“Stay Woke”
A sermon delivered by Rev. W. Benjamin Boswell
at Myers Park Baptist Church
on November 27,, 2016
The First Sunday of Advent from Matthew 24:36-44
One of the most familiar stories in American folklore is Washington Irving’s famous Rip Van Winkle.
Set in colonial America, it is the story of a man who lives in a small village at the foot of the Catskills.
One day, Rip wanders into the mountains with his dog and runs into a group of strange Dutchmen.
Rip enjoys a stiff drink with the men and then falls asleep for 20 years. As you can imagine, when
Rip wakes up, he discovers some shocking changes. His dog was gone, his beard has grown
incredibly long, his house is in complete disrepair, his wife and children are gone, and there is no
one living in town that he recognized. Rip learned that wife has passed away and all of his close
friends have either died or moved away as well. While Rip was asleep, everyone he cared about was
lost and his life had passed him by.
Martin Luther King Jr. loved the story of Rip Van Winkle and used it often. King liked to say, “The
thing we usually remember about the story is that Rip slept for twenty years, but there is another
point in that story which is almost always completely overlooked. When Rip went up the mountain,
a sign in the local tavern had a picture of King George III and when he came down it had a picture of
George Washington.” “So,” King proclaimed, “the most striking thing about the story of Rip Van
Winkle is not that he slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution.”
In a speech entitled, “Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution,” King warned, “One of the great
misfortunes of history is that all too many individuals and institutions find themselves in a great
period of change and yet fail to achieve the new attitudes and outlooks that the new situation
demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.”
As we see in our scripture this morning, King wasn’t the first prophet to tell people to stay awake.
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus said, “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know day or the hour that
the Lord is coming.” The text for the first Sunday in Advent is always an apocalyptic passage from
one of the gospels about the “second coming” of Jesus and the end of history. The purpose of
reading this kind of story at the beginning of Advent is to remind the church that Advent means “the
arrival.” During this season that we enter into today, we immerse ourselves in the story of waiting,
anticipating, expecting, longing, and preparing for the First Advent when God came to a couple of
poor, unwed, teenage, refugees, displaced by imperial power, who were looking for shelter in the
city of Bethlehem. But we also embrace the wonderful mystery of waiting for the Second Advent,
when Jesus will come again to consummate the reign of God and bring the beloved community on
earth as it is in heaven. Advent is the season where we live in the time in-between; as if the
kingdom is already here, but not yet fully realized.
For centuries, Christians have been fascinated with the second coming of Jesus and have used it,
sometimes in different ways, to curb behavior. I’ve once heard a mother say to her children, “Is this
what you want to be doing when Jesus comes back?” It can be a powerful motivator. Unfortunately,
our fascination with the second coming has often been coupled with a preoccupation for predicting
when the world will end. In his famous book The Late Great Planet Earth, Hal Lindsay said the
world would end in the 80’s, and the book sold 28 million copies. The world didn’t end in the 80’s,
did it? Harold Camping predicted the world would end six different times, but his miscalculations
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didn’t prevent people from contributing over 80 million dollars to his organization in 2011. Endtimes speculation was at its height as we approached the year 2000 (Do you remember Y2K?) with
the 17 best-selling novels in the Left Behind series that told us what the end would be like. All these
apocalyptic predictions are enough to make one wonder if Jesus said, “About that day and hour no
one knows, neither the angels, nor the Son, only a few American Evangelical pastors we’ve told. So,
wait for them to tell you . . .”
Sadly our preoccupation with the end of the world has often led Christians to disregard the present
and, ironically, focusing on the second coming has allowed many people to sleep through the
revolution. Speculations about the time of the Advent are, as Jesus told his disciples, an adventure in
missing the point. The one excruciatingly clear detail Jesus taught his followers about his return is
that no one will know. The most important point about the second coming is that it will be
unpredictable! The apocalyptic language of Jesus was not intended to predict the future, but to help
us to learn how to live in the present. So, Advent is really the season that we are always in, as
followers of Jesus, the time in between, the already but not yet time of expectation, longing, and
hope where we wait on God to usher in the beloved community.
