Worth Waking For

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September 7, 2014

Romans 13:8-14

⁸Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. ⁹The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁰Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

¹¹Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; ¹²the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; ¹³let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. ¹⁴Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Sermon: “Worth Waking For”

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”

That Earnest Hemingway, what a way with words he had. 

Sleep is about as enticing as it gets.  This is why we occasionally (or not-so-occasionally) find ourselves falling asleep in a comfortable chair in front of the television. 

You know the feeling: your eyelids get a little heavy, blinks come slower and more often, and, then there’s the head droop over to one side, until you futilely snap yourself back to alertness, only to drift off again. 

Perhaps some of you are feeling this way right now!  If I notice it, I’ll just have Susan pound the piano a bit and get us all awake again.

Sleep is a wonderful thing.  It is also a dangerous thing.

Doze off behind the wheel of a car and you’re liable to injure yourself or others.  Doze off during an important meeting or at school and you’re bound to get singled out and embarrassed.  Doze off on an airplane and you’ll find yourself accidentally snuggling up to the total stranger next to you.

The danger in each of these sleep scenarios lies in not even realizing you’re asleep until it’s too late.

And that, my friends, is where we find ourselves most of the time: asleep and not realizing it.

It looks this this:  we pray the same exact words to God, going through prayer like one goes through a grocery list, and we are asleep.  We read our Bible, but don’t engage in deeper Bible study with others – especially those who think differently than us -- and our faith never grows and changes, and we are asleep. 

We see story after story on the news of violence, revenge, tragedy and suffering and feel nothing, and we are asleep.  We move in circles around those we love most, never breaking the routine as we go through the motions of some pre-choreographed dance day after day, and we are asleep.  We dream of who we would like to be, or how we would like the world to be, and do nothing, and we are asleep.

“It is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.”

Though this letter to the Romans was written in AD 55 or so for Paul to introduce himself and discuss the essentials of following Christ with Christians living in Rome, it may as well have been written to us today. 

He urges them to wake up – the same word used over and over again in the New Testament to describe the resurrection.  Wake up – live honorably; wake up – lay aside the works of darkness; wake up – stop the quarreling and the jealousy; wake up – salvation is close; wake up – clothe yourself in Christ.

We followers of Christ often spend a lot of time talking about what happens when we all sleep in death.  We speak of the danger of not knowing eternal rest.  But we never seem to speak of the danger of never waking up in this life.  Of drifting through our days, letting them run into weeks, then months, then years, then decades, then a lifetime, and never being fully awake. 

But if we really believe that Christ was woken from the dead, then we were meant for more.  This life was meant for more.  Salvation is near!  Time is short.  Life is fleeting.  We better not sleep through it.

All of this talk of waking and sleeping reminds me of the way a child deals with sleep: I’ll give my niece Olivia as an example.  An exuberant two-year-old, she is too busy exploring the world, finding wonder in even the smallest details, to sleep.  When you tell her it’s time for a nap, she behaves like you’ve just insulted her deeply.  There’s whining, squirming and, sometimes, tears.  Sleep is the enemy.  She fights it with all she can (until of course you lay her down in a comfy, cool bed with her blanket and then sleep wins that battle).

Eventually, though, we grow up, and we stop fighting sleep.  Sleep becomes our preferred mode of operation until we’re capable of sitting in a conversation without really listening, following God without really doing anything, going through our days without really feeling. 

Anne Lamott captures the danger in this sort of slumber as only she can:

“What if you wake up some day, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because you were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen. Repent just means to change direction — and NOT to be said by someone who is waggling their forefinger at you. Repentance is a blessing. Pick a new direction, one you wouldn’t mind ending up at, and aim for that. Shoot the moon.”

Anne teaches us something important – the same thing Paul was trying to teach the Romans in his letter: waking up and repenting are the same thing.  Wake up – open your eyes – change direction, because salvation isn’t about tomorrow.  It’s about today.  If we’re to put on Christ, to be bearers of the one we follow, we can’t do that yesterday, and we can’t do that tomorrow.  We can only be bearers of Christ today.  And if we’re asleep, we can’t do that at all.

Wake up.  Pick a new direction.  Try out Sunday School even if it means changing your routine a bit.  Live your life deeply – don’t snooze through it.  And if, like Earnest Hemingway, you find that your life tends to fall apart when you’re awake, then trust God to put it back together again.  For at least a broken life is still lived. 

Paul tells us to put on the armor of light because the battle against sleeping though life is just that, a battle.  A battle against the darkness of the inside of our own eyelids, seeing only ourselves (and really seeing nothing at all).  We must fight against the urge to sleep, and open our eyes to actually see God and our neighbor, and seeing them, to love them. 

God has granted us this one life; Christ has shown us how meaningfully it can be spent in love, no matter how many or few years we have left; the Holy Spirit has given us all the creativity and joy we need to fully live it.   Life, my friends, is worth waking for.   Amen.