Thought for Today
Genesis 2:21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.
Psalm 3:5 I lie down and sleep; I wake again, for the LORD sustains me.
Matthew 1:24 When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife,
Luke 9:32 Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him.
“Human beings are not supposed to sleep but to be awake . . . Being awake means loving the day and its work . . . Being awake means seeing the world as it is before God, without judging it. Being awake means being open, ready for the future, looking it in the eye and not fearing it . . .This being awake is not something we can give ourselves. Rather, God must call us to this being awake . . . Live before God as the one he has made you to be!” (I Want to Live These Days with You, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pg. 239)
The insurance company providing our Medicare Supplemental Plan regularly reminds me that I need to get at least 8 hours of REM sleep nightly. Our primary care physician does the same. All of my life, I have been told that physical health demands at least 8 hours of sleep nightly. Those Bible verses above suggest that sleep is fundamental to our spiritual health and wellbeing.
The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer has influenced my own thinking more than any other writer I can think of. He was jailed by the Gestapo in WWII for teaching and preaching his faith. In the Gestapo prison, he continued to teach and preach. Ultimately, he was executed in that same prison for teaching and preaching.
So, who am I supposed to believe? Am I meant to be awake or to sleep? Are my physical health and my spiritual health eternally at odds, one demanding sleep, the other demanding wakefulness? Can I faithfully and successfully ignore the requirements of one to fulfill the demands of the other? Or, have I created a false dichotomy?
Neither Bonhoeffer nor I are physicians. Neither of us, however, would ever suggest that the design specifications written by our Creator God for the creation of humanity contain an inherent conflict, an irreconcilable flaw.
It helps me understand Bonhoeffer’s words to remember the background against which they were written. Bonhoeffer lived in Germany during the 1930s and midway into the 1940s. He witnessed the descent of one of the most advanced nations in Christendom into the horror of Nazism and the Holocaust.
That devotion I read yesterday also included these words about being awake, “It means seeing God’s clear day as it is, loving his creation and his work, but at the same time seeing the suffering of creation, the misery and helplessness of other people, hearing their petition even where it remains unspoken. And it means knowing about eternal guilt.” (ibid)
My parents and their generation were called to be awake to God’s world and the issues present in that world. Christians throughout Christendom needed to confront the rise of totalitarianism and misogyny at home and abroad. Sadly, that confrontation was WWII.
Even more sadly, the woes of the world have not yet been resolved. There are still nations and individuals who believe that ‘might makes right,’ that bullying is acceptable behavior. And hate still abounds.
I am unaware of any Christian faith tradition or denomination that does not pray the Lord’s Prayer. Christians are called to work toward a world where God’s will is done on earth as it is heaven. We must always be alert to the fact that we’re not there yet.
Maybe Christians should adopt the last stanza of Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening as our official poem, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep./But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep.”
Pray the Lord’s Prayer, live and work to make it so, trust God
Pastor Ray