God is coming to turn the world upside down, taking up residence in the womb of a peasant girl
from Nazareth, and being born in the flesh of a poor homeless Jewish man. So, Advent is a
revolution. The question for us though, during this time of revolution as we wait on the kingdom, is
not “when” but “how.” How should we wait for the coming of the Messiah and the arrival of the
reign of God? Well, Jesus was pretty clear in this passage. He said, “Wake up and keep watch!” But
what does it mean to “stay awake?” Surely, Jesus was not expecting us to literally stay awake all the
time. Of course not, we need sleep. Jesus was offering us a way of being in the world—a way of
living with our eyes wide open in a spiritual posture of watchfulness, attentiveness, and vigilance.
Jesus said, “Stay awake, keep watch, pay attention, and be vigilant,” but why? Why should we be
vigilant and pay attention? Well, because the world is trying to lull us into a deep sleep. The powers
that be are committed to keeping the world the way it is, to maintaining the status quo, to holding
the current power structure in place, and preventing a revolution from happening, and would love
nothing more than for us to sleepwalk through our lives. They construct false idols and beckon to us
to escape the harsh reality of this cruel and unjust world by taking what seems to be an innocent
and harmless stroll into the beauty of God’s creation—like the pilgrimage of Rip Van Winkle, up the
mountain. And, once we arrive in the woods, we are invited by symbolic Dutchmen to forget about
the problems of this world, to distract ourselves with entertainment, to soothe our pain with a
strong drink or some other form of self-medication, and to lie down and take what seems like just a
short little nap. In America right now, this invitation sounds incredibly tempting! I don’t know
about you, but I could use a long nap from all the mess in our country and in our world today—a
chance to escape. Twenty years sounds about right. Yet, Jesus warns us: We must resist this
temptation.
Like Dr. King, Jesus said, “Don’t sleep through the revolution of the season of Advent.” Practicing
Advent is more counter-cultural and revolutionary today than it ever has been in the history of the
world. The world tells us that the season of Christmas, is a shopping holiday that begins on the day
after Halloween, and goes for 25 days until the major feast day of Black Friday, and then extends
another 30 days or so until the day after Christmas when gifts are returned back to the store and
they make twice as much money as before. Most Christians in America today sleepwalk like
Zombies from Thanksgiving to Christmas consumed by their consumption, anesthetized by the
sentimentality of the season, and without any sense of the watchful, attentive, vigilance that is
called for during the revolution that is the season of Advent. It is not that we are simply called to
stay awake because we need be on guard in case something bad might happen. We are called to stay
awake, keep watch, pay attention, and be vigilant because we have work to do during this season.
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Before he was executed in 1945 for resisting Hitler, the Jesuit priest Alfred Delp wrote some
powerful words from a Nazi prison. He said,
If we want to transform life again, if Advent is truly to come again—then…it is time to
awake from sleep. It is time for a waking up to begin somewhere. It is time to put things
back where God put them. It is time for each of us to go to work, with the same unshakable
sureness that the Lord will come, to set our life in God’s order wherever we can…Advent is a
time when we ought to be shaken and brought to a realization of ourselves. The necessary
condition for the fulfillment of Advent is the renunciation of the presumptuous attitudes
and alluring dreams in which we always build ourselves imaginary worlds. A shocked
awakening is the experience of Advent…Being shattered, being awakened—only with these
is life made capable of Advent. [Only] in the bitterness of awakening, in the helplessness of
coming to, in the wretchedness of realizing our limitations, the golden threads that pass
between heaven and earth in these times [can] reach us.
