Waking Up Is Hard to Do

“Waking Up Is Hard to Do”

Mark 13:24-37

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

November 30, 2008

Advent 1

Long ago, soon after the founding of the Christian church, our fathers and mothers in the faith, with no little genius, discerned that the four biblical gospels held within them deep wisdom about the pattern of human life. Alexander Shaia, in his visit to our church at the beginning of the month, helped us to see that each of the gospels address one of the four basic questions that we face repeatedly in our lives.

How do we face change in our lives is the question that Matthew helps us to answer. Knowing that our lives are not static, but dynamic, and that any successful life requires us to make changes along the way, some of them costly and potentially risky, Matthew tells us not to shrink from change but to enter into it.

How do we endure suffering and pass through times of trial is the question Mark’s gospel embraces. Oftentimes, the changes we are asked or forced to make in our lives calls forth some sort and degree of suffering or discomfort. We feel as if we are being tested and, perhaps, on trial. There are things we may need to relinquish or leave behind, or from which we must turn away or turn toward, in order to steer through our suffering.

How do we discover joy is the question John addresses. How, from the cauldron of change and challenge, do we find new equilibrium, hope, and solid footing on which to ground our lives in new circumstances?

How do we mature in service to others is Luke’s concern. Having embarked on a journey of change, come through the fires of trial and suffering, and found again a measure of coherence, congruence, and joy in our lives, how do we put ourselves in the service of the common good? How do we employ what we have learned and experienced to contribute to the renewing of the greater community and of the world?

Alexander Shaia contends that there is only one gospel, really, containing the four aforementioned chapters…Matthew, Mark, John, and Luke. As I think about my own life in terms of this quadriform pattern, what Shaia calls “quadratos,” it fits. Almost every important event in my life requires an encounter with each of these four questions and, for my life to be healthy, I need to navigate each of them successfully.

For example, it was almost fifteen years ago that this congregation extended to me a call to come to be your pastor. There was a big part of me that was excited by the prospect, but I had been at my previous church for a decade and it was no easy thing to contemplate leaving good friends, to uproot my family, to disengage from a ministry that was going well in order to come to a place and a people about whom I knew relatively little, where I would have to prove myself again, and where it was possible that things would not “take” or work out. But change was calling to me and the question I had to answer was whether or not I would accept it. Would I be willing to leave behind much that was precious to me in order to grow in ways that I could not if I stayed where I was?

I decided, obviously, to come, and though your welcome here was genuine and generous, I can tell you fifteen years later that there was then more than one day when I quaked with these inner queries: What have I done? What have I gotten myself into? There were some lonely days back then, missing the people whom I had left. I had become “somebody” where I had been but I was “nobody” the moment I touched down in Jamestown . A couple of the members of the staff were on their way out and did not wish to engage a new start or a new “boss.” I found that in a new place and new circumstances I had to find a new voice and, eventually, a new theology. I knew I could not go back, but the way forward seemed a wilderness to me. I cannot say I suffered, exactly, but, it was for me a time of significant inner testing that I had to endure and pass through if my hopes, as well as those of this congregation, were to have a chance of being met.

The time came when I knew that our mutual decision for me to be here was the right one and, in that joy, new and challenging visions for our ministry arose both from the quality of our dreaming together and from the increasing attention we began to pay to our neighborhood. And, to this day, I am, and we are, seeking to mature in our service to our neighbors and to each other.

Some changes come to us unbidden. Grief, for instance. We are compelled to enter into the changes the death of a loved one entails, to go through the dark night of loss, to come to a place of new light, and then to share what we have learned with others when they are called to walk a similar path.

The quadratos pattern surely can be seen in the life and ministry of Jesus and thus it is that his life and teachings are so instructive for us. Jesus being led into the desert prior to beginning his public ministry in order to wrestle with changes that such a call would mean for him, the trials and suffering he underwent, the joy he discovered in his closer walk with God, and his life of service all show the universal and eternal design for how we grow in our lives. It is not that we are simply to revere the life of Jesus lived long ago, but to allow the same Spirit of God, the same Christ, that was in Jesus to be born again and again in us now, to animate and instruct our lives now.

The early church saw this pattern in the four gospels chosen to be a part of holy scripture and developed a guide, called a lectionary, to direct our reading of those gospels over a three year cycle. Year A would be Matthew, Year B would be Mark, Year C would be Luke and John would be interspersed throughout the three years during the seasons of Lent and Easter. But, for over a thousand years, the church lost its lectionary, allowed it to fall into disuse, and thus the ancient pattern for which the gospels were chosen was hidden to our experience. In the last forty years, though, the lectionary has been rediscovered, and now, with Shaia’s work showing the way, we again enjoy the possibility of actually practicing the gospels as they were intended, of allowing them to guide our lives. Rather than engaging in theological debates about the gospels, we can allow them to guide and inform our lives so that we can live more faithfully and purposefully.

Today begins Year B of the three year lectionary cycle, the Mark year, the year of learning how to endure the challenges and trials, even the suffering, that change and changes, both chosen and otherwise, can bring to us. This gospel this year seems exceedingly apropos given the shaking of the foundations that the current economic storms portend as well as other unsettling events happening in the world. Time and again throughout his gospel, Mark gives us the image of a stormy sea to represent the tumultuous passages of our lives. Don Harrington and I put our snow blower and shovel, respectively, aside for a while the other morning as we met on the sidewalk in front of our homes and talked about how these seem to be winnowing days when much of what we thought would last forever is coming to an end, when the “flow” of life as we have known it is being re-directed. How shall we endure these times of unease and uncertainty?

The apocalyptic language in today’s gospel reading is not meant to be taken literally, but metaphorically, as a way of coming to grips with those times in our lives when the world we have known begins to fall apart or fall away. The death of a loved one might make it seem to us as though the sun has darkened. The loss of a job or a change in our standard of living might well feel as catastrophic as if stars are falling from the sky. The scrambled order of nations with their surprising rises and demises might be as disturbing as the moon going black. New interpretations of ancient religious texts and a reconfiguring of the role and place of churches in society might make us wonder if the heavens themselves are shaking.

What does Mark’s Jesus say to us about times like these? He says that God is with us in them. We are not abandoned or forsaken. He reminds us that in God we live and move and have our being. In perilous and difficult times, faith and trust in the God of life and our lives is required.

So, too, Jesus in Mark tells us over and over again, “Stay awake! Keep alert!” What new thing is being wrought in the crucible of these changes and the fires of trial that we experience? Whether in our own lives, the life of our nation, or the church, the one thing we do not want to do in hard and threatening times is to ignore what is happening around us and/or within us. We do not want to go into a cave or go to sleep and simply hope for the best. These are the teachable moments, these shaking times. These are not days of doom and gloom but times of heightened opportunity to work into being a world more just and kind, to craft a life more creative and compassionate, to draw a future for both world and church that beats more strongly with the pulse of God’s loving heart.

It takes courage in troubling times not to retreat and retrench. It takes courage to listen to gospel angels who tell us that finally we need not fear because God is close to us. It takes courage to stay awake so as not to miss openings and opportunities for infiltrating the world with gospel that cracks in old, broken, dying ways permit.

Waking up is hard to do because it sometimes seems easier to pretend that we really cannot do much about the way things are. Somnolence does not ask much of us. But Jesus says, “Wake up!” For times of terror, trial, and testing do not signal the end of life, but the start of a deeper, wiser, more sustainable experience of it!

Amen.

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