Waking Up For Tomorrow
by Griff Martin
A Sermon for the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
On Isaiah 40:1-11/ Luke 2:8-
The Second Sunday in Advent
December 6, 2020
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
Incarnate and Coming God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing reality we can all together experience. Make us attended to your presence here in this space and in these words God, for if we are aware of your being here then nothing else will matter, but if we are not aware of your being here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter.
It’s probably somewhat safe to say that for some of us whom are gathered here this morning, the middle of the night has become a known quantity in the last few months and we are not alone in this new friendship. This is known in the medical community as coronosomnia, which is an another gross word to add to our vocabulary of new gross words this year alongside coronavirus, covid, social distancing and global pandemic, all words I am most ready to put back into a box and close tightly up.
And although at this point a lot of what we know about coronosomnia is just anecdotal, here is what we are gathering and learning… Almost every evening between 2-3 am, Google searches for the phrase ‘insomnia cure’ have drastically increased over the last few months. Sleep experts are already seeing a huge increase in sleep problems among us, which is expected with all the stress, fear and anxiety we have held as a people the last few months. It’s also because sleep is part of our routine and when our routine changes, our sleep changes and all of our routines have changed in the past few months.
Which is why we are awake at 2 am after doing everything we know to fall asleep… we have done the pillow flip looking for the cool side, we have counted sheep, we have snuggled up next to the one we love and then we have gone as far as possible away from them after they said stop waking me up in a voice that makes us question if they ever loved us, we have read our nighttime novels, we have gotten angry that we put away our phones hours earlier like we were told to do and we have not touched them and still we are awake (and feel totally alone without our phone addiction), we even drank that horrible sleepy time tea and a little something else and still… we are watching the minutes creep by.
1:58 am, 1:59 am, 2:00 am, 2:01….
The middle of the night is the worst. We are all visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. We play a million games of ‘what if’ about every decision we ever made in our life and the untold stories we never lived. All our anxieties are very awake and alert, our fears get very loud in the middle of the night, our grief suddenly has a green light to go and the so-called dark emotions suddenly seem very lit up for us. The middle of the night is a rave for all the things I don’t want to see in the light of day. It is the psych ward that seems way too full and yet the nurses keep letting patients in.
Or at least, that is my experience at 2:02 am.
And as hard as I have tried to find an easier path -- and by "easier" I mean quicker, less painful -- the truth is that my middle of the night miracle healing always happens with this… I have to wake up, I have to center my mind and get back into the driver's seat, so to speak, and I have to name what is keeping me awake -- a fear, an anxiety, a worry, bad news -- I have to name it and I have to put it back to sleep, to put it at peace.
My therapist calls this offering a mental cup of tea… for instance, if it’s a fear… Invite the fear in, give fear a nice cup of tea and give fear a place to sit and rest and then ask some questions like: Why are you here? What do you want me to know right now? Is there something so important that you feel like we have to talk about it this minute? Let fear have its moment and then I gently say, ‘Okay well now I know that and I am here to hold that too, and let’s game plan what we need to do about this and then let's take a nice rest because we can’t do anything until at least 7 am.’
And what I have learned in all of that practice is truly prayer, what I am doing there is this, “God why have you woken me up? What do you need me to know that I have missed in the daylight hours?”
Which is what I think might be happening in the entire nativity story… I had to go back this year and look to figure out the lighting of the nativity scene. I have always imagined this entire thing happened under a starry night sky but the only clue we have about a starry night sky comes from the shepherds' portion of the story. It’s in their portion of the story, where we get the "watching the flock at night" line.
Which means that if Joseph is as good as I think Joseph is, he probably was not traveling at night with his very pregnant wife and putting them in danger, he probably did that in the daytime and he probably was busy looking for an inn and a room during the daylight hours and not traipsing around with a pregnant woman in the middle of the night. And also, I don’t know a lot about pregnancy, but I know that labor is often not a quick process. So I had to do some tidying up of the story and realize that maybe my time table, Jospeh and Mary arrive in the night, go around town in the dark looking for a room, finally find one and then Mary has this perfect quick labor and suddenly the angels are there in the field with the shepherds and all of this takes place from 8pm to midnight.
I just know from experience that God tends to work longer hours and the process seems to be lengthy, messy and often seems eternally longer than I would like; it’s not an 8-midnight thing. And that is not entirely God’s fault, I think it is because God has to spend so much of God’s time waiting for us to be obedient and even before that God has to spend a lot of time waiting for us to get quiet and still enough to pay attention to God.
