Sermon for 2005 Bishop’s Convocation

by Bishop Margaret G. Payne

I can remember a feeling that I had long ago on an early winter morning when I was in that dreamy time between sleep and wakefulness. I was lying in bed with my eyes still closed, my mind just beginning to grapple with the fact that it would soon be time to get up and begin a busy day, when suddenly I felt a strange and gradual shift in the universe.

Where there had been a sense of sleepy safety, now I felt an alert wariness; where there had been serenity, now I felt unsettled. There had been no noise, no movement, no reason to believe that something was wrong, but I was afraid.

I lay there for quite a while – almost five minutes I would say, wrestling with thoughts of doom and danger, still waking up, wondering if God was trying to tell me something, or if I was experiencing a premonition of some kind. Finally, I decided that I had to do something, so first I opened my eyes.

Six inches from my eyes was a face, a small face, the face of my five year old son, who said: Mom – are you awake yet?

And I have to say that lately I have been wondering, amidst some strong feelings of doom and danger if we could open our eyes, maybe God would be leaning over us saying: Lutherans in America, are you awake yet?

“Awake, awake – put on your strength,” says God to the Israelites in exile. “Shake yourselves from the dust, rise up, loose the bonds from your neck. In Isaiah 52 God is rousing Israel from exile, releasing it from its misery and telling it to go home. But before Israel can go home, it has to wake up – wake up from the dulled and inattentive feeling of hopelessness rouse itself from the lethargy that comes from wallowing in the status quo shake off the dust of feeling doomed and set itself onto the road that leads to Jerusalem.

I can hear a voice saying: What do you mean that Lutherans are asleep in America? We are the children of Martin Luther, and we have never been in bondage to the distortions that affect other Christians: We are truly awake.

Now, I have to remind you – sleep is a funny thing. I am afflicted with the problem of chronic insomnia, and in an effort to avoid becoming addicted to sleeping pills, I have learned a lot about sleep, so that I can figure out what exactly it is and how to get more of it in natural ways. Many people are tempted to believe that sleep is basically a temporary kind of unconsciousness – that nothing much goes on when we are asleep. But that’s not true.

There are four stages of sleep which are punctuated by brief awakenings, and in each of those stages there are varying patterns of brain waves, muscle tension and movement, and eye movements – you have probably heard about REM – rapid eye movement.

When we are in an REM stage of sleep – the brain waves are almost exactly as they are in a person who is awake; the eyes move suddenly from side to side there is an irregular heart-beat, and 80-90 percent of dreaming takes place in this stage. Interestingly, except for people who have disorders that result in actions like sleepwalking, most of our muscles are paralyzed during REM sleep – that keeps us from acting out our dreams.

I think that the mainline denominations are in an REM stage of Christianity – our brains are geared up and functioning well and we’re looking all around but our institutional muscles are paralyzed and therefore we are not succeeding in acting out our dreams … God’s dream … of a world where the love of Christ reigns.

This convocation is a gathering of leaders in the New England Synod, and I believe that one of the primary tasks of a leader is to wake people up – to wake them up from their racism and materialism and fundamentalism to remind them of their freedom in Christ and to give them the tools and inspiration to make God’s dreams come true.

God was not content for the Israelites to live their lives and do their ministry in Babylon – and no doubt there was plenty of ministry to do in Babylon. In fact, maybe the greatest danger for the Israelites in Babylon was the temptation to acclimate themselves to it so well that they forgot that they were in bondage, forgot their longing for the wholeness they would find only in Jerusalem.

For those of us who have succumbed to the temptation to acclimate ourselves to our own Babylon, it is easy to lose track of all the ways in which we are in exile – the tolerance of war and injustice, the justification of wealth that overshadows the gospel call to sacrifice, the busyness of ministry in safe congregations that spend most of their time and money on themselves.

If there are no leaders to point constantly to our paralyzed muscles and rouse us to the call of making God’s dream come true, how will we ever wake up to become all that God needs us to be?

Listen! That’s another imperative that we encounter all through Isaiah – and Jesus says it a few times, too.

When we trace through the ways in which we are awakened, it becomes clear that it has a lot to do with faith being articulated, the Word of God in Jesus Christ come alive in people as the result of those who are equipped, empowered and sent to speak the Word, and the charge to all of us to keep listening – actively listening – for the ways that God is continuing to speak to us, to try to wake us up.

This past week I had the opportunity to do one of my favorite tasks of this office – to spend time with the candidacy committee in the work of guiding men and women who feel called to leadership in our church. It’s one of my favorite tasks – in a very selfish way – because it does for me what first communion class used to do for me in the parish – it puts me in contact with people who are burning with desire to get closer to God by getting closer to the rituals and responsibilities and rhythms of life in the body of Christ.

The yearning of small children to be allowed to take communion is a holy thing, it was almost palpable in the classes that I taught. Even though the kids would be silly when we practiced all the ways in which you might be invited to take communion in different churches – saying that the wafers tasted like cardboard and peeling them off the roof of their mouth, pretending to be intoxicated by the sip of wine – the holiness and yearning was underneath it all.

And when we work with candidates for the ministry, it puts me into contact with people who are filled with enthusiasm and wakefulness and life in Jesus that is holy – and I cherish the opportunity to have some of it rub off on me. It works to wear down some of the layers of weariness and discouragement that have accumulated as a result of too many times with people who use Christian words to cloak their prejudice and hatefulness, and those who can only rouse themselves to action when their own safe worlds and congregations are threatened, and those who are in bondage so completely to their comfort that they can easily and without any guilt at all justify pathetically stingy giving to God’s work in the world.

Jesus himself woke his disciples up from the nightmare of the crucifixion – his words to them were Peace be with you – balm to their startled wakefulness, and comfort to them in the terror of such a new possibility in the world. He woke them up gradually – showing them his hands and his feet, letting them touch him eating a piece of fish to prove to them that it was not a dream. Then he spoke to them, and he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. To understand his place in the fulfillment of the Law, to learn to see the cross as God means it to be – a sign that God has entered our suffering and freed us from death. To understand the importance of repentance and forgiveness: the accepting of it and the doing of it. To understand that the call of Jesus is the call to be a witness.

All of the understanding in the world is nothing more than a private hoard and if there are no leaders to point constantly to the paralyzed muscles and rouse them to the action of making God’s dream come true, how will we ever wake up to become all that God needs us to be? – in our lives and relationships, and work and sharing the passion for peace, justice and inclusive love that filled Jesus.

We wake up as we listen to Jesus, we wake up as we touch his body in the Eucharist, waking into us and then embodying the message that God’s grace is not a dream, that the gospel of Jesus is the deepest truth of all time and our only real hope.

This Gospel should be like a crowbar for us – one end of it pries open our minds but the other end should be used for breaking down walls.

We are a dozing people who are tolerant of walls, but the call that Jesus gives us is one of wakefulness and one that demands that walls come tumbling down.

Today let us hear God’s call to wake up – secure in our victory over death, saved by the grace of God, and empowered by the same power that clothed the first disciples – let us begin to stir ourselves out of Babylon and get on the road to Jerusalem. Amen.