Sermon by Dr. Brian K. Blount, professor of New Testament Interpretation, Princeton Theological Seminary, at the installation service of NCC President Michael Livingston,
November 10, 2005 

Exclamation Point 

NRSV Revelation 3:14 "And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the origin of God's creation:  

15 "I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot.  

16 So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.  

17 For you say, 'I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.' You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.  

18 Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich; and white robes to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen; and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see.  

19 I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent.  

20 Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.  

21 To the one who conquers I will give a place with me on my throne, just as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.  

22 Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches."

Unlike New Orleans, Laodicea was a city without water.  But it did have great wealth.  Colonized by the Seleucid King, Antiochus II sometime between 261 and 246 BCE, the city the King named after his wife Laodice, was the richest in the region.  In fact, it was so wealthy that after an earthquake destroyed it in 60 CE, the city proudly refused imperial disaster aid from Rome’s FEMA agency and rebuilt itself completely with its own resources.  Talk about being self-sufficient.  Laodicea became so wealthy because of three words.  Location.  Location.  Location.  The city sat at a major intersection of roads that allowed it to operate as the economic hub on two different lucrative trade routes.  And then there were its famous industries.  In textiles, it produced a world famous shiny black wool.  It had some of the key banks in all of Asia Minor.  And its medical industry was well known for the so-called “Phrygian powder,” a medicinal eye salve that was in heavy demand.  Laodicea had everything.  Except water.  Laodicea therefore had to pipe water in an aqueduct down from the city of Heirapolis, six miles to its north.  Heirapolis was known for its hot medicinal springs that were phenomenal for bathing, but not so great for drinking.  By the time Heirapolis’ water arrived in the aqueduct to the thirsty folk in Laodicea, the water’s tepidness and mineral content made it nauseating.^[1]  The Laodiceans took to spitting the water from their mouths.

I suspect that the Christians in Laodicea got both the point and the rebuke that went along with it when John connected this very impolite, unsociable behavior of spitting with Christ.  Like the Laodiceans, Jesus had apparently been a spitter.  In our day and age, it doesn’t look good when athletes spit.  But they’re always spitting something: sunflower seeds, tobacco juice, saliva.  And the camera always seems to catch them in the act.  Since everybody’s mouth naturally produces saliva, it’s no surprise that saliva is the stuff they spit most often.  They spit and then rub their shoes in the little puddle the saliva makes in the ground.  Then they go sliding into it or tackling some other poor smuck in it.  The whole thing is just so nasty.  Especially when they rub the spit all around in their hands as if its lotion or something.  Saliva is impure, unclean, filled to the brim with germs; we all know that.  Spitting saliva is therefore a nasty habit.  And yet, Jesus spits just like an athlete.  In the Gospel of Mark, he restores sight to a blind man when, depending on the translation, he either spits on his hands and then rubs the spit into the man’s eyes or just spits directly in his eyes.  In John, he spits on some dirt, makes a mud ball, and then rubs the whole unappealing mess into a blind man’s eyes.  In the Gospels, as a part of his cure, he’s spitting out saliva.  Here in the Book of Revelation, as the risen Christ, he aims to cure what ails the movement of God’s reign into human history by spitting out an entire people.  The question we, and I suppose the Laodiceans, want answered is:  why is John so convinced that Christ is mad enough to spit Laodiceans?  The answer is important.  Hopefully, if we can find out why he intended to spit out those Laodicean Christians then, we can figure out a way to avoid the very messy prospect of him spitting out any or all of us American Christians now. 

If we observe the rules of proper etiquette, which certainly all of us polite, refined, sophisticated, contemporary Christians do, then we’ll want to start our investigation by looking at Christ.  After all, in a messed up social situation, it’s generally the spit-ter, not the spit-tee who’s causing all the trouble.  I am sure this is why, when John opens his letter to the Laodiceans, he starts with Christ rather than with them.  He introduces Christ by quoting what Christ has said about himself.  Christ shamelessly calls himself the “Amen.”  According to Mitchell Reddish in his commentary on the Book of Revelation, “In both Judaism and the early church, ‘amen’ was used as a way of signifying what was true and valid.”^[2]  Today, instead of “amen,” we might hear someone say, “Right on!” or “That’s right!” or “Word!”  By identifying himself as the “amen,” Christ is declaring that he, his life, his ministry of caring for the people society refused to care for was God’s way of saying “Right On!”  His determination to fight all the way to the cross for the people society had stopped fighting for and was even fighting against was God’s way of saying, “That’s right!”  His resurrection on that first Easter morning that promised that all those struck down by injustice, impoverishment, insincerity, and insensitivity would rise again was and is God’s way of saying “Word!”  In other words, Jesus and his life and actions are the exclamation point on everything that God has done, is doing, and will do in the world.  I’m sure John records this Christ revelation in order to make a point.  He wants the Laodiceans to ask, “well, if the risen, reigning Christ is God’s exclamation point, . . .what are we?” 

