Wake up!
Growing up, I was friends with two brothers; they were a year apart, one a bit older and the other a bit younger than me, so we did a lot together. The older brother went into the Marines. He wanted to challenge himself. The Marines are rather good at that and they excel at molding teenagers into warriors.
So he went off to Marine boot camp. He was gone 12 or 16 weeks and he excelled. He was named the outstanding recruit in his platoon. Then he came home on leave.
That first morning home, his younger brother snuck into his room in the middle of the night and started screaming like a drill sergeant at his sleeping brother. “On your feet you so and so,” that sort of thing.
The Marine sprang immediately to his feet, ramrod straight, just as he had been trained.
The younger brother thought this was hysterically funny, for just a moment, until he quickly realized that his brother had been trained for hand-to-hand combat – and he was quickly begging for mercy, which thankfully came swiftly.
We prefer to get woken up a bit more gently than that, a gentle word, a soft touch to the shoulder. But when it’s time to wake up, it is time to wake up.
My friends, it is time to wake up and I am here to do so as gently as I can, but with real urgency as commanded by our Lord. Waking up from what and to what?
Waking up from what? It’s a very short answer with infinite application. It’s the division between earthly things and heavenly things. In that way when we come to church, we are answering the call of Isaiah, coming to the house of The Lord to learn God’s paths so that we can be on them as opposed to every other path.
Those other paths are rooted in our very human and natural desires to succeed, to have a place and standing in this world, to be safe and reasonably comfortable with shelter, food and clothing and so forth.
Most of our education and experience is focused on this material world, and so, quite naturally, we remain fixed on it. This is not in and of itself necessarily an evil thing, but the more we focus on the material, the more prone to evil we are likely to become.
Idolatry is nothing more than our desire to control in a material way our destiny, whether we are talking about an actual graven image or anything we place ahead of the true God.
And it is also fiendishly effective at distracting us from the Lord, and especially the Day of the Lord. Waking up to that certainty is absolutely vital.
Jesus compares the coming of the day of the Lord like the coming of the flood. He says simply that they were living - eating and drinking, getting married, doing what people do in this life – but they are focused on these things. Jesus doesn’t mention the wanton sin that flowed from that. He doesn’t have to.
Long before Moses, long before Abraham, long before any specific theological articulation of the One God in any world religion, the Lord expected his people to have some regard for the One who created them and everything else.
And they didn’t. And so they were caught completely unawares by the flood.
The urgency in this is not about fear, it is about time. God made you and he made just one of you. You have a responsibility to God to work purposefully and continuously toward being the person he is calling you to be. You have a responsibility to the world, to everyone you come into contact with and everyone you can affect, to work purposefully and continuously toward being the very best person you can be. And you have a responsibility to yourself, not just who you are today but who you will be tomorrow and the days, weeks and years after – to eternity – to work purposefully and continually toward that future you.
Those are all three the same person. And the decision to move in that direction is to appropriate that future into the present. The getting on with solving the problem is in itself the solution. The very best you can offer God, the world and yourself is… you.
God is calling you and people need you. You want to change the world? You can. You must. Once you start, the Kingdom of God is realized. A teenager going off to boot camp has begun to become a Marine. He or she still has to do the work, meet the challenges, fail a few times along the way. But the becoming began at the start. It was there. It just had to be drawn out, proven, tested, actualized and documented.
So wake up! Lay aside the works of darkness. Lay aside your insecurities and jealousies, your resentments and anger. Lay aside any sloth or cynicism.
Jesus is clear that no one knows when the day of The Lord will come, “neither the angels of heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.”
But when that day comes – be it the Day of the Lord or your last day, do you want to be caught in deep slumber from the things of heaven, or do you want to be alert, like a coiled spring, like our young Marine? Do you want to wrap yourself around the axle of the day-to-day routines and challenges of this life, or do you want to have a heart and mind daily engaging your spirit with Lord through prayer, your mind with his word through study and your heart with his heart through devotion and service? Wake up!
This is merely a reminder for many of us, but it is a reminder we need and it is news for some. In any case Our Lord tells his disciples and tells us to wake up, be ready, “for the Son of Man comes at an unexpected hour.”
And he is coming. Come Lord Jesus!
AMEN