Stay
Awake!
Mark 13:24-37
Have you ever fought sleep? Tried to
stay awake when every fiber of your being was singing a lullaby to your soul?
Battled your eyelids as your mind hummed Mary Poppins’ “stay awake, don’t go to
sleep”?
Have you ever been at the end of a
long road trip, as the hour is getting late and the highway lines start to blur
and the hum of the engine simple lulls you closer and closer to the edge of
unconsciousness?
Did you curl up on the couch Thursday
afternoon or evening after consuming large amounts of turkey and potatoes and
pies and drift off while a movie or a football game flickered away?
OK, that last one is not the same
thing. Indeed, it’s more like the time a woman came up to me after worship one
Sunday morning and said, “wow, you really had my attention this morning.
Usually I sleep during the sermon, but today I was wide awake.”
I didn’t know whether to thank her for
her attention or apologize for keeping her from her nap.
Sleep is, of course, a good thing and one
that most of us welcome at least once a day. But sometimes it overtakes us at
inopportune moments. You certainly don’t want to fall asleep while driving;
it’s not good to drift off during an important meeting at work; teachers frown
on students dozing through class; and, well, I do my best to keep the
conversation lively enough here on Sunday mornings that you will stay awake.
But Jesus is calling us to a different
sort of wakefulness in this apocalyptic vision from Mark’s gospel. He’s saying,
in effect, “don’t sleepwalk into eternity.”
It’s actually a somewhat curious, even
ironic call. Consider: “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give
its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and powers in the heavens
will be shaken.” I think if that was going on most of us would have our eyes
wide open. We’d wonder, “what, in heaven’s name, is going on?” Terror usually
kicks up the adrenalin and keeps us awake.
And yet, in this passage, Jesus seems
to understand that not even terror will keep our attention for long.
You don’t have to look beyond the
morning paper or evening news to understand the truth of that observation.
Clearly the earthquake in
The news cycle churns. Yesterday:
hurricane; today: same-sex marriage; tomorrow: who knows. It is all too much. Donor
fatigue is real. Distance makes a difference. Difference itself makes a
difference. The married aren’t affected by marriage policies. Those on
high-ground aren’t touched by floods. The distant roar of warring nations is
drowned out by the latest buzz close to home. Perhaps we all suffer from an
attention deficit disorder when it comes to the terrors of the world, and even
those of our own lives.
Think of the broken places in your own
life – the broken relationships, the stresses of jobs, family, finances,
sickness, all the challenges that we cannot control or simply don’t want to
deal with.
When we cannot control events such as
sickness, we learn to live with them. When we don’t want to deal with things –
relationships, vocational struggles, that difficult family member – when we
don’t want to deal with it we find all kinds of ways to accommodate. Such
coping is, of course, necessary, because life is always full of pain and
brokenness that we cannot control. And even when it is under our control, the
calculus may indicate that the solution will be worse than the problem so
accommodation is also sometimes necessary. There is lots of stuff that is
simply beyond our control.
All we can control is how we respond
to it.
Does the suffering of the world and
the brokenness of your own life lead you to a sorrow such that you want to
drown in despair? Does it make you want to turn away, to find something numbing
to the mind and the soul? Are your sometimes simply too tired?
Sometimes I feel like I’m listening to
an endless loop of bad news: earthquake, famine, war, bird flu, depression, oppression,
injustice and sick kids, and on and on and yada, yada, yada. I turn on a Seinfeld rerun to help me accommodate
the brokenness in my own life and in the life of the world, to keep on living
and sleepwalking toward eternity.
And my sleepwalk is interrupted by
Jesus’ insistent: stay awake! Stay awake!
Now, let me pause for a moment to
celebrate mind candy and say “there’s nothing wrong with Seinfeld reruns!” A little laughter and entertainment are excellent
remedies for weary bodies and souls, especially if they bring us honest
refreshment rather than mere endless escape. Likewise with much needed rest and
Sabbath time.
