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Sunday, April 25, 2010
Awakening To Life
By Rev. Cindy Bates
Acts 9:36-41
36Now in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was devoted to good works and acts of charity. 37At that time she became ill and died. When they had washed her, they laid her in a room upstairs. 38Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, who heard that Peter was there, sent two men to him with the request, “Please come to us without delay.” 39So Peter got up and went with them; and when he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them. 40Peter put all of them outside, and then he knelt down and prayed. He turned to the body and said, “Tabitha, get up.” Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up. 41He gave her his hand and helped her up. Then calling the saints and widows, he showed her to be alive.Romans 13:11-12
11Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; 12the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.
I have a confession to make. I am not a “morning person”. If some of you have been around me early in the morning, you might already know that. It is not that I don’t like that time of day. I really do. I love the freshness of the morning air and the newness of the day, and the singing of the birds, once I am awake. It is the “waking up” part that is such a slow process for me. Now I know there are some of you “abnormal” people out there who have trouble relating to what I am saying. You, and Nike, just do it! You automatically wake up early, and you are bright and cheerful and talkative and maybe even want to go for an early morning run or walk. I so, still want to be your pastor, but have to tell you, it is hard for me to relate to those behaviors. I am just not programmed that way. You know what they say about this subject. There are two kinds of people. You either wake-up, and say, “Good, God, it’s morning!” or “Good God! It’s morning!”
I do not know what causes my brain and body to have such a difficult time awaking. It just does. Now once I am awake, I am good to go. Don’t take naps. Stay up late. I am able to relate to the world and those around me in a very physical state of wakefulness. I even like to take that afternoon or evening walk or jog. In fact, once I am really awake, I want there to be more hours in the day, more time to be awake to get everything done, to accomplish all those tasks I have lined up for the day. I have no desire to be unaware, not being alive to life, sleep walking. When that happens to any of us, we could hurt ourselves, bump into things, and miss a lot!
I am reminded of an experience I had just a few days ago. I was fortunate enough to be doing some sight-seeing on the coast in northern California and I was going into a fish market with some friends. I think I had my head down and wasn’t paying attention and really taking in what was around me. And I heard my name. When I looked up I saw Mike Weston from our choir. I practically ran over him. He was there doing some sightseeing with his two sisters and being able to meet them there, in that moment, was one of the brightest spots in the whole day. It would have been so easy to have been in the same place, at the same time, and have missed it! I never want to be so consumed by what is going on within me, that I am unaware of life around me.
The two scripture passages this morning talk about being awakened. The first passage from Acts is a story of a physical awakening, when Tabitha (Dorcas) was brought to life by Peter, and “he showed her to be alive.” In the second passage from Romans, Paul is talking about a very different kind of awakening. He is passionate in his witness that persons need to be alive, and awake spiritually. Both passages talk about going from death to life, from darkness to light. Both passages have something to teach us, but it is the second passage, about being spiritually awake, that scares me the most. I am not nearly as concerned about a physical death or sleep as I am concerned about a spiritual sleep.
The Monday Noon Book Group has been reading the novel, Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. In our reading the other day we came across this line. “People, mostly, did not know enough, when they were living life, that they were living it.” I think to be awake spiritually is the only way to know enough to really live life! It is so easy to get caught up in the busyness of our lives…in the material pursuits, in the paying of the bills, in the day to day challenges of coping with the next obstacle heading our way, that we go for hours or days without being awake to God’s presence with us. Our life with God can become so rote, that even when we think we are paying attention, we are not. Sometimes I wonder how many of us begin our days asking for God to be with us and then the rest of the day acting like we never issued the invitation…Saying a grace over our food but never really believing God’s presence could be around the table with us….Making decisions by asking for God’s guidance and then only choosing the path of least resistance. It is so easy to be lulled into a spiritual sleep. We do not see what we could see if we were only awake. Rabbi Abraham Heschel said that our main task as human beings “….is to bring God back into the world, into our lives…to have faith in God is to reveal what is concealed.”
