Asleep at the Wheel

1 Thessalonians 5:4–11 NRSV

But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober; for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.

These words from the Apostle Paul come to us in the midst of a conversation that he is having with the church in Thessaloniki. We aren’t sure of the exact context, but what many scholars have traditionally understood Paul to be addressing is a fear amongst the people that they had missed the second coming of Christ.

This is and has been the hope of the church since the very beginning — That Christ will return and make all things new. However, because of some of the ways that Jesus spoke about his return, it is unclear what all of the circumstances will be like. Will everything be immediately made new? Will there be a time of tribulation and conflict?

I hold to that earlier view, but I might be wrong. It is believed that the people of Thessaloniki held to the latter view, and were experiencing persecution. So naturally in their minds, they wondered if they had missed it. So Paul writes to assure them that the return of Christ still looms in the future.

How shocked they would be to learn that, 2000 years later, we still wait on that same hope. But the beautiful thing is that Paul’s words of encouragement to this early church community are still words of encouragement for us today.

We are in the midst of a sermon series called “All Your Mind” where we are looking at Jesus’s commandment to Love the Lord our God will all of our hearts, all of our souls, and all of our minds and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Specifically we are looking at the two most often neglected pieces of this command:

Loving God with our Mind and loving ourselves.

Because what happens here is that an inability to love God will all of our mind and and inability to love ourselves is one of the driving forces that keeps us from being able to cope with and recover from mental health disorders.

So we’ve talked about depression and we’ve talked about anxiety. And today we are going to talk about possibly the greatest crises in our society today: Addiction.

When you think of addiction you probably think of folks who live in the woods and under bridges. But the reality is that this is something that is no longer relegated to the underside of society. Addiction — in its many forms — touches lives across the entire spectrum of humanity. And sometimes it is even more insidious than just using pharmaceutical or hard street drugs in excess.

The literature of Narcotics Anonymous, a 12 step recovery fellowship, defines addiction as a “mental, physical, and spiritual disease that affects every area of a person’s life.” It is physical in that it is compulsive — there seems to be an inability to physically will oneself to stop. It is mental in the form of obsession — the never ending stream of thoughts that drive the compulsive behavior. The mind can literally trick someone into continuing to behave a certain way despite a desire not to. And it is spiritual in the sense that it forces people into a life of self-centered depravity, isolating them and cutting them off from the world and from God.

And here’s the deal: this disease can manifest in so many different ways: Drugs, alcohol, sex, shopping, video gaming, relationships, gambling, workaholism, etc.

This is not something that is reserved for a select few people who make a bad decision. This is a problem that is so widespread that I bet every single person in this room has somehow been affected: either directly or through the addiction of a loved one. This is the world that we inhabit.

What addiction does is it consumes our human existence in one way or another. It clutters our mind and fills it with lies and nonsense that block us from being able to have a relationship with God, and with other people. And it of course is the polar opposite of loving ourselves. Though addiction drives us into a life of self-centered living, it is a life that is the polar opposite of loving ourselves. It is a life that destroys the self and with it our ability to love others.

What we find is that we are living life asleep at the wheel. We are here, but somehow we are also somewhere else. Kind of just sleep walking through life, often quite unaware of our reality. Focused on ourselves and feeding our desire to escape from our lives — regardless of what it is that we use to do the escaping.

Perhaps the people of Thessaloniki were looking for an excuse to give up. Wondering if they’d been somehow left out of God’s glorious future for them, so they were asking Paul… should we just accept our fate and “eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die?” — By the way that’s in the Bible in the book of Ecclesiastes. It’s also in a Dave Matthews Band song.

But Paul says “heck no guys and gals. Stay awake and be sober, because you’ve got work to do!”

Be sober is a pretty easy command for us. Right? Now he’s not saying hey “alcohol is alway bad.” after all, Jesus turned water into wine right? But to be of a mind that makes bad choices, a mind that causes harm because it is under the influence is not the way that we are meant to live. I think that kind of speaks for itself in this discussion because when we are talking about addiction of any form, the main way that it manifests in a person’s life is through impaired judgement.

