The other night I arrived home a little after everyone else had eaten, which was fine, as I had a curry that just needed heating through. But Ann said, “There’s a bit of mashed potato left in that pan, which you can have if you like.” I’m fond of my spuds, so I got myself a spoon and ate the bit of mash straight from the pan. Well, it was all right, but it was no better than that.
It wasn’t that the potatoes weren’t up to scratch, or that they hadn’t been cooked properly. They’d been mashed with a decent amount of butter, couldn’t fault them there either. No, it was just that they’d sat there too long, and they were no longer hot. They weren’t cold exactly. Maybe they’d have been better if they had been. They were neither one thing nor t’other.
Of all the churches, seven altogether, addressed one by one in the first three chapters of Revelation, it’s the church in Laodicea of whom Christ has nothing good to say. There is no redeeming feature. They are lukewarm; they aren’t really doing anything.
Laodicea was a great commercial centre, a place also where clothes were made, and a centre for medical study, famous for the ointment produced there to treat diseases of the eye. But in Revelation we read that the church there is spiritually poor, not rich; naked, not well-clothed; blind, not clear-sighted.
And it wasn’t that they were doing anything bad. There were no scandals, and if you were to measure the strength of a church by the balance sheet and the numbers there on a Sunday, they were doing all right - so much so that they could say, and believe, and mean, “We have everything we want! We have it all!”
What they were not doing, I suggest, is building bridges. They were happy and secure in themselves, and that made them firstly blind to their own deficiencies, and secondly blind to the opportunities and needs there were in the world around them. They had constructed their own little kingdom, but they had forgotten how to live in the Kingdom of God.
One title used by the pope is “pontifex”. What that means is “bridge-builder”. To be builders of bridges is absolutely basic to Christian identity and witness. Many bridges remain unbuilt in our world because those who could afford to build are saying “Why should we? We don’t need to go there!” while those who need the bridge can’t afford to build it.
What bridges do I mean? Real bridges are things of great beauty and wonder: so many people turned out to see the new Queensferry Bridge across the Forth on its first day of opening that it began its life hosting traffic jams. The other day I was looking (on TV) at the bridge that will cross miles of sea to connect Hong Kong and Macau. We’re good at building that sort of bridge. But what about bridging the poverty gap? What about bridging the divisions we make our race or gender or nationality or creed?
The Laodiceans were saying, “We’re all right. We don’t need anything else.” But as Paul says elsewhere, it doesn’t matter what we have or what we do, if we don’t have love, it’s worth nothing. We’re sounding gongs or clanging cymbals. Love is what builds bridges. Love is what breaks barriers. Love is what makes connections. And it’s our failure to love that, if we don’t take care, cuts us off from the love of Christ, without which we have no life.
As the Laodiceans were told, he is standing at the door, knocking. All that’s needed is one small action to open the door, and he will be the enabler of our bridge-building programmes, and the opener of our minds and eyes and hearts. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment