“Awake, O Sleeper”

Every once in a while, something comes along in life that wakes you up.  One happened to me on a Sunday in September when, before I left the church, I picked up a Facebook message from Linda.  It asked that I call as soon as possible.  Sam’s wife doesn’t call me that often, so I knew something was up.  I got into my car and, with Bluetooth unit in place, I called their home.  Linda answered and prattled on for a moment about how something was just “surreal.”  About thirty seconds went by, as I struggled to get the context.  Finally, I stopped Linda and said, “Linda, what’s surreal?”  “O, she said, didn’t you get my phone message, Sam’s ‘gone’.”  She went on to relay how her husband, a relatively healthy man, had just dropped dead the previous evening.  I was so stunned that I heard very little of what she said and had to ask her to repeat it again that evening when I arrived at their house.  At Sam’s memorial service later in the week, I used Linda’s word, “Surreal.”  It adequately described my own feelings; it was just “surreal.”

Sam and I met 15 or so years ago; our boys played hockey and soccer together.  Of all the parents, Sam and I just sort of hit it off and I appreciated his friendliness and the intellectual conversations we had.  Perhaps, most of all, we helped each other through those taxing years of raising teenage boys.  One of us would share a story of something a child had done, thinking we were failing as parents, when the other would trump it with an even better story, an even greater disaster.  We would laugh, feeling better in the knowledge that we were not alone in the parenting game.  Sam was a good friend, about the same age.  Among other things his passing has caused me to wake up.  It’s reminded me that life is fleeting; that if you’re going to live, you’d better do it now.  None of us know how long we have and it’s been a huge wake-up call.

Well, wake up!  I’m not just saying that because I watched the Mr. Bean episode recently, in which he falls asleep in church during the sermon.  I’m saying it because it is a part of our scripture and a common theme of the first Sunday in Advent.  We have today entered into a new church season.  In the life of the church, it is the beginning, a sort of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the church year, we look forward to celebrating again the birth of Jesus.

Perhaps you already know that the Church has devised a thing called a lectionary with prescribed readings for each week in accordance with the Church year.  We use them to keep our preaching in tune with the church year but I have often found today’s readings a little strange.  While we are at a beginning and are looking back to the first Christmas, these texts push us forward, to “the end” of time.  They encourage us to reflect not only on the first Christmas, but also to another Christmas, another “Christ-time;” the time when Christ will return in “power and great glory” to bring life as we know it to a close and usher in the Kingdom of God.  It’s a common New Testament theme.  It’s in the Gospels, in Acts of the Apostles, it’s in Paul’s writings, and in the book of Revelation.  Jesus is coming back, so, “Wake up!”

Mark was the first Gospel, and it describes the coming Kingdom with all sorts of delicious language and themes.  Mark uses the apocalyptic language.  Apocalyptic was popular in Jesus’ and in Mark’s day.  It uses larger-than-life categories, catastrophic language to describe a great, and final, “Day of the Lord.”  “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken (13:24).”  And when these things occur, the Son of Man will appear, “coming in the clouds with great power and glory … to gather his elect from the four winds (13:26).” “When is it going to happen?” people would ask.  “Is it near?  Is it far?  Have I got time?”  According to Mark, Jesus says, that there’s not much point trying to figure it out for even he, himself, did not know.  The timing of the Kingdom is a mystery that lies with God, the Father, alone (13:32), “No one knows the day or the hour.”  “Wake up, therefore,” we are told.  Be alert!  The kingdom is at hand!

I often liken the coming kingdom to a complete renewal of life.  I had to refresh a computer some time ago.  It was causing me ongoing issues, software wasn’t communicating properly with other software.  Some programmes had become corrupt and weren’t functioning as they should.  I couldn’t get my printer to work.  I couldn’t get my word processor to work all the time.  The computer was slow and sometimes stopped altogether, it would freeze.  I tried everything I could.  I reinstalled software, tinkered here and there, and fiddled around for hour upon hour.  Finally, as a last resort, I saved my documents and reformatted the hard drive.  I wiped everything clean, reinstalled the operating system and all the programmes from scratch.  It took a while but my computer was healed, refreshed, and renewed.  It worked the way it was supposed to work.