Lukewarm, that’s what!!  The Laodiceans were not an exclamation point affirming loudly the Lordship of Christ with their words and their lives.  They were more like a stopping point, more like a period.  Through Christ, God was doing an awful lot in the world, changing, transforming, re-making, and then the Laodiceans came along and it all apparently stopped.  Period. 

Christ’s challenge to those early Christians should prompt a question in us latter day Christians.  Are we like the Laodiceans?  Are we the End, the point where God’s revolutionary, world shaking movement stops?  Think of the history of this revolutionary country, born from a revolution for justice, revitalized from time to time by justice revolutions from within:  abolition of slavery, women’s right to vote, civil rights, rights for minorities and seniors, New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Integration.  Now it’s our time and our turn, under the leadership of our church.  But where is the exclamation point?  What do we wealthy Laodicean, I mean wealthy American Christians have to say with our words and our lives in response to the words and the life of God’s son?  What kind of Christian speech form are we?  Does revolutionary transformation stop with us?  Period? 

Well, giving us the benefit of the doubt, maybe we’re a question mark.  You know, the kind of Christian who looks at all the chaos swirling in the world around her, goes back in the church, closes the sanctuary doors, lowers the lights, and offers a bewildered prayer.  Maybe we don’t know what God is doing in the world.  Maybe we aren’t sure about our place in God’s plan or even if God does have a plan.  Maybe we aren’t sure if we’re supposed to stand up, make a phone call, or write a letter or an email--after all, that’s easier--or what we do in a time like this.  Maybe we are a question mark.

Then again, maybe we’re a comma, as we string together nonsensical faith statements in these difficult times that we think ought to make people feel better just the same.   Parents lose their children fighting in Iraq, families lose everything they have ever known fighting the Leviathan let loose by Katrina, whole communities disintegrate day in and day out suffocating under the stench of poverty while our country touts its wealth and superpower status, and the best many Christians can offer is, “the Lord doesn’t give you any more than you can handle,” comma, “it’s God’s will,” comma, “just pray about it and it will all be all right,” comma, comma, comma. 

Some of us are like quotation marks.  We don’t have an original Christian thought in our pious heads.  Instead of reenacting the radical, boundary-breaking ministry of Jesus that touched untouchables, that brought into community those who had been excommunicated from it, that rejected laws which imprisoned people behind bars of tradition that cared more about protecting the power of the powerful and the wealth of the wealthy, that tore down divisive walls that segregated people along lines of status, ideology, religion, or ethnicity, we just go around quoting the catchy Christian slogans of the day:  Quote:  “God is my co-pilot”;  quote:  “What would Jesus do?”;  quote:  “God said it.  I believe it.  That settles it.”  Unquote.

Some of us are even like the blank underlines that have absolutely nothing at all written in or on them at all.  When injustice rises, when people fall, we have nothing to say and no time to do anything more than look for someone else who has the time, energy, and effort to fill in our blank. 

I think most Christians are an ellipsis, you know, the dot...dot...dot in the middle or at the end of a sentence that suggests that a whole lot more is on the way.  “I’ll be there as soon as worship service is over,” dot...dot...dot...“I can’t do anything about the economic principles of this country that keep you poor, but I can save your soul,” dot...dot...dot...“Believe in God, pray every night, come to our church, give some money to our church, and God will bless you and bring prosperity to your life,” dot...dot...dot...“I can’t believe the uncompassionate policies of our political leaders, but I’m glad that they go to church and talk to God,” dot...dot...dot... I’m glad that with Christ God chose to speak with an exclamation point and not a dot...dot...dot;  I’ll bet the people struggling right now, suffering right now, dying right now would prefer an exclamation point to a dot...dot...dot that promises the revolution of a new heaven and a new earth that never really comes. 

