In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of cultural decay, and we’ve seen a lot of things that we thought that we’d never see. We even see that among people who name the name of Christ. You can look at a lot of Protestant denominations and pastors that you never thought would give… For example, on the issue of homosexuality, 20 years ago if you were predicting that there would be prominent Evangelical pastors that would suddenly turn on that issue and come out and say that gay marriage was okay, people would have thought that you were crazy. We as Orthodox might comfort ourselves and say, “Well, those people are just Protestant, so what can you expect?” But when you look in the Orthodox Church, unfortunately you can see some of the same kinds of things—not on the same scale, but there are people who are trying to compromise with the spirit of this age.

In Revelation 2, beginning with verse 18, our Lord Jesus Christ addressed the church of Thyateira, which had people who were trying to compromise with evil. It says:

And unto the angel of the church in Thyateira, write: These things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like unto fine brass.

Most of us have had the experience of seeing someone who was really angry, and you look into their eyes, and you can see fire, and you know exactly the image that’s being depicted here, and that’s that Christ is very angry with the evil that he sees going on in this church. When it talks about his feet being like fine brass, in Isaiah 52:7, it says:

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace, that bringeth good tidings of good and that publisheth salvation, that saith to Zion: Thy God reigneth.

Some of the Fathers, commenting on this, say that this is an image of the purity of the Gospel message, the faith of the apostles. It’s a faith that can’t be tarnished. We can depart from that faith, but the faith is pure. Then [Revelation 2] verse 19 says:

I know thy works and charity and service and faith and thy patience, and thy last works to be more than the first.

So as with all these epistles to the seven churches, the Lord first points out the good things in that church that he can compliment them on, the things that he wants to pat them on the head and say, “Keep doing these things.” And he’s saying that you’re doing more than you were doing at the beginning, when your church was just founded. You’re increasing in works and charity, and that’s a great thing. But then in verse 20, it says:

Notwithstanding, I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman, Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.

Undoubtedly, this woman was not actually named Jezebel. Just a few weeks ago we celebrated the memory of the Prophet Elijah, and we talked a little bit about Jezebel, but Jezebel was a devout worshiper of Baal, who with zeal persecuted those who worshiped the true God and promoted that evil religion that included things like child sacrifice. Her husband, Ahab, it’s not that he was a righteous man that was somehow led astray by this woman; he was a weak man that was led astray by her. He married this woman probably because they wanted to form a political alliance between the northern kingdom and the Phoenicians. So this was a compromise, a worldly political act, that led to great spiritual calamity in the northern kingdom of Israel.

When it talks about her teaching people to commit fornication, on the one hand this could be talking about spiritual fornication, because in the Scriptures very often when the people would fall into idolatry the prophets would talk about this as being spiritual adultery, but also along with that idolatry, very often there was sexual immorality, and there’s good reason to think that probably it wasn’t just spiritual fornication that was being talked about here. Tolerance has its limits, and of course we as Orthodox Christians don’t believe that we should ever use any force to make people become Orthodox, but that doesn’t mean that within the bounds of the Church that we should tolerate whatever anyone wants to do. There have to be some standards that we maintain, and sometimes that even means excommunicating people, telling people that they’re no longer members of the Church and ask them not to come back until they straighten up. Of course, we want them to come back, we want them to straighten up, but this idea of separating ourselves from people who are in error is something that you find throughout the New Testament.

St. John Chrysostom points out that it’s a lot more likely if you’re healthy and you’re around someone who’s sick, it’s a lot more likely that you’re going to catch their illness than it is that that ill person is going to catch your health. That person needs to recover from that illness before you spend a lot of time around them, or else the risk is that you’re going to catch that illness yourself. The famous Roman orator, Cicero, was talking about political traitors, but you could see the analogy between what he says and those within the Church that want to lead the Church astray. He said:

A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious, but it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banners openly, but the traitor moves amongst those at the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments. He appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of the nation. He works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city. He infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear; the traitor is the plague.

Again, we want to be nice, particularly in our culture. We’re nice to a fault. People who are pushing all kinds of evil have learned that if they just keep pushing and they get in people’s faces, that most Americans, because we want to be nice, will just back off and say, “Well, maybe if we just cede ground on this issue, they’ll leave us alone.” But once we give up on that issue, they move forward a couple more steps and start getting back in our face about something else. So we want to be nice, but we can’t just tolerate evil as it progresses, not in our culture, but especially within the bounds of the Church.

We have our Ahabs and our Jezebels in the Church, and I’ve been amazed to hear even clergy who have talked about how homosexuality maybe isn’t really that bad, maybe we just misunderstood it, maybe the Fathers of the Church didn’t quite understand what it was all about, maybe the writers of the Scripture were just ignorant people. Well, if we believe that, then we might as well stay home on Sunday morning and watch “Meet the Press” and drink a cup of coffee, because that means our faith isn’t true; it isn’t what it claims to be, so we might as well just hang it up. But if we believe that the Orthodox Church is what it claims to be, and if we believe that our faith really does come from Christ and that this is a divinely inspired tradition that we have, then we have to take it seriously.