The coming kingdom of God is portrayed much like that, as a “reformatting” of life and creation.  From almost the beginning, the harmony that we had at creation was lost.  Wrong choices, going against God’s order, have left things not functioning well.  Jesus is telling us that the time is coming when God is going to “reformat,” as it were, the whole of creation.  We are marching towards a time when the current order will cease; a new and righteous order will begin.  There’s always judgment associated with this theme.  As with last week’s text about the sheep and the goats (Mt.25), some are going to have a part in the new and righteous kingdom and some will not.  And so Jesus says, “Wake up, I want you to have a part in the kingdom.”

It’s not easy to wake up to the Christian gospel in our culture.  Our urban, educated, 21st century culture has become almost numb to the power of the gospel.  Many have bought into Enlightenment and Modern worldviews that elevate the physical over the metaphysical and scientific thought over theological.  We’ve forgotten that they deal with different questions and realities.  Perhaps, just as many have bought into postmodernism with its pluralism and theories about truth and reality.  Yet post-moderns have forgotten to apply their presuppositions to their own thought and we may well ask how they know that they are right?  Or how it is they know anything at all?  Then there are the ramifications of a multi-faith environment and tolerance crowd which preaches about equality and pluralism to the point that people have no idea why any one religion would be right, let alone why anyone should devote their life to one.

It’s a tough age, yet it was into such a world that Jesus came (the first time).  Into the world of Plato and Aristotle, into a world of pluralism and many truths, into a world drenched in polytheism and alternate religious views, Jesus came and walked, and talked, and lived, and died … and, then, according to many, rose from the dead.  It’s not easy in our culture, it wasn’t easy in the first century, but the gospel calls us to deal with events, things that happened, things that were experienced.  If true, it makes everything he said important.  Wake up!

It’s not easy to wake up to these things in the modern church either.  In our urban, educated, 21st century Church culture, we have likewise become a bit numb to the power of the gospel.  I think it’s partially due to the rise of higher criticism in academic circles.  For most of the 20th century, students were being educated in Seminaries and theological colleges in methods of biblical scholarship that, while they sought truth, they also served to undermine the veracity and power of the message.  Little by little that filtered down into the pulpits of mainline congregations and into the lives of clergy and lay-person.  In the midst of uncertainty, passion for the gospel declined; we no longer knew what we believed.  In a way, however, the mainline churches have become stuck in the theological culture of the 50s and 60s and 70s.  By the time the 80s rolled around, in the colleges, the critics themselves were being critiqued.  That has continued as a new generation of scholars have created a new day for a faith that can be thoughtful and filled with belief about Christ.  It hasn’t quite filtered down to mainline church pulpits yet, but it will.  We need to awaken again to what’s out their and a gospel that is filled with power and excitement, and a passion for Christ.  Wake up!

Jesus, of course, encouraged wakefulness.  He woke up the daughter of Jairus (Mk 5:40); he woke up his friend Lazarus (Jn.11:39); he asked his disciples not to sleep while he prayed in the garden of Gethsemene (Mt.26:41, 45), to stay awake (Lk.22:46); to keep watch (Mk.14:35); he talked about being attentive in the parable of the ten virgins (Mt.25:1); he exhorted us to be vigilant (Lk12:35); to learn from the birds of the air and the lilies of the field (Mt.6:26) because life can be like a big school.  We need to wake up.  Religion professor, Clemens Sedmak, says that to make a difference like a Mahatma Gandhi or to see God working in the world we need to wake up, be mindful, be attentive to things and what’s going on around us.