God’s exclamation point also calls himself the true and faithful witness.  In the time John is writing, faith is a political concept--in fact, it always has been, always will be.  Americans fret all the time about the separation between church and state.  In the Roman occupied Asia Minor of John’s time where Domitian was emperor, no such boundary existed.  Domitian was worshipped as Lord and as Savior.  In Asia Minor, cities spent tax dollars erecting not only temples to the Greco-Roman gods like Zeus, Apollo, and Athena, but also to the divinity of the emperor.  Emperor worship found its greatest supporters in the 7 cities to whom John wrote his 7 letters.  In each of those cities, public funds were used to erect temples and statues praising the divinity of the emperor. Worship of the emperor was identified with loyalty to the emperor. The true patriot worshipped.  Only the true worshiper was a patriot.  Anyone who would not worship the divinity of the Caesar was politically and socially as well as religiously suspect.  What was a Christian, who believed in the singular, exclusive Lordship of God and God’s Messiah, to do in such a circumstance?  How could a Christian worship Caesar?  How could a Christian be a patriot?  These very religious questions had life or death political ramifications.  Religious disloyalty made a person a political threat.  You could change all that simply by witnessing to the Lordship of Rome and Rome’s emperor after you’d finished worshiping and witnessing to the Lordship of your Christ.  After you leave the church house, come bow down before the state house.  That’s all you had to do.

But your model witness was Jesus.  When he was told to testify before the congress of Palestinian and Roman leaders in first century Palestine that his life and ministry did not represent the way that God was really operating in the world, he didn’t take the fifth;  he took the cross!  When he was told to stop his disruptive activities that threatened to destroy the social fabric by empowering the powerless, enriching the poor, healing the sick, bringing outsiders into the communal centers, and sitting racial outcasts at tables with those of the race who had cast them out, he said no.  He kept witnessing to a vision of a new world where society was structured not by economic and political self-interest, but by the charitable expression of sacrifice, mercy, and love.  And he kept witnessing even when he was threatened with that cross.  Faithful to God’s expectations, true to God’s cause, he kept preaching and living out his revolutionary vision until Rome hung him so high on a tree that all the world could see what happens to folk who keep speaking up when the powers that rule our world have told them to sit down and shut up.  This faithful, true witness, John says, is the model for all us would be God witnesses who follow.

Just what did that mean in Laodicea and the other six churches?  Despite the threats made against anyone who refused to witness to the Lordship of Rome and Rome’s emperor, not only must Christians refuse to make such a witness, they must also, like Jesus, go out and offer a contrary witness to a revolutionary Lord and a revolutionary life lived out in obedience to that Lord.  It wasn’t enough just to duck and cover when the Roman religious/political priests came looking for patriotic emperor worshipers.  John expected the Laodiceans to stand up and make their voices heard in a world that did not want to hear what Christ wanted them to say.

That was then.  Ancient news.  Literally.  We don’t go to church now worried that some emperor might find us annoying and get more than annoyed in response.  We live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Well, . . . maybe.  But if you listen hard, you can hear the exiled John shouting to the privileged followers of Jesus in 21st century America:  MAKE SOME NOISE!!  That is what exclamation points do!  The question isn’t “what should we do?”  The question is:  “how loud should we be?”  Most of the time we know what we are supposed to do and say in most social, religious, political, and economic situations in which we find ourselves.  Most of the time, we’re doing it and saying it, but we’re doing it and saying it so softly and genteelly that I don’t think Washington and the patriot pushing priests of self-absorbed, self-interested, self-deluded politics can hear our testimony.  It just won’t do to mumble out our declaration to live by the expectations of God’s rule as represented in the revolutionary behavior of Jesus’ life and ministry.  A witness stands up and stands out and declares her commitment to the revolutionary truth to which she testifies, to the revolutionary truth that sets all creation free.  Like an exclamation point!

