J Philip Bible Readings

3 “And to the angel of the church in Sardis write: ‘The words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars.

“‘I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. ² Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. ³ Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you. ⁴ Yet you have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy. ⁵ The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels. ⁶ He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’

Scholars interpret the words 'strengthen the things which remain' (2) to mean that they  should allow strength to come into these external things which had no life in them - things which gave them a name that they lived - so that they might pulsate with the living presence  of God. It was in fact a call to them to allow the Spirit of God to course through them to  make them alive. One is reminded of the vision of the dry bones in Ezekiel 37 with its ques tion 'Can. these bones live?', and this lends force to the challenge to allow the energy of the  Holy Spirit to touch and transform the deadness of institutionalised religion in any age. James  Denney has a telling passage in which he exposes the barrenness of 'official' religion in our  Lord's own day. 'It was part of an established system of social order with which all their  worth-while interests were bound up and their one concern was to maintain the existing  equilibrium. Living religion the Sadducees dreaded. A religious movement perturbed them  and they did not know what to make of it. When the Christian religion began to put forth its  irrepressible expansive power after the Resurrection we are told that they doubted whereunto  this would grow. They did not want growing things at all in this sphere. A religion that grew,  that operated as a creative or recreative power, that initiated new movements in the soul or in  society, a religion that gave men new and infinite conceptions of duty, making them capable  of self-dedication and martyrdom, so that you could never tell what mad, disturbing thing  they would do or try.... such a religion the Sadducees could only regard as the enemy. They  were more than willing to give religion the formal acknowledgment which its place in the so cial order required, but a religion which - for anything they could tell - might explode the so cial order, was something with which they could hold no terms'. This is the situation for  which Christ was prescribing, so to speak, the breath of the Spirit. Who shall say we do not  need such a prescription today?