Wake Up!

I had a spiritual director many years ago who said to me once, “You know, Frank, there is a tremendous reluctance on the part of human beings to become a conscious species.” If I made a list of the half dozen Words-with-a-capital-W that have ever been spoken to me, that would be on the list. “There’s a tremendous reluctance on the part of human beings to become a conscious species.”

Adrien Ferdinand de Braekeleer, "Beggar in Front of  Door" 

Here we are on the first Sunday of the first season of a brand new Church Year. Perhaps somewhere along the line you have figured out why there is a Church Year. One way of putting it is that the Church Year is a device that, should it actually work, would aid us in becoming conscious. But conscious of what? On the simplest level, conscious of what is. Consciousness is awareness. Consciousness is being awake. One of the needs all creatures have is to sleep, and sleep is a state of unconsciousness. Indeed, the massively great ocean of unconsciousness containing both our personal unconscious and the collective unconscious of the entire human species, begins oftentimes to churn and swell, tossing up pieces of truth in the form of dreams. Dreams essentially are one of the ways that the Unconscious has of getting our attention. It is as if the Great Unconscious is a voice crying in the darkness, “Wake up!” Sometimes indeed the voice is so strong that we do awake from sleep, shocked, perhaps frightened, even terrified. The natural reaction is to want to shut up and shut off the messenger that wakes us, disturbing our sleep, interrupting our peace. So we consciously do whatever it takes to avoid dealing with the stuff that erupts from the depths. And sometimes we miss important truths precisely because they are hard to take.

All of this is intricately wired in to the essence of Advent, and especially the First Sunday of Advent. We already know how the Church Year is going to play out. We know that in three weeks we’ll be at Christmas. That will be followed by Epiphany. And before you know it, we’ll arrive at Ash Wednesday. Lent will follow and Holy Week will come along bringing front and center the themes of suffering, death, and renewal. Easter’s relief we can already anticipate to burst in celebration. Then comes Pentecost and long summer and fall as again we unpack the implications of all that has happened between today and Pentecost. You can hardly miss that the Church Year traces the life of Jesus. And that should itself signal something to be aware of: Christ’s life is not just about Jesus. It is about you. Because all of what happens to him—from gestation to ascension and beyond—is taking place in your own life and mine. If you are not aware of that, or if you are only partially aware of that, my very point is that the purpose of Advent is to announce it so clearly that you will be roused from sleep. Wake up! Become conscious. Because enormous things are going on right now in your own life, far beyond any of those things on your Christmas list, or your to-do list, or your grocery list, or your bucket list. Indeed whatever is going on in your life is the way that the Presence of Christ is pressing upon you and turning up from day to day. The issue is not to ignore what is happening but exactly the opposite: to become conscious of the Presence, the Spirit, the Reality that is showing up in the details of your own life, including some of which you're not yet aware.

For the practical minded there is always the pressure to get out of the realm of theory and into what can be sensed, felt, applied. That’s a fair issue and an important one. Let’s see how it works.

Start with a piece or two of typical Advent imagery. Take, for example, the hymn known as “Sleepers, wake.”

            “Sleepers, wake!” A voice astounds us,

            The shout of rampart-guards surrounds us:

            “Awake, Jerusalem, arise!”[1]

The hymn goes on to build a scene of the arrival of the Bridegroom, Christ, for whom some are prepared and some are unprepared, like the wise and foolish virgins in Matthew’s gospel [25:1-13]. We need light, for the Bridegroom’s arrival is in the middle of the night. There is a wedding feast. We are invited and don’t want to miss it.

This is about an event in the human soul. It is very much related to what is going on in the external world but equally connected to what is happening in the interior life. The message is that something important, even earthshaking, is happening. But that doesn’t mean it is an earthquake or a terrorist attack or a war. In fact the staggering thing might be so small that it could be easily overlooked, dismissed as unimportant. It could be a birth, a lost child, a mentally ill man, a grieving mother, an execution, all of which are real enough to be happening in yours or my field of awareness on any day. Are we tuned out to those things, or are we conscious of them? If you’ll think for a moment, every one of those things I just mentioned is a part of the Jesus story. Not only are they possible pieces literally or figuratively of your own biography, but they are certainly pieces of our world.