You may be wondering why I intentionally chose to use the improper grammatical phrase “stay
woke” as my title today. In recent years, the hash tag, #StayWoke has become an important cultural
term. As great words often do, it originated in poetry and music, from singer/songwriter Erykah
Badu in her 2008 song “Master Teacher,” which uses the refrain, “I stay woke, I stay work” over and
over again. With these words Badu elevated what her elders had been saying for years about not
being placated or anesthetized by society.” After writing the song, Badu came out in support of a
rock band that was arrested for protesting Russia’s anti-LGBTQ legislation. Using Twitter, she urged
her followers to “stay woke” and a slogan was born. Around that time, other Twitter users began to
use this hash tag to encourage each another to remain vigilant about other social issues, and when
Trayvon Martin was shot and the Black Lives Matter was born, the hash tag became the mantra of a
movement—a revolution. It went viral as the rallying cry for public outrage about shootings of
black men from Ferguson, to Baltimore, to Baton Rouge, to St. Paul, to Tulsa, and then here in
Charlotte.
“Stay woke” is an invocation that is not unlike the one that Jesus and Dr. King gave. It is an
invocation to live with our eyes wide open, be aware, and know what is going on in our community.
To stay conscious of the way systemic racism and oppression operate while hiding itself in plain
sight—to not automatically accept the official report—to question what the media says—to be safe
and keep working for justice and love for all people. As Cornel West said, “Justice is simply what
love looks like in public.” Back in 1966 King said, “if we are to remain awake in this revolution it is
necessary for the church to reaffirm over and over again the essential immorality of racial
segregation, and to oppose the idea that there are superior and inferior races.” He concluded, “Any
church which affirms the morality of segregation and does not oppose the idea of white superiority
is sleeping through the revolution.” We’re we awake or were we asleep when King said that? Are we
awake or are we sleeping now? Do we even want to be awake or, like Rip Van Winkle, have we shut
our eyes tightly to ignore the reality of the world, so that we can sleep comfortably through the
revolution?
Waking up is hard. It is disorienting, and it is often painful. Staying awake, as Jesus suggested, is
even more difficult because when we wake up to the truth of the cold hard world we live in we
don’t often like what we see and we want to crawl back under those nice warm sheets and pull the
covers over our eyes. Not to mention, staying awake can be physically, emotionally, and spiritually
exhausting. But we have extraordinary work to do to get ready for the reign of God to come. And it
is not just external work—out there in the world. When Rip slept for 20 years he also missed the
chance for an internal revolution. He missed the chance to improve his relationship with his wife
and friends, to tend to his farm, and to take responsibility for his life. The season of Advent is an
external AND an internal revolution—a revolution of heart and mind; body and soul. So we must
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shake off our apathy, our lethargy, and our desire for the anesthetizing sleep of comfort of sleep,
consumption, stability, and sentimentality. We’ve been charged with the work of love, peace, mercy,
and justice, and we cannot do the work we’ve been called to do, if we are asleep. In the Bible, sleep
is a metaphor for death and waking up is a metaphor for resurrection. So let us refuse the
temptation to sleep and rise up, be resurrected, and live as if we are fully alive—with our eyes wide
open.
St. Irenaeus once said, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” Advent does not give us an
excuse to quit the job of being the church in the world—rather it calls us to take it up with even
more urgency and responsibility. Alfred Delp summarized our task with these final words:
Here is the message of Advent: faced with one who is the Last, the world will begin
to shake. Only when we do not cling to false securities will our eyes be able to see
this Last One and get to the bottom of things. Only then will we be able to…awaken
from sleep to see that it is time to repent, time to change things. It is time to say, ‘All
right, it was night; but let that be over now and let us be ready for the day.’
If we want to participate in the revolution of Advent where God is coming to turn the world upside
down into the beloved community we all hope for, then we must stay awake, keep watch and pay
attention, so we can be vigilant and ready to rise up with new life as resurrected people to meet the
dawn of God’s new age. We must believe the night is over and live as if daylight has finally come. So
let us not sleep this Advent season, but let us greet this new day as an opportunity for revolution
(internally and externally), let us wake up and stay woke, let us keep watch, pay attention, and be
vigilant, so that we can be a part in the incarnation of love that is coming into our world. Amen.
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