Where the Way Leads, Jan Richardson, used by permission.
I’ve been having trouble staying asleep.
That’s both a literal fact and a metaphor.
First, the literal fact. These days, if I wake up and the clock says 5:00 a.m., I feel deeply blessed. I made it to 5:00 a.m!! I usually wake up around 2:15, 2:30, 3:40, or on more leisurely nights, 4:15. This has been going on since I don’t really know when … June? May? And what’s to blame? It could be blue screens, sugar, caffeine, being over-tired, for a while I thought it was over-training on my runs. Or it’s the job transition, and my instinctive resistance to the emotional punch that’s coming as I prepare to say goodbye to people I love. (That’s you.)
Or it’s the pandemic – a word I have come to despise. It’s monster hurricanes and heat waves and fires. Sometimes in the night my thoughts don’t turn dark as much as dull gray – without the sun shining, I can slip into existential malaise about how deeply troubled the whole world is. Easy for me to feel, I know: I have a roof, I have food, I have friends and water and even a new dog. But anyone with any amount of empathy for this imperiled world will find it hard to just power through. This is an existential era. It’s going to be a while before we pull through to a peaceful and creative renaissance. Probably mid-century at the earliest, give or take melting ice caps.
So yeah, I’ve been having trouble staying asleep.
But that’s a metaphor, too. I’m a white cisgender man with education and retirement accounts who can walk and carry more than 50 pounds, and I speak English, the language of empire: I have enough privileges to stay asleep – to tune out of the world’s problems, that is – if I really wanted to. These days I keep thinking about that viral video of King Charles III scolding an aide about the fancy pens on his table. For a moment Charles looked almost like a disgruntled chimpanzee as he snarled quietly at the aide to move the pens out of his way. Yikes. I am not one of his subjects but for his sake and theirs I hope Charles can be a bigger person than that. I just know that having privilege means he doesn’t have to be a bigger person.
Charles and I both could manage to stay asleep if we really wanted that.
But I choose most mornings to just get up, literally and metaphorically. Just get up: you’re worried about Hurricane Ian and Ukraine and guns and droughts and inflation and authoritarianism? Just get up. You’re worried about your loved ones or your loved ones’ loved ones? Just get up. You’re worried about a new pain in your knee or the way the neighborhood is changing or how rusty and rickety the ferries are looking and sounding these days? Just get up.
But that’s hard. We’ll probably need some help getting up, getting going, getting back to work in the world. For many of us – and I include myself in this – some of the work we have to do is brand-new for us. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, some sixty of us did the Sacred Ground curriculum that opens our eyes about white privilege and white supremacy, and we got to the part where the curriculum tells us to not start trying to do stuff to make it better. We had to get up first.
Well actually we had to wake up first, and then get up. We had to wake up to the hard truth that white folk don’t have to think or say or do anything about racism, because we benefit from it and we are free to stay focused on the fancy pens on our ornate desks. Many of us, when we did Sacred Ground, grappled with the guilt and shame of that, and instinctively asked, What can I do?? But again, the curriculum said we should not take immediate action: we should focus on waking up – and getting up – first. Stand up and face my part in this injustice. Let the emotional impact of that hit me. Understand that I personally may not be guilty of slavery or Jim Crow or redlining or cultural genocide, but if I don’t wake up and get up, then I am passively perpetuating it.
And this is the difficult emotional spot where we can understand, maybe for the first time, what Jesus is getting at today when he responds to the plea of his followers who cry out, “Increase our faith!”
“Increase our faith!” they plead. It even sounds like a demand. They’re speaking in the imperative mood: this is an order. And they nearly shout it to Jesus, just after he tells them sternly that they must forgive one another, and warns them that they need to be on their guard against temptations to go astray, and lead others astray. He is getting closer to Jerusalem now: we’re in Luke chapter 17, just a couple of chapters away from his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, where the crowds will soon turn against him and he will be executed. Jesus is sounding more urgent now. He’s saying lots of things his followers don’t want to hear.
So when they seem to be shouting, “Increase our faith!”, maybe they are panicking. They don’t yet know the terrible things that will happen to him in Jerusalem, even though he keeps trying to tell them all about it. It’s just so upsetting that they won’t let themselves listen to him. They won’t accept it. But Jesus is saying other hard things too. He’s making stern demands. The way of faith—the way of Jesus—is really difficult. He wants to prepare them for that, so he keeps pushing them to understand. He keeps trying to wake them up. They’re scared.
We can relate. We aren’t just frightened by all the challenges and crises around the world, though they are plenty scary. We may also feel daunted by the work that we still have to do. There’s so much to learn, so much to change, so many broken things to mend. Meanwhile, our own faith community has its own challenges, with transitions (plural), and uncertainty about the future.
And yet, as hard as all this sounds, hear the good news that soon follows: Shortly after today’s hard conversation, Jesus heals ten people in a story about the power of gratitude. A bit later, in chapter 18, a widow gets what she needs by being persistent, and when Jesus commends her, he shows us all how to be allies to what the bible calls “widows and orphans”— people on the outs, people in deep need. Jesus shows us that when we are their allies, great rays of hope dart across the landscape. God truly empowers us to make a real difference in this world.
For all of his hard sayings, Jesus is building a growing community of hope, even as he walks ever nearer to his own death. And his death is followed by resurrection, the joyous reason we gather here Sunday by Sunday. As one of our best prayers says it, “things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new.” After his death, his scared and exhausted followers sensed the risen Christ’s living presence; they knew he was there with them. Though the Risen One was a stranger, he was also familiar; though he mysteriously eluded their understanding, he was palpably present to them, intimate with them. He was raised from the dead, and his followers were—his followers are—filled with the Holy Spirit.
And so, in light of the resurrection, Jesus’s response to their demand that he increase their faith may seem a bit less harsh. His response is basically, “Wake up, get up, and get to work!” He sounds pretty stern. But he will be with us through all of this: on the cross, he joined humanity in our suffering. And from his own empty tomb, he startles us awake. He then leads us—and he leads all ‘widows and orphans’—through suffering, and up, up, and out of the dull gray dreams that haunt us by night.
Do not despair. God is with us. Christ is risen. The road is hard! But the dawn of God’s dominion is rising over this whole tired and frightened earth.
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Preached on the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 22C), October 2, 2022, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Lamentations 1:1-6
Psalm 137:1-6
2 Timothy 1:1-14
Luke 17:5-10