But here is where Paul’s words really strike at the heart of the condition of addiction — stay awake. Now Paul’s not saying don’t take naps. If naps are out of bounds for Christians, then I don’t know if I can follow Jesus ok.

No what Paul is getting at is much more profound. The word he uses for alive is a Greek word “gregoreo” (my gregs in the room just perked up, this ones for you) and the meaning that Paul is assigning here is much more compelling.

Gregoreo means to be constantly ready and to remain fully alive.

And I just love that idea. Be fully alive. Like be fully the person that God created you to be. Live in a way that fully embraces the gift of life that you’ve been given from God. Be fully avaliable to use the specific gifts that God has given you to fulfill the specific calling that God has placed on your life.

The sad reality is that far too many of us walk through life fully unaware of the gifts and the calling that God has given to us. We are asleep at the wheel, just kind of fumbling around from one temporary feel good thing to the next, hoping that somehow we will find meaning and fulfillment in anything other than God’s love for us.

Paul says “knock that kind of living off. Wake up from your amnesia. I am enough for you.”

The theological founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley, made a habit of going into the places where people lived hard lives. What he found in the cities on the outskirts of England were people who were stricken by poverty, and that their poverty was a side effect of the overwhelming culture of alcoholism.

The men would work in mines and then drink away their money until their situation had gotten so dire that they could no longer work. There was no hope. Families were handcuffed by the affliction of the bottle that shackled the men.

Now this was long before AA or NA or any 12 step type of recovery program existed. All that there was in the way of help was the church. And the church was unwilling to go into these places. But John saw what was happening. A disease, a spiritual malady, was present. These were people who needed help.

So Wesley began speaking out against excessive drinking and alcoholism. He emphasized personal responsibility, self discipline, and a disciplined Christian lifestyle.

In order to accomplish this goal he established small groups called methodist societies where people gathered for mutual support, prayer, and accountability. These groups provided a community that helped people stay committed to a sober lifestyle by focusing on personal reflection, repentance, and a commitment to living a virtuous lifestyle.

Basically John Wesley invented AA and didn’t realize it. I have a friend who is a pastor over in Tampa who says that the 12 steps of AA are the best discipleship program avaliable.

Our Bishop, Tom Berlin put it another way. He says somewhere along the line, we gave real methodism, the methodism of John Wesley over to 12 step programs and then turned the other way to play church.

While all along the purpose of the church is to be a place of healing. In Wesley’s society, alcoholism was the driving force behind a hopeless world. By restoring individuals to sobriety and to a state of “awakeness” Wesley was able to help entire societies find healing, hope and transformation.

The goal of a 12 step program isn’t simply to stop using drugs or drinking alcohol or doing whatever it is that is causing your life to be a walking train wreck. The goal is to produce a spiritual awakening that opens the mind, heart, and soul of a person to a new way of living and seeing the world.

This spiritual awakening allows a person to truly live life — fully alive. Alive in the hope and in the promises of God. Alive in the gift of life. Alive in the love of God, neighbor, and self. Alive in the power to go and seek out and save the lost — alive to live out the mission of Jesus in the world.

If this is all speaking into your heart because you struggle silently with some kind of addiction: there is hope. There is healing. there is transformation. And I want you to find it. I want to help you find it. Come see me. I’ll show you how I did it.

But for the rest of you, I want you to imagine for a moment with me. What would it look like for us to be that community of hope. That place of healing and accountability. What are the ways that we, as a church can reach out into our modern day coal mining towns and lift people out of their slumber and into a fully alive way of being. How can we be the facilitators of a spiritual awakening?

I think that you have heard some ways today through my friends at better together. But how can we go even further? How can this become a way of life for us. How can we be a church that more deeply reflects the call of Jesus to be a place of refuge and transformation?

Well I think it begins in here, in the heart. It begins with a willingness to see people and a willingness to want to go where the church has feared to go before. And it continues with a willingness to walk beside people, to show them that they are loved and that they are worthy of new life.