"The Challenge of Staying Awake"

Luke 12:32-40

A Sermon Preached by The Rev, Douglas M. Donley

August 19, 2001

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

Five years ago today, I pulled two all-nighters in a row. Kim and I went to sing some shaped-note music and then checked into the hospital. Amanda was 11 days late already and Kim was about to approach her 11^th month of pregnancy. It was time to have a child. After 15 hours of labor, the anesthesiologist gave Kim and epidural so that she could sleep though the contractions. I, on the other hand, could not sleep. I watched the monitors. I changed the CD’s and tapes in the boom box. I wrote a note to my still gestating daughter. The anesthesiologist never offered me anything. But there was no way I was going to sleep. I was not going to miss anything of this miracle called life. I wanted to savor every last moment of couplehood for Kim and me, knowing that children from then on would help define our lives. At the end, there she was, blond hair and all and it only took 29 hours of labor. That long night changed my life. I’m glad I was awake for it.

There are some times it’s easy to stay awake. Other times, it’s more of a challenge. The Christian life is lived in the gaps between the ease and the challenge of staying awake. It’s easy to stay awake when the vision is clear and you know the outcome. It’s harder when things are less clear.

Today’s scripture tells us that we need to stay awake, or at least alert and ready to respond to the call of God, for we do not know the hour or moment it might come. If we’re asleep, then we may well miss the train. But it is a challenge to stay awake these days. We often want to fall asleep and get some needed respite from all that troubles us.

The Buddha was asked once if he was a god, the Buddha replied, "no, I am awake."

So many of us sleep or coast through this life without connecting to a truly passionate vision of God for our lives and I think that’s a dang shame. That passionate vision of God for our lives is why we are here. It’s what brings us to church and it must awaken us. It’s hard to stay awake, though. Our culture lulls us into complacency, at least for those of us in relative comfort and ease. But the gospel calls us to stay awake. Not unlike the passage we have heard from Luke, the 13^th chapter of Mark’s Gospel ends with these words:

"Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And I say to you what I say to all: Keep awake."

The challenge of staying awake manifests itself in at least three ways. Fatigue, distraction and boredom.

Worship services happen before meals and not after for a reason. We’ve all been to those luncheon meetings where someone speaks right after a big meal. The lights go down and try as we may we cannot keep our eyes open. Some people have said that the moving of these pews into this configuration was done in part so that people wouldn’t fall asleep. There would be too many eyes on them. Don’t get me wrong, some of the best Christian sleeping has happened in church. But there has to be somewhere more comfortable than on hard pews in the heat of summer.

Plenty of us know what it’s like to be dog-tired. Some of us are so overworked, over-booked and underappreciated that we just don’t have the energy to do anything. Kim and I joke that she needs to get a job so that she can rest. Young children can make you exhausted. When we are so very tired, it is hard to stay awake. We feel guilty when we have idle time. We feel the push to achieve, publish or perish, make another set of cold calls to get a job or to keep in business or pay the bills: you know the drill. But then you have to ask yourself, to which god are we sacrificing? A retired friend of mine told me last week that graveyards a filled with indispensable people. So that’s one way we are challenged to stay awake, when we are fatigued.

But fatigue is not something that only manifests itself in physical ways. A friend of mine who has battled clinical depression distinguishes the time mired in the clouds of depression and the time she emerged from it thanks to counseling and the right combination of medications. She calls the time of her re-emergence as waking up. Chemically, she was asleep and when she finally awoke, she saw the world in a new way. A caring non-judging patient community is an essential ingredient in the road to recovery for this kind of fatigue.

The second time it’s difficult to stay awake is when there are other things on your mind. When we are distracted. It is the difficulty in keeping your mind focused. Sometimes we are conscious, meaning our bodies are awake, but we are distracted by something else that disturbs our sub-conscious. This is that gnawing feeling in your gut that something is wrong here, but it’s hard to put your finger on. It preoccupies you to the extent that you are not really cognizant of what’s going on. You’re awake, but something else is drawing your attention. This is sometimes called day-dreaming. It is also called obsessing. It’s not bad. It just shows you where your focus is. And it may also remind you of what you need to be concentrating on.

