Sermon Mark 13:24-37

"And the Stars Fell"

While manger scenes pop up all over town and Christmas carols fill the airwaves, we are given a different vision of the coming Lord. According to Mark, we can forget the stable, the star, the shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night. When Mark looks into the sky, what he sees are cosmic fireworks: a darkened sun, a dim moon, stars falling from the sky like sparks from a sparkler - and there, in the center of the smoke, the Son of God coming in clouds with great power and glory.

It is a vision of the end time, the final coming of the Lord when the world as we know it will become compost for the world God has been trying to give us all along. We have refused that world, for the most part. Like the prophets before him, Jesus spent his whole life describing it to us, but it turned out to be much more difficult than anyone had imagined. It involved way too much togetherness, for one thing - not just worshiping with other people but actually living in community with them, making decisions together, pooling resources, holding each other accountable, with no permission to leave certain people out because they were too brusque, too gushy, too left, or too right.

The way Jesus described it, it was a world in which nothing could be taken for granted. God could be anywhere, in anyone. If you went to sleep for even 15 minutes, you might miss the most important moment of your life. You might wake up to find God standing over you with suitcases in both hands, saying, "Where were you when I arrived? The door was standing wide open, no lights on anywhere. I thought I told you to watch out for me."

"Therefore, keep awake," Jesus says, "for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake"- (vv. 35-37).

The word is gregoreite, the same word Jesus uses in the Garden of Gethsemane when he begs Peter, James, and John to stay awake and pray with him. Gregoreite! he says, Stay awake! Stay conscious! As hard as it is, as long as it takes, don't go to sleep on me.

Since I love to sleep, this is a hard saying for me. I agree with G.K. Chesterton who says that sleep is one of the surest signs of trust in God. When I am trying to run the world all by myself I have a hard time sleeping.

I wake up at two in the morning and start thinking about all the awful things that are going to happen because I failed to handle them properly. My [cat is going to die] because I forgot to take her for her annual check-up]. My [apartment] is going to burn down because [I might forget and leave the burners on]. The government is going to get all my money when I die because I keep putting off [getting a will].

The longer the list, the longer I stay awake. It is only when I surrender it to God that I can sink into blessed unconsciousness. So I tend to think of sleep as a good thing, not a bad thing, but I also know how sleepiness can work on people who are up against problems they do not want to face.

[A friend of mine, when she was a first-year university student, had a roommate who slept all the time. When she left for class in the morning, her roomie was asleep. When she came home for lunch, her roomie was asleep. In the afternoon, her room mate stirred for a short while, but by dark she was back in bed with a pillow over her head. It was several weeks before the secret that had driven her to unconsciousness was known. She was pregnant. Abortion was illegal. She had no choice but to drop out of school and have the baby, which she likely she did. After she packed up her pajamas at the end of the fall quarter, my friend never saw or heard from her again.]

So there is that kind of sleep too - not a sign of trust but of terrible fear, so terrible that the mind just shuts down. If you have ever had anesthesia before surgery, then you know how it goes. First, there is a kind of static between the ears, then the eyelids start to stick, then sleep comes and the world goes away. There is no pain. There are no dreams. There is only darkness and oblivion.

There is another kind of sleepiness most of us know about, which is a result of boredom. You have a three-hour flight, or a fourhour drive, or a five-hour wait until someone comes to fix the washing machine. With so much time on your hands, it can lose its meaning. It is hard to say whether it passes slowly or quickly. It does both. It does neither. Even if you find other things to do while you wait, you know you are still waiting-for something you cannot make happen, for something you cannot rush - and the sheer monotony of all that helplessness can put you right to sleep.

I do not know which kind of sleepiness Jesus is warning us against, but he clearly wants us to wake up. Gregoreite! Stay awake! Stay conscious! As hard as it is, as long as it takes, please don't go to sleep on me.

None of us ever knows when the end will come - for us, for those we love, for the church, for the world - and the weight of all that unknowing can put us to sleep because being asleep is a lot easier than being afraid, or being bored, or being helpless. Being asleep is easier than being alive, period, only Jesus will not stand for it.

"Wake up!" he says, when his own end is near. Wake up to whatever life is bringing you - as a person, as a people - wake up to pain, if that is what is there for you to wake up to, because you cannot be healed until you admit you are hurt; wake up to the love you will not let yourself have because you are so afraid you will lose it; wake up to the future you are so furious about because it is not the one you ordered; wake up to the fact that you are not the master here, just the servant in charge; and while you are at it, wake up to the incredible honor of being given such a job - not down in the basement, but at the front door where you will be the first to see the master when he comes.

It has been a long time since he came the first time, and we have been waiting a long time for him to come again. But how long is not really the issue for us; how awake is. Our job is to stay conscious - to resist sleep, to stay alive to everything that life is bringing us so we do not miss God when God comes.