A good nap can feel so good sometimes! I often take a nap after lunch, then when I wake up I felt refreshed and ready to work again. But sometimes there is a negative side we should think about. In the letters of St. Paul, he uses "sleep" as a metaphor for a number of things: escape, being unprepared, and even for being dead, and in today's epistle lesson, sleep can mean that we are "out of it," clueless. Sometimes in the middle of class, students seem to have no idea, no clue as to what is happening, so they "tune out," and the teacher needs to say "wake up!" I find my self like that once in a while. It is like I am walking in a fog. What is really scary is when I am driving and suddenly realize that I am not fully paying attention to my driving. Sometimes I can be working on something and I completely forget about the time. This is the situation to which St. Paul speaks in today's lesson. "Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep" (v.11). What kind of sleep is St. Paul talking about? Could it be the slumber of living life in a fog, the meaningless, monotonous existence of one day after another, as though we are sleepwalking: not knowing who we are or where we belong: not knowing the time of opportunity or even experiencing something new and revitalizing? Could he mean that we fall asleep, metaphorically speaking, because we do not know God, whether God's judgment or God's promise? Could he mean that we are clueless to God?

It is bad to be out of it, but even worse is not wanting to be clued in, and choosing to drop out of things. St. Paul talks about being out of it as the time before people came to faith. Before they "first believed," they had no understanding, no answer to the darkness they were in. They had no hope of finding the light. They had no news, neither the Good News nor the bad news. Then those people came to faith. But Paul still had to tell them to wake up. This is how we are sometimes. We have come to faith, but we get sleepy in our faith. This unfaithfulness might lead us to try to sleep to escape our problems, or we might find that we spend nights unable to sleep because we are so bothered. Both might be forms of faithlessness, it might show an inability to trust God, or an unwillingness to trust God. Without faith we miss God's actions in our lives, we miss the news that a Savior has come for us, is with us now, and will come for us again. Asleep, we are moving close to death.

Having lost track of time, having lost track of God, we are already dead and do not even know it. Now we have the worst problem of all. We could run out of wake-up calls. My alarm clock has a sleep mode, it will ring again in 5 minutes after I hit the sleep button, but after 30 minutes it won't ring again. If we ignore the alarms, the next thing we know is that we slept all day and we could be waking to the darkness of the evening. It would be like waking to the call of God who says that time has run out on us. We are condemned to a sleep from which we will not awake -- or perhaps that's an awakening from which we cannot escape into sleep. This is, by far, the worst news of all.

However, St. Paul tells his readers that "The night is far gone; the day is at hand" (v.12). The dawn has come, the darkness is over! The reign of darkness has given way to the dawn of a new day when our Lord Jesus Christ in his first advent defeated the powers of evil and sin. Christ, who suffered dark shame on the cross, lifted the judgment of God that would otherwise have kept us in the dark. Christ suffered the darkness of death and the tomb and then rose in the new dawn of Easter. The night is now behind us. In Colossians 1:13-14 Paul wrote, "For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." That is the sort of morning news that will wake us up from the dead! Paul loves this image. Listen to 1 Thessalonians 5:9-10. "For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him." That wake-up call is for this life, for today's struggles, for tomorrow's sorrows, and also for eternity. When St. Paul adds, " The night is far gone; the day is at hand" (v.12), he is referring to the second advent of Jesus. This salvation is near (v.ll). It means the resurrection from the dead -- peace with God.

In the Gospel, we hear the call to wake up from sleep and to live in Christ's light. And this is good news that makes our day! We have God's promise that on the final day those who are in Christ will awaken to everlasting day. Our Advent Season wake-up call is the call to trust God's word and promise by "clothing ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ" (14). What do you do in the morning when you first wake up? Wash your face, get dressed, and have breakfast? This is just like the work of the Holy Spirit. Through the Gospel the Holy Spirit calls us to the water of Baptism which washes away our sin. In faith we put on Christ like a uniform. And in the Sacrament of the Lord's Table, our faith and life is strengthened and nourished. We become awake and alert to life in all its fullness. The fog is gone, we know what is happening.

We have put on Christ, we are all dressed up and God gives us a party to go to. It is called life. It is a life of love shown to others. This is why St. Paul tells us verse 13, "Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy." In other words, gratifying the desires of the flesh is now behind us, because we are justified by faith (Romans 3:28). We know what our life is for, what our bodies are for, what our relationships are for: They are for the Lord and for the neighbor. St. Paul probably considered self-indulgence as a way to lull ourselves into sleep. So he warned against self-indulgence, such as, sexual misuse and abuse, getting drunk or getting stoned, or even harboring ill feelings like jealousy in our relationships. Because we are awake in the Spirit, because we are children of the day, we are active in day-time type of things. Our faith becomes active in love as we awaken to life for others. And I pray that the time spent in prayer and worship will give you more energy than a nap, and will clear you minds for the adventure of Advent.

Amen.

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