But this is precisely what the Laodiceans were NOT doing.  According to John’s vision, Christ refers to them as lukewarm Christians.  By lukewarm, he means that they were chameleon Christians.  They changed loyalties like they changed clothes.  They wore combat Christian fatigues for waging faith when they were safe in their sanctuaries.  But they slipped all too easily and comfortably into tuxedos of timidity for their forays into the real world.  They accommodated themselves to Roman life in Laodicea and the expectations of pagan and imperial lordship that went with it.  After all, when in Rome . . .dot . . .dot . . .dot . . .   Instead of speaking out and acting out against the abuses of an economic system that made Laodiceans wealthy and others, like their fellow Christians in the city of Smyrna, impoverished, they tried to make as much money as they could from that system.  Instead of speaking out and acting out against a social and religious system that made patriots of those who worshiped the emperor and were loyal to the emperor’s programs and plans no matter how unjust those programs and plans were, the Laodiceans tried to make themselves appear as loyal and as patriotic as the most Roman Romans.  That is how the Laodiceans became powerful.  That is how the Laodiceans became model Asia Minor citizens.  That is how the Laodiceans became rich.   They accommodated themselves to the social and economic travesties of the world in which they lived.  They prospered from the very system that God was calling them to MAKE SOME NOISE against.  They did the same thing religiously and socially.  They passed themselves off as citizens of the year, attending festivals, trade fairs, cultic ceremonies, imperial ribbon cuttings, anything and everything where they made themselves look like any other prosperous Laodicean.  They sold their souls so they could fatten their wallets.

Rich in possessions, they were poor in witness.  They were “lukewarm.”  Neither hot nor cold.  I remember the first time, as a child, I saw frozen carbon dioxide.  The man who showed it to us kids called it dry ice.  He said some people called it hot ice.  When we touched it we realized that the nonsensical title actually made real sense.  It was so cold that it felt hot.  Its burn was actually a deep freeze.  It is something like hot ice that Christ expects from the Laodiceans.  He wants Christians so hot that they freeze Rome out.  He wants Christians so cold that they burn down Rome’s pretensions to ultimate greatness.  What he got was luke-warmth.  He got Laodiceans who lived only as much Christianity as they needed to live, witnessed only as much of the transforming, revolutionary, life changing ministry of Jesus as they needed to in order to feel good about themselves and not attract any undue attention from the Romans around them. 

Are we contemporary Christians in danger of becoming a lukewarm Laodicea while America acts more and more like John’s Rome every day?  Notice how America has become an emergency management kind of country that only really feels spurred to live a revolutionary life of sacrifice and attention to the least among us when a tragedy occurs.  And not enough of us Christians seem to envision ourselves being exclamation points speaking prophetically to the powers that power America until some massive tragedy points out just how much in the way of resources and good will we actually have to change the world in which we live.  We can’t seem to think in revolutionary ways unless there’s an emergency.  And since Hurricane Katrina, we don’t even seem to do emergencies well.  It’s nice to see the government gear up when we are attacked by terrorists or deluged by horrific cataclysms of nature.  But how come we aren’t acting like Christian exclamation points when the government seems to be giving money away to people who have money, while the storm never stops for impoverished U.S. citizens who are being attacked in low income, working poverty, insufficient health care, gargantuan drop out rates, drug infestation, insane fuel prices, and unpredictable employment on a routine, daily basis?  There are social hurricanes swirling across urban and suburban landscapes every day in this country and our elected leaders don’t seem to notice, or if they notice, seem unable to marshal the kind of energy, intellect, imagination, and vision to inspire an entire country to fight back.  J.R., a homeless man in San Francisco quoted on September 25 of this year (2005) in the Trenton Times made this observation:  “Those people who were abandoned in New Orleans, they were abandoned long before that hurricane hit.  We all were.” 

According to the same Trenton Times issue, proposals are before Congress to slash 35 billion dollars from social programs like food stamps and Medicaid with further cuts to Pell grants and Veteran’s health benefits coming, while tax cuts for the wealthy that have already cost 819 billion and some estimate will cost 2 trillion in 10 years continue on pace.  All of this while 37 million Americans lived under the poverty line in 2004, a jump of 1.1 million from the year before.  45.8 million people don’t have health insurance.  25 per cent of American blacks live in the kind of poverty that we now all know existed in New Orleans.  36 million Americans are hungry or at risk of hunger.^[3] 

And what has been the national voice of the national church in all this?  We do newsletters and mass mailings and emergency fund drives and political lobbying and build one more Habitat House.  Jesus didn’t just focus on changing individual lives and circumstances;  he also primarily challenged the entire societal structure.  He targeted and transformed the structures that structured their world.  And he told his disciples to do the same.  Two millennia later, we still hear the sound of his voice.  Why doesn’t anybody seem to know what we believe and what we feel about how the way we run our world does not match up with the way Jesus ran his ministry that prioritized the poor, outcast, cast out, and socially, politically, and economically unacceptable of his day?  The Rev. Cecil Williams of the Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco said people were calling his church after Hurricane Katrina saying:  “Not only did we not know there was so much poverty, but also that so many of these poor people were black.”  How could they not know?  Are we exclamation points not loud and visible and socially active enough?  That’s the question Christ is asking folk in Laodicea.  If we aren’t living, if we aren’t witnessing the way Jesus, the true and faithful witness, was living and witnessing, if we aren’t obsessively pressing for radical change in the way Jesus was pressing for change, if we aren’t risking our social standing to profess and live out the demands of a faith that cares more about God’s people that we could ever care about ourselves, then according to this Laodicean letter, we deserve to be ejected from Christ’s mouth like lukewarm, useless spit.