We can’t just agree to disagree. Sometimes people will talk about a concept in the Orthodox theology that’s called theologoumena, which is a very big word that basically means a theological opinion that’s within the bounds of acceptability. Well, you might have a theological opinion about issues where the Church doesn’t have a clear teaching, but they’re not way-out-there opinions; they’re just opinions where some Fathers would say this, and some other Fathers would say that. So if you agree with some of those Fathers and don’t agree with other of those Fathers, that doesn’t mean that you’re a heretic. But you can’t have a theological opinion that flies in the face of the clear and unambiguous teachings of the Church, the canons, the Fathers, and even the current teaching of the Church, because our bishops have been very clear: that’s not theologoumena when you say homosexuality is not a sin. That’s heresy; that’s spiritual treason. Verse 21:

And I gave her space to repent of her fornication, and she repented not. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her, into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death, and all the churches will know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts. And I will give unto every one of you according to your works.

God is not willing that any should perish. He’s patient and he’s long-suffering, and he gives people many opportunities to repent. But there will come a day in the life of those that resist God’s grace and refuse to repent when they’ve had their last chance. So we can’t presume on God’s mercy and his grace and just figure, “I’ve got plenty of time to repent,” because you don’t know how much time you’ve got.

Those that follow this Jezebel are told by Christ that they’re going to be destroyed with her, as well as those who continue to compromise with her, to tolerate her evil opinions. You can kid others, you can even kid yourself, but you can’t kid God, because we’re told that he searches the reins and the heart. The reins are your kidneys, and of course we know what our heart is, but these had a symbolic meaning in Scripture. Basically, the heart was the seat of the thoughts, and the reins were the seat of emotions and desires. What it’s saying is that God sees all that; he sees into your very being, and he knows the truth about you. You can’t kid him; he knows what you believe, and he knows that you know that what you’re doing is wrong when you’re doing it.

So you need to face up to him, and you need to repent. You need to come clean with him if you don’t want to be destroyed with Jezebel and her children. Verse 24:

But I say unto you and unto the rest in Thyateira, as many as have not this doctrine and which have not known the depths of Satan as they speak, I will put upon you none other burden but that which you already have. Hold fast till I come.

Now when it talks about the depths of Satan as they say, that’s a hint that probably what was going on here was that they were teaching a particular Gnostic heresy which was that flesh and matter was evil and that the path to salvation was basically to wallow in sin, to explore evil, get it out of your system, so that you could be free from all these worldly concerns.

There was a Greek philosopher that I read who commented on people who had opinions like this, and he said that the fact that these people are just evil and base is shown by the fact that they want to explore every evil thing in this life, but they don’t want to explore every good thing first. They don’t want to explore all the virtues, because you could spend all your life trying to experience everything that’s good, pure, and beautiful before you’d ever get to anything that was evil. But they wanted to explore the evil because they just wanted to have an excuse for their sins.

To the pious in the church that hadn’t taken part of this error, Christ says, “Hold fast to what you already have. Contend earnestly for the faith once delivered unto the saints. Hold fast to the traditions which you received from the apostles.” In Revelation 3:11, Christ said something very similar; he said, “Behold, I come quickly. Hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown.” If you’re walking in an area and maybe it’s a dangerous area or something like that, and you’ve got something of value and you think people might be inclined to take it from you, what are you going to do? You’re going to hang onto that very tightly, because you don’t want that taken from you.

Well, when you’re talking about the crown of life that we all want to win, that means everything for all eternity to us, that’s something that you want to hang onto very tightly. So you can’t, just to be nice, compromise. You can’t let these things go out of laziness. You need to hold tight to the faith that’s been handed onto you. You need to be zealous for the faith. It can’t be something that you kind of feel like doing sometimes and you kind of feel like not doing sometimes.

When you wake up on Sunday morning or on a feast day, you should never wake up thinking, “Oh, I don’t feel like going to church today.” If it’s possible for you to go to church when there’s a service, particularly on Sundays and feast days, you ought to be here. When it’s time for you to pray, you ought to not be thinking, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to pray right now. Maybe I’ll just blow it off,” because if you’re serious about your faith, if you’re serious about God, these are the things that are of utmost importance to you. When it comes to the questions of “Am I going to do the right thing? Am I going to be kind to someone I don’t need to be kind to? Am I going to give rather than take from someone?” These are the kinds of things you need to remind yourself: I’m a Christian. I have to be in this all the way. I can’t be halfway. Do the right thing. Verse 26:

And he that overcometh and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations. And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers, even as I have received of my Father.

The middle part of that is a quote from Psalm 2. But there are several places in the gospels and the epistles where we’re told that we will judge the nations. Well, what does that exactly mean? because we know that there will be a judgment. God will be on his throne, and we will stand before God and be judged by God. So what does it mean that we will be judged by other people or that Christians will judge the lost? In Matthew 12:41, you get a little bit of an idea. Christ said to the Jews; he said:

The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation and shall condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah. And behold, a greater than Jonah is here.

It’s not that we are going to be on the throne in God’s place, judging other people, but that we will testify to the truth of God and against those that have not obeyed it. Verse 28 says:

And I will give him the morning star.

Christ himself is the morning star, but the morning star is also an image of the resurrection. It’s the light just before the dawn that signals that the night is ending and the day is about to arrive. Verse 29:

He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.

Amen.