            I dare not slight the stranger at my door

            Of threadbare garb and sorrowful lot,

            Lest it be Christ that stands and goes his way

            And I, unworthy, knew him not.[2]

Be awake, be aware, be tuned in to the present moment. One of the major challenges is to become conscious of what it is that keeps drawing us back into obliviousness. It is not hard too detect. Our preconceptions serve as blinders to shield us from what we find disturbing. Most of us by the time we reach early adulthood have decided what is important in life as well as what is true. By the time we’ve reached midlife we have probably bought into a narrative of the way things are and there is little chance of our being pried loose from what we already believe to be true. I have noticed that it is generally something unexpected and often unwanted that explodes in a life with a force strong enough to rearrange how a person views reality. All of these things are voices crying in the wilderness, in the darkness, “Sleepers, wake! Become aware. Become conscious. Christ the Bridegroom is appearing in the form of that toothless beggar that irritates you on the street. God is flirting with you in the purple blooms dotting the field you’re idly passing by. The Lord of heaven appears today in a manger, a nursing home, incarcerated, being hauled off by ICE to be deported, as a child screaming because his parent is on a drunken rampage.” These are the kinds of things that we’d rather not be conscious of. Many of them are too painful. So we build excuses including whole political philosophies as to why we don’t need to pay attention to the hurts, troubles, pain of the world. We even go so far as to imagine that God really agrees with us and cares nothing for those who differ from us.

The message of Advent is heavily accented with proclamations of the Second Coming of Christ. So a quick look through Advent hymns and collects turns up a lot about that. But the way the Second Coming has been treated has itself been a huge contribution to the forces in us that resist being a conscious species. The Second Coming is real all right, but not because it is going to mean the end of the planet or the death of the solar system. It is real because it is happening already.  To borrow the words of Emily Dickinson, if I can stop one heart from breaking, or ease one life the aching, or cool one pain, or help one fainting robin unto his nest again,” not only shall I not live in vain but I shall be myself the witness and the agent of the breaking in of the Kingdom of God.[3] For with deeds of love and mercy the Christ manifests.

Why is it that we are so enthralled by the things that keep us unconscious of the Presence of God? It does not help to say that it is sin, or that it is the work of the devil. Of course it is. But why are we continually pulled away from consciousness? I think you probably know. It is our old enemy: fear. We are afraid of so many things: being abandoned, lost, friendless, helpless, powerless, loveless. And most of the world’s ailments, from the devastation of the environment to the rampant abuse of human beings, from sex trafficking to the tax structure about to become law, stem directly from fears that frequently lie buried in unconsciousness in the human heart.

Advent calls us to be awake, but waking up does not come without a price. Letting go of illusion, dealing with reality is hard work. Sleep becomes attractive, especially if it is the sleep of escape. We have a choice. Sleep on and miss the Bridegroom, the wedding feast, the celebration; or wake up and see that the stars are falling all around us, not in catastrophes too sad to mention, but in the shimmering beauty of goodness and truth, mercy and forgiveness in which we are welcome to dwell.

Bid then farewell to sleep
Rise up and run!
What though the hill be steep?
Strength's in the sun
Now shall you find at last
Night's left behind at last
And for mankind at last
Day has begun![4]

Blue Ridge Mountains at Dawn.  Photo by Margaret Ann Faeth

A sermon based on Mark 13:24-37

©Frank Gasque Dunn, 2017

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[1] “Sleepers, Wake,” The Hymnal 1982, 61.

[2] Author unknown.  

[3] Emily Dickinson, “If I can stop one heart from breaking,” in The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi (New York:  Barnes and Noble, 1924, 1993), p. 6.

[4] T. H. Ingham, “High O’er the Lonely Hills,” on the internet at http://www.higherpraise.com/lyrics/love/7_love500834.htm, accessed December 3, 2017.