It’s time for true confessions.  Some people are natural athletes;  I am a natural ellipsis.  I want to help, dot...dot...dot, but I don’t have the time right now, dot...dot...dot, and I’m not really strong enough or well known enough or certainly rich enough to make a difference, dot...dot...dot..., but I feel bad about all that is going so wrong in our world and I pray continually that God will intervene, dot...dot...dot..., that somewhere, in someone God will find an exclamation point...dot...dot...dot........................ 

Sometimes I just get weary.  I start to think my witness won’t matter anyway.  As I watch the religious and political landscape and realize who commands the clout necessary to direct the way our civilization defines and lives out the meaning of “civil,” I feel like I am singing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.  Just a few months ago, around the middle of July, I was reading about a conservative political columnist who was talking in Time Magazine about one of his new bestselling books, and I was so saddened by the societal vision he and his book espoused that I got up from my desk and went outside to sit in the 95 degree heat to cool off.  And it’s not just that he was conservative in his ideology and I’m not;  it was that his form of conservative Christianity, whether you call it hot or cold, was visible and was making a visible difference, and mine was not.  Remember, in John’s narrative, Christ doesn’t oppose the cold to the hot, he wants both the cold and the hot, as different, and sometimes as opposed to each other as they might be, to become exclamation points.  How can the full voice and view of Christianity take its shape and have its impact in the world if only the hot or the cold version of the faith stands up?  I don’t know whether my version is hot or cold, but I often feel like, like me, it’s not sufficiently standing up.  I just feel weary.  And weak.  I admit it.  I surrender.  And then my commentary work forces me back into reading the Book of Revelation where it had to have looked from any logical perspective to John of Patmos, looking as he was through the witness lens of a mangled, slaughtered, executed Lamb, that Rome’s God was God.  Then, like John, I get mad.  And I remember that the church is supposed to be God’s exclamation point.

What happened to make Jesus’ faith, caring for the poor, putting others ahead of ourselves, using our resources gladly to help not us but others, breaking down boundaries that excluded others even if the boundaries that excluded and defeated others helped us achieve, the wrong kind of faith?  How did it happen that that faith became the false religion and the Christianity of ME became the Christianity that drives our country?  How did we Christians, we Jesus people, let that happen?  How did it happen that Jesus’ God lost out to MY God?  How did it happen that a church founded upon the radical love of Jesus of Nazareth who gave and gave so much of what he had that he didn’t even have a place to lay his head, whose bleeding heart was pierced by the lance of Roman pre-emptive imperialism on a Roman cross, who was handed over to be crucified by the leaders of his own people because he pushed radical reforms that equalized all people of all stations before God and before each other, who gave up his life fighting so that we could freely live our lives,...how did it happen that his church became a meek, gentle, spiritual whisper whose revolutionary message you can hardly hear in this rowdy, raucous, reviling world? 

I ask you Michael, because as president of the National Council of Churches, I hope you can help inspire our churches, even those that radically disagree with me, to confront such questions.  I hope you can help all of us, no matter what our perspective, be it hot or cold, to exclaim our faith in revolutionary ways.  I hope you will inspire us to exclaim who we are with the passionate witness of hot ice.  I hope you will help us to be more than lukewarm religious bodies looking for political photo-ops that make us look like chameleon chaplains for the powers that be.  You know I’ve never been one to be shy about sharing my opinion on such matters, so let me put a bug in your ear right now for the God whose Christ challenged the church at Laodicea.  The true and faithful God . . . is strangely enough the same God . . . whose true and faithful witness to a revolutionary vision . . . was hung on a cross . . . that was stabbed into the ground . . . like an exclamation point.

Contact: NCC News. Leslie Tune, 202-544-2350, Philip E. Jenks, 212-870-2252