The Woke God

I lift up my eyes to the hills - from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

God will not let your foot be moved; God who keeps you will not slumber.
God who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all evil; God will keep your life.
The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in
   from this time on and for evermore.

These beautiful words, known to us as the 121^st Psalm, have been a haven of hope, peace, and blessed assurance for many people of faith for thousands of years. I hope they provide you with some stability as well, as we continue to face times of uncertainty and peril, as well as conflicting opinions and inconveniences. 

The psalmist’s declaration that God does not sleep might be a reference to an Ancient Near East barb. Elijah used it that way when challenging the prophets of Baal to call down fire and see whose God would answer. When, despite every shenanigan they could muster, not a single flame appeared, we read, “At noon Elijah mocked them, saying, ‘Cry aloud! Surely he is a god; either he is meditating, or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” (I Kings 18:27). The jibe that Elijah offers is the same assurance that the psalmist offers – God is not the god who slumbers, who sleeps, who is unaware of our steps, our pain, prayers, or our sufferings. To use a phrase that might open up new meaning for us, God is woke. 

While the psalm makes an assuring claim, it is not about magic. The psalmist knew times of trouble, calamity, grief and loss. To say that God does not sleep is not a blithe declaration that we are somehow immune to tests of our faith or pain in our hearts. It means that we are not alone in our pain. For those of us in the Christian faith, the woke God is demonstrated profoundly in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. God did not, in fact, intervene with an army of angels or ten plagues or by calming the angry sea of the crowd with the words, “Peace, be still!” Jesus felt the full pain of human suffering in every respect – physically, psychologically, and even spiritually. Consider the garden where Jesus prayed for the cup to pass before relenting to God’s will and not his own. Consider the cross when he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus’ cry show that he was staring at the yawning maw of meaninglessness, helplessness, hopelessness. There’s only a semantic difference between a forsaking god and a sleeping god. 

If you have been overwhelmed by the nature of this pandemic, by the toil of facing exposure in order to serve the affected, by the loss of someone you love, or the foibles of human reactions to it, the Holy Week that we recently remembered speaks powerfully to our moments of asking, “God, are you asleep?” There are times that it is an unavoidable question. 

My prayer is that you will find as much power and poignancy in the story of Easter that you find in the crucifixion. When we intone, “Christ is risen,” and respond, “Christ is risen, indeed,” we are not merely citing an ancient cheer. We are declaring, with a faith that seems inexplicable at times, that the emptiness of death does not get the last word. God is ever woke. And with God’s non-slumbering presence, we have hope. Thanks be to God. 

Mark of St. Mark