Nevertheless, we are called to
wakefulness.
“Therefore, keep awake,” Jesus says,
“for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or
at
Advent is the season of watching and
waiting. It is a season of hopeful expectation. It is a season of preparation.
But, above all, it is a season of
wakefulness.
Of course we know that wakefulness is
not always easy. We want to turn away from what is difficult. We want the solace
of sleep. This is nothing new under the sun.
Jesus’ disciples turned away from the
terror in the
Nevertheless, we are called to
wakefulness. Even now, in the midst of a season of great darkness; especially
now when such a season cries out desperately for light and more light. For advent
means coming, and we are called to be awake to what is being born in our very
midst.
And what is that, or, more to the
point, who is that being born here and now among us?
It is the one who calls us to awake;
the one whose coming radically reorients all of life, even our definitions of
what is lowly, what is weak, what is broken.
As Bonhoeffer put it, “Where the
understanding is outraged, where human nature rebels, where our piety keeps a
nervous distance: there, precisely there, God loves to be; there [God] baffles the
wisdom of the wise; there [God] vexes our nature, our religious instincts.
There [God] wants to be. … God in lowliness – that is the revolutionary, the
passionate word of Advent.”[1]
This watching, waiting, preparing
wakefulness is not passive. Advent does not mean, “just sit back, relax, and
watch the show unfold.”
No, Advent calls forth an active
watching, waiting, preparing wakefulness that drives us deeper and deeper into
our common humanity – deeper and deeper, that is, precisely into the places
where God wishes to dwell most fully. Advent drives us deeper and deeper into care
and concern for the brokenness of the world and to ministries of healing and
wholeness whenever and wherever our gifts meet the needs of the world. Advent
does not call us to places of isolated sanctuary; Advent calls us toward the
manger.
When we journey into Advent in this
way, the wisdom of the wise will be baffled and religious instincts will be
vexed. After all, who among the powerful and the wise would ever imagine that
the future of the world might hinge on the birth of a child?
This is the radical, indeed,
revolutionary word of Advent, and we are living into it even now here at
Clarendon.
If you don’t believe this, go home
this afternoon and Google “Clarendon Presbyterian Church.” You will find
hundreds of references from the past few weeks to our new policy concerning
weddings and the celebrations of covenant commitments. If you don’t have
internet access, come look at the small pile of letters on my desk.
Clearly the traditional religious
instincts of some are vexed as evidenced in one letter that promises a prayer
that we will “see the wisdom of God’s holy marriage design and change [our]
policy to once again sanctify traditional marriages and no others.” That was
one of the more polite instances of vexed piety. We have certainly been called
a lot of things in the past couple of weeks including “unbiblical,” “freaks”
and “all going to hell.”
Nevertheless, you will also find
dozens of expressions of gratitude, and writers saying “thank you from the
bottom of my heart for supporting equality for all.” One gentleman from
Last week I was on a talk-radio show
that aired nationally, and when I expressed surprise to the show’s producer
that our policy would be of interest to a national audience she said, “you
don’t know how much this means to so many people across the country.”
Indeed, who would have imagined that a
tiny, mainline congregation from
Of course, who would have imagined
that good news for the poor, release for the captives, recovery of sight for
the blind and liberation for the oppressed might have such humble beginnings as
a manger in a stable in an insignificant backwater of the
Yet is this not precisely the promise
of Advent – that God has and will again break into the world and into our lives
in most unexpected ways?
So let us journey together once more
into Advent, a watchful and wakeful people of faith, trusting the One who calls
us to our present wakefulness that we might be fully alive in this moment, and
fully present to the One who calls, the One who has come and the One who is
surely coming again into our lives.
Stay awake. Stay awake and journey
together toward the manger, for that way lies our wholeness, that way lies our
healing, that way lies the turning of the world, that way lies the love and
justice of the gospel. Stay awake! Let it be so.