A couple of years ago, spiritual writer Kathleen Norris, came out with a book with a very strange title called, Acedia and Me. The book was written shortly after her husband had died and in the midst of her grief she was struggling with her spiritual well-being. Acedia is Greek for “negligence” or “indifference”. It is very normal for someone going through grief and loss to become numb to life, and not pay attention to their physical or spiritual well-being. But for Kathleen Norris the ancient meaning of acedia spoke to her as a spiritual threat for our day and time for all of us. She said, “I did not recognize it as a temptation, something I could resist. I was not aware that even as I maintained a busy productive life… sloth had a firm grip on me. For I had become aware that it was possible to reject time as well as embrace it. If I wanted to, I could live just barely, refusing the gift of each day”. In other words, she knew, whether in a period of grief or just dealing with the everyday challenges of life, one’s spirit could be asleep. As she states in the quote on the front of your bulletin, when life becomes too demanding acedia can act as a spiritual morphine and we just don’t care. (Actually she uses an even stronger phrase here.) Do you know some people who just don’t care anymore? Who have just given up? Do you ever feel that way yourself?
We are living in a time of huge challenges both globally and personally. I cannot imagine there isn’t a person sitting here this morning whose life has not become a little more stressful in the last couple of years because of the economic crisis alone. If a spiritual sleep can come to us even more easily when we are needing a relationship with God the most, no wonder Paul had an urgent message to the people of the Church to “wake up”…”don’t go to sleep now, God needs you!”
When I look at my own life, I really am afraid that there has been a pattern of denying my spirituality when I most needed God’s strength, God’s grace, God’s wisdom in my life. Sometimes when life is most chaotic I fear I am most guilty of not taking care spiritually. I identify with Kathleen Norris when she says in her book, “I have become like a child I once knew who emerged one morning from a noisy, chaotic Sunday school classroom to inform the adults who had heard the commotion and had come to investigate, ‘We are being bad, and we don’t know how to stop.’”.
What if we are asleep and do not know how to wake up? Paul said, “You know what time it is…it is time to wake from sleep.”
I am reminded of a story told to illustrate how easy it is to get so distracted we miss what is right in front of us. An old legend said that if you found a certain stone on the coast of the Black Sea and held it in your hand, everything you touched would turn to gold. You could recognize the touchstone by its warmth, the other stones would feel cold, but the touchstone would turn warm in your hand. So a certain man sold everything he had and traveled to the Black Sea and began picking up stones. After some days had passed, he realized that he was picking up the same stones over and over again. So he devised a plan: Pick up a stone; if it is cold throw it into the sea. Weeks and weeks went by. One morning he picked up a stone and it was cold so he threw it into the sea. He picked up another. It was cold and he threw it into the sea.
Then he picked up a stone that turned warm in his hand, but before he realized what he was doing, he threw it into the sea! He had the touchstone in his hand, the treasure he had been looking for….but he threw it away. So dulled and lulled by the routine, he didn’t recognize its specialness.
Sometimes, when I am having feelings of doubt about myself or wondering if I am really listening to what God has to say to me in life…there is this fear that creeps in and says what if you get to the end of your life and you realize you have missed the point. You didn’t get it…and you threw away the most precious gift of life God had to offer? And then, I usually come to my senses and realize, no, it doesn’t need to be that way because God wants us to get the message so badly that God is very persistent and keeps coming to us to say over and over again, “Are you awake? Are you paying attention?” God certainly said that in a major way on a starry night in Bethlehem and on an Easter morning outside of Jerusalem, but I believe God says it in other ways every day of our lives. Mystic, Mechtild of Magdeburg said, “The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw, and I knew I saw, all things in God and God in all things.”
Barbara Brown Taylor’s book, An Altar in the World, gives an image that I have found to be very helpful in my waking process. She talks about thinking of all the altars in the world, where we can come and wake up to God’s presence. She says, “When I can stop what I am doing long enough to see where I am, who I am there with, and how awesome the place is… I can see it for once, instead of walking right past it, maybe even setting a stone or saying a blessing before I move on to wherever I am due next. Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish, separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine possibility it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.” Have you cracked your shins on any altars this week? What altars will you crack your shins on in the week to come?
One of the greatest things we can do for one another as a faith community is help keep one another awake…keep one another from giving up or being indifferent or not caring, settling for less than we can be. Trusting that God is in all things, especially the difficult times of life, we journey together not alone. And through the ups and downs of living we come to know a God who is closer than we can comprehend, a faith that endures all things, a community that sustains us, and a self, a personal self, that is loved and accepted, no matter what. Together, let us be awake to all of the possibilities God has before us.