But can we do that as individuals?  Have our lives become so complex and full that we are no longer able?  I love Neil Postman’s thoughts in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.  He wrote in the 1980s and, in the midst of revealing how the media, entertainment and technology have taken over our lives, he refers to George Orwell and how many lived in fear of 1984 and Big Brother.  When 1984 finally came and the prophecy didn’t pan out, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves.  The roots of liberal democracy had held.  But according to Postman, we fooled ourselves for there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling vision of the future out there: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.  In Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their ability, autonomy, maturity and history.  As he saw it, people would come to love their oppression by simply adoring the technologies that undo their capacities to think.  In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley warned of “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”  In 1984, George Orwell saw people being controlled by the infliction of pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.  I often wonder if television, radio, home theatres and sound systems, smartphones, computers and video games have taken over our lives?  How can we smell the roses, or encounter God, if we are continually walking along the streets and meadows of life with our heads buried in the immediacy of the smart phone?   There’s much more out there and we need to wake up to what’s really important (and I must confess to being a serious smartphone user myself).
Of course, many people slept in the face of God before the smartphone.  There’s always something to distract us and people will always tell themselves that they’ll get around to God and worrying about eternity one day.  There is always a “one day,” but maybe we need to be more proactive, maybe we need to “wake up.”

I have a friend and when he hears that I am preaching on any given Sunday, he’ll text me and say something like, “It’s game-day buddy, hope you’re ready, have a good one.”  And I have many friends for whom every Sunday is “game-day.”  And I’m not referring to a lot of preacher friends, just a lot of friends that get comfortable in their couches and settle in to watch NFL Football.  For those that actually play the game, there’s an awful lot of training and preparation for the game.  During the week they train, they pump iron, they run drills, the coaches study film of the other team and try to anticipate how to stop the other team and how to do the right things to win themselves.  There are team talks, planning sessions, more practice, more drills, and then it’s “Game-day.”

In Canada, today is the biggest game-day of all for Hamilton and Calgary as they face each other in the Grey Cup Final.  And when it’s a final, more preparation than ever goes into it.  Above all, each team relishes one thing, and one thing only, victory.  Going to the final is never enough, victory is the only thing, the whole season of training and pushing and planning and preparation hangs on this one game, this one day.

Ultimately, what Jesus is telling us today is that an even bigger “Game-day” is before us. The biggest game-day of all in the game of life.  It’s when the Son of Man comes in power and great glory to gather his elect.   Unlike the Grey Cup, we don’t have a date for it, it comes “like a thief in the night.”  So the best thing to do is to always be ready, to always be prepared, to be awake to the possibility that today is the day.  And just as players ready themselves for the Grey Cup Final, longing to be victors, we ought to be readying ourselves for the biggest “game-day” of all and finding ourselves gathered with the “elect” in God’s new kingdom.

I wonder if you would let me be the coach for a moment, preparing the team for game-day.  I want to give you a task this Advent Season; that’s from now until December 24th.  Imagine yourself, preparing for game-day.  I’m going to ask you to take a few minutes out of our day to engage some higher things and a higher power.  I’m going to ask you to prepare by doing two things every day from now until Christmas.  The first is to pray, to have a short conversation with God.  I realize that some of us may be rusty at that, or haven’t given it a real go before, but for the next 24 days, as soon as consciousness awakes in the morning, have a chat with God.  Tell him about your day ahead, your life, your family, and ask that he help you “wake up” to higher things.  The second is this.  You have 24 days starting tomorrow until Christmas.  There are 24 chapters in the Gospel of Luke.  You may have a New Testament at home, or you can find it on your computer or smartphone, but read one chapter a day for the next 24.  You’ll finish Luke and then maybe read ch.1 & 2 again on Christmas Day to get into the true spirit of the Season.  It will only take a few minutes each day although it would be good to reflect on it a little, here and there, throughout the day.  Take a few minutes at the beginning of the day or during your lunch hour and read a chapter because the biggest game-day of all is coming.  It’s time to wake up, to prepare if we want to be among the victors.

If you will join me in this, just a few minutes each day, I’m sure we will have some awakenings among us.  The consistency of it, will open eyes.  It will give new understanding, new insight and hope.  A hope that will carry you, no matter what this life throws at you.  For you will know when the biggest game-day arrives, you will be with Christ.
Wake up!