Time to Wake from Sleep
Romans 13:11-14 and Matt 24:36-44

A Sermon by the Reverend Mark Lancaster

Time to Wake from Sleep…  Good morning. Grace to you and peace from God our creator and the Lord Jesus Christ.

My, Oh my,  don’t we human beings seem to think we are the very center of God’s universe. Mind you, we have made a real mess of creation—with poverty and disease and war and rapid environmental degradation. But even if humans are not the center of it all, I agree with Jeffrey Sachs,  that for the first time in human history we do have the potential to eradicate poverty, hunger and disease from the face of the planet and to stop climate change in its tracks—we need only the will. And part of that will means remembering what our grandparents taught eons ago—there is enough of God’s good earth for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed.

St. Paul put it  another way. He said, “IT is time to wake from sleep.” He went further to say, “Lay aside your deeds of darkness.”  .. “Put on the armour of light.” Paul was using the metaphor of clothing as a way to suggest that followers of Jesus should  embrace a kind of readiness and alertness—a waking from sleep—that most of the rest of humanity does not seem able or willing to put on.

A few years ago, we were working in Calcutta with Mother Teresa and her sisters of charity. One of our volunteers was about ready to retire from a lucrative executive position and approached Mother Teresa to ask if he might come back and spend 5 years working there with her after he retired. While a noble gesture, Mother Teresa kindly turned him down. She said, “Frank, there are many materially poor people here in India that you could help. But, I must tell you, that the poorest people from a spiritual perspective that I know are right there in your own country. And your poverty there is much more difficult to fight than our poverty here. So, please, go home and help America out of its greater poverty.” IT is time to wake from sleep, dear friends.

So, what does it mean for us to “Put on the armour of light? Paul tries to get at this by naming the many hurtful things that would automatically stop in the lives of believers if they put  on Christ—the whole armour of light.  He says “we would stop our carousing and drunkenness”.  Stop our promiscuity and sensuality, stop our strife and Jealousy.”  Now we could take all of these things quite literally and convince ourselves that we are just fine.  WE could insist we do not really do any of these things, so, what is the problem? Aren’t we already wearing the whole armour of light?

But I would challenge us to think of these concerns Paul talks about in slightly different terms. Do we carouse and get drunk with our power, our prestige, our money, our education levels, and our living in the Bay area? Are we promiscuous with our belief that our way of life is superior to anyone else’s and are we not constantly engaged with the sensuality of satisfying our every whim for things and experiences in life? And then there is strife and jealousy.  How many families have you seen torn apart with strife over money? How many wars have we fought because we were afraid that someone would want to come and take what we have? And then how drunk are we in how we use God’s gift of creation to us?  Time to wake from sleep, my friends.

With the advent of the industrial revolution human beings began burning large amounts of coal, gas, and oil, carbon-based fuels to facilitate our lifestyles. One effect has been the kind of pollution we are used to - smog over cities etc. - that's a minor effect. The major effect  when you burn fossil fuels is that you release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A colorless, odorless, non-poisonous gas, but a gas which by its molecular composition traps heat close to the atmosphere, that would otherwise radiate back out to space. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 was about 275 parts per million before the industrial revolution. It is now about 385 parts per million and it will be above 500 parts per million long before the middle of this century unless we make major changes in the next few years to dramatically curtail our use of fossil fuels. If we don't, we have now been warned by leading scientists what to expect and the picture is pretty scary. Time to wake from sleep, my friends.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 1,500 climatologists from around the world spent the last five years in an endless series of research and analysis on this problem. They reported in their gathering at Shanghai recently that in this century we can expect to see the global average temperature increase about 4 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit. That would take it to levels higher than it's ever been in human history, indeed than it's ever been long before human history - the worst case scenario this century, just in this one century. If everything tops out at the upper end of the parameter we could see temperature increases as high as 11 degrees Fahrenheit as our global average temperature. Any such changes are completely unacceptable. We know that they are unacceptable because we've already increased the temperature about 1 degree Fahrenheit and we've begun to see what happens when you do that. For instance, one of the things that happens is that the world gets a lot stormier, a lot wetter. That's because warm air, in the fashion that God designed this planet,  holds more vapor than cold air. So, to increase the temperature you get a lot more evaporation in dry places and you get a lot more drought in places that are already dry. Deserts will grow rapidly in places where people are already desperately poor.

That water vapor gets up in the clouds it has to come down someplace, so in places where it's wet you get a lot more precipitation, a lot more deluge, a lot more flood. Severe storms that drop more than two inches of rain in a 24-hour period have increased about 20 percent across this continent against the baseline. That's a very large increase in a basic physical phenomenon. Time to wake from sleep, my friends.

Consider what is happening to the cryosphere, to the frozen parts of the planet. Every glacier system in the world is now in rapid retreat, and remember this is just with a one degree rise in global average temperature. By 2015 the snows of Kilimanjaro will have completely melted. Glacier National Park will have no glaciers by about 2030. The ice cap over the Arctic has thinned 40 percent in the last 40 years. Those are unbelievably large changes in very fundamental elements of this planet in a very, very short time. They come with real consequences. Time to wake from sleep, my friends.

