LET US NOT BE WEARY

A SERMON FOR THE 15TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

I was giving a sermon the other week, and as I looked round the sea of faces before me, I noticed one man who was sitting there, slumped over, his head down and his eyes closed.  I tried shouting a few lines of the sermon to see if he would react, but he just sat there.  No great mystery here, he was fast asleep.

We all have to fall asleep at some point or another.  It’s part of our human nature that now and again we get tired and need to close our eyes and leave this world for a time.  We fall asleep and are no longer conscious of the world around us.  Some people enjoy deep sleep, some toss and turn; some folks dream a lot, others hardly at all;  there are those who need only three or four hours of sleep, while others have to take a full eight hours or more to be able to function the next day.  But we all need some kind of sleep, and sleep deprivation, we know from experience, is very bad for us.

Why?  Why did God create us with this need for sleep?  Why the necessity for this down-time, where the body shuts down almost completely in order to rejuvenate itself and restore its ability to function?  We know all the scientific, natural reasons why we have to sleep, but let’s think for a moment what God intended.  The answer must surely lie in the resemblance that sleep has to death.  Sleep seems to mimic death, insofar as the person asleep has no awareness of what is going on around him.  We describe him even as “dead to the world.”

Why would God want us to have this daily reminder of what it feels like to be dead?  To have no cognitive functions that come from sight or hearing, smell or taste or touch.  Firstly and most obviously, I think, to remind us simply that we all must die one day.  There’s a bed in our bedroom, and nightly we lay ourselves down upon it and close our eyes.   One day, that bed or another like it, will be our deathbed, and our eyes will close for the last time.  God teaches us, through our nightly sleep, that this is not something to be feared—death is just as natural as sleep, and just as inevitable.  There’ll be a day when we just “can’t keep our eyes open any longer,” and we will fall into a twilight sleep, then ever deeper until we are at rest.  Eternal rest.  Nothing to be afraid of.

God also wants us to know the reason we must die.  Because just as sleep allows us to wake up each morning, refreshed and ready for another day, so too when we wake up in eternity we will be revitalized, restored to the true and everlasting life that awaits us all.  When we sleep, our dreams seem very real, sometimes too real!  But no sooner do we awake in the morning, these dreams lose that sense of reality, fading from our thoughts and memory never to return.  So too when we finally awake in God’s presence, this life and all that was in it will fade before us and become the phantom that it actually now is.  Our death will herald the end of the illusions of this life, when all the joys and sufferings we have ever experienced will disappear into obscurity as the glory of a new everlasting life in union with God will sweep away everything else from our consciousness.

This is something we should contemplate at night as we lay on our beds.  “I will lay me down in peace and take my rest,” we pray in the 4^th Psalm, because thou, Lord, only that makest me dwll in safety.”  With prayers like this one, the Church’s night office of Compline reflects the connection between sleep and death.  Compline begins with the words, “May the Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end.”  Many are the hints throughout the office that our nightly sleep is simply the foreshadowing of a longer, eternal sleep, as we sing, for example, the words “Into thy hands I commend my spirit,” echoing the words of our Lord on the Cross; or after the Canticle of Simeon, the Nunc Dimittis, we pray “Save us, O Lord, waking, guard us sleeping, that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.”  “Rest in peace.”  RIP.

There’s nothing more natural and normal and human than feeling tired, especially after a hard day’s work.  It’s okay to be tired.  We should be mindful of all its natural and spiritual benefits.  And when we’re tired, we should take the time to sleep—although I’d appreciate if you could hold off just a little longer.  In fact, let’s remember St. Paul’s exhortation in his Epistle today, that we should never be “weary of well doing.”  One of the worst illusions of this life, and, believe me, this illusion will be the first to fade when we awake before the judgment seat of Christ, is that when we get tired of being good, it’s okay now and again to be bad.  “I’m not perfect, I’m not a saint, I need some fun now and again, I’m sick and tired of always having to obey this rule and that, of hearing that it’s a sin to do this and that…”  “Sick and tired?”  “Weary in well doing?”  “Be not deceived,” says St. Paul, “God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap…  And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”

To think anything else is an illusion, a dream.  If we sow good deeds, if we persevere in virtue, in holiness during our life, we shall reap the ultimate good deed in heaven, which is to love God to the highest level of holiness and perfection for ever.  This we will reap if we faint not.  Heaven is only for the perfect, and if we ever get there it will only be because we have reached that highest level of perfection to which we are called.  If we don’t reach that level here in this world, we’re going to have to be purged, tempered like steel in the fires of Purgatory.  Those delusions that sinful pleasure make us happy, that we benefit by gratifying our own desires, getting our own way, indulging our own selfish will, all those delusions must be rejected and cast off before we can enter into the fullness of the presence of God.  They are dreams, they will fade, and we will one day awake to what is truly real, to what will be our reality forever, our reward or our punishment.

So let us be vigilant in this life, even when we sleep.  And if we are actually awake, let us not sluggishly dream our way through life in the vain imaginings that comfort and freedom from suffering are our sole objectives.  Let us rather inspire ourselves with the story in today’s Gospel of the widow of Nain and her deceased son.  Let us remember the inevitability of that final sleep from which we too will awake to hear our Lord telling us, “I say to thee, Arise.”  And we that were dead will sit up and begin to speak, praying for mercy at our Lord’s feet.  If we have sown the love of Christ, then we will reap the love of Christ, and he will take our hand and deliver us to our mother, our Holy Mother Church, the Church Triumphant, there to speak forever the glorious praise of God.