First Friends Meeting
Mark 13:32-37
‘Stay Awake’
Doug Gwyn

When I a child, I had a tendency to look forward to things in the future. Christmas, of course, was a big one. So was the end of school in June. There were all sorts of things I would set out there on the horizon, dream about and idealize, counting the days. I remember my Dad cautioning me at least once that it’s important to live in the present, to pay attention to what’s happening now, and not just dream about the future.

Jesus taught the same lesson during his years of ministry. His parables, which we’ve been studying for several weeks now, were one way he tried to help people pay attention to God present and active in their lives. The people around him were poor Galileans, barely eking out a living under a harsh Roman occupation. They yearned for the kingdom of God – the world put right. They dreamed about it and idealized it in all sorts of ways. They dreamed about a Messiah who would come and liberate them from the Romans, who would bring prosperity and ease to their lives, who would make Israel a great nation again, who would somehow make it easier to be good people. Such were the dreams of the kingdom of God. Big dreams, high ideals. And they were right to dream big – it was a world of great violence, oppression, injustice, immorality. No one should be satisfied with that, then or now.

So, along comes this carpenter’s son from Nazareth. He wasn’t all that impressive. He wasn’t what they had dreamed of. But he preached the kingdom of God here and now. He told these little stories, how the kingdom breaks into the most humdrum details of daily life – yeast in a lump of dough, sowing and harvesting, or the pay-out at the end of a long day of labor. And over time, they began to get what he was talking about. They began to see the kingdom of heaven happening among them. They began to enact the kingdom of God. They opened their homes to strangers, they shared as never before. People were being healed, physically and spiritually. Actually, it was nothing like what they had dreamed. It was not about waiting for something grand and glorious to come from afar or drop down from the sky. It was about paying attention to what’s happening here and now, the person standing in front of you, and seeing new possibilities for good. So, when Jesus and the movement that followed him arrived at Jerusalem, the big city, what amazing things would happen next?

But in the passage Al has read for us just now, that situation has changed – drastically, horribly. Jesus warns them that he is about to be taken from them, and that their world is about to fall apart. They will be persecuted, there are wars and other terrible things to come. He promises that he will return, but even he doesn’t know when, or in what way. So he warns them, be alert -- you don’t know when that time will come. It’s like a man going on a journey. When he leaves home, he puts his servants in charge, each with work to do. And he commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, stay awake, for you don’t know when the master of the house will come…he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. What I say to you I say to everyone: stay awake.

Now, on the face of it, this sounds like the opposite of everything Jesus has been teaching. Up ‘til now, it was all about finding the kingdom of heaven here and now, building up from small things, like the tiny mustard seed. Now we’re back to waiting for something to happen? The Church has often got caught up in waiting for something to happen. We think of groups that try to predict the second coming of Christ, when it will happen and how. It can become a very passive religion. It gives up on mending the world. It just waits for Christ to come along and magically fix things. Most of us see that problem. We try to get on with life as we find it here and now. Jesus said don’t worry about tomorrow – today has enough troubles of its own. So we let the end-time, whatever that is, be what it will be – let’s focus on the meantime. Quite right. The problem is, we get caught up in the meantime, coping with life as we find it. We make our bargains with the powers that be, and find ourselves accommodating to the injustice and immorality of the world. We call it realism, but it’s more like “I’ve got mine – go get your own, if you can.”

I think it’s important for us to yearn for a better world, to ache for the kingdom of God, for a world set right. Like the prophet Jeremiah, the word of the Lord should burn in our bones. The disciples Jesus gathered were men and women who ached for something better for themselves and for the world. And he left such people to carry on the work. Not to sit and dream. In the parable, the master puts the servants to work while he’s gone. But they work with a constant sense that he may return at any moment. That’s what it means to stay awake.

We Quakers are both famous and notorious for our stubborn hope for a world set right, for a world without war, a world where everyone has enough. The Quaker movement was gathered in the 1650s from among people called Seekers. Men and women who hungered and thirsted for righteousness, who yearned for the kingdom of heaven on earth. Their hunger was acute, because they were sure the kingdom was coming soon. Some looked for Christ to come down out of the sky. Others looked for new apostles to come and rebuild the Church from the foundations up. The Quaker breakthrough among these Seekers had a lot to do with those misplaced hopes, those mistaken impressions. But it happened in a way they didn’t expect. They were waiting for the Lord to come and do something, to free them from their spiritual captivity and set the world right.

The key shift that George Fox helped them make was to move from waiting for the Lord to wait upon the Lord. He counseled people to stop looking out there for their salvation and find it within themselves. He preached that “Christ is come to teach his people himself.” Christ has returned – you missed it! The master has returned and you were asleep! But you can still turn and find Christ as you find his light shining in you, as you let the light teach you and lead you. The whole purpose of silent Quaker worship was to be still and discover Christ present with them – the kingdom of God among them.

So they turned from expecting something in the future, to discovering a present, unfolding reality. They woke up. That was the Quaker breakthrough then. And it’s the key for us today. It starts with a hunger for something better. We may imagine it as a future world or some other kind of ideal. Those expectations and ideals are illusions. They will always mislead us. And yet the hunger they sharpen in us seems to play a role. In the tradition of Islam, one of the early Sufi mystics put it, “what you are looking for you will never find by seeking. But only seekers will find it.”

The key is to wake up to Christ with us here and now, to the kingdom already within and among us. But how do we wake up to that? And hoow do we stay awake? As I said a moment ago, one way we do that as Friends is when we gather together in silent worship to ‘wait upon the Lord’, to feel the Spirit moving among us. Of course, open worship is sometimes the hardest part of our worship to literally stay awake through! But as we quiet the heart and mind, we get a little more real with ourselves, and more honest to God. It becomes easier to do that here on Sunday mornings if you cultivate quiet prayer at home during the week. It’s not easy to carve out and protect a regular time of day for prayer and meditation. I know it’s a constant struggle for me. But the discipline of regular prayer and meditation will reward your effort.

Later this morning, you’re invited to watch a Bill Moyers interview with Pema Chodron. She is an American Buddhist teacher and writer. She describes how Buddhist meditation works and can bring better peace and clarity to your life. It’s not the same as Quaker worship and meditation, but there are areas of overlap. There’s a growing Buddhist movement in the West today. It includes some Christians who are using techniques of Buddhist meditation to further their walk with Christ. As Jesus said, “Whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40). If another tradition of meditation can help you truly wake up, it can help you move closer to the Lord, not further away.

But it’s not all about prayer and meditation. Remember, in the parable, the master leaves us with work to do. We are meant to be busy in our work lives, in our service to others, in our families. The trick is to carry on that busyness alongside a regular prayer life. As you do that, you find yourself more focused and at peace with your work. At the same time, your work life yields fresh insights in your prayer life. That’s Christ slowly putting your faith and your practice together, helping you grow in both. You begin to realize, the kingdom of God is not a far-off dream but a reality that keeps cropping up here and there in your life.

So, as we move into open worship, you might wish to consider, where am I finding God’s kingdom in my life? How can I move more fully into participating in that? How can I share that discovery with others?