.’
One recruit wrote, ‘Take off uniform and mingle with crowd.’[1]
I think that’s rather like the issue Jesus had with Pergamum:
14 Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: there are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality. 15 Likewise, you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. 16 Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.
Effectively, the Christians at Pergamum had taken off their uniform and mingled with the crowd. How? Note the reference to eating food sacrificed to idols and committing sexual immorality. It sounds very much like some of them were joining in with the practices of the local pagan religious cult.
The management guru Peter Drucker once famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and this rather sounds like the local culture had eaten the Christians for breakfast. After all, surely it doesn’t harm to mingle with the local crowd if the alternative is sticking out like a sore thumb as a Christian and getting in trouble as a result?
But the problem here is that in letting themselves be absorbed by the surrounding culture they ended up imbibing a lifestyle that denied the Gospel. So no wonder Jesus calls them to repentance.
Could it be that we face the same challenge? Sadly, there is plenty of evidence of both individual Christians and the church corporately taking off uniform and mingling with today’s crowd. We do it when we baptise the world’s ethics and try to convince ourselves they are consistent with the Gospel.
We take off our uniform when we succumb to the politics of ‘might is right.’
We mingle with the crowd when we adopt a celebrity cult in the church, just as the world does.
We do it when we worship the god of individual choice, or the idol of consumerism. And you don’t even have to buy anything to worship consumerism: you can just treat church as a consumer choice, that exists solely to meet your needs and tastes.
Yes, we are every bit in as much danger as the Pergamum church of letting the culture eat us up and losing our Christian distinctiveness.
And when we do this, we are saying we are ashamed of the Gospel, and of he One who went to the Cross for us. That’s serious.
We might do well to reflect on whether there are any ways in which we have bent the shape of our faith to fit what’s popular in our society, rather than calling our society to change shape in conformity to Christ.
Each one of us needs to examine ourselves from time to time to consider whether we have compromised our faith to fit the wider culture.
In conclusion, we have a choice and each choice will lead to a different response from Jesus.
If we choose to take off our uniform and mingle with the crowd, rendering ourselves indistinguishable from the wider world, then Jesus has a solemn response. He says,
16 Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.
In other words, he will speak against us. Is that what he has done when scandals have been exposed in the church that is exposed in the world?
But there is good news from Jesus if we take the more difficult route of staying in our distinctive Christian uniform in the world:
17 Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.
The ‘hidden manna’ surely means he will sustain us in difficult, wilderness times in our lives. The ‘white stone’ is what a not guilty verdict was returned on in the local courts and indicates Christ’s acceptance of us. The secret name likely signifies his intimate knowledge and love for us.[2] These are ways in which Jesus strengthens us when times are tough.
So there we have it. We are faced with a tough choice, whether to identify publicly as Christians at a potential cost or to go underground and be indistinct from the rest of the world.
But the easy road is confronted by the opposition of Jesus, and the tough road takes us into the blessing of Jesus.
Which will we choose?
[1] Adapted from Murray Watts, Bats In The Belfry, p137 #232.
[2] See Ian Paul, Revelation (Tyndale New Testament Commentary), p90.
Big Circumstance 