I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 11, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Genesis 12:1-9, Romans 4:13-25, and Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26.
The other night, I couldn’t sleep.
Maybe you’ve had one of those nights, too, where you go to bed and turn off the lights and as you lie there, suddenly all of the questions and the challenges you are facing loom up in the shadows and take on newer, larger dimensions. Maybe you start to think up problems you didn’t even know you had. And you toss and turn and flip and flop and look at the clock and tell yourself “I have to get to sleep,” but then that just makes you more anxious and so now you can’t sleep because you are stressed that you can’t sleep.
I am grateful that this is not a nightly occurrence for me; it happens just once in a while. And I know that for some folks, sleep is persistently hard to come by for a whole host of reasons. But as I was lying there the other night, trying to calm my mind, listening to the fan blowing, I was reminded of other June nights: the ones from my childhood, when I would fall into bed, tired from the day’s activities, and the fan would be blowing in the window…but back then I would just drift off, unfazed by any existential angst or unfinished to-do lists.
And it occurred to me that, by and large, many of us probably slept a lot better when we were children. Back when our loved ones were just down the hall and we didn’t feel so alone. When it was easier to release the cares of the day, easier to trust that tomorrow would be just fine, and that maybe, when we wake up, it would be even better than we dreamed it to be.
But somehow, along the way, things change, and by the time we are grown, a great number of questions and worries and memories hold vigil at our bedside, and it becomes hard to fall asleep in their company. What was once an easy rest, a trusting openness to tomorrow, is now a tense, restless waiting, our minds spinning in the darkness as we try to solve all of the problems of the world before the morning comes. And so while I was lying there in bed, I thought, how precious it would be to sleep like a child once again.
As I was recovering from my sleeplessness this week and reflecting on this Sunday’s readings, something else occurred to me that hadn’t before: that sleep is actually a powerful metaphor for faith. Because the sleep for which we long, that wistfully-remembered sleep of the June nights our childhoods—deep, peaceful, trusting—is quite similar in nature to what St. Paul is talking about when he refers to this thing called “faith” in the letter to the Romans.
When Paul speaks of faith, he is not just talking about an intellectual assent to a set of doctrines, nor is he speaking of a blithe certainty about how and why the world is the way that it is. He is talking about that intimate sort of bond you feel when you know that you are safe, that you are loved, that you are not alone in the dark, and that tomorrow will be ok.
And to this end, Paul uses as an exemplar of such faith the figure of Abraham–someone who had the benefit of neither doctrines nor certainties, but who did (a few passages later in Genesis) fall into a deep sleep and had a dream of what would be–that he would be the “father of many nations.”
Abraham could not have imagined on his own how God was going to do the things God promised to do, but he gave himself over to the promise anyway. And this giving over of the self to something large and mysterious; this surrender to the dream that God unfurls for us in the darkness—this is what we mean when we talk about faith.
As best we can tell, Abraham did not lie awake making checklists, trying to figure out exactly what he had to do in order to make this happen on his own; instead, he said, God is with me, and I suppose that will be enough to face whatever tomorrow brings. And so it was.
The faith of Abraham was an abiding trust that the God who called him by name would hold him and carry him and nurture him, like a parent cradling a sleeping child. And so we laud him as the progenitor of our faith not because of his perfect understanding, but because he was the first among us, the first in this long unfolding story, who simply rested in the arms of God. He was the first to trust that tomorrow would be just fine, and that maybe, when he woke up, it would be even better than he dreamed it to be.
A question that remains, though, is how? How do I arrive at such a tranquil faith, such a restful surrender? How do I trust in God so deeply, so fully, that I can drift off in his loving arms, despite the real dangers of this life, despite the despair and the unanswered questions that keep me awake at night? How can any of us, once we are no longer children, once we feel so alone?
Of course the answer, as always, has something to do with Jesus. And our Gospel passage points toward it.
There’s a lot going on in this Gospel reading, actually. It’s kind of like those dreams you have where one scene suddenly transitions into another, layer upon layer. But after the calling of the reviled tax collector Matthew and the healing of the woman with the hemmhorage (both people, by the way, who have surely suffered their own share of sleepless nights) the story culminates with…what?
Jesus visiting a child, lying in her bed. A young girl who, he says, is not dead, but sleeping.
Now of course we can interpret this passage several ways, and most of us might assume that he was speaking metaphorically–that the girl was indeed dead and that Jesus brought her back to life, like Lazarus. Or that she was sick or comatose, and he revived her.
But there is another possibility, too, one that is a bit more evocative and mysterious, one that we might dismiss as easily as the observers in the story itself: the possibility that Jesus meant what he said.
What if Jesus was right, and the young girl was indeed asleep, in another state of consciousness, resting in the tantalizing, hidden promises of God? She wouldn’t be the first person in the Bible to have done so. As it is said:
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
What if she was a mystic deep in a vision, deep in the hidden, luminous darkness of God? What if she was asleep like Jesus was asleep in that boat on the stormy sea; asleep like Joseph when the angels spoke to him; asleep like Abraham dreaming of his children; asleep like one who is held in the arms of the Almighty; asleep in order to remind the clamoring, sleepless world—including us— of what true faith looks like—
Not like a restless, anxious night, not like a to-do list, but like….rest. Perhaps faith, in the end, is nothing more than rest. Resting in God.
If so, then this young girl is, for us, another Abraham. Another reminder that faith, more than anything, looks like curling up in the arms of a loving parent and falling asleep.
And thankfully, we have a God who desires but one thing: to hold us and rock us through the night.
Come to me, all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Will we still have some sleepless nights? Probably. Anyone who loves this world and the people in it is bound to worry a bit. But I hope that when I am lying there in the dark, lamenting my inability to figure life out once and for all, to know what’s coming, to know exactly what to do, that I’ll remember dreaming Abraham and the sleeping girl, and I hope I’ll remember how faith feels less like having all the answers and more like slipping into cool sheets on a warm June night and drifting off, knowing that tomorrow will be just fine. That maybe it will be even better than I dreamed it to be. And that no matter what happens, God will still be there, waiting to take my hand when I wake up.
For he has come through the clamor and the noise, through the vast night of eternity to be at our bedside, to cradle us like a sleeping child, to promise, “you are not alone. I am here.”
And in that promise, I rest.
By Another Road 