Day 05 - West Central Turkey: Sardis, Thyatira

Today’s theme was about compromise. We started in the town of Sardis walking through the beautiful olive groves and then through the vineyards. Olives and grapes were essential in everyday life.

Imagine when Jesus was walking through the vineyards and olive groves of Israel… It was just natural for him to grab a vine or a branch and use it as an analogy for a truth that he wanted to tell. “I am the vine, and you are the branches” was one of his examples as he talked about being grafted in Him and how sometimes pruning the old and unproductive out of our lives allows us to flourish and produce more fruit.

To the Jews, fruit was synonymous with good deeds. Good fruit equals good deeds and bad fruit equals bad deeds. 

It was in this backdrop that we had a conversation about “what to do when we fail”.  In some of our versions of the Bible, the Greek word ARIO gets translated as “cut off” (cut off the vine). That can quickly lead us to think that if we mess up and produce bad fruit, we can be cut off from Christ. ARIO in Greek can also mean “to lift up”. In this view, the vineyard keeper carefully examines each vine and “lifts up” some of the branches that are on the ground (where fungus can attach to the leaves and the light is limited) up into the sunlight allowing them to flourish and grow fruit. The vineyard keeper may also remove some of the harmful things in our life that keep us from being all that we could be. The image is one of the Vine Keeper intimately connected with each vine… carefully nurturing it with love and care to produce more good fruit.

So how might this apply to Christ followers who fail? Do we discard? Or do we lift up and nurture back to thriving? The story of the prodigal son is a great example of this in action.

Read Revelation 3:1-6 which contains Jesus words to the church in Sardis.

We climbed further up into the city to be closer to the Acropolis. The Acropolis was a 25-acre spot sitting on top of the mountain that was fortified and protected. The lower part of the city was called the necropolis. A large earthquake damaged much to the city causing the city of two parts to become a city of three parts.

The city was very wealthy and full of pride. In Jesus letter to this church, he called them out on that. He looked at them and said much of their fruit was dead and call them to “wake up”!

He identifies that there is still some good in the town and they need to identify that and “lift it up” and bring it into the light so that it will bear good fruit. Then He told them that their work is not finished.

In the letter to the church, He talks about coming like a thief in the night. They would’ve understood exactly what Jesus meant. In their history, they were conquered by the Persians in a somewhat sneaky way at night. A quick google search brings you the story.

We then walked over to the middle part of town where the synagogue was built right next to the gymnasium and the bathhouse. We wondered if the church was working to influence the local culture by putting itself right next to the cultural center of the city.

The big structure that is behind the group photo is the entrance to the bathhouse. As you can tell, it was large and a very important part of the cultural center of the city. Harvard University oversaw the reconstruction of that entrance.

Brady and Sarah Anne then let us down to the temple of Artemis. Artemis was a major god of Asia Minor and the primary god of the city. She was the protector of women. The columns of this temple were 75 feet tall plus the roof! This temple was never completed due to an earthquake. The priest at this temple were all women. The female priests had lineage originating from the Amazon. If a man wanted to be a priest here, they would have to go through some body modifications that we would rather not discuss in this blog. 

A section of the Artemis temple was called the Torabulloriam. In this section, a bull was sacrificed, and blood ran through the floor showering down on the people below so that they bathed in blood.  Some of the Christ followers had refused to do this. This is referred to in Jesus’ letter to Sardis when he says, “Yet you still have a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy”.

Later, in the fourth century, a Byzantine church was built inside the abandoned temple. 

The question we talked through at this site and again at the next site was “am I being more influenced by the world than I am influencing the world?

Our last stop of the day was at the church of Thyatira. The name of the city means fortress. It’s an old city founded around 3000 BC… which is about the time of the Egyptian pyramids. It was founded as a shrine to the sun god.

In Roman times it was governed by trade guilds. These trade guilds were very powerful and had their own god. A guild was a mixture of religious and social affiliation. There were bronze working guilds, carpentry guilds, and various other affiliations. In order to work or eat or be part of society you need to be in, and participate in, a guild. This caused trouble for the Christians as they could not worship the god of the guilds. If they were to survive, and not compromise their faith, they needed to ban together to create their own economy and support each other.

The letter to the church in Thyatria is found in Revelation 2:18-29. They are the smallest church yet received the longest letter.  Jesus basically shocks them about their moral compromise by connecting their lifestyle to the Old Testament Jezebel story.

Some of our conversation revolved around Jesus saying that he “knows your deeds”. He didn’t say that he knows what you believe. Our deeds are evidence of our belief. Like the Sebastion 5x5 panels we talked about on day 4 at Aphrodisias, what we do makes up our story and is on display for others to see. Faith and works are two sides of the same coin. How we live before the world DOES matter.