Lay of the Land (Pt 9)

As I communicated recently with a friend about George Floyd’s murder and the protests that it sparked, my friend pushed back with these words: “You need to dial down the woke!”

I’ve been sitting with his words, asking God about them.

I’m struck at how this label, “woke,” has such deep roots in the Christian faith. In many ways, it is the summary of the Christian faith. Paul used this language in his letter to the Ephesians:

13 But all things are exposed when they are revealed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light. 14 Therefore He says: “Awake, you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.” (Eph. 5:13-14 MEV)

Some scholars believe that the last part of this text–”Awake, you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light”–was an early Christian song, or at least an early Christian confession. It’s believed that when someone was baptized in the earliest days of Christianity, those who witnessed it would say these words aloud to the baptismal candidate, “Awake, you who sleep!” 

Picture that. Hear that. The first words the church gives you as you rise from your immersion into Christ is a charge to be woke. It feels like now, more than ever, the church should return to that ancient practice. The first step for every newly baptized Christian should be to wake up and see what’s really happening around us.

Not long after Paul wrote this text, early Christians tried to summarize the stages that a person grows through as they follow Jesus. They believed the final stage was “union”–complete and total harmony with God and with others. The first stage was this: “awakening.” They wrote that we awaken to three things: 

1. We wake up to our God. We gain new or greater clarity about who God is and what God’s up to. 
2. We also wake up to our world. We gain new or greater clarity about what’s really happening in our world. 
3. And we wake up to ourselves. We gain new or greater clarity about who we are, especially in relationship to God and to our world. 

Waking up, in Christ, was not the end. It was intended to lead to action and growth (purgation, illumination and union). But it was the starting point of faith, and of life. A Christian is someone who was waking up to who God truly is, who they truly are, and what’s actually taking place in the world around them.

The sad truth is that many who are first awakened when they become Christians fall back asleep. Churches are filled with people who are once again missing what’s really happening with God, in the world, or in their own lives. One contemporary author, David Benner, writes this: 

“Many things keep us content with our small selves and block us from becoming all we can be. None, however, is more important than the fact that most of us go through life as sleepwalkers and, even after a moment of awakening, tend to quickly drift off once again …” (David Benner Spirituality and the Awakening Self)

Trappist Monk Thomas Merton warned similarly …, 

“There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished by our vital relation with reality.” (Thomas Merton Thoughts in Solitude)

One of the challenges for Christians is the challenge to get awake and stay awake. It is a disaster to “be immersed in unreality” and to “go through life as sleepwalkers.” Not only because of the impact it has on us personally. But because of the consequences it has for others. In many ways, the deaths we’ve witnessed recently of black men and women in the United States have happened because the white church has fallen asleep. In his book Woke Church Eric Manson warned that…

“…the evangelical church seems to be asleep to the hotbed of tensions that threatens to overflow into communities across America. Scripture makes it clear that we are supposed to be totally awake to what is happening in our world…”

For too long the white church has rested blissfully in unreality while black people are oppressed and murdered. Perhaps we need to be rebaptized and charged once again, “Awake you who sleep!”

In 1959, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the commencement address at Morehouse College. He would preach this sermon often, including at the National Cathedral the Sunday before coming to Memphis, where he was killed. In the sermon, King told the story of Rip Van Winkle. What most remember about that story is that Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years. There was, however, another important part of the story–the change that happened while he slept. In a little inn, when Rip Van Winkle fell asleep, there hung a picture of King George III of England. Twenty years later, when he awoke, the picture had changed. Now it was a picture of George Washington. King notes:

When he started his quiet sleep America was still under the domination of the British Empire. When he came down she was a free and independent nation. This incident suggests that the most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle was not that he slept twenty years, but that he slept through a great revolution … There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.

What we’re witnessing night after night in this country is a revolution. It’s a move of God. It’s kingdom-coming. It’s the cry of people fully awake. And how tragic it would be to sleep through this revolution.