Wake Up! Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Hebrews 10: 31-39, Mark 13:14-23 November 16, 2003, Year B Proper 28 The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi A father knocks on his son's door. "Jaime," he says, "Wake up!" Jaime answers, "I don't want to get up, Papa." The father shouts, "Get up, you have to go to school." Jaime says, "I don't want to go to school." "Why not?" asks the father. "Three reasons," says Jaime. "First, because it's so dull; second, the kids all tease me; and third, I hate school." The father replies, "Well, I am going to give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it is your duty; second, because you're forty-five years old; and third, because you are the principal." Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest and author on spirituality, told this story at the beginning of his book, "Awareness." He uses it to send home his message that in order to lead a spiritual life one has first to wake up. As we approach the end of the season of Pentecost and of this church year and enter the Advent of a new year, the Scriptures for the next several Sundays will offer us a wake-up call. As is usual for this time of year, the readings are about the end-times, full of apocalyptic symbolic images warning of the end of the world via an immanent cosmic cataclysm in which God destroys the ruling powers of evil. Apocalypse is the loud knock, the harsh voice, and the cold floor meeting your bare feet when you'd rather stay safe and warm in your comfortable bed. Apocalypse is always a call to wake up to spiritual reality. The Good News is that it is an old story, a necessary story, part of the story of our salvation. In some ways, I have mucked up today's lectionary by including the Deuteronomy reading as part of our emphasis on the stewardship ingathering, the presentation of our financial pledges for next year, the placing them on the Altar, and the thanksgiving that all this represents. Today's lectionary originally included a reading from Daniel and another apocalyptic warning. Yet, the juxtaposition of our reading from Deuteronomy, the presentation of our pledges on the Altar, our litany of thanksgiving which we will recite along with apocalyptic imagery offer us an opportunity to contrast the story of God's grace, the invitation to respond to this grace in thanksgiving, and the wake-up call of the apocalypse. Today's Gospel concludes with a warning about false messiahs and prophets. Jesus has no one specific in mind this warning, but instead warns that throughout all time there will be people with messages that divert us from the truth, offering cheap solace in the face of the hardest moments of life. Do we have to look far to hear false prophet messages that come in so many ways. Consider an email spam I received this past week: "Bill, we speak to you as a friend. We want you to find love and happiness. Click here now and begin what could be the most important searches of your life." You don't know how bad I wanted to click just to see what it was, but then I thought, "What if it's a porn site and Nelda walks in. I'll have to spend the rest of the day at the emergency room dealing with her heart attack." Consider also the messages of food marketers who so thoroughly brainwash children into craving high caloried, nutritionally empty foods and result in an ever increasing unhealthy generation; of media marketers who convince us every new gadget and product will be the source of our happiness, inducing pleasure over responsibility and inviting us to continually put ourselves in debt in pursuit of that ever elusive happiness; of those who manipulate our fear to see everything as a risk and anyone different as an enemy and claim that good is brought about through military might and not through reconciliation and justice. The easy answers, the comfortable answers to the dilemmas of life, come from many voices but do not offer the hope of transformation but advocate the love of power. Jesus offers a wake-up call, not to be lead astray from the transformation of the power of love. Distinguishing between those who say what we want to hear and those who might be speaking an uncomfortable truth requires spiritual awakeness. Learning where God is calling us often requires a breathing space, a physical or psychic distance, to discern. It is another way of saying: make space for grace to happen! It's the perspective that we are powerless over other people and what they do, and yet if we open ourselves to God we may be able to respond in ways we cannot even imagine. Both Jesus and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews encourage us to endure, for the sake of the kingdom. We are called to work for something that is good, to work for the Kingdom of God. When we are in our darkest moments, when it all seems overwhelming, sometimes the best we can do is know that somehow God will use our suffering and turn it to good. We may not experience it, we may not recognize it, but for someone our experiences may become icons of God's kingdom. As Jesus told the disciples, we do not know when the Kingdom of God will arrive, neither the day nor the hour. We don't experience the same urgency that Jesus and his followers, or the members of the early church, did. But as the church year winds down, as we move into the darkest time of the year, we also turn once again to the anticipation of the season of Advent and all it foretells. We turn once again to hope in the Light of the World, the hope of our redemption, and the promise of God's kingdom. Jesus' message wasn't to get all tingly with fear and religious chauvinism, for that well-trod path has brought too much of the cruelty-based suffering that Jesus begged us to avoid and too little of the self-sacrificial suffering that was his essence. Nor was his message to stay in bed with the covers over our heads, refusing to face the day before us. The truth is the world has never been without massive suffering: wars, famines, refugee migrations, mass murders and holocausts, natural disasters - when they are happening to you and to people you love it is the great tribulation - it is the end of the world as you know it. Jesus' message was to not be overwhelmed by the chaos but to see what God sees, not only a landscape populated by tyrants and false messiahs, but souls yearning for life and love, aching to believe in something noble, aching to know the mystery of the Sacred, aching to be rid of despair, aching to be accepted into the loving arms of God that we are called to offer to all. Some have commented to me they will be glad when this year's stewardship emphasis is over so that we can quit talking about giving. And yes, in recent newsletters and recent sermons, you have probably heard a disproportionate share about pledging. However, as a wise preacher once said, every sermon is - or at least should be - about stewardship. You see every sermon should tell us about God's grace given to us in abundance, freely, unable to be earned. Every sermon should invite us to accept that grace. Every sermon should ask us what we place a higher value on than on that grace. Every sermon should be a wake-up call that asks us whether we are we going to stay in bed, covers pulled over our heads, avoiding the world around us, or are we, in thanksgiving, going to accept God's grace that will enable us to put our feet on the cold floor and surrounded in that grace, answer our call to be co-creators with God in transforming the world into God's image. Jesus wants you to wake up to the fact that the decisions you are making today have eternal weight. You can decide to roll over and go back to sleep. God will not force you to wake up. Or, you can get up and discover you're forty-five or twenty-one or seventy years old and a co-creator with God with a job to do. It's time to get up! Answering the wake-up call, today, acknowledging with thanksgiving the grace we have received, we will place our pledges on the Altar, trusting God to use what we offer to bring God's kingdom near to the chaos of the world in which we live.