Sermon

It's Time to Wake Up

by The Rev. Carol Sanford

Let’s talk about waking up. Yes, I do know that for some folks the beginning of a sermon signals that it’s time for a nap. Go ahead and get your rest; that’s not the kind of waking up I’m talking about.

What I want to address today is a rather peculiar comment from St. Paul that is easy to overlook. It’s the part in verse 11 where he says,  “you know what time it is; how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. ”  What I find especially interesting here is that Paul is not giving out information. He does not say, Good morning! It’s time to wake up! as you would to sleeping people who do not realize that they are missing an important appointment.  He speaks as if to people who, although they are still asleep, are somehow aware that it’s time to get up.

You know those mornings when the alarm goes off and you hit the snooze button, or when a dog barks and jostles you out of sleep for a minute, but then you sort of doze for awhile after the barking stops? Think of St. Paul as the alarm going off again or as the dog yapping at another squirrel outside your window and disturbing that fog of avoidance you’ve sunk back into. You know that you need to get up but it just seems too hard and, sometimes,  hardly worth it.

Some days of course, we do need extra literal sleep, and it can be healthy to stay in bed a bit longer, or we may be ill and the wholesome thing to do is to pull the covers over our head and not stir at all. This is precisely where the metaphor breaks down. Whenever and wherever we see the light of Christ dawning, it is time to arise. I have some recent experience of this to share with you.

Not long ago, I returned from spending a portion of the summer in the Pacific Northwest. For over a month in Washington State, I did not watch television or read a newspaper, and I was online only very rarely.  I didn’t encounter much in the way of heavy traffic, and my surroundings were, overall, a lot more peaceful than in the middle of Kansas City where I live.

As soon as I returned here, the pace of my days quickened, the amount of information coming at me seemed like an onslaught of mostly unwelcome news, and the noise level ratcheted up. I was especially struck by the blare of advertising and of the shrieking of negative political discourse. I truly felt that I had entered another, a harsher, world.

Some people refer to a return from vacation as coming back to real life, but it had the opposite effect on me. I felt as if I had entered a fog of unreality or, if you will, a sort of dream state.

Mind you, and this is very important, I entered this dream state with full willingness and complicity. It wasn’t the industrial lawnmowers across the street that pulled me out of a healthy awareness of God. I do complain of their noise, but they did not compel me to pick up the TV remote and start flipping through channels. Being back in the city didn’t require me to page through the celebrity gossip magazines at Barnes and Noble or to rearrange my brain into judgmental thinking. Catching up on world news did not mean that I had to neglect prayer. Quite the opposite should have been true, but, like someone drifting back into a deep slumber, I found myself succumbing to the pull of merely absorbing whatever was presented to me, rather than offering something back to the life around me.

But God can, and will, use anything and everything to wake us up and bring us back to him. I was aware of the cultural numbness beginning to overtake me, but I kept going with the flow until I read some news so startling to me that it jolted me awake. What I read was a notice of a backpack retailing for $34,000. Let me repeat that: a backpack retailing for $34,000 dollars.

Instantly, I thought of the beginning school year and of the backpack program here at the Cathedral and of other such programs across the country. I thought of all of you and of the countless others who are willing, in so many ways, to help each other, and to extend that help to all of the family of God. When I began thinking about how many school supplies and school lunches $34,000 would buy, I didn’t just wake up, I became recommitted to staying awake.

St. Paul really spoke to me this week when I read, “ Lay aside the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light.” Armor may conjure up images of medieval knights at war, but we do not have to think of life as a battleground; it probably feels too much like that already too much of the time. We might instead remember that people who are secure do not need to fight, and that there is no greater security or protection than living in God as God would have us live.

In St. Paul’s upbringing as a faithful Jew, there would have been no greater armor than fulfilling the law, and he incorporates the language of that heritage by pointing out that Love is the fulfilling of the law. He goes on to express his Christian conviction that, as he phrases it, ‘putting on the Lord Jesus Christ” is putting on an armor of light.

Whatever words we may use to express our awareness, most of us truly are aware, even in our sometimes sleep-bound states, of where the true light is and of what it means to live honorably. No one has to explain to us anything at all about the difference between a $34,000 backpack and a hungry child with no money to pay for some notebook paper and a pencil to take to her first day of school. And no one needs to tell us what to do about it, either.

St. Paul was right.  The night is far past. We know it’s time. We need to wake up.

The lie is that spiritual sleep is better than being fully alive. Fortunately, where two or three are gathered in God’s name, God is in the midst of us. If we keep coming together as we are this morning, we will keep waking up and the illusion that life without love is more desirable, more comfortable, than life immersed in God’s love will be increasingly shattered.

The world can become a new and shining place for us and through us. When we put on Christ, the armor of light, we carry light into the world and we begin to see through light-filled eyes and it is good, after all, to be awake.  Amen.

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral