A Sermon For Insomniacs

A Sermon For Insomniacs

Matthew 24:33-46
December 2, 2007

“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son,
but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of
Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying
and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until
the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man.
Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be
grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for
you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of
the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have
stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also
must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

I don’t know how many of you have a problem with insomnia, but I want to share with
you that I do, and have, for many, many years. I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t
sometimes difficult for me to get to sleep, especially on the days that I am most tired,
ironically enough. Studies have actually shown that something like 58% of us
experience insomnia at least a couple of times a week, which is a really surprising
number to me, actually. It always feels as if you are the only one, right, the only one
suffering through the long lonely night, when it seems impossible to shut down your
mind, and to let the darkness take you it into its embrace. My mother and I are just
alike—we suffer with insomnia, and have always been late owls, and my sister and
father are the complete opposite—if you would let them, they would sleep 12 hours a
day. My idea of a good night’s sleep is six hours, though I have heard others who have
been satisfied with only four, which seems amazing to me.

If you do a search on the internet, you can find all sorts of supposed insomnia cures,
including pills, but there is also the old stand-bys we all know about: limiting your
caffeine (which I’ve done recently, and it has actually helped) or drinking warm milk or
herb tea, avoiding naps during the day, and taking a warm bath. But it also has some
unusual tips for those of us struggling with sleep, including toe wriggling, sleeping with
your head facing north, visualizing animals in the wrong color (like blue cats and green
cows) and picturing something boring. And there may be something to that last
suggestion, because there was a story on CNN that said that “researchers from Oxford
University have discovered that the traditional cure for sleeplessness of counting
sheep, believed to date back to the 19th century, is not as effective as simply imagining
a relaxing scene. Working with a group of 50 insomniacs, one subgroup was asked to
count sheep while another was asked to imagine a relaxing scene such as a waterfall,
and a third group was left to their own devices. The group that were asked to imagine a
relaxing scene, fell asleep on average 20 minutes faster than if they were asked to do
nothing. Those who counted sheep and those in the control group took slightly longer
than normal to fall asleep. “Picturing an engaging scene takes up more brain space
than the same dirty old sheep,” explained Allison Harvey, who conducted the study with
Suzanna Payne. “Plus it’s easier to stay with it because it’s more interesting.” (http:
//archives.cnn.com/2002 /HEALTH/01/24/sleep.sheep) Now, I know that a waterfall is a
beautiful thing, and is relaxing, but in the end it would probably bore me to sleep, if I
had to sit and watch it for too long!

The great thing about being an insomniac, of course, is that I am in great company—I
was doing some research, and I found these interesting tidbits about other insomniacs,
all great like me, of course! Hah!

--Napoleon Bonaparte rarely slept more than 4 hours a night. He simply learned to live
with the condition.

--Painter Vincent Van Gogh preferred to self medicate. He would apply a strong dose of
camphor to his mattress and pillow. Although it no doubt helped him fall asleep it was
also steadily poisoning him.

--U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt found that a shot of cognac in a glass of milk
helped him fall asleep.

--Actress Marlene Dietrich found that a sardine-and-onion sandwich on rye helped her
fall asleep.

--Film comedian Groucho Marx’s insomnia began when he lost a small fortune in the
stock market crash of 1929. To ease the symptoms he would phone strangers up in the
middle of night and insult them.

--And it is reported that film actor W.C. Fields, on his worst nights, could only fall asleep
under a beach umbrella being sprinkled by a garden hose.

Clearly, those of us who are insomniacs need to embrace our condition, because it
clearly leads to greatness and fame, though probably that fame won’t come to me as a
male model, because, aside from the thinning crop of hair on my head, bags under the
eyes from no sleep are not generally consider real attractive!

But enough about me not being able to fall asleep: today I want us to explore Christ’s
call in this passage to do what I am not trying to do on those sleepless and long nights,
instead of going to sleep, he is asking me to stay awake. Christ seems to be asking me
and us to do the complete opposite of what I desperately want to do a few nights every
week, which is to stay awake to this world, to be attuned to the world around me, to not
let my mind rest too much, because of what may yet be happening all around me. Last
week, I shared with you how unexpected God really is and how crazy the movements of
God in our life seem to be, at least crazy to many of us who are living with oddness of
God’s doings in our lives. You and I, I suspect, we would have never done it the way
that God did it in our lives, whatever “it” may be—it is mystery to many of us that God
chooses to act in the world in ways that seems so illogical, so not what we wanted to
happen…and yet, we also find, later in our lives, that the reason we had to go through
that time was to prepare for the time we are going though now. This is just not a God
we can really expect to act in the ways that are familiar to us, from the Old Testament
on, and all through the life of Christ, with that unexpected birth, that unexpected life,
that unexpected death, and most amazingly, that unexpected resurrection. Who knew,
really, that it would end up that way, the story of the Messiah, and who knew how our
own lives would end up being such a surprise to us and to others around us?

Embracing that surprise is certainly part of what this passage is trying to say to us, this
apocalyptic passage from the Gospel of Matthew, apocalyptic meaning dealing with the
ending of all things. Jesus’ presence on earth is winding down near the tail end of
Matthew, but the disciples want to know more about how his presence will be felt and
experienced at the end of all things, when he will finally reign with complete power,
complete authority. Again, they want him to be a successful Messiah, someone who
would rid them of Rome’s heavy hand, but he keeps being surprising, he keeps baffling
them with his words and his life, and his choices, especially his choice not to lead a
violent revolt against the legions of Rome.   And the surprises are to keep coming,
according to Matthew here, because no one knows the day or hour when the Christ will
come to wrap the story of the universe, and so Jesus asks them to let go of their need
not to be surprised, their need to know everything, the day, the hour, the
circumstances. Some things in this life must just remain a surprise, and how and when
Christ comes, and how and when God moves in our lives—well, that mystery, that “not-
knowing,” just must be lived with, and sometimes struggled with, if we were to be honest
with each other. It’s interesting, actually, that our need to know or to even have
someone else know how thing will turn out is so great that we will sometimes does some
pretty unethical things. Scholars who specialize in what we call textual criticism have
noted that some of early (not the earliest, but still early) manuscripts of this passage
actually delete the words “nor the Son” because it obviously disturbed someone long
ago that not even Christ knew when he was coming home, so to speak! At least Christ
shouldn’t be surprised, so someone thoughts thousands of years ago, and yet that
seems to be the case—even the Son of God, the Child of God, knows not the day or
hour—and so it too remains a mystery, a surprise even to him as well.

Now, I said a few moments ago that part of this passage was about embracing our
surprise at how God moves in our lives, and how mysterious the movements of the
Divine really are—but that is only part of the meaning of this passage. The other part
is just as important, maybe more important, for us right now, and that is this command
to keep awake, to embrace the spiritual insomniac within each of us, to not let our
hearts and minds and souls fall asleep in the midst of the waiting for God to act in this
world, and to act in our own lives. In fact, the text uses an almost comical image,
because the English translation doesn’t quite do the original Greek justice here. When
Jesus uses the metaphor of an owner staying awake to confront the thief at appointed
hour of the break in, the words used there, “broken into” actually mean “dug through”
in the Greek, which makes sense if we remember that a typical Palestinian house was
built with mud, and quite literally had to be dug into in order for it to be broken into.
Now, that takes time and anyone with good ears would probably hear some thief
spending hours and hours digging through the mud walls in order to get inside. I have
vision of the owner of the house, up late at night, coffee in hand, and her robe on,
tapping her foot as the thieves make an obvious racket in their attempt to make some
supposedly easy money!

So, it would be obvious, this attempt by the thief to break in to the house, if we attend to
Greek in which it was originally written, and so, in some real way, I think Christ is
pointing us to other important lesson of this passage, which is to actually look for the
ways that God does move in this world, to keep awake, to stay awake in order to not be
so surprised at how God moves in this world and how God moves in our lives. I just
keep thinking that we miss so much of God in our lives because we are just simply not
paying attention to God in this world—we are not watching for God in this life. Maybe
that is why we are so surprised all the time at what God does, because we don’t pay
attention to the surprising ways that God does actually do things in our lives all the
time! Don’t get me wrong—we’re always going to be surprised at how God unfolds our
lives—there is no way of getting around that truth, but sometimes I think we are
surprised a little too much. I think that has to do with the fact that we let all those
miraculous moments and those moments of wonder and awe just pass us by, simply
because we are not awake to our lives, to our own miraculous existence.   Even Noah
knew that something incredible was about to happen, though he didn’t know when and
how the great flood was going to take place. It was still a surprise to him, but he had
been paying attention to God and the world around him, so much so that he prepared
he and his family with building that ark for the surprise that was about to come, at some
point, unbeknownst to him. I just think that staying awake means living our lives in
wonder of all that is, and being awake enough to notice when God is trying to get into
our locked up houses and our locked up hearts and our locked up lives—remember,
Christ comes to us like a thief in the night, even if its a thief that we can hear burrowing
through the walls of our hearts and lives. And staying awake also means noticing the
ways that God moves in this world, beyond ourselves, beyond our friends, beyond this
nation even—God is still working in the life of this world, even now.

For those of us who are insomniacs, well, this is good news, that staying awake might
be something useful in our spiritual journeys. Of course, Christ is not asking us to
literally stay awake, to literally embrace our insomnia—but he is asking us to attend to
the wonder of our lives, and to the wonder that God is bringing into those lives. We’re
going to miss the great story that God is writing with our very lives if we live that life with
our eyes closed to what God is doing. I’m still going to try find some solutions to
wakefulness, but my soul, well, my soul needs to embrace a kind of spiritual insomnia
so that it won’t miss a single moment, not single minute, of the wonder that God has
placed into my life—I just wouldn’t want to be surprised at the end of all things, to look
back and wonder how I could missed out on the beauty of it all.   Amen.