Which means that maybe the angels have been visible to the shepherds for a while, trying to get their attention, but the shepherds were so busy all day… they had to herd the sheep, they had to get the sheep fed, they had to get them to water, a few sheep had to be shorn, they had emails to read and write, they have Netflix to catch up, they had task lists to get done… you know, they were just doing the things we do in our waking hours.
And finally they got dinner ready, they got a campfire built, they got the sheep to bed and things started to finally get quiet and they all started nodding off, but one of them could not sleep. He was tossing and turning, counting sheep if you may and finally he has enough, he plans to do what he often does when he can’t sleep, go for a quick walk, move a bit and then resettle. But as he gets up from his sleeping bag, he realizes that something is off about the sky this night, an odd glow. And the more he finally pays attention, he realizes the odd glow is actually a Divine Message.
And then he pays attention and then the heavens finally fully open up when someone has slowed down enough to notice them.
And he wakes the others up because what he has just seen is worth waking people up over and suddenly they all realize that God is doing something new and the joy that they get to be part of it is overwhelming to them and that gets them up and headed to find and join Jesus.
And once they were woken up, nothing would ever be the same again.
Sometimes we just need the stillness and the silence of the night, of the dark, to see what we missed in the day time, to hear God anew, to experience the song of the angels.
I think that stillness and silence is real for us this year. It started back in March, when we began a long night time as a people. We were confined to our homes and without the usual routines and distractions to make us numb and busy. Instead we were forced to see things that had long been there but we were to numb and busy to fully notice.. like when an unarmed black man was murdered in broad daylight and we had to sit with the pain that we had long neglected or when we noticed this virus was disproportionately impacting certain communities of color and we had to sit with that pain, or when the numbers went up and we were so scared we were going to get the virus and we had to sit with that fear, or when our loved ones died of the virus or just because of something else and we had to sit with the grief alone or when we noticed that without all our travel the world was healing itself from all the harm we created and we had to sit with that or when without the distractions of life we had to fully face some of the closed closets in our own hearts and we had no real escape this time.
We were awake, we have been woken up and we have now seen things and felt things that can no longer be ignored. They are not new things -- Jesus has been weeping over our stewardship of creation, over our systemic racism and treatment of one another, over our broken systems for a long time. Jesus has just been waiting for all of us to finally notice his weeping and the heavens weeping and crying out and agreeing to join them in creating something better. To finally hear the angels song once again, but this time it’s a song of lament and it’s a protest anthem. But it’s still an invitation.
And suddenly we are wide awake, seeing more fully and more truly, and we realize that God is doing something new and the joy that we get to be part of it is overwhelming and that gets us up and headed to find and join Jesus.
Because sometimes God gives us dreams at night and sometimes God wakes us up at 2 am, so that we can be better in the light.
Amen and amen.
*artwork: Advent Triptych, by John Swanson
Coronosomnia (Advent Poem 2)
By: KB
In this scenario, I am a driver. Approaching
A car at the first sighting of an evening dawn.
There is a worldwide unrest. There is a seminal
slacking of slumber I’m tasked with driving
into; I’ve been forced into different circumstance,
unforeseen by me but not unforeseen to my
savior. I am not the only one that needs saving,
and I bring this with me into the driver's seat & set
cruise control in while all of the perils of this world
are exposed to me. Fear, get in. Memories that
I wish weren’t memories, get in. Pandemic anxiety,
inequities & human error, get in. Every passenger
Is everything about me that keeps me up. I see me,
sweetening into the nighttime silhouette; on this road,
Minutes creep by as I do; slipping into sour & then
see the unfortunate open of my eyes. My biggest
mistakes, get in. I jump from bed & my sins speak to me.
I dream awake & someone else speaks to me. They say,
"I won't put you through what you cannot handle".
They see the world for what it is: a microcosm of everything
I can choose to learn & heal from. My spirit, my middle-
of-the-nighttime miracle. I learn that I must name the thing
in order to heal from it. Everything we’ve experienced
is everything we need to know. In the face of turmoil,
my stillness is my midnight sleep medicine. I travel until
I see the light. At foreday in the morning, I unbuckle every
passenger and we walk into the path chalked in names
that we remember, in names that I can feel with my feet,
and in sand that kisses me in the middle of a yawn
that propels the day. I am more than my own afflictions.
I, and this world, am worthy of self-work and forgiveness. Amen.
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