Philadelphia sat near active volcanoes. The ash made the soil extraordinary - this was vineyard country, something like Napa. It also made the ground unreliable. When the earthquake of 17 AD leveled the city, other towns rebuilt quickly. Philadelphia couldn't. The aftershocks kept coming, and people eventually gave up on buildings altogether and moved into tent camps outside the walls, choosing open ground over a roof that might fall on them.

That is the church Jesus writes to. People who know exactly what it is to have little power and no stable ground under them.

Philadelphia is one of only two of the seven churches Jesus does not rebuke. There is no correction here, no "but I have this against you." What he says instead is: I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name. Behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. And to a congregation camped outside the city because the city was not safe, he promises to make them a pillar in the temple of God - the one structure that never has to be evacuated.

The weakest church gets the door nobody can close.

Last week the church at Pergamum had married the world. This week, Thyatira is celebrating the anniversaries.

That is the difference this sermon turns on. Pergamum tolerated what it should have refused. Thyatira went further, absorbing and endorsing and finally celebrating the thing, until sin was no longer something the church struggled against but something it no longer had a word for.

Jesus introduces himself here as the Son of God - the only time in Revelation he uses that title - with eyes like a flame of fire and feet like burnished bronze.

Picture chrome after an hour's polishing, catching the light so hard you cannot look at it casually. He sees. And he judges.

Thyatira was the smallest of the seven cities, a commercial hub where two Roman roads crossed, and it receives the longest of the seven letters. The small compromised church gets the most words.

What Jesus offers it is time. He gives opportunity to repent before he comes to judge. The letter is severe precisely because nothing about it is final yet.

The eyes that flame are the same eyes that wait.

In the mid-nineties that AOL voice saying "You've got mail" meant something was waiting for you. Sometimes it was good news. Sometimes it was the other kind - the doctor who tells a patient he has twenty-four hours to live, and then explains that the bad news is he has been trying to reach him since yesterday.

Jesus opens his letter to Sardis the same way. "I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive." That sounds like commendation. It isn't. The sentence finishes: "but you are dead."Sardis was a wealthy industrial city, famous for wool and dyed fabric, reputedly the first place gold and silver were minted. The church there had a matching reputation. It was known. People spoke well of it. And it is the one church in these seven letters where Jesus finds nothing at all - not one attitude, not one action - that he can commend.

This sermon sits in the uncomfortable gap between what a church is known for and what it actually is. Notice that the instruction is not to start something new. It is to wake up and strengthen what remains.

Reputation is what other people can see. Sardis shows how little that is worth.