Forgive me for using harsh language for a few minutes, but I'm going to. God’s creation matters for all of life and I have reached the point in my life where I am unwilling to pussyfoot around with polite language. These things are happening in large measure because of us. We in this country burn 25 percent of the world's fossil fuel, create 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide. It is us; it is the affluent lifestyles that we lead that overwhelmingly contribute to mother earth’s problems. And to call it a problem is to understate what it really is. Which is a crime. Crime against the poorest and most marginalized people on this planet.

Let’s consider Bangladesh, a wonderful country, vibrant, green, alive, feeds itself even though there's 130 million people in an area the size of Wisconsin. Amazing place. The biggest problem is that it is low to the Bay of Bengal, it's a river delta. The Ganges and the Brahmaputra come pouring out of the Himalayas, cascading down through the mountains, and they flatten out when they reach Bangladesh and broaden out. The country is half water, it's as much water as soil when you fly over it. That's one of the reasons it's so fertile. Every year they flood out and lay this little beautiful layer of silt, and things pop out of the ground. Trees as big around as a 30 year old white pine might be only 2 or 3 or 4 years old in Bangladesh. You can just watch things grow, it's amazing.

But let's say you raise the level of the Bay of Bengal just a few inches, and that's what we're doing because thermal water, forget all the melting glaciers, warm simply because thermal expansion takes up more space than colder water does. So we're going to raise, by every forecast, the level of the sea at least a foot in the next fifty years. If you raise that, then those waters cascading under the Himalayas have no place to go and they just back up and go out all over Bangladesh. That's what happened in 1998. The water was a little higher than usual in the Bay of Bengal and a lot of water was coming down out of the mountains and for about 90 days, about a quarter of the year, two-thirds of the country of Bangladesh was in thigh deep water or worse.  They are incredibly adaptable and resourceful and did a heck of a lot better living in thigh deep water then we would have done. But they can't do that year after year after year. Can't plant the rice crop. They weren't food self sufficient that year. Time to wake from sleep, my friends.

And Bangladesh is just one on the list of a hundred places that will be similarly traumatized in this century to come unless we make major changes in how we live. It's a crime against the rest of creation, against all the other interesting corners of God's brain, against the lion and the antelope and the vulture and you can just go on down the list. Think about coral reefs. I'm sure some of you have taken vacations in the tropics and dived on coral reefs. Enchanting beyond belief. An ecosystem almost impossible to imagine in its jewel-like beauty. Coral reefs, probably by current forecasts, will disappear as an ecosystem by about 2050. As you raise the temperature of the ocean it kills the small animals that create the coral, that create the reefs, they're bleached, they die. Once those corals begin to die all the fish populations that they support die off and so on up the food chain.  Time to wake from sleep, my friends.

In the high Arctic, the polar bear - this incredible incarnation of the other, fiercest of mammalkind, uninterested in us, not scared of us - the polar bears in large parts of the Canadian north are about 20 percent skinnier than they were 10 years ago. They lost all this weight in the last decade. Because as you melt the pack ice it becomes incredibly difficult to hunt seals and that is what polar bears do for a living. No pack ice, no hunting, no polar bears. Time to wake from sleep, my friends.

We are helping to perpetrate crimes against the future, against everyone who is going to come after us. To strip mine the future. At the moment we are not doing nearly enough about it. Though our scientific system has done a tremendous job alerting us to the dimensions of this problem, neither our political systems, nor our cultural systems, nor our economic systems have yet to respond in any meaningful way. The reason they haven't responded goes back to this question with which we began. As long as we consider ourselves to be undeniably at the center of everything and insist that our immediate comfort and gratification to be the most important of all tasks, it is extremely unlikely that our leadership will rise to the occasion and lead us into any real change.

The most important meeting perhaps in history will take place in Copenhagen this December and 95% of the leaders a that meeting will not agree to do what it takes to save our planet. Most will be too worried about their upcoming elections to really lead. WE must push them to do what is necessary to save God’s creation. Time to wake from sleep, my friends

WE are the richest nation in the history of the human race. Jesus said one time to his disciples, “To whom much is given, from whom much will be expected.”  What does God expect of us if not to Wake from Sleep—to see how very much we have and how much the rest of the world needs from us…..including living within the means of nature.

When you think about it, St Paul’s use of the image of “the Armor of Light”  may seem like a battle image. I would suggest that it is much more than that. In Paul’s day, clothing was both for protection and for projection. It projected something of the wearers identity, occupation and status, and it provided protection from the elements and from attack.

In telling his hearers to put on Christ, Paul invites us to be both protected from the deeds of darkness that grow in our own hearts, and to “Project” the centrality of Christ in our lives. And for me this means, waking from the kind of sleep that allows us to never notice the pain, the poverty and the environmental destruction facing the world and to not live in our own medicated state of denial and ultimate unhappiness.