Proverbs reminds us that without a vision, the people perish. We as a church can become so distracted by the busyness of church work, that we forget the vision that brings us here and binds us together. Busy-work not related to our vision can distract us from our vision. This is part of what was unearthed by the burnout or streamlining task force in the past year. We will address this in our retreat in September where we will invite people to talk about what passion feeds their souls.

Once we have that information, we can create a new church structure which will awaken us by minimizing the distractions while we attend to those things about which we are truly passionate.

Think about what is God’s vision for your life? Can you articulate it? How are you attending to that vision? Are you keeping awake? Or are you distracted?

That’s the second thing that keeps us from being awake, distraction.

The final challenge to keeping awake is related to dsitraction. It’s called boredom.

My sister Trish sent me a few e-mail jokes yesterday which relate to this aspect. A Sunday school teach asked the chuldren just before she dismissed them to go to church, "and why is it necessary to be quiet in church?" Little Annie responds, "Because people are sleeping." Maybe that’s what it looks like to children sometimes, maybe some adults, too.

Another little girl became restless as the preacher’s sermon dragged on and on. Finally, she leaned over to her mother and whispered, "Mommy, if we give him the money now, will he let us go?"

Children are honest and we love them for it.

Church can be boring to a child who is used to excitement and the fast pace to TV. There is a body of church growth literature that says that in order to reach younger people, everything needs to move fast. Nothing can last more than six minutes without a transition or a break. That’s the amount of time between the average TV commercial. We spend so much more time in front of the TV than in church or reading a book, or just about anything else. That time span and excitement addiction defines how quickly we get bored. It’s hard to keep awake when you’re truly bored.

But there is another way we can get boring. People get bored or fall asleep because of irrelevancy. Churches are too often answering the questions that nobody is asking. This manifests itself in the rehashing of tired old dogmas that feed an institution and might not feed our souls. And then when it comes to the real important issues, too many churches just don’t have adequate answers. What we offer are trite platitudes which do nothing to help those in need. Of course people are going to get bored by that.

We need to address the questions that are haunting people’s lives. We need to make sure our worship and everything that we do here are so engaging, so focusing, so enlivening that no one will be tempted to nod off or allow distraction to creep in for fear of missing something important and life changing. Who knows, we might even leave church a bit more energized instead of worn out.

Church needs to be relevant. We need to address the questions people care about.

How do I develop a contemporary spirituality in a culture where there are many avenues to the Spirit?

How can I accept people who disagree with me without demonizing them?

How can we welcome those who are seemingly undesireable?

How can we deal with the fact that there are major pressures in our lives to succeed, to be happy, to avoid conflict, to have healthy relationships, and many of us secretly don’t feel we have the capacity to do so?

Where is God when I’m surrounded by so much hate and genocide and destruction done often in the name of that very God?

How can we reconcile the mystical experience of God with the raw data that Science gives us? Attend the Karen Armstrong History of God discussion to find out more about this one.

How can I forgive someone who has been an abuser?

How can I find redefine my identity as a survivor of abuse, or cancer, or depression, violence?

How can my life be relevant?

Where can I find excitement, passion, relationship, community and a sense of higher purpose?

How can I be a better person, a better partner, a better spouse, a better parent, to be more nurturing to those around me without losing my sense of self?

These are the questions that make for an enlivened worship and church experience. I won’t address all of these in today’s sermon or even in the next few months, but I am interested in making what we do here engaging not only to us, but to others who might come through these doors. May it be so that UBC is known as the church that is not afraid to ask the hard questions and is not afraid of the hard answers to those questions. We might even see it as our duty to wake up our slumbering neighbors, family members and friends to God’s vision for a healthy, enlivened, awakened people committed to a relevant and transforming faith.

But may it also be said that we are a church that keeps us focused on the things that matter. Fatigue, distraction and boredom do not keep us from being engaged because what we are doing is relevant. May we be so focused and attentive to God’s vision in our lives that if the owner of the house comes in the middle of the night, we will be ready, because we are awake.

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