Are You Getting Enough Sleep?

Text:  Romans 13:11-14

Theme:  "Are You Getting Enough Sleep?"

First Sunday of Advent

December 1, 2013

FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Denton, Texas

Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

 

+In the Name of Jesus+

 

¹¹ And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. ¹² The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. ¹³ Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. ¹⁴ Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.

 

Happy New Year  to the Church!  Let's get going!  Start with Zechariah chapter nine, verse nine:  "See, your King comes to you, righteous and having salvation."  These words from the Old Testament, pull double duty.  First, they served for years as the first words from God to the people on the First Sunday of Advent.  They were part of the Introit, or "Entrance Hymn", that God's people sang as they entered into the new church year.  The second gift the verse renders is that it generates the overall theme for the entire year which gets underway today.  We are not the ones who come to the King; it is the King who comes to us.  "See, your King comes to you, righteous and having salvation."  In the church year, it's Advent all the time.  The King came to us in history -- as the baby of Bethlehem's manger.  The King will come to us again at the end of time to be our judge-- as King of kings and Lord of lords.  The King comes to us now in His Word and blessed Sacraments.  In the church year, it's Advent all the time!

 

Advent, from the Latin adventus, means "coming".  The Advent wreath, with its evergreen, signifies new growth.  The circular part of the wreath symbolizes that God has no beginning or end.  The lighting of the candles each week reminds us of how, gradually, the light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world, as the Gospel of John declares.  The liturgical color of Advent is purple, and that signifies both royalty (as in the King is coming) and repentance (what we are invited to do to prepare for the arrival). So there you have it:  a quick primer course on Advent!

 

While the wreath is a traditional symbol of Advent, perhaps a modern symbol could be your alarm clock.  This possibility introduces us to our text from Romans.  In a nutshell, this New Testament Reading is a spiritual alarm clock.  It's a wake-up call.  The implication is this:  while many people may be wide awake physically, they are spiritually sound asleep. 

 

In this reading, God wants us to "understand the present time".  Assuming that we do "understand the present time," then we realize that we can no longer hit the snooze button on the spiritual alarm clock.  It's time to wake up!   Why the wake-up call?  It's because "...our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.  The night is nearly over; the day is almost here."  It's time for the spirit -- your spirit and mine --to get up and get dressed.  "Put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light."  "Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ," says God's Word to us today.

 

I won't ask for a show of hands, but I'm wondering how many of you would say that you're getting enough sleep.  I have no doubt that some of you would claim that you need more -- perhaps much more.  I know that I do.   A Huffington Post article in April of this year reported that about a third of American workers, 40.6 million adults, get less than six hours of sleep per night.   Never mind the fact that the Center for Disease Control recommends that we all get AT LEAST seven to eight hours a night.

 

Here's some simple math.  Well, it's not quite that simple, but here goes.  I was born on November 9th,1960.  That means that I'm 53 years old.  As of today, I have lived 19,380 days upon this earth.  One third of one day is eight hours, and eight hours is the recommended hours I should sleep per night.  If I were getting adequate sleep, I would have by now slept for 6,460 days in my life.  That translates to over seventeen years of sleeping.  At the moment, my average amount of sleep is about six hours a night.  If that is the actual average of sleep per day for my lifetime, it translates to over thirteen years of sleep -- about four years of sleep less than I, apparently, needed.  All of this makes me sleepy.  Perhaps it's time for me to go home and crawl back under the covers! 

 

Crunching the sleep numbers can be done physically.  We can diagnose the body and its needs fairly well.  But what about our spirits?  An honest assessment of our lives shows that we've overslept many times -- sometimes by days and sometimes even by years.  God tries to wake us up, and that old sinful nature in each of us always reaches for the snooze button. We put God off.  God sent patriarchs and matriarchs and judges and prophets and apostles and peoples and pastors and elders and deacons and nations and events, but still God's children did not wake up.  Their spirits snoozed; their spirits overslept; opportunity after opportunity came and went for them to get up and get dressed, but they rolled over in bed.  To use another biblical phrase, they "loved the darkness."  Jesus once said:  "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing."

 

The season of Advent in the year of our Lord, 2013, is here.  Are we, so to speak, going to roll over in bed?  "But pastor," someone says, "we're not into deeds of darkness; were not into carousing and drunkenness; we're not sexually immoral; we don't engage in debauchery and dissension and jealousy!"  But I'm here this morning to say that if I talk that way, if you talk that way, if we talk that way, we need to be very careful.  The Bible declares, in no uncertain terms, that if we keep the whole law of God perfectly but stumble just once, we're guilty of the whole thing.  My point is this:  the alarm clock that is going off, the wake-up call that is Advent is just as much for the  the religious person as it is for the unbeliever. 

 

I read an article this week which confirmed what I had thought for quite some time -- that America has lost trust in many of its once-trusted institutions.  That was old news to me.  But the new "news" was this:  a growing number of Americans are starting to lose trust in each other.  If we have no trust in God and if we lose trust in others, who does that leave?  It leaves only ourselves.  And the self, if not reborn, is interested only its own needs, wants, desires, gratifications, and so forth.  Is it any surprise, then, that human spirits fall deeper and deeper into sleep?  Is it too far off the mark to say that our culture and our nation is in something of a spiritual coma?

 

My friends, we need Advent now more than ever.  We need to be singing "Jingle Bell Rock" far fewer times and "Oh, Come, Oh Come Immanuel" far more times. 

 

The good news of today is precisely this:  when that spiritual alarm clock sounds and when we get up and clothe ourselves with Christ (as the text bids us do), we are not alone.  For in Christ, God is "Immanuel"; God is with us.  He is trustworthy (worthy of our trust), for not only did our King come to us, our King also did for us what we could not do for ourselves.  His death upon that cross and His resurrection from that tomb have made a new day, a new church year, and a new life a reality for each one of us.

 

The night is over.  A new day has dawned.  Your King is coming to you -- righteous and having salvation!  He comes to alert us, feed us, go with us in our lives every step of the way.   We wake refreshed!

 

Amen.