Waking up means seeing the sacred in all  things, all beings of the natural world. Unfortunately, we have not been taught to identify the sacred with the natural world. In fact,  for most of us today, at least in the west, the natural world has come to be viewed purely as a material reality – with no intrinsic value and no inherent worth. Its’ value for us is simply utilitarian – its’ worth coming only from the value we humans give it. Nature’s bounty and abundance are seen solely as commodities, as things that can be bought and sold, extracted and exploited, used and even abused if we humans so desire. And it is this mentality that has brought us to the desperate state we find our world in.

One powerful insight that comes to us from our spiritual traditions and from indigenous peoples as well, is the notion that there is only One Earth Community, there is only One Sacred Community and that is The Community of Life, and virtually everything that exists is part of this interconnected, interdependent, interrelated and living system.

When we look at the natural world this web of interconnection is everywhere and if we want to unlock the meaning of life in our world, to wake from sleep,  we must try to understand this interdependent and interconnected way in which all of reality is interlinked. John Muir once wrote that when you try to take out anything by itself, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe. When we eliminate any one layer or dimension of reality, when we ignore poverty all around us – or when we destroy any one life-form , say through global warming or pollution, then all the others are threatened – including the human community. Humans do not – humans cannot – exist apart from this total community of life because, even though everything is different, we are not separate. As Thomas Berry so eloquently says, “The human community and the earth community together form a single, sacred community, and we will go into the future together as a single sacred community or we will both perish in the desert.”

Some of you who have traveled in Asia a familiar with a Buddhist monk’s begging bowl. There is powerful effect to see the Buddhist monks moving among the people, holding their bowls out in a simple gesture of request, knowing that the people would provide for their needs. In this simple act of humility, part of a long-standing tradition, there is a web that connects the monks to their community, a community that seems to innately know the importance of the presence of these spiritual teachers among them, and so they support them with gifts of sustenance. I believe the begging bowl to be a sacred vessel, a sign of God’s providence, a powerful image of a community that is shaped by a deep sense of inter-dependence.

Multiple strands of inter-dependence seem to be woven into the very fabric of creation that flows forth from our Creator. It is engrained into the very nature of earth’s eco-systems and into human community. When we wake from our sleep we can see this. As I think about the begging bowl, it is so clear to me that the earth itself is like the sacred vessel that God holds forth to us, that contains all the gifts that flow from God’s generosity and from every aspect of creation itself. Earth is the vessel that holds our sustenance and we are completely dependent upon it. We are like a beggar, holding forth our begging bowl before creation, receiving all that we need to sustain us, each and every day of our lives, including the poorest among us. God places it before us as gift. The question that we are challenged with is this: have we humans failed in returning the gift of sustenance that the earth community requires from us—have we taken too much?

Too few of us notice the danger we are causing even to ourselves—our very souls- to say nothing of our impact on the rest of the world-- by staying fast asleep.  Often we have been afraid to wake up to how we could make a real difference in the world because we have come to believe that only by grasping for what we can and by protecting what we have grasped, can we achieve a happy and full existence. Unfortunately, it almost always works out the opposite way.

Standing against this false notion is the One who is the final and eternal standard of life; the materially poor, yet joy filled One returned from the darkness of the tomb to open our eyes and to awaken our spirits to all that is good in life—our neighbors, ourselves and the creation God has given to sustain us.

I will close with one more story. I was working in Haiti a few years ago. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world. One early morning I was riding up a very steep hill in the back of a pickup truck with some of our project partners. One was a young Haitian mother with three little ones in tow. She asked me in Creole if I knew what the first thing that every good Haitian parent taught their children when they were old enough to learn.  I had hoped to come up with a clever answer but she gave me the answer before I could respond,  “WE teach them to share whatever they have with whoever is around them—we share everything.” This from a very poor mother in one of the poorest nations in the world.  IT was time for me to wake from my sleep.

Here is the rub that we all feel, however. We wonder, even if we really wake from sleep, what can we really do to make the world the kind of place we want our children to inherit? In a word, my answer would start with “humility”, the humility of a beggar, the humility of a poor mother, the humility of one awed by creation. I have been humbled time and time again as I have worked all over the world and built friendships with very poor, uneducated, powerless people like this young woman. I have been humbled by their generosity, their graciousness, the way in which they have regularly put me in touch with my own humanity like nothing else I know. And, again and again, I have been humbled to learn that someone with no education at all could be my teacher. No matter how rich a nation becomes, no matter how educated a person becomes, no matter how many soldiers a country can put on a battlefield, in the end none of this really matters. What will really matter in the end is the extent to which we have been able to lay aside our own deeds of darkness; our drunkenness with power, our promiscuity with wealth,  our constant need to consume more and more of the earth’s resources and our war making to prevent others from getting what we think only we deserve. Jesus calls us every day to wake from our sleep and to learn from young, poor mothers like my friend in Haiti.

In this holy time, since all of time is holy,  may each of us believe that we can make a difference in the world and that without each one of us playing our parts, God’s dream for the world will never be complete. Let us not let God down. Let us wake from sleep. Amen.